Alicia Jones 3: New Frontier by D. L. Harrison

many uses and I wasn’t even thinking
that hard about it.
    Figuring that asking forgiveness was better than permission,
I took my mine out.
    “Al, get those people down, and subdue the man so he can’t
hurt the woman.”
    The last thing I wanted was for the man to snap his wife’s
neck when he realized he could no longer throw her off a building.
    The ball disappeared from my hand and shot up into the
sky.  The roof was too far away for the field to work, way further than
fifty feet up, but then the gravity ball could fly itself up there.  I really
needed a better name for my invention…
    The crowd gave a gasp of horror as the unhappy couple were
pulled right off the roof, and the man’s arms were pulled to his sides. 
Perhaps I should have specified to Al how it should be done, that poor woman
must be terrified. 
    The gasps gave way to sounds of confusion as the couple did
not fall to their deaths, but floated down sedately toward a couple of police
officers in the middle of the street.
    I shrugged sheepishly, “I can use it to pry open the car
too.  It’s capable of subtlety but also brute force.”
    He gave me a look of speculation, “A person could fly with
one of those things.”
    I laughed, “Yes, they could.  They could also make a
car fly, if I can ever get approval for public sales we’ll finally get those
flying cars they’ve been promising for the last hundred years or so.”
    Obviously mine didn’t count, it was actually a
spaceship.  The good thing about using artificial gravity for flying cars
was that they wouldn’t be able to exceed light speed.  I wasn’t sure that
kind of power would be good in the general public’s hands.  It would only
take one suicidal nut deciding he wants to take the world with him or her to do
it, or some kind of crazy terrorist.  Granted, safety protocols were
involved, but someone determined enough could probably find a way.
    The cop laughed and his voice was a little wistful, “That
would be something.”
    Nora said without a trace of condescension, “It will come,
when we first discovered the technology it took years before it was commonplace
on Tressia.”
    The emergency vehicle finally made it, and I did wind up
assisting them in getting the doors off.  It was probably better this way
anyway, let a medical professional decide if it was safe for the occupants to
move or not.  There was no danger of the vehicle exploding after all,
without gasoline that simply didn’t happen anymore.
    Regardless, our little side trip made us late for the show,
so we decided to go dancing after all…

Chapter
9
    Kristi joined me in my workspace with a smile on her face,
she looked excited.
    I looked up at her and waited, and her smile grew wider.
    She said in anticipation, “Want to watch me blow something
up?”
    I laughed, “Sure.”
    Instead of sharing the feed on my overlay, she put it on the
wall screen.  It was probably just in our heads, but somehow that made it
more real, and shared, than watching the same feed internally.
    She said breathlessly, “So, I’ve got one built.  It
draws the equivalent energy of a large scale fusion reactor instead of the
smaller ones we have locally attached.  It’s about thirty times more
powerful, and the effective range has almost doubled.  I’ll send you exact
numbers later.  The truth is, this isn’t much of a test, outside being
able to fire it.  The shield missile has no chance of survival if
hit.  Hell, the attack shuttles, battle cruisers, all of it, including the
test ship which has shields twice as strong as anything else we have won’t take
more than one hit to be vaporized.”
    She made a face, “Still, it will show it can aim, fire, and
not blow itself up.  I also have a number of normal missiles out there,
just for target practice against incoming attacks.  Ready?”
    “Fire away,” I said bemused by her excitement.  Not
that I blamed her, who didn’t like to watch stuff explode?
    Kristi nodded