Tiona (a sequel to "Vaz") (27 page)

What am I going to tell my wife?

***

As Tiona walked to the shelter for dinner, she said, “AI, please contact my dad.”

A moment later she heard Vaz’s voice in her ear. “Yes?”

“I want to take Dr. Eisner up tonight, is that okay?”

There was a long period of silence which didn’t worry Tiona as that was a common event when having a conversation with her father. Then he said, “We think the military is looking for it.”

Tiona’s heart skipped a beat, “We? Why?”

“They came to the door this afternoon and spoke to your mother. They were asking about loud noises and bright lights. Presumably they’re looking for a rocket that launched from near here.”

“Oh,” Tiona said thinking furiously. “So now Mom knows we’ve been building a flying saucer in the garage?”

“Yeah.”

“Is she pissed?”

“Um, I don’t think she’s pissed about what we built. I think she might be kind of upset that we took it up without the government’s permission.”

Tiona laughed to herself. It was just so typical that her dad wouldn’t actually know whether her mother was mad or not. “So, you think we shouldn’t fly it again?”

“I don’t know.”

“It seems silly to have built the thing if we’re only going to fly it once.”

“We’ve proved it works. We can let other people fly it now.”

That’s classic for dad too,
Tiona thought,
once he’s gotten something to work, he starts losing interest in it! Besides, I think he found riding in it pretty scary.

“Well, I still want to take Dr. Eisner and Nolan out for a ride. You think as long as we stay under a few hundred feet the military won’t notice us?”

There was another long pause where Vaz said nothing. Then, “I’m a little worried that if the military finds you before you go public, they might try to restrict the technology for military use.”

At that startling thought, Tiona stopped suddenly in the sidewalk. Someone muttered a curse as they bumped into her from behind, but she didn’t notice. “Really?”

“Yes. So I think you should announce it
now
.”

Tiona resumed walking to the shelter, “I want to take the guys up for a ride first,” she said with determination. “We’ll announce it tomorrow. Is it okay if I come by and pick it up tonight around 10:15?”

“Okay,” Vaz said sounding doubtful.

“I assume the AI can turn off that transponder?”

“Yes.”

***

Riker stumbled into the command center that General Harding had set up. When they’d rousted him he’d been catching up on a few winks since he hadn’t gotten much sleep the night before. He turned to the NCO just inside the room, “What happened?”

The NCO glanced up at him; then said quietly, “NSA picked up a couple of tweets, EPOs and emails from North Raleigh about a ‘flying saucer.’” The Sergeant glanced over at General Harding, “We weren’t going to wake the general up, but it’s a good thing we did. He’s on fire about this crap!”

Riker glanced over at the general as he went over to get some coffee, grateful to the sergeant for letting him know that the general thought this saucer report was important. He probably would have discounted any reports like that as bullshit. Feeling more awake, he moved out into the main part of the room and started trying to make sense of the various displays that were up.

Harding saw him and said, “Riker, get with the AWACS guys and let me know if you can pull anything out of the clutter. NSA is picking up reports of a flying saucer, supposedly heading west from the north side of Raleigh.”

Riker saw a desk labeled AWACS. It was next to a desk labeled RDU, presumably the airport radar system. He went over to lean down between the two desks. “You guys got anything?” he said, skimming his eyes over their displays. “Looks to me like if this saucer is heading due west from North Raleigh it would run right into the airport?”

One of the NCOs answered quietly, “Those are civilian tweets and such, they probably don’t know west from shit.” The NCO glanced up and realized he’d been talking to a major, “Uh, Sir.” After a pause he said, “AWACS is giving us plenty of ground returns and we’ve had the AI screen everything out that’s stationary. But we’re still getting plenty of mobile returns from cars, trucks and such.”

“Have the AI screen out all the returns that are on known roadways.”

“Yes Sir.” He began to murmur to the AI.

Riker turned to the NCO on the RDU desk. “What have you guys got?”

“Nothing squawking a transponder like last night. If it’s flying, it’s too low for the airport’s radar.”

“Sir!” the NCO at the AWACS desk said, “There’s something over this big park southeast of the airport! ‘Umstead Park.’” He pointed at a red icon headed west over the park.

“It’s not one of ours?”

“No Sir, our own assets have green icons. Known civilian aircraft are in yellow.”

Riker was about to call for the general’s attention when the icon went off the southwest edge of the park and suddenly disappeared. “What the hell happened to it?”

“I don’t know,” the NCO said in a tone usually reserved for the sighting of ghosts.

They stared at the screen together for a while. It was practically blank except for the yellow icons of aircraft taking off or landing at the airport and the green icons of the Apache helicopters General Harding had scattered about the area. With nothing to go after, the Apache’s icons were stationary.

Eventually, Riker said, “Let’s see the road traffic again.”

The NCO murmured to his AI and a moment later moving red icons blossomed everywhere, most of them following one another in little lines down various roads. The few isolated ones were presumably on roads with very little traffic. Riker’s eyes went back to where their bogey had disappeared, “Damn!” He pointed, “If our UFO turned and started following the highway here, where it disappeared, it would’ve fallen off our map because the AI was excluding things following roads, right?”

“Yeah!” The NCO breathed.

“What road is that?” Riker asked. His eyes scanned ahead along the road, wondering if one of the many icons he saw there could be the bogey.

“I-40.”

Riker stood, his mind scrambling as he tried to think of a way to figure out which of the icons was his bogey. Suddenly the NCO said, “Sir, do you want me to have the AI track the bogey from Umstead Park forward to its current location? Out of its memory, I mean?”

“Yes!” Riker said with a feeling of relief. He looked up, “General, we may have something here.”

***

Nolan stood by the southwest goal of the soccer field, shivering despite his heavy coat.
Damn! It’s too cold to be meeting on a golf course or soccer field in January!
He wondered what Tiona could have in mind. Considering the temperature, it couldn’t be any kind of wild casual sex like he’d briefly fantasized about. A car pulled off the road behind him and he turned to watch it bump out a little dirt lane toward the soccer field. He turned and started that way,
At least I didn’t have to wait
too
long here in the cold,
he thought
.

As the car approached he realized that it was a fairly late model Volkswagen. Not a high-end car, but something much better than he expected a girl who ate at the homeless shelter to be driving. It pulled up near him and stopped. The door opened and someone got out.

Someone bigger than Tiona. “Hello?” Nolan said

“Hello Nolan,” Eisner’s voice said, “Tiona said you’d be here too.”

Nolan’s brain stumbled heavily over this unexpected encounter.
Dr. Eisner! What does Eisner have to do with “something I’ve always wanted to do?!”
Then he heard a faint rumbling sound. Not loud, but low in the bass registers. Nolan slowly turned, his eyes taking in the astonished look on Eisner’s face as he did so.

A flying saucer?!

Nolan stood, gaping beside Dr. Eisner as they watched the saucer slowly come down on the field. It was so large that he expected it to settle into the turf, but instead it seemed to barely touch. The fact that it didn’t appear to be crushing the grass made him decide that it was some kind of optical illusion or special effect. He turned to Eisner, wondering what the professor was thinking.

Eisner tore his eyes away from the saucer and glanced at Nolan, “Holy crap! I was expecting her to arrive here with some kind of rocket she’d carried in her car!”

Nolan realized that Eisner knew a lot more about what was going on than he did. He felt vaguely disappointed to learn that Tiona had confided more in Eisner than she had in Nolan.

They heard a door open and a second later a head popped up out of the back of the dome on top of the saucer. Tiona said, “Hey! You guys want to go for a ride?”

Eisner and Nolan walked uncertainly around to the back of the saucer. Tiona seemed to be looking at them expectantly for a moment, then she said, “Oops, I forgot that the deck of the saucer’s pretty far off the ground. Just a sec.” She started murmuring to her AI and a moment later the whole saucer started tilting so that the edge they stood at dropped from nearly 5 feet down to about two and a half.

Putting his hands on the saucer, Nolan vaulted up onto it then turned and gave Dr. Eisner a hand up. He felt a little uncertain about standing and walking on the sloped surface of the saucer, but Tiona murmured to her AI and the saucer flattened itself to level. They stepped to the little opening she was standing in. “Come on in,” she said backing into a doorway. Push the airlock doors shut behind you.”

Eisner went in first and Nolan followed, head and eyes swiveling. There were in fact two doors on both sides of a small chamber. The doors pushed shut from the inside like you would want for an airlock where the air pressure inside would hold the door shut if the outside of the vehicle was exposed to vacuum. Nolan pushed them shut and turned around.

The ceiling inside was low and Nolan had to crouch to keep his head ducked below it. Five seats were in the middle, all facing forward. They looked like you might expect to see inside a big SUV, though a little more widely spaced. Up high and overhead windows provided a panoramic view. Down low, control panels and screens were forward. Heavy duty steel cabinets were mounted around the periphery. Nolan’s eye caught on what appeared to be a microwave and a small refrigerator.

Tiona sat down in the front left seat, “Sit down! Buckle in and we’ll go up for a little ride.”

Feeling dazed, Nolan took the seat next to Tiona. Eisner took the one behind him. Tiona burbled merrily on, “So, the main disc underneath you is an eight meter thruster with a two point six meter opening in the middle for wiring and life-support, etcetera. There are small disks…” As she continued talking, the saucer lifted up, sailed over some trees, and started skimming slowly down the fairway of one of the golf holes. The fact that they were flying was so astonishing to Nolan that he found it hard to focus on what she was saying. However, his mind did catch on a statement about, “One of my dad’s fusion plants is underneath to provide power.”

“Your dad’s fusion plants?” Nolan said.

Tiona twisted in her seat to glance back at Eisner and grinned, “I guess you didn’t tell Nolan about that, huh?”

Eisner’s voice came from behind Nolan, “Tiona’s dad is the one who developed the hydrogen-boron fusion plants that GE has recently started selling.”

Nolan turned to stare at Eisner.

Eisner gave him a meaningful nod.

Nolan felt a prickle in his scalp.
Her dad must be worth a freaking fortune!
He turned to stare at Tiona, “Why do you have to eat at the homeless shelter?!”

Tiona looked at him, a surprised look on her face. “How do you know about
that
?”

“I saw you going in there.” He paused for a second, “I looked in and saw you eating with them.”

A huge grin broke across her face, “And
that’s
why you’ve been buying my lunches?!”

Nolan nodded, the question still writ large on his face.

She shrugged, “It’s my little charity,” she said, lifting up over a couple of trees and onto a different fairway. “I eat with them and try to figure out which ones have
actually
had bad luck as opposed to drug problems. If I think they truly need a leg up so they can get a job and get back on their feet, I give the social workers money to help them.” She frowned, “But not for addicts.” After a momentary pause she said, “Well, that’s not completely true. I’ll help an addict if I think they’re really trying to get clean, but most of them aren’t.”

And that’s why she wears clothes that make her look like a homeless person?!
Nolan thought to himself. Aloud he said, “So how high will this thing go?” Nolan expected her to say one or two hundred feet, because she’d had it up at least 50 to 75 feet going over some trees.

Instead, she said, “Out into space and across the solar system.” She shrugged, “It can accelerate at a steady five gravities, though probably no one could take that for very long. But even at one gravity, you could get to the limits of the solar system and back in a month or so.” She looked over at him and smiled, “That’s why I said it was something you’ve been dreaming about. With this thing, you can
be
an astronaut!”