by Laer Carroll
"I can never thank you enough for what you did for Adrian."
Sasha looked down and fidgeted.
"I just made some phone calls and lit fires under people."
"Don't think you can fool me. I know you did more than that."
"Adrian told you that?"
"No. But I know him and I know you. You went there and helped.
"Did you kill any of them?"
There was no use trying to hide the truth.
"Only three."
"Good. I wished you'd killed more!"
Sasha gave a wry smile. "If it'll make you feel better I did wound four of them and scared the living shit out of several more. If you'll pardon my language."
"It helps. Now let's go make sure Hugo's and Stephanie's little animals have not demolished the house. "
She put an arm around Sasha's waist and the two joined the party in the patio. What with several Bluebird and Marine invitees and their guests it numbered close to fifty people.
One of them was Anna Prince. She was half-lying in a garden couch with a small child under each arm and was smilingly listening to another even smaller child standing at one arm earnestly explaining something.
The two women stopped and watched for a few moments, after Katie had looked to see that the other children were safely occupied.
"I swear she acts more like a grandmother than I do."
"Yes, I've noticed that too. She really loves children."
"Think there's some tragic story behind it?"
"Maybe," said Sasha. "But she's only twenty-something and nothing I've read about her suggests anything."
As if Prince had heard them she turned her head and smiled at them. Katie and Sasha walked to join her.
The party was an easy and happy affair. The children only had to be restrained or rescued about a dozen times and the adults who did not know each other soon rectified that situation.
At about half-past 1:00 the food was ready, or at least the main courses. Snacking had been going on from the beginning.
The two oldest grand-children, a girl and a boy, proudly helped distribute the meat. They had "assisted" Sasha's father in preparing the meat and had, Sasha knew, long had a bit of rivalry going as to who was the most grown-up.
Both Hugo and Stephanie also made a point of thanking Sasha for lighting a fire under Bluebird personnel to rescue their father. Neither seemed to share their mother's intuition that Sasha had done more than that .
Mid-afternoon (4:07 by Sasha's internal clock) Anna Prince "stole" Sasha away for "a couple of hours" to "discuss a new job."
At Prince's request they flew south to Bluebird Pendleton, a few minutes flight time. This day and time only a few cars were parked in the employee lot.
The two women crossed the street in front of the Headquarters building and Anna Prince opened the front glass double-doors with her laser card.
Sasha followed Anna down a corridor and into a second door which opened into the security monitoring room. A uniformed female security officer in an ergo chair was turning it toward the door. At a nearby desk a male guard was standing looking toward the door. Undoubtedly both had seen on their radar and vision screens the approach of Sasha's air car and recognized their ultimate boss when the two women got out of the vehicle.
"Hello, Wang, Addels," the billionaire said to the officers. "We'll be in the Virtue Lab for a couple of hours."
"Righto, Boss," said the man.
Sasha noticed tiny details of face and stance of the two which said they were mildly interested in her. By now she was a regular visitor to Pendleton and a lot of people recognized her by sight. But some of them also knew that she had some role in the Prince organization other than the public ones and the fact that she was a friend of Prince and Storm Cloud.
It was inevitable; despite the best security people did gossip. But as long as no one knew more than those facts she was content. It might even help if she ever again had to do something like the Storm Cloud rescue. It might even predispose them (a tiny bit) to ease her task.
They left the HQ via the back door into a small parking area. Anna Prince selected a golf-cart type paramag vehicle to take them on a zig-zag path through several big old "temporary" buildings to one of them. In the late-afternoon light Sasha could see that like all the others its outsides had been sand-blasted smooth and repainted light blue.
Inside it was a living-room sized lab with several tables along the opposite wall, a desk in a far corner of the room near the row of tables, and several large cabinets against a side wall.
Followed by Sasha Anna Prince headed for the cabinets, skirting a pair of side-by-side chairs in the middle of the room which seemed to be generously cushioned easy chairs upholstered in light-grey leather. Opening a cabinet she removed two helmets, handed one to Sasha, and put the other one on.
Anna showed Sasha how to don her helmet. It was very light, consisting of a strap which went around the back of the head at eye level and held wrap-around transparent goggles over the eyes. Another strap over the top of the head kept it from slipping down.
Prince told her how to adjust the straps to fit the helmet to her head, then had her slide a small switch on one temple to ON. A tiny green light began to glow next to the switch. Prince pointed to two quarter-sized disks on the inside of the horizontal straps.
"These are brain-wave sensors. They let you control equipment attached to the helmet via wireless. Place these two disks on your temples. Yes, like that. Now adjust everything so that it's comfortable."
Sasha felt a very slight electrical tingle on her temples where the two disks touched her. In a few moments the tingle seemed to go away. At the same time she sensed how a two-way flow of information was passing back and forth to her brain. She doubted any normal human would have sensed this.
"Now I'm going to calibrate the sensors. Look at me."
Sasha turned her head and saw Anna Prince slap at her. Reflexively one of her hands turned it aside and her body began to go into a counter-move that could put Prince on the floor. Prince flowed away from her and grinned.
"Sorry! I should have known better against you! But if I'd warned you that would have spoiled the test."
Sasha grinned. "It could have spoiled you. Give me warnings for tests like that."
"Yes. Valuable lesson: use something like THIS for a reflex test."
A translucent football appeared in the air several feet in front of Sasha. It jumped toward her but stopped halfway.
"Wow," said Anna. Her eyes were focused on something near her face—virtually near. Sasha realized that she was looking at a virtual reality instrument readout visible only to her. No doubt projected onto the inside surface of the goggles.
"Your reflex time is right at the edge of the charts. No wonder you do so well in athletics.
"Now, let's sit down."
The lights in the room dimmed perhaps two-thirds toward darkness. This made more evident ghostly images in the goggles of the insides of, she guessed, a hypersonic transport. There were passenger seats all around her. In fact, she and Prince was standing submerged in two of the seats near an aisle.
Prince stepped into the aisle and Sasha followed her, amused because she found herself automatically avoiding "touching" any of the phantom seats.
The aisle led toward the two real seats in the middle of the floor, now obscured by a virtual door. The door slid open as they approached it and she saw two imaged seats "behind" the two real seats. They were positioned further apart than the two real seats, just as they would be in an aircraft cockpit, so that the crew could more easily look out the front windows of the craft. If they had been in one.
Prince sat in the left seat and motioned the shapechanger into the right.
"Prince is partnering with two companies on this project. Malibu Games and Reality Inc."
Two logos appeared a couple of feet in front of Sasha. One was the famous Malibu icon, a fat orange zigzag lightning bolt edged in black. The other was a
fat deep-blue copy of a word: Reality .
"You probably know Malibu Games. Reality does game kiosks in malls. They're also active in high-end simulations for military training. They had already been in talks with Malibu for compatible products. We got involved because one of Prince's subsidiaries buys and sells high-tech patents."
The woman grinned at Sasha. "Want to go into orbit?"
"Sure."
The lights in the room went out. In front of Sasha floated a vehicle which Sasha had not seen before. It was a slender arrow head, with fat sharply raked-back delta wings which blended into the body and a V-shaped tail rising smoothly from the rear. A wide mouth opened up the tip at its front. Behind the large mouth two smaller side-mounted mouths curved a quarter of the way around the flattened oval body. Its skin was a pearly white which seemed to be partly translucent.
"The material of the hull is something new. We call it silly diamond because it's silicon and carbon bound together. "
"Silicone?!"
Anna laughed. "Started out as a new kind of silicone lubricant. Luckily the experimenter abandoned that when her experiment went wrong. Not only is it much harder than diamond, it shares heat all over its surface. It's technically a new state of matter called a hypermetal."
The image disappeared. In it's place was the insides of a cockpit. In front of them was a (virtual) wrap-around flat screen which showed the view out the front, sides, above, and below their feet. The view made it seem as if their virtual spaceship floated just above the HQ a quarter of a mile away.
Prince demonstrated the (real) seat belts on the chairs. They were lightly padded, not just straps. They included two shoulder restraints forming an X across the chest. There were also thigh and calf belts.
The billionaire punched a few buttons, lights turned red then orange then green, and she put her hands on the driver's yoke and lifted them off. The view dropped away below.
The vehicle tilted back more and more. The seats tilted forward to match and flattened like an easy chair, the leg support easing into wells below the controls. Acceleration pushed her more deeply into the seat, deep enough that the sides curved around her a bit, almost like a cuddle. The seats were well-built. No part of her felt more weight than any other.
Sasha wondered briefly how the sensations of acceleration were simulated so well they seemed real.
The view of Pendleton shrank and slid behind them as Prince turned the craft from northward to westward. The PacificCoast to the north came into view, along with the coastal highways and cities, including San Clemente and the asado they had left behind. Faster still, but still just below the speed of sound at their height, she guessed, their craft turned more until it rushed upward and out over the ocean.
Off to their right the complexity of the Los Angeles metroplex came into view. Higher still and the large Santa Monica mountain range beyond revealed themselves, their peaks and depths highlighted by the slanting sunlight.
The coast slid backward out of sight. They were far out over the ocean. The sun in their forward viewscreen began to rise.
Faster and higher yet fled the space craft. The sky ahead began to darken from blue toward blue-black. The clouds over the blue ocean fell away, brilliantly white on their tops.
Soon the curve of the planet revealed itself. The coast of Asia appeared, rolled under them. It was mid-day here, and the panorama was very beautiful. Sasha drank it in, saying nothing. It was a long time before either spoke.
The muted hissing roar of the engines eased and then cut off entirely. Sasha felt the seat under her ease its grip upon her. For a moment she felt the familiar sensation from trampoline competitions of being weightless, airborne, until her body reminded her that she was still on Earth. For a moment she felt intense disappointment.
Anna Prince said, "We're now about three-fourths of the way to orbital velocity. I could go into orbit. But for our discussions we'll just continue around the planet back to where we came.
"Now, I've got a proposition for you. Would you like to be the 'face of space'?"
"Probably. What would it involve?"
"A little background first. Space travel is now pretty routine. It's also still pretty expensive. I'm going to change that."
Anna Prince quickly reprised the advantages of paramagnetic jets powered by superbatteries. No critical moving parts, no burning of precious petroleum-based fuels, no fuel in fact.
"Rockets need fuel, of course, but they come into play at the edges and outside the air. Big cost savings."
Almost a decade ago probes had discovered that the Lagrange points near the moon, opposite the moon, and a third of the way around the Earth contained at least a hundred times as much material as astrophysicists said could possibly exist, at least for long. There had been wild speculation, Sasha remembered, that space aliens had moved the material there.
"Bringing even the most precious minerals back to Earth isn't economical. But space-based factories which create products, or pre-process material to make it easier to create products on Earth, can be made profitable. I'll see to that."
Anna Prince was a recognized financial genius whose "magic touch" had increased her parents millions a hundred-fold in just a few years, then a few years later made her a billionaire. So when she made such a statement Sasha took it as simple fact, not boasting.
Out the virtual view ports Sasha saw that the Earth below them had passed well into night. At first the scattered lights below were few and far between. But they multiplied rapidly until Europe was a necklace of bright lights. Some were yellow, many were like white diamonds.
Then the blackness of the Atlantic spun below them.
"I'm in talks with the Hilton hotel chain. They are seriously thinking about making their fantasy luxury hotel in orbit real. You'd be one of the celebrities who visit it during its construction and opening. Which is about two years off. I had already begun a core structure in synchronous orbit which I'll sell to them."
"More use for those billions just 'sitting in banks doing nothing'."
Prince glanced at her, smiling, nodded.
Now the east coast of America's seaboard was coming up, along with its own necklace of earthbound stars.
Anna Prince sobered, stared unseeing at the sights before her, glanced at Sasha.
"I was impressed with how carefully you handled the Philippine insurgents. You only killed three of them."
"Well, I figured out long ago that a lot of the enemy in those adventure movies were just family men trying to support their families. I got impatient with all the blowing up and throat-cutting of the poor bastards."
"Which is where you come in, again," the woman said. "Bluebird has its special agents, who go in singly or in small groups, to get something or someone or get something done. Four of them worked with you on the end-game part of Adrian's rescue."
Oseye, Blake, Lilith, and Sarah. Sasha had long ago guessed what they were.
"I want you to become one of them. But a very special special agent. Unlike them you have some unique abilities. I'm not going to pry into them, how or why they work, or even what they are. For me what is important is that they let you go places without being noticed and perform actions it would take several people to do. They let you exercise your compassion where it's deserved."
Again Prince was silent, letting Sasha think.
It was too much to take in right now, or to make a decision. She said so.
"THAT is another reason why I want you for this job. You take your time. You think. A remarkable trait, especially for one so young.
"So take your time. And if your decision is No then that's all right. Anyway, I believe eventually, maybe a year from now, maybe in ten years, you'll say Yes."
The billionaire triggered the safety restraints and Sasha felt them clasp her, first lightly and then a bit more tightly as the jet engines came on and began to clutch at the thin air, retarding rather speeding their progress.
"Why do you support such actions, Anna? If fo
und out, they could make lots of trouble for you."
The woman sighed.
"The world has so much wrong with, it can break your heart thinking about them. I was born incredibly fortunate and raised with much love and care. Then I suffered tragedy and became very angry and destructive."
Sasha had read that Prince's parents had died when she was twelve. She had not reacted well to that. She spited her guardians and roamed with all the freedom of her great wealth. The rumors said that she had put herself in dangerous situations and courted self-destruction, killing four men when they had attacked her in some slum. But there had never been any evidence the rumors were true.
Then she had straightened herself out and let herself be home-schooled. Later she had gone to very exclusive and no doubt expensive private educational institutions. At the earliest legal age she had taken control of her financial empire and, despite dire predictions, succeeded brilliantly.
"I bought Bluebird because it's obvious that national military machines have been declining ever since the Great War and the Hairy Years following them. Private security agencies will gradually take their place. They have to be restrained and modernized and made as humane as they can be. Bluebird acts as an example, and sometimes even forces other security agencies to follow better paths to profits."
The space plane was now deeper in the atmosphere. The central part of the US was rolling under them, darker than the eastern edge of the country but with occasional smaller and larger cities. The sound of the engines was louder, the restraints a bit more urgent. And far ahead she could see the sky brightening as they began to approach the west coast and the late afternoon they had left behind nearly two hours before.
"Also, every once in a while, I can see where clandestine actions can improve the situation in the world."
"Well, it sounds intriguing. I'll think about it. But I won't do assassinations. And sabotage? You'd have to be very convincing to get me to do that. I too feel that my special gifts, as I think of them, must be carefully used."