Unpopular Science

Chapter 35

The eldest and only son of Jacob Fastbinder III stabilized the air pressure, then keyed open the door to Fast- binder’s new jet.

“You’re on your own from here, dudes!”

The first metal cylinder, which was tapered at both ends like a hand-stretched glass Christmas ornament, rolled obediently out of the custom-widened side door of the passenger compartment. The second cylinder got stuck on something.

“Hey, come on, you big tub of lard, get going!” Jack Fast yanked the stick left and right. He heard the cylinder collide with something inside the aircraft. “Oh, great! Did you bend another seat support? I’m gonna strip your gears. I’m losing my patience with you and it’s already down to eight degrees in here. Take this!” He turned the aircraft on its side.

The cylinder, much wider and shorter than the first cylinder, bonged against another seat but tumbled out of the jet and started the journey to earth. The journey would take a long, long time as free falls go.

“Pops,” Jack radioed.

“Yes, Jack, are they on their way?”

“Yeah, Pops, but I think that fat tick-tocker bent the seats, just like in the tests. We need a better jet. I’m getting tired of replacing passenger seats in this little prissy thing. We need something with real bomb doors. Maybe the Canadians—”

“We’re not going to buy a bomber, Jack!”

“Aw, jeez, Pops!” Jack signed off and scowled into the stratosphere. “Fine. I’ll build my own dam airplane.”

The cylinders tumbled just seconds before righting themselves, and then they were ultra-aerodynamic, slipping through the thickening atmosphere in virtual silence. They were black, without signal lights, so they remained unseen. The coating of paint on the exterior allowed military scanning waves to slip over them as easily as the airstream. The ground control that was constantly monitoring the skies over Washington, D.C., never even knew the oversize Christmas ornaments were above them.

The Fastbinder jet never entered restricted airspace, simply followed its flight plan up the coast. The cylinders would plummet straight into the ocean until they brought out their guidance wings, which were scarcely more than ridges distending from the metal. They created just enough of an alteration in the course to steer the falling cylinders inland, still unnoticed. The ridges guided the cylinders directly over the White House, then pulled inside to allow the free fall to continue.

The tremendous speed of the cylinders might have punctured all the way into the underground bunker levels, but bombing the President wasn’t the intention.

The intent was to make a soft landing on the White House lawn and snatch up the most high-tech rodents in existence. FEMbots had an estimated black market value of thirty-five million dollars each.

The cylinders contained no living tissue that might be crushed by the sudden deceleration of the most severe High-Altitude/Low-Opening jump in history.

The first cylinder burst and loosed a compacted wad of dense fiber the size of a bed pillow, which unfurled into thousands of black streamers—a cloud bigger than the entire White House itself. The streamers were torn away in a millisecond by the intense force of the wind, but not before slowing the cylinder markedly and not before pulling out a second wad of compact fiber. Another billowing cloud of paperlike streamers. And a third. Finally the cylinder had been sufficiently slowed to deploy a trio of extreme heavy-lift parachutes, which opened in series and brought the cylinder to a crunching, 11-G deceleration. If there had been a man inside the cylinder, he would have become human remains in that instant.

The three huge parachutes carried the cylinder for only three more seconds before the ground loomed up beneath it and the cylinder’s tapered end penetrated the lawn soil. The landing looked smooth, but again it would have turned human occupants to jelly.

The three parachutes transformed simultaneously into flames that consumed them and vanished in a moment, allowing the second cylinder to land without tangling.

When you watched airspace over the White House, you used protocol. You never, ever deviated from the proper vocabulary of the operation.

But Sergeant Julian Cleary couldn’t help himself. There had been one alert tonight already, still unexplained, and the watch crew was tense. Cleary was nervous. So what if he used a few nonsanctioned exclamations?

“Mother of crap!” He got a hold of himself and reported, “We’ve got an eminent catastrophic strike. It just showed up, at two hundred feet!”

His commander appeared. “Too slow to be a bomb.”

“To fast to be anything but—shit!”

On his screen, the warning lights blinked and the audible alerts screamed and the tiny indicator showed the twin objects coming to a stop on the White House grounds within seconds of each other.

Sergeant Cleary and his commander rolled their eyes up to the ceiling. They were the on-site watch team, so whatever the objects were, they had just come down right above them.

They frantically began making alert calls, which were redundant since the event had been witnessed by three other watch teams stretching from Washington, D.C. all the way to NORAD in Colorado. The military response was already launching.

Which left Julian Cleary with nothing to do except watch and listen. Any second now, he was sure to feel the tremors of the explosion that would erase the White House from existence.

What the hell were they waiting for?