Unpopular Science

Chapter 16

“What is this thing?” Jack asked, nodding at a sand-crusted jumble of wires sitting on the table.

Fastbinder glanced up from the papers spread before him. “Sensor pod of some sort I had Ironhand extract it from an unmanned VTOL that was undergoing repairs at the air base.”

Jack brushed sand away, then whistled appreciatively. “Gee, Dad, they sure stuffed a lot of junk inside. Have you figured out what it’s for?”

“Not yet.” Fastbinder replied absently, his attention on his paperwork.

“A sensor set in a drone VTOL,” Jack said to himself. “This the only control system?”

He repeated the question when Fastbinder failed to answer.

“Yes,” Fastbinder answered impatiently. “Whatever the aircraft was for, the answer is in that sensor pack.”

“Mind if I have a go at it, Pops?”

“Yes, yes, please,” Fastbinder said, waving Jack away and already concentrating on his reading again.

They were both, father and son, unsettled by the events in Barcelona. They had been told how fast and unusual the pair of assassins were, but they had never expected what had happened at the Cote mansion.

The defense system Allessandro Cote had installed was huge and powerful. He had paid millions for it, and Fastbinder had given him a huge variety of the best defensive and offensive automation devices ever created. You could have defended Baghdad with that setup.

So what went wrong? Why had all those systems failed to stop two men, even extraordinary men? Had the two men been stopped at all? There was no real guarantee that the pair was dead…

Jack Fast dropped his backpack and flipped on a telescoping light, immediately losing himself in the mystery of the electronic device in front of him. He grabbed a soft-bristled brush designed for sensitive electronics, using it to remove most of the sand. Underneath he found a plastic shell encapsulating most of the electronics. That was good news and bad news. It meant the sensors and chips should still be intact, but they would be extra-difficult to get at without damaging them. The encapsulation meant the thing was designed for harsh environments, which really only made sense if they were flying the Vertical Takeoff and Landing unit at a very low altitude over the southwestern deserts. Once you got out of the reach of the airborne sand, you wouldn’t need this level of environmental protection.

“Check it out! ORNL!” he exclaimed suddenly as he spritzed the device with canned air and uncovered an engraved logo.

“Hmm,” Fastbinder responded, not looking up.

The Oak Ridge National Laboratory was one of the Department of Energy’s national laboratories, and researchers there routinely came up with advanced technologies. Their developments regularly ended up in military hands.

Jack pondered this as he sorted out the connections. The unit had been extracted forcefully from the drone VTOL unit, wrenching apart the connections. Figuring out all the dangling cables and connectors was a little like a veterinarian trying to figure out the nature of a new species of animal, having only the dragged-off head to evaluate.

Jack Fast, however, was in his element. There was nothing he loved more than solving a technological mystery, especially when it was new, possibly top-secret technology.

Painstakingly he removed the insulation from the cables, identified those he could, and spliced them into good cables that linked into a computer terminal. The computer pulsed the unknown connections with the tiniest electrical signals that strengthened incrementally, looking for feedback.

Jack Fast rubbed his neck and was surprised to find himself alone. His father had gone to bed. He had been working three hours.

When he looked at the clock again it was after one in the morning, and the computer had identified the nature of the last of the connections. It helped tremendously that the unit’s control system was the current generation of Gee-DAM, giving him a big head start. The computer was now feeding data into the unit and determining a command structure based on the Gee- DAM protocol, gaining control of the sensors. Jack Fast now knew how to control the device—if it were attached to its autonomous helicopter.

But what did the thing do!

He began running it through a simulated flight The sensor bank fed readings to the terminal, but the readings were nominal. He waved his hand in front of it. Nothing. He pointed it at the light bulb. Nothing. He bent over the pod and shouted, “Hey!”

Nothing.

He picked up the sensor pod and looked at it, then lifted it overhead, trailing the cables and connectors, and the screen jumped.

Jack grinned, but couldn’t make it jump again. He waved the sensor bank around the room, so the readings jumped again, and by narrowing his sweep he homed in on a dark shape tucked under one of his father’s workbenches.

Jack Fast yanked the flexible light so it would shine on the dark object.

Under the bench was a genuine, antique Flexible Flyer children’s wagon. It was one of the first ones ever made, worth thousands to some toy collectors, especially with pristine original paint like this one.

Inside the near-mint wagon was a compact smart bomb, stenciled with the letters:

UNEXPLODED ORDNANCE TOP SECRET PROPERTY OF THE U.S. GOVERNMENT

Possession of this ordnance is extremely dangerous and will result in the immediate incarceration, military trial and conviction by the Terrorist And Potential Terrorists Isolation Division (TAPTID) of the Department Of Homeland Security (DOHS).

Jack Fast was not surprised to find live, classified ordnance in his home. He waved his sensors at it, waved it away, waved it back.

“Cool!” Fast said. “Hey, Pops, wake up!”

He was waving it around when Fastbinder emerged from his tiny bedroom cubicle in his boxers. His head was wild, his legs were scrawny, and he was scratching his chest drowsily. He was not a pretty sight. “What’s the problem?” Fastbinder grumbled.

“Aw, jeez. Pops, the turtle’s poking out his shell.”

Fastbinder adjusted his boxers. “Better? Now what’s the problem?”

Jack was waving the sensor array around the workshop. “Look at the screen. I figured out what this thing does. And it does it really well.”

Fastbinder, his curiosity aroused, leaned into the monitor. As Jack waved the sensors, the screen took a reading of something.

“What?”

“Ordnance.”

“Ordnance.” An ordnance sensor was definitely nothing new.

“Now watch.” Jack waved the sensors at the wall. The screen jumped.

Fastbinder thought about what was behind the wall. Nothing. Twenty feet of empty dirt. Then the storage house, heavily shielded.

The sensors were seeing through it, registering some of the odd bombs Fastbinder was keeping there.

No sensor should be able to see into that building.

If this sensor could see through bomb-proof shielding to find live ordnance…

“Just think what it could do!” Jack Fast exclaimed.

Fastbinder was wearing a look of rapture. “Yes. Just think!”