Tiona (a sequel to "Vaz") (30 page)

Vaz just kept walking.

***

Major Riker sat, pretending to stare at the screen while his mind raced. He felt fairly certain that several of the general’s orders, especially those to fire missiles at a civilian craft, were illegal in the absence of any evident threat. The orders hadn’t been issued to Riker himself or he hoped he would have had the courage to refuse them. Now he wondered about his culpability in not objecting to orders he thought were illegal even when they were issued to others. After all, the pilots of the F-15s had fired upon orders, but they had no knowledge that they were firing on a civilian craft. If Riker didn’t object, who else would? He wanted to go up the chain of command, but didn’t know anyone with higher rank than Harding. At present, after Harding, Riker was the most senior officer other than a balding, overweight, sweating colonel who was leading some IT specialists on the other side of the room.

All in all, Riker wished he’d paid more attention to the lectures he’d had in officer’s training about illegal orders and what to do.

Suddenly Riker heard Harding begin a conversation with the girl flying the saucer. Apparently he’d used the NSA to intercept a call from her to her parents. Riker admired her courage when she yelled at Harding for launching missiles at her. Then he wondered how she’d known missiles had been fired.

Harding issued threats against the girl’s family to try to get her to come down to earth, but she just disconnected the call.

Riker felt sick. It only got worse when a lieutenant stepped up beside him and whispered in a low voice, “Major, I’m concerned that what the general’s doing isn’t legal.”

Riker closed his eyes for a moment, then turned to look at the lieutenant, “So am I.” He sighed, “The general hasn’t given
me
an illegal order that I can refuse to carry out, has he given you one?”

The lieutenant shook his head. “But I think he’s issuing illegal orders to… others…” the lieutenant said uncertainly.

“Well, if he does issue you an illegal order, you should refuse it. I’m trying to get up the courage to go tell him I think what he’s doing is wrong, but I’m worried he’ll just have me arrested. Do you know anyone way up the chain of command that you can tell about this?”

“No.
Especially
not this time of night.”

Riker studied the floor for a moment, then said heavily, “Go out and try to find someone. I’ll stay here and try to stop the general if he does anything else.”

The lieutenant nodded and turned for the door.

Riker turned to study the general. Harding had just started yelling at someone. “Where did they go?!” The general listened for a moment, then said, “Some kind of secret passage from one house to the other?” A second later, he said, “I don’t give a shit
how
they got away. Track them down!”

Riker assumed that the conversation he’d just heard meant that the girl’s parents had managed to escape arrest somehow. He glanced over at the door the lieutenant had gone out through. The lieutenant wasn’t gone! One of the guards was blocking the door and said, “The general said no one comes in or goes out!”

Though he spoke in low tones, from the lieutenant’s fidgety motions, Riker had the impression the young officer was saying he had to go to the bathroom. To Riker’s dismay, the guard let him leave the room, but detailed another guard to go with him.

Riker considered having his AI try to make a contact outside the room, but hesitated. First of all, he didn’t know who to contact. Second, he suspected Harding had the NSA watching all communications going in and out of the room. Harding was over with the NSA liaison at the moment, speaking heatedly, presumably about how to intercept and divert any communications related to this fiasco.

***

Nolan, Tiona, and Eisner stared at one another for a few moments, then Eisner said heavily, “I think we’d better give ourselves up.”

Tiona’s eyes widened, “What if we never see the light of day again?!”

Eisner said, “That kind of thing just doesn’t happen in the United States.”

Nolan said, “I don’t know, I think that general sounds like he’s bat shit crazy!”

Eisner said, “Let me call my wife. I need to at least let her know what’s going on, and I can ask her to call some news services.”

“Okay,” Tiona said. She started murmuring to her AI, presumably asking it to set up the call.

Before enough time had passed for a call to ring and be answered, there was a connection pop and they heard Harding’s voice again, “You can’t call anyone except me. You can’t talk to me about anything except when and where you’re going to give yourself up! Let’s arrange a time, shall we?”

Tiona had the AI hang up again and turned wide eyed back to Eisner and Nolan. “Any other ideas?”

Eisner said, “We’ve
got
to give ourselves up! If they’ve arrested your parents, my wife and Nolan’s folks can’t be far behind!”

Tiona’s eyes turned to Nolan questioningly. He paused a second to consider, then said, “I don’t think we should. The only lever we have is the fact that they don’t have us yet.”

Eisner said, “The longer they have to chase us and the more money they have to spend on it, the angrier they’re going to be!”

Nolan said, “What we need is publicity!” He paused for a moment looking like he had just had an idea, then said, “Could we rescue those astronauts out at Kadoma?! If we could do that, it would get us the kind of publicity that no one could ignore!”

Tiona stared at Nolan for a moment; then her eyes went up and out the windows overhead, tracking back and forth as she thought. “We could rescue them…” She said slowly, “but I have no idea where Kadoma is. We can’t very well go get them if we don’t even know which way to point the saucer.”

“Just do a…” Nolan blurted, halting as soon as his mind caught up with his words.

“… search?” Tiona asked. “We can’t even make a phone call,” she said disgustedly, “much less get a data connection we could do a search with.”

“We could…” Eisner trailed off, his eyes distant as if he were thinking hard about something.

“You have an idea Dr. Eisner?” Tiona asked.

“Maybe we could land in another country. American dollars spend pretty well in most foreign countries and I’ve got some cash. We could pay someone to let us get on the net from their connection.” He shrugged, “A lot of countries used to have internet cafés where people who couldn’t afford their own computer or a link to the net could rent time on a computer. I don’t think they’re all that common anymore, but some of the poorer countries probably still have places like that.”

Nolan frowned, “Cash?”

Eisner arched an eyebrow, “You try to access your credit, and I’ll bet the NSA will be right on top of you.”

“Oh…”

There was a long pause in their conversation as each of them considered their situation. Finally, Tiona said, “Okay, I can’t think of a better plan. What country would you suggest?”

Eisner shrugged, “I know that Haiti and Nicaragua are both very poor countries in the Western Hemisphere. Does anyone’s AI have enough on board resources to throw up a map?”

Tiona said, “My dad loaded petabytes of information into the saucer’s AI for times when it would be too far from earth to access the net. Presumably some pretty good sets of maps are in there. Let me see…” She started speaking to her AI. A moment later, a map of Central America and the Caribbean popped up on the big screen in front of them. She said, “I asked the AI if it had data on Kadoma’s orbit or location and it didn’t. But it does have a pretty big map database.”

Eisner said, “Nicaragua’s a little closer and so I vote we go there. Besides, I speak some Spanish but they speak French in Haiti.”

Tiona said, “I’ll bet that the general is tracking us with radar. I’m worried that he’ll have people there in Nicaragua pretty quickly after we land.”

“You’re right, we shouldn’t go there directly,” Nolan said, staring at the map. “How about if we drop out of orbit to the Galapagos, then fly at a low altitude, hopefully under their radar, to Nicaragua.”

Tiona thought for a moment, then said “Okay.” She began speaking to her AI and a moment later the earth rolled up in their windows until it was directly overhead.

Eisner and Nolan both reacted with startled exclamations. Tiona said “Rather than turning off the lift and dropping back to the earth which would leave us weightless and queasy, I thought it would be better if we turned over and accelerated back down. This way we keep some weight on.” The earth began swelling in the windows overhead. As soon as they had approached the speed of sound going downward, Tiona flipped the saucer back over and started decelerating with just enough force to keep them from going any faster.

She brought them down about thirty miles north of the Galapagos, hoping that that would keep people on the islands from seeing them. They didn’t know whether the NSA would pick up comments made on the net by people in the Galapagos. When they got lower they reclined their seatbacks so they could sustain the heavy decelerations that stopped them just above the waves. From there, with the big disk keeping the saucer aloft, Tiona turned up the forward thrust from the row of half meter disks inside the big disk. The saucer started sliding northward to Nicaragua at 0.8 Mach, staying low over the water. It would take an hour and a half, so Tiona suggested they all try to get some sleep.

Nolan woke groggily when the saucer’s AI told Tiona that they had arrived at the coast of Nicaragua. He’d had a thought as he drifted off to sleep, “Uh, Tiona, what if the general’s been able to follow us up to Nicaragua with some space-based kind of down-looking radar?”

Tiona turned to look at him, “I know such things exist, but I don’t think they can have them covering every bit of the globe! Do you really think that Harding has been able to divert one
just
to look for us?”

Nolan shrugged, “I’m assuming he has a lot of pull, or he would never have been able to line up a couple of jets to fire missiles at us.”

Tiona gave him a wry smile, “If Harding
is
tracking us, I’m not sure there’s anything we can do about it.”

“Well, I had an idea… If this saucer is air tight enough to fly out into space, it ought to be watertight too, right?”

Tiona’s eyes widened, “Are you suggesting we use it like a submarine?!”

“Well, we shouldn’t go very deep. Presumably the hull design is stressed for pressure from the inside, not pressure on the outside. But we only have to be a little ways under the waves to defeat any down looking radar.

“So you’re suggesting… what?” She looked ahead at the lights of the approaching coast. That we go underwater right here?

“No, I think we should go right up to the coast, so the general thinks we got out there. We submerge just off the beach and move underwater, back out to where the water is deep enough to travel fairly safely. Even if we just go thirty or forty miles north or south it’d make any search the general sends out a lot more difficult. After all, he can’t just swamp the entire coastline of a foreign country with troops.”

Tiona thought about it for another minute, then gave some instructions to the AI.

They moved north along the coast, staying about five feet underwater. Not wanting to raise a large wake, they didn’t travel very fast, but they had a few hours until dawn anyway.

***

Lisanne turned and looked at her husband as he crouched in front of the small screen of the AI in their motel.

When the people broke into their house the night before he had walked tirelessly. Lisanne would have asked him to stop for a rest if it hadn’t been so cold. Since they didn’t have any jackets they had stopped in an alley and put on practically every bit of clothing in the bag he’d pulled out of the closet. Then they had walked and walked until they’d come to the cheap motel they were in today. Vaz hadn’t had to search for the hotel, so Lisanne realized that he must have known where it was. It was right on the edge of a light industrial area about seven miles from their home. When she’d asked him how he knew where to find the motel, he’d said, “It’s next door to one of the fabricators that builds things for me. Every time I come to the fabricator, I notice it because of its address.”

Lisanne had puzzled about the address, 14142 Durant Rd for several seconds before deciding that she was pretty sure those were the digits of the square root of 2, just the kind of thing that Vaz would obsess over.

When they went to the office, Lisanne wondered how they were going to get a room at the motel without their AI for a credit transfer. To her amazement, Vaz dug in the bag and pulled out a thick stack of hundred dollar bills, handing most of it to Lisanne. “Can you check us in? You know I’ll screw things up, talking to the clerk myself.”

Lisanne had checked them in. She’d worried that the clerk would demand ID, but apparently couples checked into this motel anonymously all the time to have affairs. The clerk didn’t seem the least bit worried about who they were if they were paying cash. Once they were in the room she’d turned to Vaz and asked, “Someone broke into our house. Why are we hiding out here instead of going to the police?”