Ode To Defiance Chapter 7

2

Pros and Cons and Pirates

Fail early, fail often, but always fail forward

—John C. Maxwell

Dash stood with Ted on the top deck of the

Chiron

. The wind whipped at her, and she kept shaking her head to get her hair out of her eyes.

Three man-size drones whirred above them, struggling to hold position against the gusting air. Ted watched them mournfully.

Dash shook her head. “Bring them in, Ted. I think we’ve learned as much as we need to.”

After bringing the drones back and stowing them, Ted followed Dash glumly to her office. He fingered her jade Ganesha statue as she delivered the final verdict. “I’m sorry, Ted, but as the simulations suggested, they just can’t draw enough power from a satellite.”

Ted had come to Dash with an idea for a much longer-range copter. Despite the advances the copter engine designers had made in fuel efficiency, there were still places on Earth it was hard to get to. This bugged Ted because he wanted to build a copter for Matt that could go all the way from the BrainTrust to his spaceport in Texas without stopping. Dash similarly wanted to build a copter for Lenora that could get her teams into northwestern China with neither muss nor fuss.

So Ted had dug up some old research on beaming energy from satellites to see if they could power a copter from space. He’d gotten rather excited…more excited than was justified, perhaps. He got even more excited as he read about the ancient experiments with the Stationary High Altitude Relay Platform, SHARP, that had flown in the 80s with 500kw of microwave beams from a ground station.

Dash had thought it was worth investigating, so she’d worked with the satellite engineers on the

Dreams

to build a couple of small prototype power satellites, unfolding large but featherweight and cheap mylar mirrors once in orbit to power free-electron lasers. Matt and SpaceR had chipped in a free launch to Low Earth Orbit (piggy-backed on the launch of a much larger satellite) in exchange for a handful of shares in the venture if it succeeded. Ted had built the prototype drones with his own money.

The drones were quite odd in appearance, with a large top surface covered in multi-junction solar cells that could collect at high efficiency just about any frequency of electromagnetic radiation from low IR to UV-B. The surface sprouted numerous dipole antennas to serve as a basic rectenna for collecting microwaves.

The drones and the satellites communicated not only about the position of the respective systems but also about the efficiency of transmission of different parts of the spectrum. In the face of cloud cover, for example, the system focused on beaming microwaves. Depending on other atmospheric conditions, the best frequencies could be found in infrared, light, and UV wavelengths.

But as this test had shown, nothing worked very well. The microwave beams spread too wide, while the UV beams scattered too much in the atmosphere. Beaming too much power in the high infrared tended to cook the recipient.

Ted mumbled, “I’m just sure it would work if we could use a carbon nanotube optical rectenna.” With such a nantenna, they could get tremendous efficiency in the visible light spectrum.

Dash shook her head. “Perhaps. But we’d need more than a square centimeter of it, and that’s about all we could get at the moment.”

Ted rose to depart.

Dash sent a few hopeful words after him. “We can’t scale it up enough to drive a passenger-carrying copter, but it works moderately well for the lighter drones, especially if we give them more lifting surfaces. I can’t think of an application offhand, but there’s real potential here.”

Ted stopped in the doorway. “If people would just let us plant power-beaming stations here and there on the ground, it would work too. If people could just get along with each other, it would be easy.”

Dash had the same thought quite often about many problems, not just this one. But she had been acquiring a disturbingly practical bent since working with Colin.

Fix the problems you can, and leave the others for someone else

.

Still, she suspected the satellite-powered drones could solve the problem…if she could just figure out what the problem was.

Ciara looked over the cast of new candidates for residency on the Prometheus archipelago. Every day a couple of barely seaworthy boats showed up with exhausted yet hopeful recruits.

Most of them had come because they’d passed the preliminary Accel test on their cell phones that suggested they could qualify. Since the preliminary test had evolved into something quite reliable, most of those people easily passed the full rigor of the final test to start new lives as students on the

Mount Parnassus

educational ship. An immersive education in STEM subjects was the first step to becoming productive residents.

Some of the people on the boats came because someone else had told them they’d pass the tests on the BrainTrust for no good reason Ciara could determine. A few of these achieved residential status anyway, usually the ones who had fought their way out of the middle of the Congo, thus demonstrating the kind of relentless determination—the grit—that the BrainTrust prized as much as engineering genius.

This time, one fellow had brought his wife and small son aboard even though he had failed the Accel preliminary test. He pursed his lips stubbornly. “I just know I can be valuable here. I’ve proven my worth every other place I’ve ever lived. Please just give me a chance.”

He pointed in a direction that made no immediate sense to Ciara. “The men wrangling the bots that clean the passageways. They aren’t well-coordinated; they spend half their time cleaning things another of the crew just finished cleaning.” He looked down. “Well, not half, but there’s an opportunity to make it better. Put me in charge for a few days and let me show you.”

Ciara blinked slowly. “So, Oziegbe, you’re claiming some sort of exceptional management/leadership talent?”

Oziegbe smacked his hands together. “Yes! Please, just let me demonstrate.”

Ciara sighed. “Come with me to the testing facility. I’ll put you through the full assessment.” She led him down to her offices on the Kentucky Derby deck.

Here the artists in charge of the passages had rendered the walls with gently rolling terrain covered in bluegrass. Horses roamed across verdant valleys, and in one section, a small train of camels angled across the landscape. People who thought they knew Kentucky generally objected to the camels—until they saw the framed photo on the promenade of the actual camels in the actual Kentucky. Ping had just laughed when she’d seen it, explaining to Ciara that she had gone on a camping trip through Kentucky once, sleeping in the bed of their pickup truck, and seen camels just like the photo.

And speaking of the devil, as Ciara and Oziegbe walked along, Ping caught up with them.

While the

Parnassus

had been filling slowly but surely with new members, the fact was, even with only four peacekeepers, they were overstaffed. Ping needed some action, and she clearly kept hoping Ciara would find something for her to do. New candidates made a toothsome opportunity. More than one testing failure had become unruly upon finding he did not qualify.

After Ciara introduced Ping, Oziegbe looked at her in puzzlement. “So, you’re the security chief.” He hesitated, clearly afraid of being inadequately tactful. “Do you only deal with shipboard trouble? I confess, I’m surprised you haven’t gone into Djeregbe to clean things up. They’re doing terrible damage to your reputation.”

Ping focused on Oziegbe like a hunting tiger that had just caught the scent of prey. “Who’s that? What’s Djeregbe?”

Ciara at least knew that much. “It’s the city—well, the dilapidated town—just north of us that is the closest jump-off point to get here. The original town on the oceanfront was destroyed by floodwaters, of course, but it’s experienced a rebirth of sorts as a kind of BrainTrust waystation.”

Oziegbe shook his head. “But it’s nothing like the BrainTrust. It’s…well…it’s full of fraudsters and hucksters.”

Ping glowed. “How awful!”

Ciara glared darkly. “It’s a part of Benin. It’s not a part of the BrainTrust, and not within our jurisdiction.”

Ping said placatingly, using a Ping variant of the concept of being placating, “Yeah, you’re right, but I should probably go see. You know, get eyes on the ground; just a little investigation to see if there’s anything we could do that would make it easier for the right people to find their way to us.”

Ciara rolled her eyes as she realized she could not stop her security chief if said chief decided to go. “Investigate

only

. Understand?”

Ping smiled radiantly.

The testing system used to select BrainTrust residents was oriented toward finding people who would succeed as engineers and scientists, but it was based on much older systems that had been designed to identify people with excellent leadership skills. While the preliminary test you could download as an app for a cell phone did not do significant leadership testing, the full system aboard the

Parnassus

did.

When the full assessment was concluded, Ciara nodded, satisfied. “OK, Oziegbe, you win. You’re in charge of the ship’s cleaning crew until we find something more suitable, a place where you can actually earn your keep. Keep an eye open, since you’re as likely as I am to find your real position in this fleet.” She tapped out a message on her tablet. “And my mom needs to know that we need to put a section into the Accel testing app to do a preliminary check for top one-percent leadership skills. Truth of the matter is, we need more people like you, Oziegbe.”

Oziegbe breathed a sigh that blended both relief and pride, and Ping shook his hand in congratulations.

Ciara pursued her mission to the next step. “Do you happen to have any relatives with your skills? Or ones that might pass the tests to become engineers? We’re always eager to explore the possibility of giving a chance to friends and relatives who could arrive on board with a solid social foundation and someone to vouch for them.”

Oziegbe shuddered and put up a hand in a halting motion. “My family all died in different terrorist and military raids, and my wife’s whole family, hundreds of them, share a widespread belief system best described as a ‘cultural kleptocracy.’”

Ciara looked puzzled. “’Cultural kleptocracy?’”

Oziebge nodded. “To describe it the way it works in practice, if you start a new business, you have to hire relatives so they can steal from you. And if you get hired into some other business, you have to get jobs for all your relatives so they can steal from your employer.”

He shuddered again. “Under no circumstance should you hire my relatives.” He whispered, as if terrified of being overheard, although they were alone, “I would appreciate it if you would tell my wife, however, that it was your strict policy against relatives that left me unable to get them on board.”

At this moment, Oziegbe’s wife and son chimed in, shouting from far down the passageway as they approached. Oziegbe cried out with glee, “We’re in!”

Both the wife and the son hugged him. “Thank you, thank you,” they said to Ciara in their limited English.

Then the mother squatted in the middle of the deck and pooped. The son dropped his trousers and followed her example.

Ciara stared. Ping laughed, head shaking. Oziegbe buried his face in his hands. “We’re originally from Senegal, you know. The air in that part of the world is, as one Peace Corps doctor described it, ‘a fecalized environment.’ They’re just doing as they were taught.”

Ciara muttered. “We need another module in the Accel ‘Introduction to the BrainTrust’ topic about the proper use of toilets.”

Ping pursed her lips speculatively. “You keep telling me that we must support a great diversity of native customs. Celebrate the multicultural clash of ideas. We could just assign a bot to each one, with a pooper scooper attachment, to follow them around.”

Ciara reiterated decisively, “Another module in the Accel Introduction.”

The sun scoured Khalid’s face as he sat down in the open market area to eat. He tugged his keffiyeh farther over his head; something in the motion stirred the air enough to give him a strong whiff of the delicious biryani on the rude table before him. It was too much; his eyes glazed and he sat motionless for a while as the waking nightmare washed over him.

Sometimes the nightmares came at night; sometimes they came when sparked by his environment, like now. He suspected he suffered from severe PTSD, although he had never bothered to get an independent diagnosis. Certainly the events of his life that had shaped him were worthy of a little post-traumatic stress disorder.

Today his waking nightmare was about his last day with his father.

They had lived in a small town just outside Rawah, deep in the Sunni-dominated western region of Iraq.

Khalid had spent the whole afternoon helping repair the decrepit truck that belonged to his neighbors. In exchange for his services, the neighbor let his father borrow the truck from time to time. At the age of six, Khalid was already the best mechanic in the village and the only one who could keep that truck operational, although he usually needed someone to handle the tools for him. He usually partnered with a sixteen-year-old who was not too bright but had longer arms with much strength. Today Khalid’s father helped him.

Evening came, the truck fired up, and they went in to dinner. As Khalid, his father, and his mother ate his mom’s delicious biryani, an old argument broke out. His mother quietly insisted that Khalid should get a better education, that he was too smart to be kept here fixing trucks. His father, with growing anger, shouted, asking what she expected him to do about it. Finally, he rose from the table and scourged her, something he had been doing all too often since he’d returned home from the Iraqi Army, from which he’d been dumped by the Americans, along with all the other Sunnis.

A truck pulled up outside their house, the sound of the engine clearly announcing that it was a much newer truck than the neighbor’s.

“Get up! Rise and shine!” a harsh voice shouted, followed by harsher laughter. “Time to pay for your sins!” The roar of a long burst of machine gun fire set Khalid’s heart pounding in a way the cruel voice never could.

Half a dozen men charged into their home and dragged all three of them into the street.

The cruel men—a Shia death squad, clearly—formed a semicircle around them and forced them to kneel with their hands behind their backs. A good-natured argument arose over who would get to execute the heretics this time, but eventually, the winning soldier raised his rifle and aimed.

Khalid never forgot that rifle—the rifle that destroyed his life and saved him. Years later, when weapons became important to him, he found its designation: an American M16, one of the rifles given to the Iraqi Army after the conquest.

Putting the butt of the assault rifle against his shoulder and taking casual aim, the designated executioner fired. He clearly intended to hose them down.

But he’d barely started firing when the gun jammed. This too Khalid understood, years later. The M16 was a fragile weapon of war, requiring methodical maintenance, the kind of maintenance well-trained, technologically sophisticated Americans performed as a matter of course, which was hopelessly beyond the capabilities of the typical Shiite soldier.

The executioner stood there shaking the rifle, then banging it on the ground.

A radio crackled, and another man answered. After the call ended, he announced, “Enough. We have to get back to base.”

Another man objected. “But we aren’t done yet.”

The apparent leader shrugged. “Good enough.”

They continued to squabble as they climbed into the truck and departed.

Moments later, Khalid’s mother knelt and wailed over the bloody ruin of his father, who lay in a pool of dark crimson that looked black in the dying light.

The Republic of Benin had had a complicated history long before the arrival of the Prometheus fleet of the BrainTrust Consortium. The tortuous history of dictator Kerekou, who had reigned in unrestrained glory from 1972 to 1991, lavishly exemplified the trials and tribulations of the nation he ruled.

Kerekou had first announced that Benin would transcend all the foolish political persuasions of the time, from capitalism to socialism. In effect, this resulted in personal control by the autocrat, unfettered and impervious to error. Shortly thereafter he declared himself a Marxist, which lasted until he announced he had become Muslim…which lasted until he realized he was a Born-Again Christian. Along the way, he took full control of the educational systems of Benin into his own uniquely capable hands, resulting in the departure of almost all qualified teachers from the nation.

A fully functioning democracy emerged at the turn of the century, and the future brightened. Then West Antarctic Ice Sheet C snapped from its anchorage, sailed majestically into the ocean to warm up and melt down, and lifted the sea level everywhere, including Benin’s densely populated coast.

Porto Novo, the nominal capital, and Cotonou, the effective capital and largest city, hunkered at sea level at opposite ends of Lake Nokoue, which was itself mere spitting distance from the Bight of Benin branch of the Atlantic. Both cities sank into the ocean, although Porto Novo, with high plateaus to the north, offered reasonable relocation opportunities for anyone with enough money to build anew…which was to say, almost no one. Still, the official capital moved slightly north and noticeably higher to become the actual capital, in practice as well as in theory.

Little existed south of the Porto Novo Highlands. Nothing, really, except for one saltwater swamp where the destitute and hopeless huddled in the mud. This swamp was built on the remains of the town of Djeregbe, south of Lake Nokoue, a shanty port transformed into a disintegrating, disease-saturated ulcer of a town that viewed itself, with much contemplative mirth, as the Venice of Africa.

Ping muttered as their copter approached, “Mos Eisley, a most wretched hive of scum and villainy.”

Diric shook his head. “Mos Eisley was much nicer. At least it was in a clean desert.” He swept his hand across the shantytown. “I don’t think we can land. Every piece of ground with dirt mounded up high enough to offer a dry spot has a building on it, and we can’t set down on a roof because not one of those buildings is strong enough to survive a copter landing.”

Ping ran an exasperated hand through her hair. “This copter’s supposed to float, although I don’t think anyone’s tried it lately.” The only case where she knew of someone trying to land a copter in the ocean was when Dash had been rescued from kidnappers, and the copter had flipped and sunk. That hardly counted as a good test, though, since the copter was full of bullet holes at the time. That had no doubt caused some modest damage to the copter’s seaworthiness along with its hull integrity.

Ping guessed it was time to test the limits of copter tech once more. “Put her down there, on the water by that pier. We’ll see what happens.”

They landed. Ping strapped on her batpack, while Diric strapped on his more ordinary day pack. She then fiddled with the release on the storage compartment hatch of the copter and left it open.

They rented a ride on a rowboat between the mounds of dirt that offered dry footing, and eventually they reached the mound that held the tin-roofed wood-planked stall wherein Uteteh’s Surefire BrainTrust Admission Training engaged in business.

Before they reached their destination, Ping halted. “Diric, why don’t you go ahead and see what he’s selling? Before I burn the place down on general principles.”

So, Diric came unto Surefire alone and innocent. Slouching slightly to get underneath the tin roof, he smiled wide-eyed at Uteteh. “Can you really guarantee me a place on the BrainTrust?”

Uteteh nodded vigorously. “You look like a smart young man, so I can certainly make you a resident. Let me give you a little test first. Some people need a bit of extra prep work to qualify.” He pulled out a deck of flashcards covering a wide diversity of topics. He flipped them at Diric at high speed, jotting down notes about Diric’s answers from time to time.

At the end, Diric tapped the cards. “I’ve heard the BrainTrust tests candidates too. Is it like this?”

Uteteh nodded again. “Yeah, man. I got these cards straight from the archipelago when I was a resident. Before I came back to help people like you. This is the real deal.” He frowned. “Now, I have mostly good news.”

Diric clasped his hands together prayerfully. “Can I make it?”

“Yeah, yeah. The good news is, you’re almost good enough. The bad news is, you’re not quite ready. You’ll need to study.” He slapped a fresh deck of flashcards on the table. “Study diligently with these for twenty-four hours, and you’ll be good to go. Only twenty bucks, man, and you’ll be using the gold toilets on the BrainTrust in no time.”

Diric stood flabbergasted for a moment, a silent pause that Uteteh was more than equipped to fill. “And more good news. I have a charter boat going out to the BrainTrust day after tomorrow. The boat is almost full, but I have one reservation left. Thirty bucks for the trip, but you better buy it now. I’ll be sold out if you wait.”

Ping came around the corner, having listened to all this with a bemusement that had slowly simmered into hot anger as she thought about the people this jerk had ripped off. She smiled brightly. “Oh, you’re way overbooked already. In fact, you’re out of business.”

She shrugged off her batpack, which she had filled with suitable supplies for this expedition, jumped lightly over the countertop that separated Uteteh from his customers. “If you had a mediation agreement with the BrainTrust, I’d have to take you to them. But you’re in luck; you’re going to get off lightly. Give me all the cash you stole from your customers—which is to say, give me all your cash.”

Uteteh bunched his fists indignantly. Ping just laughed. “Don’t.”

Assessing the confidence that confronted him, Uteteh decided the better part of valor was to play along. As Uteteh handed over his ill-gotten gains, Ping turned to Diric. “Please pull the gas can out of my pack. We’re going to build a bonfire.”

Uteteh lurched to the front of the shack and screeched out five names. Ping responded by bouncing him off the wall, which unfortunately damaged the wall more than it damaged Uteteh. Indeed, the second bounce smashed the wall out, leaving Uteteh sprawled on the ground beyond the shack. The building now looked a little more modern, approximating the shape of an asymmetric A-frame.

Ping grunted and ducked under the awning.

Diric pointed into the distance and muttered, “Trouble.”

Ping followed his finger and immediately cheered up. “Excellent. The local police. I needed to get them all together so we could talk.”

The local police force consisted of five large thugs wearing the nondescript rags of their profession.

Ping approached them, waving her new-found wealth. “Guys, I have a job for you.”

The nominal leader called, “Actually, it looks like you have money that belongs to us.”

Ping stuffed the cash back in her pocket. “Ah, a hard negotiator. Cool.” As the men settled into a circle around her, Ping leapt toward the nearest one, and kept running from one to the next faster than the thugs could keep track.

A few moments later, the five thugs lay in five piles of meat.

Ping stopped to take a breath. “Five men in one minute. Could Jam do that? Maybe, but I can do better too. My speed can definitely be improved upon.”

Ping went around the circle again, inspecting their injuries. She kicked one. “Hey, nice elbow to the eyeball.” She touched the bruise under her eye.

She kicked another one. “And good kick to the knee. Almost got me.” She stepped away and put her hands on her hips. “You’ll all do for the moment. Like I said earlier, I have a job for you.”

The men slowly sat up. The leader, in pain, whispered, “What job?”

Ping waved her hand around the ruins of Djeregbe. “You’re going to go to all the rip-off places like Uteteh’s and collect all their money. If they give you trouble, tear their stores down. I’ll leave you the gasoline. Any questions?”

The leader asked the obvious question. “How will we know who all the rip-off joints are?”

Ping pointed dramatically at Uteteh, who was holding onto a corner of his ex-storefront for support, wobbling as the building made repeated efforts to fall down. “Uteteh here will point out all his competitors. Right, Uteteh?”

Uteteh recognized a boss when one hit him on the head. “Yeah, that’s right.”

The men’s eyes lit up as they thought about the payday they would get.

Ping waved a finger back and forth. “No, no. I can see what you’re thinking. Don’t make a mistake. You’re going to collect the money and give it to my representative when he gets here.” Seeing the sly expressions on the faces, she continued, “No, no. I can see what you’re thinking.” She pointed into the sky. “See the giant dirigible up there loaded with telescopic cameras?”

The men peered up. The leader mumbled, “I don’t see nuthin’.”

Ping nodded. “Exactly. You’re under continuous surveillance, and you can’t even see where it’s from. But look here.” She fiddled with her cell phone, brought up a real-time view of their little circle, and held it in front of each man so he could see himself being recorded. “You can’t move an inch without me seeing it. Try to steal from me, and you’ll be sensationally sorry. You’ll be my example for everyone in town.” She gesticulated with some carefully crafted insanity. “Everyone will enjoy the show.”

After the former thugs and the former con artist shuffled off to their new duties, Ping called the BrainTrust. “Ciara, I’ve got a fine project for Oziegbe. He was right; this place needs a wholesale makeover. It makes sense for us to have a station here for the people who come in hopes of joining us, but it needs to be built from scratch. Send bots. Lots of bots. And let’s get these people hooked up with Accel, see how many of them we can put to work for us here in Djeregbe. Who knows? Maybe we can even pick up a resident or two.” Ping listened with surprising patience as Ciara objected. “A part of Benin? Look at the pics I’m sending you. Benin abandoned this place decades ago. No one’s going to fight over this swamp full of sewage. Trust me.”

After a few more words that led to a tentative agreement, Ping snapped her phone shut. As she and Diric returned to their copter, Diric asked, “Why’d you let them go? They’re thugs. Was it really wise to give them jobs?”

Ping shrugged. “You know, I wasn’t entirely joking when I called them the local cops. They clearly work for some kind of local business association keeping order, or they’d have ripped off Uteteh themselves. The main problem is, they don’t shut down the frauds and scammers like full-fledged policemen would. But it seems likely that most of them are trainable.”

Ping brightened as she had a thought. “I’ll put Gleb in charge.” Gleb was an ex-Spetsnaz commando with whom the BrainTrust had a complicated history. He was now working at an ill-suited job with the Prometheus, subsidized by the Russian oligarch he had tried to assassinate. “He’s a little too rough-and-tumble for peacekeeper work on the Prometheus archipelago, but he might work out here. Certainly he can teach them discipline.”

Diric looked into the sky and asked one last question, wonderingly, “Do we really have a dirigible hovering overhead so high we can’t see it?”

Ping laughed lightly. “Not a technology we offer quite yet. No, when we got out of the copter, I released a bunch of mini-vid drones, the same kind we used on the

Storm King

before Abshir took command. I just wanted our new employees to think the cameras were invulnerable so they wouldn’t get any bright ideas about knocking them out.” She chuckled. “I think it worked, don’t you?”

Ping watched Djeregbe shrink in the distance as Diric flew their copter home. Suddenly an excited voice burst forth from the radio. “Hey, Boss, this is Captain Abshir. We’ve just spotted what looks like pirates grabbing a girl in the middle of the ocean. I’ve brought the

Storm King

up to full speed, but we’re pretty far away. Can you get to her sooner?” He quoted a set of coordinates.

Diric veered toward the conflict and gunned the engines. Ping answered Abshir, “We’re on our way! Can you slow ‘em down?” Over the radio, she heard the distinctive sound of the 50mm firing.

Abshir sounded smug. “That rattled their cages. We dropped one off their stern, and their boat’s bouncing all over the place.” He yelled, off-microphone but loud enough for Ping to hear, “Nice shooting!”

Then he growled. “They’re back up to speed. And I’m afraid to fire again since they’re too close to the girl.”

Diric pointed out the cockpit. “I see them.”

At first glance, it appeared that the old speedboat with four men aboard was trying to rescue the girl. She was all alone on a piece of wood about the size of a boogie board, nine miles out to sea. One would presume her to be a survivor from a sunken boat. But looking more, carefully Ping could barely discern some sort of paddles on her hands and fins on her feet, suggesting, insanely enough, that she was out here intentionally. Swimming to the BrainTrust? Crazy as it seemed, Ping knew of other cases of people going through more horrific trials than this to get to the place where hope for a brighter future still existed.

Meanwhile, the way the men on the boat were laughing and taunting her and the way the girl veered away from them to try to escape, waving them off from time to time, clearly indicated that rescue was not the men’s primary goal.

Ping bit her lip. “We’re still too far. Hey, Abshir, have you kicked in the supercapacitors?” The

Storm King

had been one of the first platforms to receive the new graphene power storage systems to soak up excess power during normal operations, which could be used to augment operations in an emergency. The supercapacitor had an energy density comparable to a lithium-ion battery, but a power density a thousand times greater. It could pour out electricity in an unbelievable torrent when required.

Abshir snorted. “Of course. That was the first thing we did. It’s working great, and we’re at forty knots, but it’s still not good enough.”

“Well, that girl will just have to hang tough.” Ping continued to peer at the boat, wondering if Abshir wouldn’t need to rescue the men as well. The speeder was not really designed for ocean waters, although it was apparently more or less adequate here in the Bight of Benin…if you were foolhardy enough.

The men—the pirates—dragged the screaming, struggling girl on board, cheering now and giving the finger to the

Storm King

since they knew the BrainTrust patrol boat could no longer shoot at them once they had a hostage on board. They accelerated away, then, as they saw Ping’s copter approach, angled away from the copter and shook their fists in the air.

Ping stayed focused on the girl. “There’s something wrong with her arms,” she muttered. Her eyes were pulled away by a change in the movement of the

Storm King

. The ship was slowing down.

Abshir swore over the radio. “I pushed too hard and wiped out our emergency power too quick. Very inefficient of me. If I’d done this right, the power would have lasted a lot longer, and we’d have gone almost as fast. Sorry.” He paused. “I don’t think we can catch that speedboat at all on standard power. Looks like it’s up to you.”

Ping smiled wickedly. “It’s like Disneyland here today, just going from one fun event to the next. Not a problem, Captain.” She looked at Diric. “Drop me into the middle of that boatload of idiots please.”

Diric frowned. “If they’ve got guns, they’ll blast us on the approach.”

Ping peered at the boat again, then shook her head. “These are low-end pirates, Diric. I think they’re armed mostly with knives.”

“I guess we’ll find out.” Diric soared in low, and sure enough, no machine-gun fire greeted them.

“OK!” Ping shouted, “Yippee!” She dropped into the boat, falling slightly to starboard as the vessel veered to port to try to avoid her landing.

Four men stood up on the dinky ship to confront her, causing the boat to sway wildly in the choppy seas. As Ping had predicted, they were armed mostly with kitchen knives.

But the man on the tiller had a rusty old pistol. He fired twice.

Ping twisted out of the way of the first shot, clearing the way for the bullet to strike the man closest to her as he tried to stab her with his knife. Ping jumped to the rail of the boat to dodge the second bullet, but it was unnecessary: the bullet jammed in the pistol’s chamber and exploded in the wielder’s face.

A perfect storm of simultaneous events followed. Ping tipped the boat by standing on the rail. The pistol owner rocked the boat further as he staggered blindly around. The man hit by the first bullet stumbled into the starboard side, and a gentle wave wobbled the vessel from the port side. Altogether, they managed to lurch the ship far enough to capsize.

The girl in the bow screamed and thrashed as she went into the water. The men screamed as well, but Ping paid no attention, swimming smoothly around the pirates to reach the girl.

Finally Ping got a good look at the girl’s arms, which had looked so odd from a distance. What had looked like paddles from a distance

were

in fact paddles strapped to her arms, extending all the way from her elbows to her hands…except she had no hands.

The sight was jarring, even incomprehensible for a moment. Finally Ping realized that this girl was a victim of one of the several amputation campaigns that had swept through Africa over the course of the years. Ping had heard of this, but some part of her mind, some civilized part, hadn’t really believed it despite all the horrors she had witnessed.

Ping shook her head. “Hold on…” she started to tell the girl before realizing that holding on was not something she could do. “Wrap your arms around my shoulders. Don’t choke me, but don’t let go.” Then Ping realized that, with her phone and translator app underwater, the girl probably didn’t understand English either, so she started to pantomime.

But Ping had underestimated her new charge, who responded, “’K,” and complied. Ping turned to the pirates.

The one who had owned the pistol, still blind, was simply flailing in the water, screaming. The one who had been shot had disappeared; Ping thought a small cluster of bubbles might mark the location of his passage. The other two had abandoned their knives, along with any attempts to attack Ping or grab the girl as they struggled to right the overturned speedboat. Success evaded them with deft surety in the chop.

Ping put some distance between herself and them nonetheless. Shortly, the

Storm King

arrived and threw a rope net over the side. Ping eased up to the net and spoke once more to the girl, whose teeth were now chattering behind blue lips, “Hold on really tight. Just another minute more.” The girl nodded, and Ping climbed slowly up the side of the ship.

When they reached the deck, two of Abshir’s crewmen wrapped them in blankets. They paused for a moment at the sight of the girl’s arms, then finishing the wrapping process as if it were nothing out of the ordinary. It occurred to Ping that in this part of the world, her ex-pirate crew had seen it before.

A second team of sailors started hauling up the net. Ping was about to order them to halt, but Abshir beat her to it. “Leave the net down. We’ll rescue the other four,” he bellowed.

One member of the team squinted out to sea. “Only two left, Captain.”

Abshir threw his hands in the air. “OK, we’ll rescue the last two.”

“Aye, aye, Captain,” the net handlers responded morosely.

One of the handlers shook the net vigorously. “They’re having trouble hanging onto the rope,” he announced.

Abshir’s second in command hung over the rail with the rusty old knife he’d cherished since his pirating days, presumably in case the surviving kidnappers had any fight left in them. “Ow!” He held up his hand, letting blood drip from his palm into the ocean. He snuck a furtive glance at Ping. “Knife slipped.”

Ping growled, “That blood’ll attract sharks. Better get those two out of the water fast.”

The net handler shook the net again. “They’re still having a lot of trouble holding on. Not quite sure why.”

The second in command muttered, “My blood hardly makes a difference. The sharks are on their way anyway, what with the way the two dead ones are bleeding out.”

At that point, screaming started from over the side of the ship—the kind of screaming that comes from yelling as hard and as fast as you could draw breath.

The net handler shook his head. “Too late,” he announced.

The second in command offered a few words of comfort. “Captain, Miss Ping, it’s really all for the best. I mean, sure, we were all pirates before you took us on, but we were just trying to feed our families.” He pointed over the side. “Those guys were rapists and murderers—a wholly different kind of beast. They really

were

bad guys.”

Ping glared at the men, trying to decide how angry she should be. Abshir shook his head. “And there you have it, Boss. The moral high ground on the high seas of Africa.”

Ping turned her glare on her captain, then on his second in command. She sighed and said quietly to Abshir, “Could you at least get him a better knife? If he’s gonna cut himself like that often, it would be good if he didn’t get tetanus or a fungus that’ll eat his insides out.”

Abshir shrugged. “I’ll try, but he’s very attached to that knife.” He paused, thinking about alternatives. “I can probably get him to grind off the rust and oil the blade, anyway.”

Ping just rolled her eyes.