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More young adults had joined the build team on the drone that would be both a defensive and offensive weapon. Two more teens, Sarah Starling and Jason Wilson, were rotated to the Hail Nucleus after enjoying some R&R on one of Hail’s islands. They had spent much of their young careers on the Hail Proton.
Jason stood atop the Jefferson Starship capsule. He repeatedly stuffed long foam rubber projectiles into each of its four pneumatic cannons. Each of these test missiles was as round as a beer can and about the length of a walking cane. Extra weight was added to the missiles to mimic how the real projectiles would fly.
“Firing number one,” Sarah reported, and Jason made sure he stood clear. With a short blast of air, the rubber missile shot out of tube with a pop. It flew across the lab and made a smacking sound when the sticky suction cup on the end encountered the laminate flooring. The tube flapped this way and that, bouncing around a little before standing straight up on its end.
Paige Grayson pulled out a four-foot fabric measuring tape and held it out for Jason to grab. From his position on top of the drone’s capsule, Jason placed the end of the tape at the side of the cannon’s hole, and Paige walked backwards toward the projectile. She held the measuring tape up to the end of the rubber cylinder jutting into the air and reported, “Forty-two inches.”
Dallas Stone entered the number into a spreadsheet on his computer. “Not bad,” he responded. “The weight of each projectile will be at least three times the test projectile weight, and we are only using about one third of the air potential in the cannon. We should be able to at least triple the range, maybe even more.”
Alex Knox added, “But a lot of that depends on how we configure the projectiles. I mean we have a lot of choices which are dependent on the situation. Nonlethal weighs less than lethal.”
“Agreed,” Dallas said.
Still sitting on top of the capsule, Jason suggested, “Let’s go ahead and stress test the cannons. How about we double the weight of the projectiles and double the air pressure?”
“We don’t want to break the darn thing before we have a chance to use it,” Knox said.
Grayson had made her way back to the boys and said, “What? You don’t have confidence in your own design?”
Knox looked conflicted, but Dallas was not going to pass on the challenge. He asserted, “We have to test it. Let’s triple the weight and run the tubes at two times the pressure.”
Now Knox looked worried.
“I have complete faith in you,” Dallas told Alex.
“I don’t,” Grayson said, but it was unclear whether she was joking or not. It was hard for Alex Knox to read her.
Paige said, “Jason, after it is loaded, I recommend you better get down from there. You could get hurt if the entire tube disintegrates and blows shrapnel around the room.”
Knox looked even more worried.
*-*-*
Up one deck, sitting in the Italian restaurant, Hail, Renner and their analyst, Pierce Mercier, ate lunch.
Pierce had been giving a lecture on the environment to the students attending one of his classes. In total, the Frenchman taught three different subjects to Hail’s teens. He had a fatherly appeal and was always happy to mentor them the best he could.
“How did your lesson go today?” Hail asked him.
In his thick French accent, Mercier responded, “Very well, thank you. At least I think it went well. It’s not as if the students come up afterward and tell me what a great job I did.”
Hail laughed and said, “Yeah, I assume that for the most part teaching is a thankless job.”
“But, I really do enjoy it.” Mercier responded. “Without exception, the young adults in your employ are very smart. They could really do anything they wanted with their lives.”
Hail’s smile faded, and for a moment, he wondered if the French scholar was trying to tell him something or make an inference. Hail asked, almost afraid to hear the answer, “Do you think this is a healthy environment for the kids?”
Pierce didn’t answer immediately, and Marshall interpreted that the man had mixed thoughts on the matter.
“Marshall, in a nutshell, we are teaching these kids to kill. Sure, we detach them from the nastiness with distance and a cloak of safety and invincibility. We sanitize the violence, but that doesn’t change the fact that we are teaching them to kill.”
Hail winced at the assertion. No matter how badly he wanted to deny Pierce’s observation, he knew the man was right. Deep down, he’d understood that fact even before Mercier had brought it to his attention. For some reason, killing humans who deserved to die didn’t bother him. However, what suddenly bothered him was the realization that he had become desensitized to the truth of what they were teaching his kids.
Hail fumbled for a response to Pierce’s claim, but came up with nothing.
Gage came to his rescue by changing the subject. “So, Marshall, did you ask the President for the anthrax?”
Hail looked pleased to have the conversation take a less provocative direction and replied, “Yes, I did.”
“Did she freak?” Gage asked, sticking a rolled-up fork of spaghetti into his mouth.
“I could tell it knocked her for a loop, but she didn’t fall out of her chair if that’s what you mean. She said she was going to discuss it with her advisers.”
Renner chewed and talked from the side of his mouth. “I would have liked to be a fly on the wall during that briefing. Can you imagine their heads simultaneously exploding while they wrestled with the request?”
Pierce ate quietly, having previously suggested to Marshall that he shouldn’t make the request for the pathogen. However, Pierce had been voted down so all he could do was listen to the conversation as a bystander.
“Yeah, I would bet that as director of the CIA, Pepper told them how dangerous you could be with a deadly virus in your possession. Doesn’t he realize that we are sitting on a mountain of nuclear material? Just ask Alexander Litvinenko how that worked out for him.”
Pierce asked, “Are you referring to the former officer of the Russian FSB?”
“Yep, but on second thought, you can’t ask him because he’s dead.” Gage added. “Poisoned by polonium.”
“Yes, he was,” Hail confirmed, “and it’s not like we don’t have the capabilities of synthesizing polonium. The beauty of polonium-210 is it emits very little gamma radiation so it can be smuggled past radiation detectors, but it emits a large number of alpha particles and is 5,000 times more radioactive than radium. Just a speck the size of a period at the end of a sentence is 3,400 times the lethal dose.”
Pierce set down his fork and asked Hail, “Is this something I should lesson plan —the chemistry of killing by nuclear means? After all, it is a fascinating science.”
Renner smiled at Mercier’s brashness. Marshall wasn’t called out very often in relation to his new pastime. However, if there were someone on the entire ship that wouldn’t hesitate to check Marshall’s actions, it would be the Frenchman.
Hail looked perturbed, and when he spoke he sounded troubled.
“Yes, Pierce, we teach our kids how to kill, but when you look at this from a historical framework, maybe as a history lesson, since you insist on turning it into a class discussion, you do realize that when young adults go into the military, they are taught to kill. Youngsters have been fighting and dying to protect our way of life all the way back to when we were Homo habilis. We just weren’t as smart when we were apes as we are now. We couldn’t gauge the cause and effect of our actions, but now we can.”
Pierce asked, “Do you think that the kids we mentor are capable of making those decisions, or are you pushing them into it? After all, it’s not as if they have many options. All the cool kids on board are pilots. The others that work in the restaurants or maintain the ships and such, not so much. If you were a new and impressionable recruit on this ship, which job would you choose to do?”
Hail had shouldered a huge amount of guilt for allowing his wife and kids to fly back to the States without him. That plane leaving Dusseldorf International just happened to be one of the five jets that were shot out of the sky in five different countries that day. It had taken him years for that sensation of burning guilt to subside. He would be damned if he’d allow Pierce’s new hypothetical insights to take him back down the tubes.
Hail said in a controlled tone, “I always tell the kids they have an option. They don’t have to fly. They don’t have to take part in the missions. They certainly don’t have to kill anyone.”
“Do you tell all the kids or just the cool kids?” Mercier asked, apparently trying to get a rise out of Hail.
Renner’s cell phone went off and he answered it. “Yeah, all right. We’ll be there. Keep them on the scope and keep a drone close to him.”
Gage hung up and said, “We have movement on one of the trackers we planted in Kornev’s fobs. Kornev is in one of his cars and driving somewhere.”
Hail dropped his napkin on top of his half-eaten lasagna and said, “Let’s go.”