Tiona_a sequel to Vaz

by Laurence Dahners

  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?”

  He’d blinked at her a few times, then said, “The people who broke into our house weren’t regular criminals, they were FBI, CIA, military, or some other one of those groups. They were working with the men who asked you questions in the afternoon. If we call the police, the people who are looking for the saucer will get the police report as soon as it’s filed.”

  Lisanne had still been pondering the possibility that a secretive government agency was looking for them when Vaz said, “I need to program a way to reach Tiona in the saucer. Can you get us some breakfast in the morning?” He’d turned to the small AI in their motel room and been working on it ever since.

  Lisanne had almost asked him why he would have to program something to let them reach the saucer, before she remembered that the agencies looking for them almost certainly had ways to intercept normal communications.

  It was getting light outside and Lisanne was hungry. She peered out the window and saw a Hardee’s sign across the street. She stepped back and looked over Vaz’s shoulder, trying to determine if he was at a point in whatever he was doing that she could interrupt him to ask what he would like for breakfast. Computer code skimmed by on the screen at a rate that Lisanne found hard to read much less follow. Despite her education as a programmer and years working in the field she found it very difficult to keep up. Of course, when she’d first met Vaz, he’d been the most astonishing programmer she’d ever encountered. But then he’d gone on to get a graduate degree in physics and to the best of her knowledge, had only done programming when he needed it to help with his physics research.

  She watched him work in awe, thinking that either he’d still been doing a lot more programming than she had imagined, or he’d forgotten so little that he was already back up to speed after just the hour or so he’d been working at it since they’d arrived in the motel. He stopped the screen, changed to a different one, then spoke rapidly to the AI, causing blocks of code to pop up here and there in the kind of coding matrix he had always liked to use.

  Lisanne leaned down to look up into his eyes, but he didn’t notice her. She’d seen him in this kind of fugue state on many occasions in the past and knew that he wouldn’t hear her speaking to him unless she blocked his view of the screen. For a moment she considered doing it, then realized she’d be doing it for herself. In his present state he wouldn’t care what she got him to eat, but she wanted to interrupt his concentration so she could talk to him about the many things that were worrying her. Which is stupid, she thought, talking to Vaz won’t make me feel any better.

  Worse probably.

  Lisanne put on all the clothes she had, then one of Vaz’s oversized shirts over that. She opened the door and stepped out, glancing back at Vaz as she went. He hadn’t noticed she was leaving.

  ***

  As dawn began to lighten the sky, the saucer slowly lifted out of the waves. Dripping, it skimmed in over the beach, some trees, and a small road that served the coast. It dropped into an opening in the tree canopy and squeezed between some trunks to mostly hide itself from above under the low foliage of the short trees.

  In an effort to look like tourists, Tiona, Nolan, and Eisner rolled up their jeans. Eisner had a T-shirt on under his regular shirt so he wore it alone. Nolan and Tiona rolled the sleeves from their shirts up as high as they would go. “I still don’t think we look very touristy,” Tiona said.

  Nolan laughed, “Better than if we walked around in this heat in long sleeves and long pants!”

  They walked into the small beachside town. Though it looked like it was trying to attract tourists, it didn’t look like it had been terribly successful so far. They found a small beach restaurant where they ate breakfast. They only had a few hundred dollars in cash with them so they chose low end items from the menu. It had been years since Tiona had worried much about the cost of anything, so she found that an odd sensation. When their waitress brought them their breakfasts, Eisner tried to use his pidgin Spanish to ask her about an internet café.

  She smiled, “There is place, 300 meters up nex’ street,” she said in broken English. “Name ‘AI Net.’”

  As they walked to AI Net, they discussed a plan for their searches. Nolan said, “I don’t think you should try to email or otherwise contact anyone you know. I’ll bet that the NSA has a watch on all your usual contacts by now. Don’t use your real name either.”

  When they got to AI Net, it did prove to have some limited capability AIs to help them with their searches. Professor Eisner attempted to contact NASA directly as the most senior sounding member of their group. Getting past the public relations face of NASA however, proved to be very difficult. They were dubious of his claim when he told them he was a professor at an American university since he didn’t want to say which university and was calling from Nicaragua. The woman he spoke to said she’d pass on his message about a way to retrieve the astronauts from Kadoma, but he had the impression she was struggling not to laugh.

  Nolan reviewed news stories about the mission to Kadoma and the astronauts that were involved in the hopes of finding someone to contact from the stories. He settled on a Sophie Bautista who he saw standing next to White and Abbott in several of the publicity photos. He asked the AI to place a call to her.

  Sophie was on her way to work when her AI said, “You have a call from Norman Maddo. He says he has a way to salvage the Kadoma mission."

  Sophie had had a friend in college named Norm Catto. Thinking that something had caused a mispronunciation of his name, she said, “I’ll take it… Norm?”

  “Hello Ms. Bautista,” an unfamiliar voice said. “Thank you for taking my call. I’m with a group that has a functioning vehicle capable of reaching Kadoma and retrieving astronauts Abbot and White.”

  For just a second Sophie’s heart skipped a beat at the thought of rescuing Zack and Ralph. Then reality caught up with her dreams. Irritated, she interrupted to say
, “Are you trying to tell me that you have…”

  Norm interrupted right back, sounding a little desperate. “Please! Don’t call it by any of the usual names. Someone capable of monitoring all electronic traffic for those kinds of keywords is probably listening.”

  Oh my God! Sophie thought, Not just a crackpot who thinks he’s invented a spaceship, but a conspiracy theorist to boot! She said, “I’m sorry but…” The guy tried to interrupt her again. She had her AI disconnect him.

  I hate people like that! she thought to herself.

  Tiona’s assignment had been to take on the news. First she had checked the news services for any reports, either about the launches of the saucer into space, or about the firing of air to air missiles over North Carolina. Their thought had been that if they found a story about it they might be able to contact whoever had written it up with a “scoop” as a means of getting publicity.

  No such luck. Tiona couldn’t help but wonder if someone had tried to put up a story about missile launches on a news service, but that the NSA had managed to suppress it.

  Next, she tried to reach some reporters directly, offering them a story that she assured them they would find fascinating. Unfortunately, they all wanted some answers to the standard, “who, what, when, where,” questions before they would agree to meet her somewhere. Since, for fear of it being picked up by the NSA, Tiona didn’t want to give her name, the fact that they had a spacecraft that looked like a flying saucer, or that they had flown into space with it twice, she gained little traction with the reporters she spoke to.

  Frustrated, Tiona sighed and leaned back in her chair. Glancing to either side she saw Eisner bleakly staring off into space and Nolan with his head down on the desk. Nolan didn’t look like he was resting, he looked depressed. “Doesn’t look like you guys are having any luck either, huh?”