3rd World Products, Book 17 Read online

  After greetings, Tanya said, “I’ll put mom on now,” and a few moments later, Marie said, “Uh… Hello, Ed,” then nothing else.

  I replied, “Hi, Marie. What’s on your mind?”

  A moment passed, then she said, “Linda told me what happened to Mike. And what you did about it.” I heard her take a breath, then she continued, “And what you did about me. I just wanted to say thanks, but it… well, it doesn’t seem… it doesn’t seem enough.”

  “But it is. You’re welcome, and what I did about Mike was for all of us. Have you heard from Will and Connie?”

  She paused again, then replied cautiously, “No. Should I have?”

  “Guess not. They didn’t contact me either.”

  “Didn’t Linda tell them what happened?”

  “Seems likely. It also seems likely they felt the same way you did about what happened to Mike. They wouldn’t have known any more about it than you did. Oh, well. I was never one of their favorite people off the job.”

  “Neither was I, apparently.”

  To get off that topic and lighten the mood, I asked, “How have you been getting along, Marie? You’re sounding good.”

  I already knew some of the answer to that. In Linda’s pictures of Marie’s progress, she’d looked thirty-five or forty after Milla’s nanobots had finished reconstructing her facial damage. The pictures couldn’t tell me about her mental progress, but she wasn’t slurring her words.

  Marie asked, “You really don’t know?”

  “Nope. I saw Linda’s pictures, but I was more concerned about what they couldn’t show. You aren’t having trouble with words now, so I guess that end of things is working out fairly well, too.”

  For whatever reason, Marie paused again before she replied, “Yes, I think… that end of things… is doing fairly well. Ed, Tanya said the Robodoc wanted to see me. Why?”

  “Prob’ly a checkup. Maybe some fine tuning or something. I don’t know. And her name is Milla. Are you calling for a ride?”

  “I… I don’t know yet. It was one thing to let the Robodoc… uhm… fix… my face and head, but my brain is… is me. The real me. I’m not sure I want it to… to tinker with my brain.”

  “Then you need more info, ma’am. All the brain-tinkering was done when Milla’s ‘bots rebuilt the damaged areas to match the other side’s undamaged areas. Strictly physical reconstruction. Any mental progress you’ve made since then is all your own work.”

  From somewhere near her, Tanya asked, “Ed, why not put up a screen and show her?”

  I said, “That’s up to Marie.”

  Marie asked, “Uh… a screen?”

  “A field video screen.”

  “You can do that?”

  “Tanya seems to think so. Yes or no, please.”

  A beat passed, then she said, “Yes. Okay.”

  I sent a probe and made it a screen at their end. Tanya waved from her seat on the couch. Next to her, Marie stared wide eyed at the screen for a moment, then said flatly, “Oh, my. Uh… hello, Ed.”

  Expanding the screen, I split it and displayed a quick review of Milla’s repairs to Marie. When the display finished, I said, “And then the excess ‘bots left your system.”

  Marie almost warily asked, “If they finished and left, why would the Robodoc want to see me?”

  “You’d have to ask her, but I think she just wants to check her work. I know I would.”

  Her left eyebrow arched. “But you haven’t. I haven’t seen you since you visited the clinic with Tanya.” Canting her head with a studious expression, she added, “In fact, I’d like to know how you knew when it was time to take Tanya and disappear.”

  That made me look at Tanya. Her eyes widened slightly, but she remained silent. I looked back at Marie and said, “Tanya and I used a probe to check your progress that evening. What we saw was pretty startling. Watch.”

  Contacting my core, I showed Marie what Tanya and I had seen; new bone and gristle and new translucent skin covering everything, becoming more normal-looking as we watched.

  Marie looked starkly at Tanya and asked, “You can do those… probe… things, too?”

  Tanya shook her head. “No, mom. We were using his.”

  Looking back at me, Marie asked quietly, “And have you done any… ahh… ‘checking up‘… on me since then?”

  “Nope. No need. I’d done all I could and the ‘bots were in contact with Milla. If they’d run into any problems, they’d…”

  Tanya angrily interrupted with, “No, Ed. What my mother wants to know is whether you’ve been spying on her.”

  She turned to Marie and snapped, “Damn it, mom! After all that, you…” She stopped there and glared for a moment, then took a breath and said, “Excuse me, Ed. I need to go hit something.” She stalked away into a bedroom and slammed the door.

  Marie watched her go, then turned to me and asked, “Well?”

  I met her gaze for a moment, said, “No,” and poked the screen’s ‘off’ icon. The screens at both ends vanished.

  Chapter Five

  A shadow passed over the area and I looked up. It was Lori. She landed and gave me a long look, then asked, “Do you need some time to yourself?”

  Sipping coffee, I replied, “No, things went about as I expected.” At her fisheye expression, I added, “You’d have to know Marie.”

  “What if she calls back?”

  I shrugged. “What if? How can it matter?”

  “I don’t think I understand.”

  Considering how to put things, I said, “Lori, I set out to fix her. Now she’s fixed. There doesn’t have to be more. If she calls back, I’m under no obligation to talk with her.”

  Looking somewhat perplexed, Lori eyed me for a moment, then said, “I’ll see you back at the house,” and lifted away.

  Sipping my coffee again, I put the mug back between the handlebar straps and started the bike. Where to? Nowhere. A country ride on a nice day.

  I’d just gotten up to sixty when my core informed me my phone was again ringing. Linking into it, I found Tanya’s number calling. Sending a probe, I found Marie holding the phone. She’d probably hit the redial button. She looked pissed.

  I answered her call with, “You got me, Batgirl.”

  “Aren’t you going to make another… screen-whatsis?”

  “Do we really need one? What’s on your mind, ma’am?”

  She said coldly, “You hung up on me. Or turned off. Or whatever.”

  “Yeah, and it could happen again. Say something meaningful.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like why we need to talk at all.”

  There was a pause, then a soft, grudging, “Goddammit, I feel as if I owe you.”

  “Well, I’d even agree with that, but you can work it off. Help Stephanie and her legal beagles fight the medical field laws.”

  “I’m already doing that.”

  “Then we’re good. Anything else, ma’am?”

  Another brief pause happened, then, “Yes. I need a board like Tanya’s. I can’t even begin to keep up with her. She’s having to carry me on her board when we…”

  I was nearing US-98 and traffic had become hectic. Interrupting Marie, I said, “Traffic, ma’am. Lemme park the bike,” and pulled into the only gas station for miles. Once I’d put the kickstand down, I put up screens at both ends, then said, “Boards cost a grand and you’ll need about two days for training. Think you can stand me that long?”

  Marie hung up her phone as she shot back, “Sure. I put up with you for most of 1972. I think I could manage another couple of days.”

  “Hey, I dunno, ma’am. I’m older and meaner now.”

  “So am I.”

  “Well, you’re on, then. Go find a grand and I’ll buzz up there on Monday. If you can handle the bunny slope, I’ll sell you a board.”

  Her gaze narrowed. “The bunny slope? What’s that?”

  I chuckled, “It’s scary as hell, ma’am. Ask Tanya about it. Good ‘nuff? I
kinda want to get back to what I was doing.”

  Heh. Tanya would give her some abridged version of her first flights on her board.

  Marie said, “If you can fly one, so can I.”

  “Yeah, that’s the spirit. See you Monday. Bye.”

  “Wait. This Lori person… what is she to you?”

  “That’s a pretty personal question, isn’t it?”

  “I suppose it is. So? Is she your girlfriend?”

  “Not at this time. That’s all you get. Bye.”

  I let the screens dissipate and went into the store for a coffee refill, then got back on the road. North of US-98, the traffic thinned to nothing. I sent a ping to Lori.

  She answered, “Yes?”

  “I’m going up to Ocala Monday. Marie wants a board. If you aren’t too busy, maybe you’d like to come along.”

  “She called you back?”

  “Yup.”

  “And she thinks she can handle a board?! Ed, I know she looks young since her repairs, but she’s actually…”

  Heh. “Yes’m? Were you about to say something about how she’s gotta be my age?”

  Lori sighed, “Yeah. Never mind. If she’s still enough like you, that won’t really matter, will it?”

  “No, prob’ly not.”

  After a brief pause, Lori said, “Sure, pencil me in. But I might have to go help Aunt Lisa with the house. Relatives are visiting this week.”

  “Okay. We’ll see how things go. Later.”

  “Yeah. Later.”

  She dropped the link. Hm. She’d mentioned the relatives on Thursday, but that hadn’t interfered with her visit to Florida. Help with the house? Was she just grabbing an excuse to put some distance between us for now? Whatever.

  When I reached County Road 44, I simply turned around. You can’t beat the scenery on Citrus Way in this area. An hour later I put the bike in the garage and entered the den to find Lori absorbed in the data on three screens at once. She gave me a little wave as she scrolled the center screen.

  All I saw were equations and such, but some looked vaguely familiar. I sipped coffee and studied the left screen. Okay, that bunch of stuff seemed to have something to do with time and distance. On the right-hand screen were flitter specifications. Lori stopped scrolling the center screen and I saw satellite data.

  “Got a project going, ma’am?”

  She replied, “Sort of. 3rd World was asked to help bring down a satellite that malfunctioned.” Looking at me, she added, “They politely refused. I’m wondering why.”

  “You could ask.”

  Returning her eyes to her screens, she said, “I could, but I’d just get some version of the official story. I thought I’d use my spare time to look into it, but so far I’ve found nothing.”

  Sipping coffee, I said, “Try this; 3rd doesn’t want to appear to be anyone’s tool or ally in any endeavors but their own.”

  Giving the ceiling a ‘here we go again‘ look, Lori turned to me and said, “Trust you to come up with something like that.”

  “Hey, if you can’t find verifiable facts, it’s prob’ly about politics. Maybe the feds want someone to think they can have satellites removed. What kind is it? Civilian, military, or spy?”

  “Military.”

  “Got a number?”

  “USA-281. There’s no other open description for it, except to say it would be very dangerous if it deorbited over land.”

  “Okay, figure this; they didn’t say the danger was falling parts, which would be the most obvious danger. That leaves what? Something likely to cause localized toxicity, which would probably be fuel, which is very probably hydrazine. I suggest you look up satellite USA-193.”

  Lori did so and I waited as she read the info. After a time, she asked, “What am I missing? Hydrazine is toxic. It causes cancer.”

  “Yeah, but its flash point is fifty-two centigrade. That’s about one-twenty-six Fahrenheit. Its autoignition temp is about the same as gasoline, so how the hell would it survive reentry temperatures? They didn’t fool anybody. They were showing the Chinese the US could shoot down satellites, too.”

  “Too?”

  “Yup. The Chinese made a big show of shooting one of theirs in 2007. Can’t say they actually shot it ‘down’ because all they did was blow it apart and create about two thousand chunks of space crap. The US actually shot USA-193 down in 2008.”

  As Lori seemed to mull the matter, I headed for the kitchen. She soon followed, and as I rinsed my mug and made a fresh coffee, she asked, “So what’s the deal with Marie?”

  I shrugged. “She says she wants a board.”

  Canting her head and studying me, Lori asked, “But you don’t believe that’s all she wants?”

  “I don’t have to believe it. I also don’t have to cooperate if she wants anything else.”

  “Why invite me along?”

  “Why not? Got something better to do?”

  Lori grinned and chuckled, “Not good enough.”

  Capping my mug, I sipped and turned to face her. “Okay. She’s living with Tanya and they’re working with Steph’s law firm, so the board isn’t an unreasonable request. But Lori, she’s someone I didn’t like way back when and have no reason to believe we’ll get along any better now. Having company along might make her cautious.”

  With a grin, Lori asked, “Meeting Marie really bugs you, doesn’t it? Why? Did you have the hots for her?”

  Putting up a screen with a picture of Marie in her twenties, I said, “Oh, hell, yes. We all did. But she turned into a shrew when she didn’t get her way. Planning an op was more trouble than the op itself. And we almost came to blows a few times. The last time she got in my face, I told Linda not to team us up again.”

  In a skeptical tone, Lori asked, “You ‘told’ her? You didn’t ‘ask’?”

  “I told her, ma’am. Ask her about that day.”

  Lori laughed, “Oh, I will!” Laughing again, she said, “Okay, I’ll come along and protect you from Marie. I have to meet this chick!”

  She headed back into the den with another chuckle. I took my new coffee out back and gave some thought to how things might go with Marie. At least she didn’t hate me anymore about Mike’s death, but there was still the likelihood of a strong personality clash.

  In a discussion with Connie, I’d once compared dealing with Marie to dealing with a gorilla. If she didn’t see you as an authority of some sort, your opinions and thoughts were of little interest to her.

  Unless she’d changed greatly, I’d be a teacher until she thought she had a handle on flying the board. Ten seconds later, I might no longer be of any use to her. The only thing that might complicate that for her might be her sense of ‘owing’ me for my previous help. But I wouldn’t bank on that.

  Hm. Nor did I have any reason to bank on that. Maybe I was overthinking things a bit. Just sell her the board, train her a bit, and get the hell away from her. Let Steph and Tanya deal with her.

  Calling up a screen, I checked email and group messages, then went to Reuters.com for news. Yammer. Politics. Jabber. Wars. Blather. Celebrity BS. Then I saw a corner pic of what appeared to be the Earth surrounded by hundreds of dots. The caption spoke of space debris. I tapped the pic and read the article.

  Upshot: way too much junk in Low Earth Orbit. Everything from paint chips and lost tool bags to satellites the size of big trucks whizzing around at over 17,000 miles per hour. One NASA article read:

  “More than 21,000 orbital debris larger than 10 cm are known to exist. The estimated population of particles between 1 and 10 cm in diameter is approximately 500,000. The number of particles smaller than 1 cm exceeds 100 million.”

  Hm. Since they can’t track anything smaller than 2 cm, somebody was doing some heavy guessing. Still, that’s a bunch to worry about in a space suit. A paint chip could take out a shuttle window. Maybe it was time to take over where Steph had left off. Back in her flitter pilot days, one of her hobbies had been zapping orbital junk.

&n
bsp; Tapping into NASA’s computers gave me their tracking data. Sending an observation probe upstairs verified some of the data. Good enough for a start. Now what? Just set up a field to intercept things? No. There were tons of the stuff and it was too widespread. Maybe go up there and… do what? Even the fastest flitter design couldn’t match orbital speeds. Close, but not quite.

  And there was no reason to go up there in person. I could use Ed2. But again, to do what? Reroute individual bits so they’d hit the atmosphere? That might be entertaining for a while, but it would undoubtedly become boring as hell fairly quickly.

  Maybe reroute stuff to collide as gently as possible in a high orbit? Form a big ball of junk instead of innumerable tiny bits of junk? And then maybe melt it all together. And hollow it out to make some kind of a space station. For what purpose? Just to keep busy?

  But the idea wouldn’t go away. I could separate metals. Use the softer stuff on the outside to ablate impacts. Blow the whole mess up like a balloon and shape it to spin decently. That would provide faux-gravity for anyone inside it later. Wouldn’t have to be a work of art; the new tenants could fix it up however they wanted.

  I pinged Athena and asked if she’d help with the math involved with safely moving things to form a ball at six hundred miles. She agreed, but suggested an elliptical orbit of between five hundred miles and twenty-five thousand miles for convenience.

  “Twenty-five thousand doesn’t sound very convenient, ma’am.”

  “It will be easier to collect debris safely.”

  It would? Hm. Yeah, probably, if she thought so.

  “Good enough, then. Mind if I kibitz while you work? I might actually learn something.”

  Athena laughed, then said, “I’m sure you will.”

  We began the effort with a small defunct satellite. I made a vid probe hover near the satellite while Athena used a bright, super-heated field to vaporize a tiny spot on the surface. A tiny hole formed and I could see more vapor jetting out of the hole. The entire event lasted less than fifteen seconds and the satellite didn’t seem at all affected.

  Calling up a screen, I monitored data regarding the satellite and sure enough, it was inching upward from its former path. Twenty seconds later it had only gained eight feet of altitude.