CHAPTER IV
A man in a yellow hazmat suit swept around the large cuboid satellite, his handheld geiger counter with its slow crackling revealing barely perceptible levels of danger.
Men looking into the chamber through a porthole smiled as they could see the yellow suited man give the thumbs up as he continued to prod and probe into all the nooks and crannies of the satellites surface.
"So...it was just a glitch with the panels?" Said a bespectacled, bald headed old man, his pinstriped suit and briefcase giving him the look of an accountant.
"Yes, it seems so, we detached those and moved them to the next chamber for analysis but the satellite apparently.....is fine" replied a white coat wearing man. His silver grey hair combed tidily.
An Air Force officer, medal ribbons on his chest, nodded approvingly. "I trust my men can get started straight away then?"
"Sure, I'll get my team to sign off for you and then you can remove your items....but...is this what the ClearOrbit Act was about ...or..." Labcoat man asked.
"Oh no, trust me, we need all that old junk out of the way, orbit slots are getting hard to find....THIS is just a side benefit." said the accountant type.
"It's really impressive what you've done, capturing dozens of space hazards with one unit, enveloping the stuff and returning it to earth or..incinerating it.." The officer added.
"It's been a great effort and now you get your reactor back and all those old secret optics and encryption comm systems ..." said Labcoat.
"Yes, although this bird went up in the early eighties a lot of the design architecture we had then has been merely upscaled, better to keep on top of our secrets..." The officer added.
"What happens to the rest? " Asked the accountant.
"Well obviously this is why we get subsidies to do this, there's little tech value except for the secret stuff. The best part is the recycle value in there, some precious metals, and valuable rare earth metals, but the Air Force will be running off with the good stuff this time while we get stuck with redundant solar panels..." Said Labcoat man to the men's laughter.
Meanwhile in the adjoining chamber the pair of satellite solar panel arrays had been unfurled, a tracked robot was slowly patrolling the room, geiger counter probe feeding results back to the adjoining laboratory.
"What the......?" said the brunette woman as she saw the results coming in.
"It's like alpha, but behaves like beta, and those off phase wave......" the brunette reached for her text books and started scanning for answers.
"No.........no.............no.........what is this?" she exclaimed, slamming her books closed.
She closed her eyes a moment to think. This was a phenomenon that shouldn't occur but, she remembered theorising about it once....it wasn't meant to be a problem, it was meant to have been a solution to a question.
Clicking on her computer terminal she began typing, interrogating the science paper database.
"No..." CLICK .."no...." CLICK ....."ah....."
The brunette looked over the paper.
"Investigation into theoretical energy capture, storage,enhancement and transmission in extraterrestrial physiology"
The brunette began clicking through the paper to a section describing how the energy cells of the superheroine , the extraterrestrial, could be disrupted. If a theoretical radiation source were found with certain properties, it could end up clogging the pathways between cells. The multiplying nature of the heroines energy would be turned off, like the flick of a switch rendering her.....normal.
The brunette tapped at her keyboard again and picked up the handset of the phone, squinting at the phone number she had found. Dialling out, cord at full stretch the brunette turned back to the feed from the robot, it's Geiger counter crackling as the camera tracked over the panels.
"Oh hi....is that professor Schneider? "
There was a pause as the Robot finished its patrol, it's camera gazing at a feint green sheen embedded in a strip at the edge of one of the panels.
"Schneider, it's me, Dr Matthews.......Molly......"