A Tower in Space-Time (The Stasis Stories #5)

by Laurence Dahners

  “Uh-huh,”

  “Well, we’re thinking of moving all of Staze to Italy.”

  “What?!” Raffa said, his mind practically exploding with the possibilities.

  “I once mentioned that we didn’t patent the IP because we were afraid the government here might declare it a secret, remember?”

  “Um, yes,” Raffa said slowly.

  “Well, they think they’ve found a way to do it despite our not patenting it,” Kaem said. He explained how the U.S government was nationalizing Staze Incorporated. That they were doing it, not for the money, but so they could restrict the manufacture of Stade.

  But that the Feds wouldn’t actually be able to staze things since the secret of how to build stazers was still only known to Mr. X.

  He explained that Mr. X feared the government would capture him and try to squeeze the secret out of him.

  “So,” Kaem said, “Mr. X and I are hoping your company has connections to the Italian government. X needs to know whether he can have assurances that Italy won’t try the same thing. Whether they’d be willing to grant expedited citizenship to our people? Whether they’d stand up to the States if the U.S. tried to extradite our people on some kind of charges?”

  “They’re going to want to know if you’ll pay your taxes?” Raffa asked.

  “We’ve paid all our taxes over here, without asking for tax-breaks or searching for dodges. We’d expect to do the same there.”

  “Hah!” Raffa laughed. “If you do that, you’ll be Italy’s favorite corporate citizens!” He hesitated, “You should know our personal income taxes are high.”

  “That’s okay. Stade’s got a very high-profit margin. We can afford to pay our people well enough that they won’t lose on the deal.”

  “What about that space tower that’s messing up everyone else’s space programs? I assume you can’t move it?”

  “Oh, no,” Kaem said. “They wouldn’t let us move it and it’s not worth it. They’ll still be able to use it since it doesn’t require any more stazing so the space program will go on.”

  “What about wear and tear? Will you make them replacement parts?”

  “Um, things made out of Stade don’t wear out, Raffa.”

  “Oh… yes. Dumb question.” Raffa went on to ask every question he could think of, then finally said, “I’ve got to talk to my padre and nonno. Um, nonno’s Italian for grandfather. They’re the ones with the political clout.”

  “I thought Grandad was a mathematician?”

  “My grandfather Moretti on my mother’s side. He’s the businessman. He’s the one who helped father get started.”

  “Okay. Unless it’s urgent, don’t call me back for the next six hours. You’ve seen my ugly face and so you know I badly need all the beauty rest I can get.” After their good-byes, Kaem hung up.

  Raffa called his father, “I need to talk to you and grandfather about—”

  His father interrupted impatiently, “Get our secretaries to arrange a time.”

  “…about bringing Staze to Italy…”Raffa continued. His father didn’t speak into the brief silence Raffa left hanging. Deciding the man had been stunned by the possibilities, Raffa continued, “The American government’s trying to take over their company and they want to bring it here instead. We don’t have time to make appointments if we want this to work. They’ll go somewhere else if we don’t jump. Can we meet at eight?”

  Distractedly, his father said, “I’ll call your grandfather and get back to you.”

  ***

  New York—Shockwaves rippled through the financial and industrial worlds today when word got out that the Federal Government had nationalized Staze. This is the company responsible for manufacturing Stade, the new material which has been revolutionizing the world. The nationalization is apparently not on the basis of any malfeasance or financial insolvency, but because of a desire to restrict Staze’s technology in order to keep it from reaching the military forces of the United States’ adversaries.

  Much of what is known about this event derives from audio-video recordings of events surrounding the abrupt takeover at midday yesterday. Retired Rear Admiral Jack Halser has been appointed to manage Staze on behalf of the government and he features prominently—and unfavorably—in the recordings. It would seem that the government didn’t request that Staze implement policies to protect their intellectual property from foreign actors as has been done with the producers of other sensitive technologies. Instead, Congress passed a bill aimed at a complete takeover of the company on behalf of the government.

  Then the government carried out that takeover in a thoroughly hostile fashion, almost as if the employees were criminals, though there’s no evidence of that..

  Of great concern to many is the question of whether this takeover is going to delay the rollout of some of Staze’s highly anticipated technologies, most specifically the medical stazers that have been saving so many lives.

  This appropriation has, to say the least, created a storm of controversy in Washington, on Wall Street, and across the nation.

  Arya arrived at work at her usual time. She had to go through a check-in process in the anteroom and present her “credentials,” consisting of her Staze ID. They shredded it and gave her a new, larger federal ID with a lanyard to suspend it about her neck. This required her to hang her phone a little higher so the ID couldn’t cover it. Then she was signed in through a timekeeping system, given some printed materials to read, and waved on into the main room.

  Surprisingly, no one commented on the fact that she had her phone suspended from her neck. She’d covered its record light with a bit of tape so they might not have realized she was audio and video recording everything.

  Inside the main room, she couldn’t help sweeping the room for Kaem as was her habit. He wasn’t there, of course, but she did see a lot of exhausted-looking agents. She suspected many of them had been up all night. Halser was out of his jacket and his eyes looked hollow. She didn’t think he’d gotten much sleep either.

  Arya proceeded directly to her desk, turning on her computer while pulling the bit of tape she’d prepared off her inner left wrist and sticking it over the indicator light. As expected, the computer booted to the lock-screen. She cursed it for show, turned off the monitor, then bent down and pretended to turn off the computer itself.

  She spent a few minutes skimming the reading materials, then got up to leave.

  “Ms. Vaii,” Halser said behind her.

  Damn, she thought, shoulda left sooner. She’d been hoping to avoid him. She turned slowly, “Yes?”

  “Where are Prakant and Seba?”

  “Prakant’s behind you,” she said, indicating the door Mahesh had just entered through. She made a show of looking around the room. “I don’t see Seba.”

  Halser rolled his eyes tiredly, “I think you’re going to find that graceful cooperation will make your life much easier than wise-ass insolence. When do you expect him?”

  “When this was our company he was usually here before anyone else. Now that it belongs to the state, I’m not sure when he’ll be here.”

  “Doesn’t matter. What I need is this Mr. X. Where do you send his money?”

  “I’ve never sent him any. He doesn’t draw a salary and Kaem says he considers the growth of the company, and therefore his equity, to be his earnings. Presumably, I’ll get directions as to where to send it when you guys pay for taking us over.”

  “He’s not gonna get any money from Uncle Sam without providing his full legal name and social security number.”

  She shrugged, “Perhaps he’ll just leave the money in your accounts until he’s ready to claim it?”

  “Tell Seba,” Halser growled, “to bring X up to date. The government has a habit of taking unclaimed money for itself.” He pivoted and stalked off toward Prakant.

  Arya headed for the door. She had to sign out with the guy in the anteroom who commented on her brief stay. She shrugged, “Computer’s locked up. Ca
n’t do any work. I’ll check back tomorrow to see if you guys have figured out what to do about that issue.”

  ~~~

  An hour later, Kaem had come by her apartment and used her laptop to unlock her work computer and ghost it onto the laptop. Finishing, he said, “Now the one at work’s locked up again but you can do anything on your laptop that you used to do on the system at Staze.” He waved at her big screen, “Cast your display up there if you’d like more room to work.” He gave her a serious look, “I appreciate you taking care of our people.”

  Inquisitively, Arya asked, “Even though paying them money that the Feds should pay them will cut into the share you’re going to get?”

  “Ah, good point. I’m wanting you to take their salary payments out of my share, not yours or Gunnar’s or Morales’.”

  Embarrassed, she said, “I wasn’t complaining. I’ll take it out of mine too.”

  “No, no. How much do we have squirreled away at present?”

  Her eyes widened, “We’ve been sending up so many launches it’s hard to keep track. It was well over a billion last time I looked.”

  His eyebrows bounced, “Good problem to have, huh? But if we call it an even billion, I’d be getting seven hundred ninety million. Minus, of course, taxes of about two hundred eighty-six million makes that about half a billion dollars. I’m pretty sure I can get by on a lot less. Take it out of mine.”

  “We’ll see,” Arya said, thinking she’d feel guilty if she didn’t pay her share. “What I was wanting to know was why you were going to pay them in addition to whatever the Feds should be paying them?”

  “Ah, call it a gesture of appreciation. Or a salve for getting screwed over in this fight between Staze and the government. Or, you could give our selfish reason, that we want them to come back and work for us once the government sees reason and gives us our company back.”

  Arya leaned back disbelievingly, “You think they’re going to give it back to us?!”

  “Sure. Right now, except for space launch, they’re holding an empty bag. And that bag’s gonna be on fire when people stop getting the stazers and other technological marvels they’ve been promised. Plus, we want the same as them. We don’t want anyone to have offensive weapons and we’ll make stuff for them that’s purely defensive—”

  Arya interrupted, “We talked about how a good defense was as good as an offensive weapon. I don’t think we should make them defensive stuff either.”

  “Yeah, but we’re going to be making commercial aircraft and ships with Stade hulls to make them safer. Surely you don’t propose that we’d refuse to make Stade ship’s hulls for the military, do you? Then a commercial ship with a Stade hull could sail right in past the guns on an aircraft carrier and ram it. I don’t think we should be building a civilian fleet that can sink our warships either.”

  “I don’t know,” she said, “I kinda like the idea of the military being weaker.”

  He shrugged, “They’d just buy hulls we’d sold to commercial shipping and mount weapons on them.”

  “I guess…”

  Cheerfully, Kaem said, “So, if anyone asks, tell them we’ll be happy to give the government just about everything they want, but we insist on doing it ourselves, not as a nationalized company.”

  “They’re not going to ask me.”

  “No, but reporters or some of our own people might. I’m doing a press release.” He caught her eyes. “Wanna move to Italy?”

  “What?” She frowned, “What brought that on?”

  “Just following up on Dez’s suggestion. And, I just thought that while we were waiting for them to give us our company back anyway, we might diversify internationally.” Kaem then spent time explaining what he was thinking. When he left her head was whirling.

  Just when I thought he couldn’t surprise me anymore, she thought. Guess I should’ve taken Italian instead of Spanish.

  She turned to her computer, thinking, Time to move some money around…

  Chapter Nine

  Dez stepped into a restaurant in Florence. Not having much Italian as yet, she continued to rely on her phone to translate for her. She’d bought a tourist’s translation speaker. It hung around her neck and spoke an Italian translation of what she said softly into her phone’s microphone. Without it, she’d have been ineffective on the two construction sites she was managing, but she wondered if she was ever going to learn Italian since she relied on it pretty much all the time.

  Using her broken Italian, she tried to ask the maître d where she could find the Stasi—stasis in Italian—people.

  He smiled, and speaking excellent English, said, “Excuse me, madam. Are you looking for the Stasi party?”

  She nodded, thinking, And there’s another reason I’m not going to learn. Almost everyone dealing with tourists—which doesn’t include my workers—speaks pretty good English.

  The maître d detailed someone to lead her back to a fairly large room. There she immediately recognized Kaem and his parents. Lee, who’d left Space-Gen and was now full time with Staze, was there, as were Gunnar Schmidt, Arya, Kaem’s cousins Sonia and Raffa, their dad Alphonso Amato, and their Grandfather, Mr. Moretti. There were more people there, all in good spirits, but she hadn’t met the others yet.

  Someone pressed a glass of wine into her hand and she took a reflective sip. Things had been moving at what seemed a breakneck speed. She’d expected to have all kinds of problems with Italy’s famed bureaucracy, but the Amatos seemed to be able to cut through such difficulties. Though, she thought, I don’t think they’re bribing anyone. I think the current government sees Staze as a means to bootstrap the country out of its chronic economic doldrums.

  In mere weeks, land had been secured on the east coast for another launcher. It was quite close to an airport, solving the problem of where spaceplanes would land. Several large older buildings had been purchased near the launch site and Dez was in charge of a team reinforcing them by installing Stade panels in their interiors. This would make them impossibly strong without disturbing the neighbors by altering their revered, ancient architecture. Dez constantly felt amused at herself for failing to recognize the possibility of using Stade to create modern interiors and simultaneously reinforce ancient buildings. I could prop up the leaning tower of Pisa, she thought. She’d been surprised to learn its interior was hollow. And, if they wanted, I could install level interior floors. Make it into a museum or something.

  Dez also had a team reinforcing the interiors and the basements of several buildings in Florence near the Amato’s factory. One was large and would serve the Amatos as a new factory for building their food preserving appliances. A small one would be office space for Arya and her people. An intermediately sized one adjoining the little one would serve for Kaem’s team of engineers and designers. The basement of the small office building was supposed to serve as X’s automated factory for building the stazers everything depended on.

  At present, they were desperately short of stazers, Dez had a team working full time doing nothing but stazing construction panels with the two stazers Kaem had shipped over in the spaceplane during a “test flight.” The panels were cast in a series of various sizes Dez had designed that could be assembled to fit most interiors. They could turn those out rapidly. What took most of the time was using an adjustable mold to make Stades that would fit around oddly positioned windows and weirdly shaped parts of the old buildings like the stairways.

  So far, the U.S. didn’t seem to have twigged to what was going on in Italy. The company had asked their employees not to talk, but there were too many people who were in on the secret. Nonetheless, Kaem was hoping Halser wouldn’t find out until they started putting up the European Space Tower—which they were calling it in hopes of getting all of Europe on their side when it came time to argue with the U.S.

  Though, Dez thought, as excited as her teams were about building things out of Stade panels, sliding them together a little bit like Legos, then fixing them with impossibly s
olid Stade wire welds, talk was bound to make its way across the Atlantic soon.

  ***

  “Gawd dammit!” Halser screamed, throwing his chair as another stazer started to smoke.

  They didn’t have many more stazers to experiment with.

  If they powered them up, the damned things burned. If they powered them up in a Faraday cage, they didn’t burn but they wouldn’t work either. If they tried to open them, they started to smoke.

  If they started to smoke, by the time they got them open, the insides were immolated. The explosives experts said the fires were due to thermite beneath the circuit boards.

  That shit melted or burned everything of interest inside the case.

  Over the past several months, he’d had a bunch of different experts stir through the ashes inside burned stazers but they’d only managed to make a few guesses about the general layout of the electronics.

  The last so-called expert had told him, “Even if we could reproduce the electronics, there’s no way to resurrect the microchips. Chips, which, from their melted down remains, I can tell were very sophisticated. But I can’t tell anything else. And, even if we were able to figure out where they came from and buy or steal an intact chip that hadn’t been installed yet, they surely wouldn’t have the firmware.” He’d raised his hands helplessly, “and we’d need that firmware.” He sighed, “Either that or the guy who built these things in the first place. Otherwise, this is kind of like asking guys who barely understand fire to build a nuclear reactor. They might build something, but it ain’t gonna work.”

  Damn this place and its open freaking floorplan, Halser thought, I need an office where I can go pound my head against a wall!

  Halser’s phone said, “You have a call from Senator Starn.”

  Halser closed his eyes momentarily, thinking, Not now! Then he calmed himself, “I’ll take it… Speaking cheerfully, he said, “Hello Senator, what can I do for you?”