Note: This story was dynamically reformatted for online reading convenience. ________________________________ This is a story about a sexual FANTASY written for consenting adults. If you're not both of those, don't read it. Characters in a FANTASY don't get sick or die unless I want them to. In real life, people who don't use condoms and other safe-sex techniques do get sick and die. You don't live in a FANTASY so be safe. The fictional characters in my stories are trained and experienced in acts of FANTASY - don't try to do what they do - someone could get hurt. If you think you know somebody who resembles any of the characters here, congratulations, but you're wrong - any similarity between the characters in this story and any real person is purely coincidental, since all of these characters are figments of my dirty little imagination. This is my story, not yours. Don't sell it or put it on a pay site. You can keep it and/or give it away with all of this information intact, but if you make money off of it without my permission, you're breaking the law and pissing me off. _________________________________ Body Guards II: Stolen Secrets - Chapter 13 (nosex) (C)Copyright 2005 - Shakes Peer2B shakes_peer2b@NONOsbcglobal.net (remove 'NONO' from the above address to contact me) http://storiesonline.net/library/author.php?name=Shakes_Peer2B /files/Authors/Shakes_Peer2B/ ________ Author's Note: I am not a physicist, so if I'm way off on some of the technical details in this chapter, please don't take it too hard. It's fiction, and I tried to make it believable enough for those who aren't physicists to enjoy. The rest of you are welcome to have a good laugh at my expense... _________ The day following our return from Texas, with, thankfully, Stephanie safely back home, the six of us met in Hastings study. For the better part of an hour, he grilled us about what went on in that hangar in Texas. Our people had already done some preliminary assessment of the data we retrieved on paper and on the hard disks from the computers we raided, and a huge picture of global conspiracy was beginning to emerge, all of it centered around oil and war. It seems that the growing shortage of oil was creating a windfall opportunity for arms manufacturers, reconstruction industries, and the oil industry, and they were going to milk it for all it was worth. For most of the rest of the day, we discussed possible solutions from every angle, including Sun, Jun, Mei, Wei and I infiltrating each of the involved companies, countries and governments and sabotaging their efforts. For the last half hour or so of the discussion, Steve Hastings sat behind his desk, lost in thought, and speaking only when addressed directly. Finally, in the middle of a heated discussion about ways and means, he said, "Listen. I have an idea, but I'm not going to say anything until I've discussed it with some other people. In the meantime, I'm going to need the tightest security you can come up with for me, my family, and my CTO. Can you do that?" Our link was abuzz with speculation, but the G-girls and I affirmed that we could keep a lid on anything that came up. "Good. We never got around to hiring you formally, Darren, so I appreciate you agreeing to help with this." Hastings said. "If you could experience what the six of us have here, Mr. Hastings," I replied, "you'd understand how little choice I have, or want, in the matter. What these ladies are into, I'm into, and I wouldn't have it any other way." I always knew Steve Hastings was a smart guy, but I never really knew just HOW smart he was until this came up. While the girls and I speculated on how to bring down a global conspiracy, Hastings got busy doing the one thing that such a conspiracy could not survive. He wouldn't tell us what it was at first, but suddenly there was a flurry of activity at his company. Bob, the CTO, and a new guy, suddenly became a priority for us when it came to security. The new guy was a friend of Bob's from college, and just as much of a geek, but, as we learned, a few months into his employment, he was to be the salvation of our country, its economy, and the entire planet. At Hasting's behest we wrapped a security blanket around Bob and Gene (the new guy) so tight that even we didn't know what they were working on until they went to test the prototype. Even that was done indoors, in a huge hangar that Hastings rented at Moffet field. We had to rent it for a week so that the girls and I could go over it for bugs, sensors, explosive devices, etc. We swept the place with a fine-toothed comb using both our mental abilities and the tried and true detectors of the G-girls' trade. Some of the bugs we found had to have been cold-war era stuff, while others were more modern. NASA thanked us afterward when we piled all the electronics we had found on the administrator's desk. Apparently, they had suspected that someone was spying on them, but never realized just how many there were. We didn't have the heart to tell them that many of those bugs had to have been planted by US agencies. Once the place was clear, we took turns in four-hour shifts of two, patrolling inside and out, invisible, and not just on the ground. Hastings felt this was so important that he even gave permission for Stephanie to join us, provided that she promise not to try to take matters into her own hands if she found anyone snooping around who shouldn't be. With Steph partnered with Mei, we could work three shifts, allowing the four not on shift to sleep and eat. We also had the expected compliment of visible security people stationed around the place, inside the closed roof, and on top of the hangar. The ability to levitate helped us tremendously, both in sweeping the place and in patrolling and making sure the other guards remained alert. The big day came and it was kind of a disappointment. A tractor trailer rig, driven by one of the trusted Gemini people, drove through the hangar door and parked. The Gemini driver got out, unlocked the trailer's loading door and left. When only Hastings, Bob, and Sun were left inside the hangar, Bob opened the loading door at the back of the trailer and operated the controls to extend and lower a ramp. The rest of us watched through Sun's eyes as, from inside the trailer a Hummer rolled down the ramp. This was one of the original Hummvee's, like those used by the military. It was much quieter than the behemoths normally are, but otherwise appeared to be a normal, commercial grade Hummvee. We continued our patrols outside and in, watching through the eyes of whoever had the watch inside the hangar during each shift, as Gene, who was driving, put the Hummer through its paces for seven hours. A series of forward and reverse motions, full throttle runs, extended steady speed runs, climbing obstacles, and basically doing all the things the rugged vehicles were originally designed for. The performance was impressive, but I'd seen and driven Hummers most of my military career, and saw nothing out of the ordinary, other than the exceptional quietness of its engine. An hour before our lease on the hangar was up, the vehicle rolled smoothly back into the trailer, the ramp disappeared, and the G-girls and I rode the rig back to the company facility, keeping on the alert for anyone who might have designs on its contents. It wasn't until later that evening that Hastings, accompanied by his two techno-geeks, explained what we had seen. "So, what did you think?" He asked of no one in particular. I shrugged. "It was quiet. Didn't seem to struggle quite as much on some of the obstacles as the ones I'm used to. Why? What's this Hummer got to do with your plan?" Hastings smiled that little smile I had come to expect when he had a surprise to spring on us. "That Hummer was running on electricity." He said. "That's quite a battery." Wei, who with her sister was the most technical among us, said. "No recharge the whole seven hours." "Actually," Hastings was still smiling, "the battery was being recharged continuously." "How?!" This from Mei, who shared her sister's penchant for paraphernalia. "By a unit very much like this." Bob answered, sweeping the drape off of something round and metallic, about the size of a basketball, that was surrounded by tubes and wires. "A microfusion reactor. It produced the energy that generated the electricity for the battery and wheel motors." "Fusion?" I asked. "Isn't it pretty dangerous to have a fusion reactor running around loose like that?" "Actually," Bob's new pal spoke up, "one of the secrets to this reactor is the containment field. It keeps radioactive particles within the reactor. Another secret is the heating and cooling. Scientists have for years searched for a way to generate cold fusion using metals such as Palladium and Titanium as catalysts. We have bypassed all that by generating plasma in such minute quantities that the unit that heats the gasses need only be as big as your thumb. We have also eliminated the need to generate Tritium from Lithium by going to a Deuterium-Deuterium reaction. This also eliminates many of the sources of excess radiation." "What do you use for fuel?" A little to my surprise, this came from Stephanie. "At present, any liquid with sufficient hydrogen content," Gene lectured, "including gasoline, diesel fuel, water, and a number of other readily available substances. A gallon of gas would power this for a very long time. The only reason we're restricted to liquids is that we haven't had time to work out the mechanics of the separation process for non-liquids. That will happen within the year. Deuterium is produced from the hydrogen, after it is separated from other chemicals in the fuel by a proprietary process within the reactor." "What about safety?" Mei asked. "The containment field ensures against radiation leakage and because it's integral with the fusion process, provides a fail-safe mechanism to prevent uncontained reactions." Gene paused for breath. "If the reactor is damaged, the field collapses instantly and reaction ceases in nanoseconds. It is possible for microscopic quantities of plasma to escape as the field collapses, but the amount is so small that it would cool before it could do any serious damage." Stephanie clearly had an interest in this subject. "But what about waste? Won't there be radioactive byproducts?" She asked. "That's one of the unique features of this approach." The scientist replied. "The sole byproduct of this fusion reaction is Helium. There can be chemical byproducts but those are collected in waste containers. Many are useful for other purposes, so on the whole the actual waste from a power plant like this is miniscule." "Is it scalable?" This from Hastings himself. I suspected he knew the answer, but wanted Gene to tell us. "This kind of power plant can be built in sizes that will power everything from a motorcycle to a medium-sized factory." The scientist took the bait. "When used to generate electricity, multiple units can be used to generate as much power as needed." "It must be very expensive..." Stephanie commented. "Because of its simplicity, even without the economies of scale that could be achieved with mass production, the entire power train for this vehicle cost less in materials and labor than its original drive train." Bob fielded that one. "In production, it would reduce the cost of most vehicles by an estimated 40 percent, and the total cost of ownership by approximately eighty four percent." "What if it runs out of fuel?" Jun asked. "Tow truck owners whose trucks use these power plants will have special restart connectors." Bob continued. "After adding a few ounces of fuel to the stalled vehicle, they simply need to supply enough power to sustain the containment field until the vehicle's own reaction restarts. Which reminds me: When not in use, the power plant 'idles' producing just enough power to sustain its containment field." "How do you cool it?" Stephanie asked. Damn! I knew the girl was smart, but until now, I hadn't realized exactly HOW smart. "Keep in mind that we're generating much less heat than you might imagine, since we need produce only a miniscule amount of plasma, and the reaction itself is very small. Much of the heat is used to generate the electricity to power the vehicle and maintain its containment field, and some is used in the chemical process that separates the hydrogen from the rest of the fuel. The remainder is dissipated through, believe it or not, the original radiator of the vehicle." This was all very theoretical to me. Being more of a pragmatist, I said, "This is all well and good, but you'll first have to push this thing through a whole mountain range of red tape, and you can bet your ass that some of the most powerful lobbies in the world will be working against it. Granted, if you get this into widespread use and make it available internationally, you'll have done an end run around the warmongers and oil barons, but getting approval for something like this will be a major battle." Hastings gave me a smile that said 'Thanks for the segue!' and said. "That's where you six come in. Until we get this through Congress, you're going to have to be our lawmakers' conscience. I don't want you being advocates, mind you, just make sure that whatever decision they make, they come by honestly. For better or worse, if we can't win a fair fight in Washington, we'll let it go, but I want you to make sure the fight IS fair, okay? Besides, my first marketing target is the easiest and could pull the rug out from under most of our opponents. Next week, I'm presenting this to the Joint Chiefs of Staff. If I'm right, they'll jump at the chance to have land and sea forces that are not dependent on fossil fuels, since they've got to know about the coming drought. When word gets out that the Military has adopted this technology, congress will begin the call for civilian applications. That will be our cue." "You said 'land and sea forces.'" I mused, "What about airborne vehicles?" "That will require a whole range of new inventions." Hastings replied. "Certainly, propeller driven craft won't be too hard to convert, since they use technology not too different than the Hummer, but jet driven craft will have to find new ways to achieve the kind of performance they now enjoy. Bob and Gene have been working on some ideas for that involving direct plasma thrust, but that's a year or more away." "So what's our role in this?" I tried to get the discussion back to something I could wrap my hands around. "Do we go to Washington and start twisting arms, or what?" "Yes and no." Hastings temporized, "First, someone still needs to handle security here. Second, I absolutely DO NOT want you telling ANYONE to vote a certain way or take a certain position. All I want from you is to level the playing field. Any shady dealings between lobbyists and lawmakers either gets exposed or used as leverage to get the lawmakers back to doing the job for which they were elected - representing those who voted for them, not just those who give them money." "So basically, we'll be Jiminy Crickett to the entire Federal Government?" I asked. "No sweat. I've been thinking about what else we can do with these powers, and I bet if we tried, we could clone ourselves." That got a polite laugh from the group, which was probably more than it deserved, but Hastings answered, "Just be smart about it. Use the bugs and gather information, then leverage that information to get more. Before long you'll have documented enough closet skeletons to put some entrenched lobbies out of business, and any lawmakers who don't want to reform in jail." It wasn't really that simple, of course. Wei, with Stephanie's help, managed security for the company and the key people. For a few weeks, we had everything our way. The folks in Washington still hadn't figured out what happened to the people who resigned, but they had at their disposal some of the best counterintelligence and investigative agencies in the world, and it wasn't long before some of them twigged to the fact that somehow, someone was getting through their security. Granted, those on the receiving end of our 'services' were not going to go public with anything they learned unless they had nothing left to lose, but it's still a big no-no to investigate members of the Government if you're not part of those investigative agencies. We didn't want to rile them too much, since the guys doing the investigating were just doing what they were told. To reduce the heat a little, we started leaving crumbs of the information we uncovered for them to find. Before long, the FBI was following up on leads we left for them and catching considerable heat from their congressional handlers. Feelings were mixed at the Bureau when we leaked the information to certain reliable press outlets about the investigation and the reaction of Congress. The whole thing got to be one big, confusing, chess game, in which we found we had the advantage. Hastings, it seems is a superb chess player, and the fact that our moves were directed by one really smart guy allowed us to outmaneuver the opposition, who had no clear leadership. A little over a year after we started, Hastings got his military contract. That made his product a national secret, but secrets have a way of getting out, and as soon as the electrical power industry discovered that they could be generating power much less expensively, and more safely, they began clamoring for release of the technology. It was touch and go until the automobile industry 'accidentally' found out about it, and joined forces with the power guys. Their combined might along with some judicious leakage of information about illicit contributions from the oil lobby finally won Congress over. By then, a Democratic administration was in power, and they saw Hastings' power plant as a way to regain some of the prestige lost in the eyes of the world during the Republican years. Within five years after its first use by the US Military, the technology was de-classified, and Hastings began selling his inexpensive power plants to any nation that could pay the price, but he kept design and manufacturing in the United States. In addition, for the first time in years, the American automobile industry had a leg up on foreign competition. Consumers around the world clamored for the vehicles that could run on a variety of fuels and only needed to be refueled every couple of years. What the news media didn't know was that Hastings got a Congressional okay to begin selling his power plant - not the plans, mind you, just the product, to people in other countries. When our State department wanted to reach out to the people of Afghanistan and Iraq to make amends for the heavy-handed excesses of the previous administration, they decided that the best thing they could do was to supply, free of charge, hundreds of medium-sized Hastings Balls. Three years after first release, Hasting's company sold the military its design for fusion powered jets. An easy sell, as it turns out, since the biggest problem in its design was creating an airframe that could stand up to the tremendous forces that could be generated by the engine. Since it needed no oxygen to burn its fuel, the thing could achieve suborbital flight without breaking a sweat, making it possible to deploy the jet from any base in the world to any target in the world in a couple of hours. No one in his right mind in Congress was going to deny our air forces access to such a weapon, especially since it didn't need in-flight refueling. It could fly from anywhere to anywhere, and back, fly rings around any fighters or missiles it encountered along the way, then reload its guns and weapons pods and be on its way again. The payload it could carry was phenomenal, increasing the destructive capability of a single aircraft ten-fold. In ten short years, Hastings industries replaced Halliburton as the supplier of choice for US military vehicles, weapons platforms and naval power plants. The Navy, having discovered that the Hastings Ball could easily replace their conventional oil burning boilers, even in conventional ships, immediately set about converting the entire fleet to microfusion power. To my surprise, Hastings never spent a single penny on political contributions. He has some sort of wierd notion that his products should be accepted for themselves, and not because of the money he gives to politicians. It's probably just as well. Since the girls and I started being Washington's conscience, the political lobby business almost dried up. Politicians had to go back to the old fashioned notion of drumming up votes based on their ability to convince voters that they will represent them, not the corporations. Did they all get honest? Not on your life. There're still plenty of crooks in office, but there are crooks everywhere. Since the illegal money tree dried up and blew away, Congress went ahead and passed a campaign finance reform act with actual funding and enforcement guidelines. The girls and I kept our ears to the ground, and still paid our elected officials a call now and then, but most of what was going on was the same sort of petty graft in which politicians have engaged since the first guy declared himself leader of the tribe. They weren't trying to rape the country anymore. How do I know? Well, to quote an old sixties comedian, "Ve haff our vays...!" Jun and I moved to DC. We became kind of a fixture there. Lawmakers knew us by sight, and some even greeted us when they saw us in casual situations. As long as we weren't showing up in their offices, they didn't seem to mind having us around, too much. We didn't get invited to parties or anything like that, but we had our own kind of popularity. Meanwhile we were doubling as security for Stephanie who, having gotten her JD and a PhD Political Science, and passed the bar at the tender age of twenty, worked diligently to get the new President elected. Her expertise as a political operative drew on the experience she gained through years of monitoring us in our efforts to keep our nation's politicians semi-honest. As a result, she became the youngest Deputy Chief of staff in White House history.