by Laer Carroll
"I'm very hard to kill, Mr...?"
"Allerbee. I see here that you are not a test pilot. Or any kind of..."
He stopped and looked up at her. She kept her eyes on him.
"Oh."
Sasha relaxed back into her seat and glanced around the table. Her smile moderated to friendly.
"Basically I'm going to be the fool who stupidly breaks all your fool-proof safety and operating features."
Vincent said, "Speaking of testing, we're going to institute a new method. We're going to test over water. That will require some mods to the basic design. Or maybe a new direction, into water-ski like activities. Sasha has some experience with extreme sports."
"Well," said red-haired Selena. "I like that idea. I always did want to work in a bikini."
A young good-looking Latino far down the table leaned forward and said, "We all have wanted you to work in a bikini, Selena."
There was laughter at that and Vincent went on to other items on his agenda. Most of them made little or no sense to Sasha. She spent her time on gauging character and remembering names. She had a perfect memory when she wanted it to be, so by the end of the meeting she knew at least the first names and several facts about most of the people in the room.
As the meeting broke up Selena said, "If we leave for lunch now we won't have to wait for seats. Could you eat?"
Sasha smiled, partly in anticipation of the usual amazed reaction when people saw what a huge appetite she had. "Always!"
"Come along. We'll collect a few people you should meet."
Shortly eight people climbed into a large grey van with two front bucket seats and two rows of rear bench seats each seating three. Sasha was given the shotgun seat and introduced to the wise-cracking good-looking young Latino, Rodrigo, who turned out to have a family including three young children whose pictures adorned his dashboard.
Three miles north on the eastern street bounding the airport, Lakewood Boulevard, took them to the Lakewood Shopping Center. There they all piled out and entered an upscale Kangaroo restaurant. It was cafeteria style and Sasha piled up her usual large lunch.
At the table Rodrigo across the table from Sasha said, "Hungry much?"
She just smiled and dug in.
So did most of the others. A few were more interested in chatting, including Selena who just picked at her salad. Sasha steadily emptied her plate and listened.
"What's it like to go to the Olympics?" said an older man with a shaven head named Elton Miller, a structural engineer across the table and two seats down to her right. He had been checking her culinary progress while he chatted with a table-mate.
"Do you want the interview answer or the real answer?"
"Interview answer?" said his table-mate, a man who appeared to be East Indian (Mihir, colloquial not accented English, no last name heard yet, computer graphics expert).
"Boring, upbeat. When I was still a gymnast—you know, parallel bars, balance beam, all that?—I said a team-mate had a different approach to dismounts. Before I knew it the press had us deadly enemies, sabotaging each other, fighting over a boyfriend. And we were twelve and best friends! Ever since I learned never to say anything that even hints at a negative."
"Give us a real answer," said a small pretty woman who appeared almost stereotypically Italian or Spanish.
"For that you'll have to wait till I get to know you better. Speaking of which, I'm Sasha. Who are you, and what do you do in this bunch?"
By Wednesday Sasha had made good headway toward being liked or at least neutrally tolerated. She had no specific duties this first week and could wander around and poke her nose into cubicles and chat if the occupants appeared willing.
She also observed several meetings. All were fast and focused, rarely lasting more than a half-hour. Everyone was relaxed at work, none worked frantically or terribly late, but they got jobs done. Sasha wondered how much of that came from Vincent Wang's managerial style, and how much came from the engineers' natures.
Wednesday lunch was a long-planned buffet in the conference room. There was turkey and ham and stuffing and cranberry sauce for Thanksgiving traditionalists and several large pizzas with all sorts of toppings for others. Afterwards everyone was free to leave for the long weekend. A few, family-man Rodrigo among them, left early. Many stayed for another hour or so. This included Sasha, who made still more friends, or at least not-enemies. She was beginning to develop a small circle of cronies.
At 2:00 Sasha said Goodbye, kissing the cheeks of Selena and Elena (the pretty Italian engineer) and swatting the proffered cheek of Mihir, who had a droll and impertinent sense of humor. She had to meet Brandon at the OC Airport.
Coming out of the passenger tunnel from his jet he spotted her right away. Not only was she one of the tallest of those waiting she was semaphoring her long arms over her head.
He hugged her and tried to lift her off her feet and swing her around but she defeated this by lifting him off his feet.
"Oof! Damned good to see you, little sister. It's been too long."
"Good to see you, big brother. Are you getting fat? I could barely lift you."
"Hah!" He knew she could lift small cars. She had let him know years ago some of her powers. Though far from all of them. Only Doc O'Neill—happily he and his wife were healthy and still around—knew those.
"How much farther do we have to walk?" he said after they had left the concourse and carried and pulled along all his luggage down a sidewalk and into an alley between two airport buildings. A laser card let them through into a working part of the airfield.
"Just to that car." She nodded forward and Brandon's eyes lit up. He had seen the red Maserati air car in a ground-car parking slot.
His eyes drank in detail as they walked closer. At the car he set his carry-on down and let his pull-along rest free on its wheels. He just looked for long moments then slowly walked around the car, finally sliding his hands along its side.
Sasha meanwhile was stowing his biggest pull-along in the trunk, pretending to struggle a bit with it in the very unlikely case someone was watching her with binoculars. The rest she put in the back seat.
She popped the car doors and got in. He imitated her and fastened his shoulder-and-seat belt. She keyed on her car, unlocked the co-pilot yoke, and when the panel which hid it slid down pulled it into position in front of Brandon.
"You're taking it up."
"Me? No way! I might hurt this baby...and us too."
"No you won't. I'll have my hands on the controls and my side over-rides yours if you screw up. Come on, don't be a coward."
"Hmm." After a bit of thought he put his hands on the yoke and asked What next?
She had done this exercise quite a bit by now, so she led him expertly through steering the car on its wheels to a helicopter take-off pad, bringing it up on its paramag cushion, and going to jet-powered flight. A few hundred feet up she took over and put the air car on autopilot for the trip to their landing spot.
At her instruction he kept his hands lightly on the control yoke to feel how the air car adjusted to wind conditions. And up- and down-drafts. As they passed from over the hotter concrete expanse of the airport the up-drafts eased off and the air car increased the power to the supporting jets a bit so as not drop below their designated height.
Not that much adjustment was needed. The car's autopilot was very good.
Watching the well-remembered land of southern Orange County move below him he said, "I want one."
"Sure. If you have a spare ten-million dollars for the basic model. And up to twice that for upgrades. Then you have to spend two months getting a helicopter license modified for air cars. And there are only three or four places you can get that."
"I'd want it in blue-black like 'Duh Bat'," he mused, ignoring her, referring to his favorite childhood superhero's air car.
Sasha let him quietly enjoy the sights and sensations until nearing the landing spot near their home. She let Red Pony land itself with
her hands alert on the control yoke.
On the ground they stepped out of the vehicle to exchange positions. She was going to let him drive the car home. It drove just like any ground car when in ground mode. But she noticed a tall man in police uniform walking toward them from the local Orange County Police station house. Prince Enterprises had a contract to allow her to land and take off from its employee parking lot.
"Hello, Captain. I'd like you to meet my brother, Brandon. Bran, this is Captain William Willoughby. He's boss here." She waved at the police station.
The man, stocky, grey-haired, in good shape, held out his hand. The two men shook.
"I used to watch you play in high school. Still do now you're in the NFL. My son was two years behind you."
"I remember. Lot of talent as a quarterback. How is he doing nowadays?"
The men talked a couple of minutes of sports talk. They seemed to want to continue so Sasha began to walk toward a nearby outdoor metal bench with a curved bottom and back. Without a break in the conversation the two followed her.
The Captain gestured Sasha to a seat, then Brandon, and sat so he could talk to both of them, eying Sasha occasionally across her brother but otherwise pretty much ignoring her.
Sasha didn't mind. The day was cooling nicely, the wind off the ocean a few miles west was picking up a bit, and the prospect before them was pleasant, the police station being part of a small upscale downtown urban area. She was with her brother and he was doing something he loved, talking about the sport around which much of his life now revolved.
After about twenty minutes Sasha stood up and said, "We'd better hit the road, Captain. My mother will be looking forward to seeing this big lunk."
Standing the Captain said, "Sorry about that. Tell her hello for me and a good Thanksgiving for you all."
Brandon shook hands with him again. "No problem. Good talking to you, sir."
After a few seconds getting acquainted with the car as a ground car her brother drove it into the street and headed for their childhood home. After a minute he said, "Nice guy."
"Yeah. He knows Mamí from when she was a D.A. I hope that helps get me a ride-along spot on the night patrols."
"You still want to be a cop of some kind, right?"
"Yeah, just not a regular position. One where my special assets can make a difference."
"Like with the FBI last year? That almost got you killed."
"Not even close. Compared to me they were moving in slow motion. Every once in a while I feel bad about killing them. Not often, though. When they saw I really had delivered the money one of them said, 'Now can we have fun with the girl?' Lizzie was just fourteen!"
The thought still hurt her heart, to imagine what they would have done to that little girl. Tears came to her eyes.
"She was just a couple of years older than Gia. Then the leader said 'kill the kid'. Sometimes I wish I could kill them all over again!"
Rage heated her insides. Her hands twisted together with force that could rend steel.
One of Brandon's hands covered hers. The touch broke her mood. She fought to calm down. To be able to turn her hands over and gently clasp his.
"Put that way I'm almost glad you did kill those bastards. But it still bothers me to think of you putting yourself in danger."
They were only a few blocks from home. She had to say this just right, right now.
"I almost wish for that. To go into a situation where I can stretch myself the way I used to. I miss that, Brandon. I miss it a lot."
He laughed with wry understanding. "Yeah, I know what you mean. I feel that stretchy need too sometimes."
He patted her hands and lifted his to help spin the steering wheel to make the turn into their block.
"Poor superwoman. With no superhuman tasks. Just world-wide fame, and millions in riches. And a loving family. Damn!" He fell to laughing, as did she. And as they turned into the driveway their entire family spilled out the front door of the house, Gia dashing ahead of everyone.
Her rare and momentary depression vanished and did not come back that weekend. Brandon's NFL team was not competing that traditional football weekend so he spent all of it with the family. The Twins and other family friends were in and out of the house and everyone visited other families important to them.
At work things went well, though she was off Tuesdays and Thursdays to attend to other work, such as showing off her air car and modeling and attending sports and school events as an exemplary famous person. It helped that by the third week everyone in her work group had gone up with her in her air car for short rides. All for purely professional reasons, of course!
By the fourth week a few minor changes and a major one was incorporated into a new test AirMobile. It was taken to a testing shed on the large manufacturing and development facility of Molnar Air in which the AirMobile building resided. Molnar was one of the country's oldest and biggest aircraft firms and Prince Enterprises had partnered with them to create the AirMobile. In the shed the AirMobile was hooked up to several sorts of testing equipment and put through rigorous automated tests.
Things broke and were fixed, or found not to work as expected and were fixed, or could be done better and were fixed. Sasha became ever more deeply involved in this, her naïve insights sometimes useful, sometimes laughable. When there was laughter she joined in.
The next week after Christmas was time for untethered tests. Connected this time by wireless radio to test equipment various operators lifted the craft and slowly drove it around in the huge barn-like building on its paramag cushion and then on its jets.
Sasha was eventually allowed to control the test vehicle. At first she, like everyone else, followed strictly designed aerial paths. But soon it was recognized that she was uniquely qualified to fly the craft. Her reactions were faster than those of anyone else, though only moderately faster. She carefully refrained from revealing how superhumanly fast she really was. She was also exquisitely precise and delicate in her control. They expanded her role: to do the first ad-hoc tests improvised by the pilot.
"Damn, Sasha," said Owen Allerbee after one such test. He was the blond-ringletted engineer who had earned a nasty look from Sasha at her first conference meeting. He had reluctantly turned into one of her admirers. "I swear you can judge things to a millimeter."
"What do you expect?" said Selena. "She's an Olympic medallist, for God's sake."
"Now can we do water tests?" said Rodrigo. "I want to see Sash in a bikini."
Mihir said, "As if you don't have her pin-up calendar hidden in your desk where Mariana can never see it. "
"Wait, wait!" Selena turned her freckled face toward Sasha, her curly red hair bouncing at the force of her turn. "You did a pin-up calendar?"
Sasha shook her head, smiling, mystified. There were plenty of photos on the net of her in various states of near-undress from all her modeling jobs. But no calendar.
"No," said the droll Indian. "But it's trivially easy to do an image search of the web and feed the results into Photofix. Voila! An instant calendar!"
Rodrigo put on a superior look. "Anyone have a guess who REALLY has a pin-up calendar hidden in his desk?"
A spare "barn" on the base had much of its interior made over into a large water tank. All weekend it was filled with water, carefully monitored by instruments to ensure it did not spring a leak or worse. Then wireless testing consoles were placed in a large truck and brought over and plugged into the electrical outlets. By mid-week a new set of tests were being conducted over the water tank.
The first were not of the AirMobile, but of its drivers. Off a diving board rented from a local aquatic supply house. Several test engineers informally qualified themselves by diving from the board into the pool, first from a few feet up, then from a second board twenty feet up. Sasha did so also, carefully excelling as one would expect an athlete of her caliber but not more so.
The next day more people "qualified" including some men who by no stretch of the imaginati
on would ever be allowed to test the experimental AirMobile. All of the women also donned bathing suits and did some diving, except one sour-faced middle-aged woman with grey hair who was almost obnoxiously feminist. She declared the baring of women's bodies in this way retrogressive and that she would have nothing to do with it .
Some men said behind her back that she just did not want anyone comparing her dumpy figure to those of younger and fitter women. But Sasha knew better from the microprobes she had sent into her body. So she did a little online research and walked out at the end of the next day with Margaret Pennebaker.
"I've been around athletes all my life. So the first time I saw you walk across a room I knew you had been one. And still are."
It was late and the afternoon breeze had picked up. There were an unusual number of clouds today and they were stained gloriously gold and purple. Margaret scowled at her but said nothing.
"So I did a little guessing about when you would have competed and did some creative guessing about names you would have gone by. And I found that almost twenty years ago a Peggy Hanson was a competitive diver until an injury side-lined her. By the time she had fully recovered she had a new ambition: engineer.
"Amazingly, the photos on the web look just like you."
They had arrived at the van that Margaret drove. The woman unlocked it but leaned against the door, watching Sasha.
"I know what you can do. I don't see any reason to tell anyone about it. But it would be nice to have someone as good as me on the testing team."
Sasha turned and walked away.
The next morning Margaret showed up at work with a brown paper bag which she brought into the aquatic barn. Sasha was not surprised and had brought a similar bag with her.
Mid-morning at the aquatic test facility Margaret took the bag with her into the women's rest room. Sasha picked up her own bag and gestured Selena to follow her but stopped her friend just outside the rest-room door. She did not enlighten Selena when the woman asked her what they were doing. Instead she lifted a finger to her lips.