Chapter VII
Lanced
A private air shuttle owned by Steinberg, Goldman, Taliq, Shabiza and O’Brien, LWC floated over a landing ground in northern Florida. From the aircraft’s undercarriage, a foam-rubber car dropped like an egg from a hastily snatched hen. Magnetic repellers hummed, ensuring that the vehicle’s twenty-meter fall was neither faster nor more impacting than that of a parachutist. Within the descending vehicle sat Alicia Martinez, a sheaf-filled attaché case on her lap.
She ruminated.
The air shuttle flung back whence it came the moment the wheels of the foam-rubber car touched the pavement.
“Mrs. Alicia Martinez has landed,” Isaac said into his lily as he sped the vehicle toward a multi-tiered causeway. The young man, an efficient driver and clerk (and Morton Goldman’s neph
