Invaders (a sequel to Vaz, Tiona and Disc) (16 page)

Reven had been thinking that Victor just wasn’t very coordinated, but even Blake, who’d
fully
proved his coordination with the way he rode his skateboard in the bowl, struggled quite a bit. He also had to start out holding onto a handrail. When he moved off around the skate park, he did a little better than Victor, though that may have just been because he wasn’t as timid. He went a little faster and went down a gradual slope. Something about the speed seem to smooth out his actions, at least until he wiped out. It was interesting for Reven to watch from outside the harness as its big disc jerked up and back to slow Blake once he’d come off the board. Since he was only six inches up when he came off the board, his knee, buttock and palm did touch down, but softly. Essentially, the harness turned what had looked like an impending eggbeater into a falling feather.

As a bunch of the other boarders started begging for a ride, Reven picked another one. When Blake handed him the harness, Reven said, “Actually it’ll be a little safer if you start riding it at six feet. Then the harness has more time to catch you if you fall off.”

The guy stopped with the harness part way on, “It may
be
safer, but I can tell you I won’t
feel
safe starting six feet in the air. I promise to go slow if you’ll let me ride it down low to begin with. Once I’ve got the hang of it, I can try going up there.”

Reven shrugged acquiescence. All in all, she let about twenty people ride the board, all of them struggling more than she’d expected that they would. The last one to ride was the guy who’d dissed her coming into the skate park. She made him get down on both knees and beg forgiveness before she let him ride.

As she buckled the harness back on herself in preparation for heading home, Blake said, “Hey, ride it hard around the park again before you take off. Show us what it can do now that we’ve got some idea what it’s like to be on it.” He grinned and winked, “That way we’ll have something to look forward to someday when we get our own fly-boards.”

Reven scorched the park and felt great riding away to their enthusiastic applause.

Still, it felt pretty empty not having Eddie there.

***

Tiona’s car descended to land in front of Nolan’s house. North Carolina, home of GSI, had voted in a fairly liberal set of rules for flying cars, soon to be superseded by the new federal regulations. She eyed Nolan’s house a little uncomfortably. She thought it was pretty ostentatious for someone in his twenties, though, Lord knows, he had plenty of money.

As she walked up to his front door, she worried he wouldn’t be home at 11 o’clock in the morning. This alternated with her sense of unease that he
would
be home—because he had nothing else to do. She felt guilty that she hadn’t seen him in weeks, but a little miffed that he hadn’t contacted her.
Shouldn’t a boyfriend call his girl sometimes?
She worried that he was rudderless, but wasn’t sure why he needed a rudder when his boat was floating so high.

Conflicted in many senses, she arrived at the front door where the AI said, “Hello Ms. Gettnor, please come in.” The door swung open and she walked in, looking around and hoping to see Nolan.

What she saw was a beautiful young blond girl sitting at Nolan’s breakfast bar eating a mango. As Tiona’s heart sank the girl hopped down off the barstool and came toward her. She had an immense and brilliant smile on her face. “Ms. Gettnor!” She put out her hand, “I’m Carolyn West. I’ve wanted to meet you for… like forever!”

Tiona shook Carolyn’s hand uncertainly, “I, uh, is, um, Nolan here?”

Carolyn grinned and wrinkled her nose, then whispered as if giving away a secret, “Yeah, but he had
way
too much to drink last night so he’s still in bed with a hangover.” Carolyn glanced back towards Nolan’s bedroom, then said with an enthusiastic smile, “I’m sure he’d muster himself for
you
, though. He’s been complaining about how he hasn’t seen you for, like, weeks! You want me to wake him up? Or,” Carolyn said as if she just had a brilliant idea, “you
could
wake him up yourself.” She tilted her head, “Though I usually take him a couple of Tylenol, then don’t try to talk to him until they’ve had a half an hour to work.”

A sick feeling in her stomach, Tiona looked away from this relentlessly cheerful and terribly beautiful young woman. She felt like she should hate her, but the girl seemed so damned likably cheerful. As her worldview rocked, Tiona’s eyes wandered around, looking for something to grant her some stability. Her eyes passed over the living room and Tiona saw
another
beautiful girl staring at her over the back of the couch. This one was smolderingly dark to go with Carolyn’s bubbling fairness. “Um, no,” Tiona said, “I should’ve called…” She stepped toward the door, “I’ll… I’ll check back on Nolan later.” She pulled the door open, said, “Thanks,”—though she didn’t know what for—and fled down the sidewalk to her car.

Awakened by the AI’s announcement that Tiona was there, Nolan finished quickly brushing the disgusting taste out of his mouth. He pulled on shorts, ran fingers through his hair, and pulled open his bedroom door just in time to see the front door closing behind Tiona. Putting his hands on his aching temples he slowly and miserably sank to his knees.

He didn’t hear Carolyn approach, but he did hear her quietly say, “I’m
so
sorry Nolan. I think she was upset. I thought she must not be the jealous type or you wouldn’t have been going out…” After a thoughtful pause, she said brightly, “I could call her and tell her we’re just friends?”

***

Tiona rolled to the edge of her bed, then sat up. Though she hadn’t had anything to drink yesterday she felt like she had a hangover. She’d been in bed for twelve hours and asleep for most of it, yet she felt exhausted. Something about the way she felt made her think her head
should
hurt, but it didn’t. She really couldn’t seem to sleep anymore, though she didn’t feel like being awake or doing anything.
Unfortunately,
she thought
, I’ve got to get up and go to the bathroom.

That chore done, she thought she should go eat something, but didn’t feel hungry.
What’s wrong with me? It isn’t like this is the first time I’ve ever broken up with a boy! I didn’t mope around like this the other times.
Thinking about it, she considered all the times yesterday that she’d rejected Nolan’s calls. She picked up her AI’s headset and settled it into place
, Maybe if I get back to living my life it’ll jolt me out of this rut.

She skimmed through a list of hundreds of messages her AI had stored while she’d been ignoring it. The AI hadn’t coded any messages as urgent priority, so she turned to the others. First she went through the ones that her AI thought were unimportant. She did this routinely out of a feeling of guilt. She knew most people just ignored the ones the AI had screened as low priority, but she always glanced over them to be sure the AI hadn’t missed anything. She didn’t see anything interesting in the file. Next she looked at the ones her AI thought were important.

There were a lot of them from Nolan. She briefly considered telling the AI to consider all messages from him to be unimportant, but then decided she should answer at least
one
call from her ex-boyfriend. She owed him that for the time they’d spent together. Maybe there was a good reason why there were a bunch of bimbos over at his place. There were several messages from her mother which was unusual.
I better call her back
, she decided. There were also a couple of messages from Rob Marshall about priorities for the big saucer’s next mission. Before Tiona had descended into the depths of her funk, she’d told the mission team she wasn’t going on the next run to the asteroid belt. She’d put Rob in charge and he had a right to expect to hear from her. Tiona’s brother Dante had left a message too.

Tiona decided to start by calling her brother and told her AI to put through a call.

“Hey, ‘T’,” he said, “I heard you bailed on the next mission to the belt. Any problems?”

“Just personal ones,” Tiona said, trying to keep the ill humor out of her voice. “I broke up with Nolan.”

“Aw, man, I liked
him
. What happened?”

To Tiona’s surprise, her brother actually sounded concerned for her, something that didn’t fit with their past heckling.
Maybe we’re growing up
, she thought wistfully. At first she thought of giving him a flip answer about how men were unfaithful brutes, but then decided that if Dante was acting mature, she should too. “It looks like Nolan’s found himself another girlfriend,”
or two
, she thought but didn’t voice.

“That’s shitty…” Dante said. Thankfully he didn’t try to tell Tiona what to do to fix her life. Instead, he said, “Is there anything I or Linda could do? Take you out to dinner?”

“No,” Tiona said withholding the huge sigh that threatened to break through her wall. “I think I just need to get on with my life. Get back to work. Maybe I’ll start thinking about other things.”

“Oh, okay. That’d be great. The leadership team would really like to have a meeting with you. We haven’t had one for a while and there’re a lot of things to talk about. Could you come in this afternoon?”

Tiona desperately wanted to say no, but after all, she’d asked for it. “How about tomorrow morning at nine?”

“I’ll set it up.” They talked for another minute or two, but then Tiona begged off so she could respond to some of her other messages.

Next she called Rob Marshall who was just getting ready to leave on the next mission to the belt. “Rob, sorry I didn’t get back to you right away. I had some personal issues come up. How can I help?”

“Oh, sorry to hear that. Is there anything
I
can do to help
you
?”

“No, no… just have some things to work out on my own.”

“Well, what I was wanting to ask. Do you remember how we talked about bringing back a substantially bigger asteroid and placing it in orbit? Something we could use for space industry?”

“Sure. But we abandoned that idea because separating out the different metals is best done in a gravity gradient. That means landing the asteroids on Earth which would be pretty difficult with something much bigger than the ones we’ve been bringing…”

“Ah,” Rob interrupted, “it sounds like you haven’t heard about Applied Astrotech’s results with microgravity metal distilling?”

“No…” Tiona briefly searched her memory, “Who’s that?”

“One of the companies that’s rented some space in the Number Five habitat. They brought up some kind of electric furnace—it’s not clear to me whether it’s an arc furnace or an induction furnace, or maybe some kind of combination—but it’s powered by a pretty substantial fusor. They’re using it, not to
melt
asteroidal metal, but to actually
vaporize
it. Apparently this furnace is able to heat the entire mass of metal to pretty precise temperatures. That’s why I think they’re using induction—because induction furnaces tend to stir the metal around. They can apparently reach temperatures that are substantially higher than I thought you could get with electric furnaces. They take the furnace above the boiling point of one of the metals, say 2800° centigrade for nickel, then wait for that particular element to completely vaporize. They have some kind of system for condensing the metal vapor against the wall of a cooled spinning drum. Next they boost the temperature just high enough vaporize their next metal etc. etc.” He snorted, “They do have a little bit of a problem in that nickel and gold both vaporize at 2800°, but apparently they have some electrolytic means for separating those two afterward. Apparently it works very well for separating most of the other metals.

“Anyway,” he continued, “they asked if we could bring them one of our metallic asteroids so they could practice refining metal in microgravity. I thought it would be a great opportunity for us to work out methods for bringing in something substantially larger. Especially now that there might be some call for it.”

“How big an asteroid are you wanting to bring?” Tiona asked, trying to get her mind around the whole concept.

“Three trips ago we pinged a forty meter diameter metallic asteroid with the radar. It should mass in the range of 220,000 metric tons. At 4 million pounds thrust the seventy-five meter saucer could accelerate it at 0.082 meters per second squared.”

“Wow!” Tiona said not sure whether she was more stunned by the size of the asteroid he wanted to bring or by the low acceleration figure. She focused on the acceleration, “That’s what, less than a tenth of a G?”

“Yeah, 0.08G, but with nearly twenty days at that acceleration we’d have it up to 141 kps, then we decelerate for another nineteen and a half. We could have it back here and into orbit in about 39 days.”

“You
know
some idiot’s going to think you’re about to hit the Earth with it, don’t you?”

“Yeah, we don’t want to do that,” he said in a serious tone. “It’d be a multi-megaton strike, so they’d have a right to be pissed if we did.”