Ode To Defiance Chapter 19

14

Darkness

During my eighty-seven years, I have witnessed a whole succession of technological revolutions. But none of them has done away with the need for character in the individual or the ability to think.

—

Bernard M. Baruch

White is the color of mourning for a Balinese funeral. Black is forbidden.

The procession started on the

Chiron

. Most isle ships, the

Chiron

included, had one deck that was two decks high for those social activities that required a more sweeping sense of grandeur. The movie theaters resided on this deck, as did the theatrical stage and the auditorium through which most residents passed when arriving on the BrainTrust for a brief intro to the workings of the ships.

Upon this deck also resided the houses of worship for religious groups, as diverse as the people on that particular ship. The

Chiron

had a handful of different Christian churches, a Jewish synagogue, a Muslim mosque, and modest versions of both Hindu and Buddhist temples.

Dash’s funeral did not start in the Hindu temple. Due to the size of the gathering, and the necessity to make some accommodations between tradition and the physical reality of the BrainTrust’s unique strengths and weaknesses, the procession started in the auditorium.

In the typical Balinese funeral, as Ping understood it, the body was placed in a white shroud. They had done that here too, but they had augmented it with more white: the deceased wore her lab coat, with her name crisply stitched into the shirt pocket. It fit her in death as it had in life.

She lay surrounded by brilliant Balinese flowers, brought from the botanical garden on the top deck of the FB

Alpha

.

The shroud that covered her face bothered Ping. She wanted—she

needed

—to see her friend one last time to make a solemn vow. Completely oblivious to the demands of convention, she reached for the white covering to pull it aside.

A pale white hand stretching from another white lab coat caught Ping’s hand as it reached. Amanda spoke softly. “No, Ping. Let her lie.”

Ping turned angrily to Amanda, but the woman stood her ground. Ping slumped. “I have to see her face again.”

Amanda released her hand. “You need to focus your anger. Build it. Prepare it. Because one day not far in the future, we will find the people who did this, and you’ll have to be your best.”

Ping looked away.

Amanda changed the subject, seemingly. “You know, in Dash’s own religion, this is a happy time. Her spirit is about to be cleansed and purified. They believe the spirit is reborn into another member of the family.”

Amanda leaned over and whispered in her ear, “But I think reincarnation is a bit more complicated than that. I wouldn’t be surprised if Dash has already been reborn.”

Ping stepped back and stared at her. “Where?”

Amanda pointed through the crowd to where she could just barely see Chance standing alone, rubbing her ear and talking to herself. “I think she’s sharing mindspace with our own Ms. Dixon.”

Ping finally smiled. “I suddenly find myself believing in reincarnation.” She stepped backward away from the body and straight into an elderly Balinese couple.

Ping jumped in place and spun to acknowledge them. “My apologies.” She eyed the pair. “Are you Dash’s aunt and uncle by any chance?”

The two nodded their heads graciously. The wife said humorously, “No poking the body. We’re watching you.”

Ping looked away sheepishly.

The husband, clearly struggling to maintain a bright mood, looked past Ping at the body. “Dyah saved my life, you know. Rejuvenation therapy.” He laughed. “They tell me I’ll soon be fifteen years younger.” He lost the smile. “I’ve never felt so old.”

Ping helped hoist the body into a very Balinese sarcophagus, a

Singa Mangaraja

—an orange lion with two wings. Normally the lion would have been atop a tall tower, but this was an isle ship; it had to fit into the elevator. The tower would come later.

In another break from tradition, women, including Ping, helped carry the coffin into the elevator and up to the dock, where all the ferries of the BrainTrust waited in polite lines to collect and carry the people on the next step of the procession. Almost half the people wore white lab coats, enabling them to follow both Balinese and BrainTrust traditions at the same time.

The ritual required that the procession follow a meandering path to confuse the bad spirits, so the line of ferries circled the BrainTrust just inside the reef, then passed out through the southwest channel.

Cremation was the next step. The whole winged lion would be set afire. Throughout most of the BrainTrust, however, setting large fires was strictly forbidden. Fortunately there was a place where fires, far hotter than any funeral pyre, were accepted as a routine undertaking.

So once the ferries exited the channel, they turned toward the

Heinlein

. Soon enough they arrived next to the VATT, the immense titanium skeleton that served as the spaceship transport tower. Normally it lifted rocket boosters up the side of the ship and carried them to the launch pad, a pad invented by Dash herself, covered in graphene-reinforced carbon tiles and capable of withstanding the very flames of Hell.

Today the VATT lifted a winged lion to the height of a SpaceR Kestrel Titan and carried it to its final resting place.

The fire was lovely in the setting sun. Once it burned out, Ping knew, they’d toss the ashes into the sea to purify the departed with both fire and water.

But for now, the fire burned its brightest, throwing wave after wave of heat into the chill air.

Ping whispered her promise. “Burn, baby, burn. The men who did this to you will follow oh so soon.”

Matt sat in his office on the

Helios

looking contentedly at the numbers, schedules, and budgets on his tablet. The assault on the

Chiron

, the virus specifically designed to target the BrainTrust, the blockade—all of it had had relatively little effect on SpaceR’s operations. The

Helios

was behind schedule manufacturing the next Titan, and there’d been a slump in Global Express passenger traffic between the main BrainTrust and the rest of the world, but these were mere blips.

He sipped his hot chocolate, luxuriating in the flavor that had been unavailable in the later stages of the blockade. Officially, the archipelago still didn’t have any chocolate, not even on the

Haven.

The Coke and coffee lobbies had gotten their shipments prioritized first.

But Matt had had his people slip a few kilos of cocoa onto the first Global Express rocket from the Prometheus archipelago carrying passengers for the BrainTrust, so he was sitting pretty, even if everyone else had to wait.

It was good for everything to be back to normal.

His receptionist chirped on his tablet, “FBI Agent Cameron Ballard is here to see you.”

Matt’s expression turned sour. Some things were not yet normal.

Ballard entered briskly, trailed by his bot minder, to stand on the far side of Matt’s desk. “Good morning.” He tapped on his own tablet, and a soft though irritating tone on Matt’s tablet announced the arrival of a message from someone not important enough for Matt to have assigned a ringtone.

Ballard continued, “I have a National Security Letter for you. You are hereby requested and required to run a Top Secret tap on every communication through your Starry Night cell satellite network that comes here to the main BrainTrust fleet.”

Well, wasn’t that a wonderful addition to Matt’s heretofore excellent morning? He popped open the message he’d just received. Sure enough, there it was—a National Security Letter requiring he engage in a massive wiretap. The fact that he was doing the wiretap was also classified, so he could tell no one.

Ballard stood before his desk with a triumphant look on his face.

Matt looked up at him wearily. “Why are you doing this?”

Ballard clenched his fists and leaned them on the desk. “Because this peacekeeper, Jam, who was a sleeper agent for the terrorists until just recently, is surely working with someone here on the BrainTrust.”

Matt put his tablet down. “I’m not even convinced Jam really is a terrorist.”

Ballard glared in amazement. “She stabbed her supposed best friend Ping.”

Matt really didn’t have much to say to that. It was pretty damning, actually, except somehow he still didn’t believe it. “So who do you suspect she’s working with?”

Ballard shook his head. “I have no idea, which is why we need all the comm for the whole archipelago.”

Matt sat back in his chair. “You do realize, all the comm using BrainTrust phones is encrypted end to end? I couldn’t give you the transcripts of those calls even if I wanted to.”

Ballard shrugged it aside. “I don’t really believe that, but the BrainTrust seems to have convinced everyone, even our own crypto people, that it’s true, so I’ll settle for the traffic analysis. Who’s talking to who? Where are the people doing the talking?” Ballard stepped away from the desk and waved his hands placating. “Don’t you see, Jam is our best connection to the mastermind. If we find Jam, we’ll find the leader of the terrorists.” His eyes glowed. “No matter where they are, I can have a strike team on the ground in twelve hours.”

Matt considered pointing out that the BrainTrust could probably have a team in place in three, but he thought better of it. Matt leaned forward and spoke sadly. “Privacy is one of the most important selling points of the Starry Night system. People all over the world depend on our discretion to talk with one another about topics their governments would kill them for discussing.”

Ballard’s expression turned smug. “I don’t give a rat’s ass about those people, and I don’t care about your reputation or your profits. This is all about saving American lives.”

“Except you don’t actually know it will save any American lives. You don’t seem to have a lick of proof of your allegation that someone here is working for them.”

Ballard thumped the desk. “I don’t need proof! I don’t care if it’s not true! You must comply!” He calmed down again. “Or the next time you go to your spaceport in Texas, you’ll go to jail forever for collaborating with terrorists.”

After a pause, Matt made a call.

Ballard growled, “Tell anyone about this, and I’ll arrest you right now.”

Matt chuckled. “That kind of threat hasn’t worked very well for you lately, has it?”

The tablet awoke, and Joshua’s voice came on the line. “Matt, how can I help you?”

Ballard closed his eyes in rage.

“Hey, Joshua. If, hypothetically, Agent Ballard charged into my office with a National Security Letter demanding access to all the traffic into and out of the BrainTrust, what should I do?”

Joshua’s voice darkened. “Oh, my. Hello, Agent Ballard.”

Ballard growled.

Joshua continued. “The first thing is, if he hands you such a letter, do not tell me.”

Matt answered wryly, “I’ve got that covered.”

“Second, let me investigate. I’m pretty sure you can talk to a lawyer about a legal challenge. I’m also sure Keenan Stull’s company gets these things all the time. I predict he’ll be glad to help.”

“Thanks, Joshua.” Matt hung up, then rose and faced Ballard as if planning to charge through him as he would have in his college days on a football field. “I promise you I shall handle this request of yours appropriately. Now you will please get the hell out of my office.”

Amanda set a cup of coffee on the conference table in front of Lenora. “Do not spill a drop,” she abjured. She pointed to the pot in her hand. “When this is gone, that’s the last of it, at least until the cargo ship from South America arrives two days from now.”

Lenora sipped it ever so carefully. “No coffee! And so the blockade finally achieves its goal of forcing the BrainTrust to surrender.” She gave a sly smile to Chance. “Too late, of course. Congratulations on having slipped past that bullet.”

Joshua muttered, “Clearly our logistics people need to be retrained. How could they have failed to schedule the delivery of coffee as the first thing? Productivity all around the archipelago is going to suffer.”

Chance snorted. “Actually, there was an even more important shipment that did get priority service. The energy drinks and sodas arrived in the nick of time to prevent a total creativity crash.” She looked away. “Dash would be so happy that the Coke made the first shipment.”

After a moment, Lenora rasped out, “Let’s get back to business.”

Everyone became attentive as Lenora popped a video on the wallscreen. “Now, even with the high-resolution cameras we use, microexpression analysis is weaker with a recording than when it’s done in person, which is one reason I insisted on coming in person. But of all the recordings of all the scientists, this is the one that disturbs me the most.”

Hilaal’s face, suffused with a warm smile, filled the screen.

Chance smiled at the screen. “He’s rather handsome, isn’t he?”

Amanda chuckled. “And utterly charming.”

Lenora nodded. “Exactly. He’s a charismatic leader, one of the most dangerous kinds of individuals on earth.”

Joshua objected, “They aren’t all dangerous. We’ve had more than one here on the BrainTrust.”

Lenora smiled at him warmly. “Quite right, I misspoke in my characterization. Charisma is like a loaded gun. Whether it is used for good or ill depends on the moral character of the one who wields it.” She played the tape forward a little bit. “The problem here is that he has managed to charm Cameron Ballard.”

Chance listened for a moment, puzzled. “Really? It’s not obvious.”

Lenora responded dryly, “If you’ve listened to Ballard interrogate as many people as I have, the gentleness of the tone of his voice is a dead giveaway.”

Amanda frowned. “What difference does it make?”

Lenora shrugged. “Perhaps not much.” She took a deep breath. “And yet I keep coming back to this recording. There’s no moment when I can definitely say he’s lying, but there are few markers at all, almost as if he’d taken a Xanax before the interview to diminish his reactions.”

Chance shook her head. “Seems unlikely, but it’s true he’s pretty calm, especially in a crisis.” She smiled at a memory. “Like when the terrorists came through. He was the one who rushed to our aid when they knocked Velma and me out, and he orchestrated the scientists in arming themselves after Uwais and Sabaah had gone up to Wenara Wana.”

Lenora skipped the recording to a bookmark near the end. “And here, when Ballard asks him if he knew Uwais and Sabaah? See how Hilaal covers his face with his hands? If he knew this was the most dangerous question, if he felt fear of giving himself away, this is how he would respond.”

Joshua grunted. “Maybe we need to put Hilaal in the brig next to Jubair.”

Amanda objected. “Or more tactfully, have Lenora interview him.”

Chance saw a risk. “If he’s trained for combat the way his lieutenants are, let me take the second interrogator chair.”

Amanda added, “And we’ll get Aar to stand outside.”

Lenora continued as if she hadn’t heard. She flipped to another bookmark in the vid. “But this is the thing I find most disturbing.” She played the part where Hilaal said, “I didn’t think anybody had a CRISPIER outside the BrainTrust.”

Lenora paused the recording and spoke slowly. “There’s a hint of a gesture here, almost as if he knew that a CRISPIER had been stolen.”

Chance shrugged. “He could have found out about it easily enough. We haven’t broadcast the news, but it’s a pretty open secret.”

Lenora winced. “But why pretend he didn’t know? Why not just say so?”

Joshua sat up very straight. “We need to get him into interrogation immediately.”

Amanda tapped her phone. “Aar, we need you ASAP.”

But when they looked for Hilaal, he was nowhere to be found. A couple of hours of searching showed he had rented a CopterLyft. The copter pilot, a teenager working for Ted Simpson, had been the last person to see him. “He brought a bunch of scuba gear and wanted to go out to the reef. I pointed out that the reef was mostly dead still, not much to see, but he said the solitude of the underwater world allowed him to think difficult thoughts more clearly.”

They sent out search copters in all directions, but he had disappeared.

Khalid laid down on the recliner in the back, closer to the engines. The recliner was made of light webbing with no padding; he could already tell sleeping was going to be nearly impossible. “Sabaah, you were right. I needed to make this a bit bigger.” His voice echoed oddly off the bare titanium walls of the cylinder within which they were now enclosed.

Khalid had encountered a rumor that the BrainTrust now had a small fleet of titanium submarines almost seven meters in diameter that could dive to two hundred meters, and they were covered with some sort of acoustic tile that felt a lot like dolphin skin. It was just like the BrainTrust to overbuild.

Khalid’s sub was considerably more modest. Just two meters in diameter, it was small enough that it had attracted no real attention when he’d printed its snap-together parts, all of which had been easily carted off by bots and robovans from the 3D printer rooms. He’d been pleasantly surprised when the rude, crude little sub had dived to ten meters before it started to leak.

The important part of the sub was of course the beta battery that powered the jet ski electric pump-jet. With the beta battery, which burned no fuel and consumed no oxygen, the rest of building a basic sub was easy. As long as you didn’t mind surfacing every night to blow out the stale air.

But now both he and Sabaah would pay the price for being a bit too austere.

Sabaah, settling into the forward recliner with the controls, chuckled at Khalid’s acknowledgment of the sub’s cramped spaces. “You should have seen Uwais bent over like the hunchback of Notre Dame when he got on board. Then visualize us with a third person—a woman no less.”

Khalid shook his head. “Sometimes I really don’t treat you two very well. I apologize. And more, I promise that I will do better next time.”

After a pause, Sabaah changed the subject. “So, do you have a plan for this Jam person? Should we have just killed her? Do you want to meet her?”

Khalid was, he confessed to himself, fascinated by this legendary warrior who now seemed to be one of his followers. He knew that from time to time Sabaah and Uwais muttered about how he needed another wife. He was not ready; he still mourned Anjum and their dead child. But perhaps someday… Regardless, today was a time of battle. Muhammad had had the woman warrior Nusaybah, who fought by his side and saved his life in the Battle of Uhud. Would it not make sense that he deserved a Jameela to stand by him in a similar fashion? “I think her resolve needs a bit of testing, and I couldn’t meet her now even if I wanted to. I have to get back to work on the next virus.” He closed his eyes. “I’ve learned enough, Sabaah. My experiments are complete. This next one will be the one that transforms the world. Let our people in America know. It shall truly be the scythe that reaps the people and clears the path for tomorrow.”

Weeks had passed since the much-discussed disappearance of Hilaal, and once again it felt as if things were returning a little bit toward normal.

Arriving on the

Helios

after a meeting with Keenan, Matt stepped onto the High Flight deck. This was currently his favorite deck theme aboard the ship, though Elisabeth, who had done the Babylon deck theme for the GS

Prime

, had graciously allowed him to commission one from her just recently. He expected it to surpass this one.

Here on the High Flight deck, as he walked down the passage, sun-split clouds danced the skies on each side, tumbling mirthfully in the sunlit silence.

Far down, the rendering below his feet showed eagles flying with easy grace as high as they dared.

Sunward, rendered on the ceiling, the untrespassed sanctity of space stared back at him through footless halls of air.

Passing the orbital systems control room, he heard cheering. What was going on? Normally, that room was almost stifling in its silence as the operators monitored their screens, punched in adjustments for the guidance systems of the overhead satellites, or occasionally muttered new instructions for an actual in-orbit shipboard pilot.

Cheering was way outside normal parameters. Matt had a few minutes before his next appointment, so he let his legs carry him into the room.

Someone had cranked the dim lights to full brilliance. Brandy sat at one of the control stations, one hand on the joystick for gimballing a satellite thruster while the other danced lightly over the sliders controlling burn intensity. All other workstations in the control room lay abandoned; if an alien starship started shooting SpaceR ships out of the sky, no one would notice.

Another cheer rose from the crowd as they leaned on desks, sat in chairs, and knelt close to the action. Brandy sat back and explained like a professor delving into a subtle and difficult topic, “See how it’s done? Now we just have to reel them in.”

Matt cleared his throat. “Could someone tell me what is going on here?”

Everyone leapt to their feet guiltily except Brandy. She uncoiled from her seat with an easy grace. “Aaron, why don’t you take a shot at piloting it? We’re almost there.” She turned to her CEO. “Matt! Sorry we didn’t call you earlier. We got sorta wrapped up in the game.”

Matt raised an eyebrow.

Brandy was the boss of the launch control team. Matt tended to give her a lot of leeway, both because she was so good at her job and because she had played a crucial role in acquiring the equipment SpaceR needed when the California government had tried to destroy the company. But this? “Brandy, what’re you doing here? I thought you ran the launches, not the orbital operations.”

Brandy gave him a lazy smile. “Yeah, but they called me in for the emergency since I’m also the best pilot we’ve got here on the

Helios

.”

Matt shook his head. “Emergency?”

Aaron, still hunched over the control panel, answered. “Yes, Mr. Toscano. They’re trying to break into our Starry Night satellite system!”

Matt knew he was staring at everyone as if he were an idiot. “A break-in?”

Brandy picked up the narrative. “There’s a ship trying to rendezvous with one of our cluster routers. I’m thinking it’s the FBI, trying to hijack our global cell network.” She pointed to one of the display screens. To Matt’s trained eye, the pattern of white shapes and pitch-black shadows denoted a lifting-body-style spacecraft along the lines of the

Dream Chaser

designs on the approach.

Matt pondered the matter. “So this is Ballard’s next move. Maybe. What’s he think he’s doing? If Jam really is a traitor and she really was working with someone here, it would have been Hilaal. Right?” He frowned. “Why are you sure it’s the FBI? Just about every major power on Earth would like to tap Starry Night.”

Brandy punched a few buttons on another console while most of the people in the room relaxed back into whatever position they’d been in before Matt’s arrival, although they held quiet now. Brandy’s fingers stopped flying, and video of a launch from SpaceR’s Boca Chica spaceport rolled. Atop the booster, where normally a capsule sat, a

Dream Chaser

-like craft rested. “I’m pretty sure that that spaceship up there is this spaceship we launched yesterday. It belongs to the US government, it’s classified, and some of my friends in the Air Force were complaining about a bunch of FBI guys hovering over their shoulders.”

Matt clenched his fists. Apparently, Ballard was assuming there was yet another traitor on board. Visions danced in his head of packing Ballard into the Black Titan, then dropping it at full speed on the Hoover Building, the FBI headquarters in Washington D.C. He concluded reluctantly that that would probably be an overreaction. “So, you’re telling me they used

our

boosters to launch a ship planning to sabotage

our

satellites?”

Brandy shrugged. “Hey, they pay, we launch. The Kestrel is just a truck to space. Right?”

Matt stood incoherent for a moment.

Aaron crooned, “I think I’ve got ‘em.”

Brandy leaned over his shoulder. “OK, now just before they latch on, pull her away. You want him partially attached before you goose the juice and flip her into a spin.”

The mating adapter on the satellite closed with the adapter on the spacecraft and Brandy yelled, “Now!”

Aaron pushed the sliders and twisted the joystick. The view from the docking camera spun dizzily. “Ugh, can’t get loose.”

Brandy nudged him out of the chair. “Allow me.” The spinning accelerated, then twisted, and moments later a gap appeared between the two vehicles. As Brandy kept the thrust at max, the satellite leapt away from its attacker. “Good thing we’ve got those oversize fuel tanks on the Starry Night sats. That was a smart call, Matt.”

Matt grunted. “Colin insisted.” He wondered if this were the actual reason Colin had insisted. The man was definitely scary, the way he planned for unanticipated futures.

“Well, it was a good call, regardless.”

Aaron was studying another screen full of graphs and numbers. “And that’s it, folks. The FBI ship is tumbling in an eccentric orbit. They have enough fuel to stabilize, but not enough to maneuver for re-entry.”

Brandy gave more explanation. “We’ve been playing a game of keep-away with them for a couple of hours, letting them get closer at an ever slower rate and using the station-keeping ion drives to put on just enough acceleration to keep them burning fuel until they were pretty close to bingo. We only used the real thrusters there for the surprise finale.” She pointed at another display with numbers that looked like a bookmaker’s odds: Matt’s team had set up a betting pool on how long it would take to trick the attackers into a dead spacer’s orbit. “OK, folks, time to pay up.”

Matt gave her a forlorn look. “So they’re trapped up there?” He pursed his lips. “Prep one of the emergency boosters. We’re going to rescue them.” He glared at everyone. “Is that clear?”

Everybody in the room chuckled with a stumbling chorus of “natch,” “yeah” and “of course.” Brandy answered, “Already prepped, Boss.” She pulled out her phone. “Aar, you ready? Good. Launch control—that’s me—says all clear, as soon as I get there.” She flipped the monitor to a view of another Kestrel standing ready on the

Heinlein

with a standard crew capsule attached. She turned to depart.

Matt relaxed, seeing his people had already anticipated his instructions. “Who’s Aar? And where’re you going?”

Brandy smiled as she headed for the door. “Aar’s a peacekeeper, and he volunteered to go with me to take custody of the, uh, saboteurs. Normally I’d also take his partner Wolf, but apparently Wolf is on some secret assignment.”

Once more, Matt was confused. “Aar is going with you? Why do you need to go? Why not just send him?”

Brandy looked at him like he was a dunce once more. “Of course I need to go. While Aar collects the FBI agents, I’m going to collect their spaceship.” She grinned. “Think of it as a war prize.” She turned grim. “Or salvage. Or cleaning up the orbital junk.”

As she departed, Matt started laughing.

Ping knocked lightly on the door to the single-bed hospital room. Realizing it had been a foolish gesture, she threw the door open—another foolish gesture since the door had a hydraulic limiter to prevent the door from snapping into someone’s face.

She walked softly to the side of the bed opposite where a bot stood on constant alert.

He looked so peaceful there. The lines of his face had smoothed out. She couldn’t remember a time when Colin’s face wasn’t ever so slightly wrinkled with worry.

This rest would probably do him good. If he survived it.

There wasn’t much else to see. Except, behind the bot was another door. Taped to the door was a sign in red: No Admittance. Keep Out.

The sign was slightly askew. It had clearly been added recently and in haste.

Ping turned her eyes away from it, but they had a will of their own and they kept drifting back. Exasperated, Ping threw her hands in the air. “What could possibly need to be kept secret from me? Surely that sign is meant for random visitors. Is there anything random about me? Not hardly.”

She opened the door and went through.

The room beyond was larger than she’d expected. Cages with mice lined three of the walls, and a wallscreen with dozens of windows open on different displays covered the fourth. Lab tables loaded with apparatus occupied much of the floor space. A bot was quietly cleaning one of the cages.

By the wallscreen, a small cot rested, about the right size for Ping to sleep on. She went over to examine the screen.

Chance’s voice raged at her. “What are you doing here? Can’t you read? The sign says Keep Out. That means you, too, Ping.”

Ping spun in place. She winced. “Sorry.”

Chance, hands on hips, just glared.

Ping waved her hand at the contents of the room. “Just what is this place, anyway?”

Chance dropped her arms to her sides and came over to point at the wallscreen. “If you must know, I’m continuing another of Dash’s lines of research.”

Ping’s eyes glowed. “And yet something else new and marvelous. What is it?”

Chance sighed. “Hyperhealing.”

Ping blinked.

“She started working on this a few days before the assault. Using a variant of the rejuv therapy—a fairly wild variant, hardly recognizable—she hoped to create a therapy that caused an order-of-magnitude leap in cell repair and replacement.”

Ping pondered this. “So if you get hit by a truck or you’re shot full of bullets, or—”

Chance interrupted with the relevant example, “—or shot full of virus and damaged so badly you’re in a coma—”

Ping smiled. “Colin.”

Chance nodded. “He’d certainly be my first patient if we had it working.”

Ping looked once more around the room with a deeper appreciation. “I take it you still have some distance to go.”

Chance shook her head. “I’m not even sure it’s possible. Well, it is, but…early in the experimentation, we had one mouse exhibit hyperhealing. We thought we were close.” She sighed. “But since then I’ve experimented with almost two thousand more mice, and not a single positive result.”

Ping grimaced. “Sounds as if the one mouse was an anomaly.”

Chance chuckled. “Sometimes I have to go back and watch the vid of that one successful mouse just to remind myself that it really did happen.”

Ping clapped her on the shoulder. “You’ll get it,” she offered with more confidence than she actually felt.

“Thank you.” Chance pointed to the door. “And now it’s time to go. Get out. And this time, keep out.”

Ping skipped out, laughing merrily.

Acting Director Cameron Ballard waited politely in the reception bot’s area outside Amanda’s office. Eventually he was granted an audience and went inside.

Amanda raised an eyebrow at him. “Acting Director Ballard. I commend you on your remarkable display of tact, waiting for me to finish my last appointment. How can I help you?”

Ballard pursed his lips in irritation, then let it slide away. “Once again it’s about how we can help each other, but since our enemies have slipped through our grasp, at this point, there’s no hurry.”

He flicked a set of photos from his tablet to the screen embedded in her desktop. “We have finally figured out who Hilaal really is. His name is Khalid ibn Tariq al-Tabari. When he was a teenager, he was a top-echelon finance manager for ISIS.”

The photos did indeed show a teenager, in different levels of graininess, that Amanda could dimly imagine being Hilaal in his youth. “You’re sure?”

“Quite sure now. We got a break with a tentative match between a regressed computer extrapolation of Hilaal’s face and the face of an ISIS financier long known to be dead. We then tracked back to Khalid’s mother, retrieved a DNA sample from her corpse, and matched it to Hilaal’s DNA, which was almost as difficult to get as his mother’s.” He shrugged. “It was incredibly difficult and time-consuming to get here, but once the FBI gets a thread to pull on, we can unravel any cloth.”

Amanda looked at the photos thoughtfully. “Khalid. A teenage-genius terrorist. Well, that explains at least some of this.”

Orbital mechanics dramatically changes the nature of combat. A noteworthy alteration in space-based warfare, compared to old fashioned aerial combat, is the way you approach an enemy you hope to take by surprise.

In the air, one desires to fly to a greater altitude than the target, then come down from behind while pouring on the afterburners to scream onto the enemy’s tail.

In near-Earth space, accelerating down from behind is strongly contra-indicated. First of all, it burns too much fuel, which is precious beyond the Earth’s atmosphere in a way that is barely imaginable to an aircraft pilot.

Secondly, you’re starting your acceleration from a position where you’re actually going slower than your opponent since lower orbits are faster orbits, so you’re burning even more precious fuel just to catch up.

Finally, there is no handy atmosphere supplying friction against which you can brake. An object in motion tends to remain in motion, which means that moments after you get into position behind the enemy, you zoom onward and downward in an elliptical path that soon puts the enemy on your own tail unless you burn even more precious fuel.

Fortunately Brandy had never been a fighter pilot, else she would have had much to unlearn. Instead, she snapped her gum between her teeth and brought her space capsule gently up from behind and below the FBI spacecraft. She took a position directly behind him with an identical velocity from which she could easily deal with any action her opponent might undertake.

Of course, the enemy was unlikely to do anything since they were pretty much out of fuel anyway.

Brandy turned to her companion. “Aar, you ready to rock?”

Aar looked a bit green around the gills from the weightlessness but answered gamely, “Good enough. Before we do this again, though, I think some special training in zero-g peacekeeping might be desirable.”

Brandy clapped him lightly on the shoulder. “Good thinking. Fortunately, I think the FBI agents may be equally untrained.”

She flipped on the comm system. “Hey, guys, you there? You want us to rescue you, or you want to die over there?”

A grumpy male voice came back. “Come ahead.”

“Cool.” Brandy maneuvered over and coupled the docking connectors together.

Aar muttered, “This is being too easy.”

Brandy nodded. “Good point. They probably figure they can take us.” She guided Aar’s hand to a button on the console. “If I call out or something bad happens, punch this button. It’s pre-programmed.”

Aar eyed the button suspiciously. “Then what happens?”

“Then you probably want to grab one of those motion sickness bags.”

Aar smiled. “Aha. Perhaps I should grab the motion sickness bag

before

I press the button.”

Brandy smirked. “Perhaps.” She opened the docking hatch on her side and floated through.

As she reached the other craft’s hatch, it opened, and a neatly attired man stuck a gun through and pointed it at her. “We are hereby commandeering your vessel for the FBI.”

Brandy grabbed a handle by the hatch and swung herself through. “Really? You’re going to shoot a gun at me in a spaceship with paper-thin walls? Are you insane?”

She spun lazily across the enemy cabin and caught herself at the far end. “Even if by some miracle you hit me, it’ll go through, blow a hole in the ship, and kill your sorry asses. Give me a break.” She pointed at the one with the gun. “For heaven's sake, safety that thing before you accidentally kill us all.”

One of the other two FBI agents muttered, “She’s right, Sam. Better put it away.”

Sam put the gun away but continued the verbal assault. “We’re still commandeering your vehicle. There are three of us and one of you.”

Brandy chuckled. “Aar, now!”

They could dimly hear thrusters firing as the ship began to tumble. Brandy pushed gently away from the wall and let the ship spin around her. The FBI agents clung desperately to whatever they could reach that seemed solid.

Early in the course of the American space program, it was discovered that most people become disoriented and upset when the room wherein they floated went “upside down.” A few, however, found it just as comfortable to have the chairs above them as below and the ceiling lights below rather than above.

The FBI agents were not among those few who naturally felt comfortable in an upside-down ship, but Brandy was.

So she had little trouble separating one agent from the pack and tossing him through the coupling to Aar. “Incoming!” she shouted before following the agent.

Aar was in little better shape than the agent, but at this point, the agent was the one who was outnumbered. Aar zip-tied his hands and strapped him into a couch.

Taking some zip-ties for herself, Brandy returned to the FBI ship and wrestled them, one at a time, across to Aar after first getting their hands behind their backs.

Finally Brandy took the controls in her own space capsule and quickly brought an end to the tumbling.

Next Brandy broke out a spacesuit from a locker.

Sam, the lead agent, snapped, “Now what’re you doing?”

Brandy responded cheerfully as she pulled on the suit. “I’m going to refuel your bird over there so I can take it home.”

Sam’s eyes bulged. “No! You can’t do that!”

Aar chuckled. “Is there anything around here she

can’t

do?”

Soon enough, Brandy had the ship ready to roll. Before she set Aar’s ship on autopilot to land on the

Heinlein,

she realized she had overlooked a minor detail and called SpaceR.

“Matt Toscano here.”

“Hey, Matt, I’ve got the FBI guys, and I’ve got their ship, but I just realized I’ve got a problem.”

Matt asked suspiciously, “And what might that be?”

“This ship really is a Dream-Chaser style lifting body. It can’t land vertically. I need a runway. We happen to have any runways?” The BrainTrust isle ships, of course, did not.

Matt chuckled. “That’s quite a pickle you’ve got yourself. Let’s see what I can find.”

Brandy hung on the line, not quite able to hear what was happening as Matt made additional phone calls on other comm lines.

Eventually he came back to her. “You’re in luck. Not long ago I would have had to say abandon it, but there’s now a country that’s more than happy to accommodate us.”

Brandy pushed him onward. “Yeah? What country?”

“Benin. You know, the country run by Empress Ping?”

Brandy barked a laugh. “They have an airstrip?”

“A beautiful airstrip that’s hardly used at all. The Tourou International Airport in the northern part of the country. We’ll have a bitch of a time getting it back to the BrainTrust, but you can land there. They’ll be expecting you.”

“Yeah!”

She disconnected the two spacecraft and sent Aar on his way back to the

Heinlein

. Then she started her own descent.

She’d flown craft like this in simulators but never for real. Fortunately, the computers did most of the work; the thousands of micro-adjustments to the control surfaces of the lifting body needed to avoid having the ship tear itself apart were all automated. She pointed the nose and went.

Soon she came within visual range of the airport. No one else was around, which was just as well.

She was coming in too hot and high. She forced it down, lifted the nose, and tried to bleed the excess speed, but she still hit the ground far in from the edge of the runway. The other end of the strip came at her at a terrible clip.

Moments before running out of runway, the ship finally started slowing faster than it moved forward and Brandy knew she’d make it. “Yahoo! I’m still alive!”

She’d have to try that again someday. After a little more simulator time, possibly.