Scene 5
"All right, Fargo, what's the deal with the darn bats?" Jo was tired and a little bit cranky. Even a piping hot Vinspresso wasn't helping her mood.
After she and Carter had helped Henry remove the remains, they'd called Fargo and arranged to meet him first thing in the morning at Café Diem to discuss their next steps. Jo was trying to be a responsible grown-up about the whole thing, but this was not how she had planned to be spending her Sunday morning. From the moment she'd woken up in her bed—not the bed she'd planned to be waking up in—she'd been fighting the urge to whine.
"Shhh," Fargo hushed her urgently. "They're top secret. We shouldn't be talking about them here. "
Jo rolled her eyes. "Half the town called about them last night, Fargo," Carter said gently. "They might have been top-secret once, but they're not anymore."
Fargo sighed. "General Mansfield is not going to like this."
"He's not going to like the charred corpse or the big hole in the wall of a home lab, either," Carter pointed out.
Fargo shook his head. He was scrolling through the project files on his tablet. "It makes no sense," he said. "They're reconnaissance drones. No explosives, no weapons. They're just big bats that fly around and take pictures of scenery."
"There's got to be more to them that," Carter took a sip of his coffee.
"They must have some kind of weapons on them," Jo insisted. "Some kind of a gas or a drug. There was something about them that was…scary. "
"Couldn't you have imagined that?" Fargo asked. "I mean it was dark and…" Jo just looked at him and he let the words trail off.
"Um, okay, so weird bat psychic powers. And explosions. But there's nothing about either of those things in the project files."
"Was anyone else working with Kwon on this?" asked Carter. "Did he have a team?"
Fargo tapped his tablet a few times. "No, not at the moment. Although Taggart actually started the project, so maybe he'll know something."
"Wait, didn't Taggart's project use geese? But those were weapons—I distinctly remember Taggart saying something about the first rule of warfare being to control the high ground."
"Yes, yes, but this was an evolution of the project. Those geese were too expensive and they kept getting lost." Fargo shook his head, still reading intently. "The specs for the bat project were to develop an observational system that worked in darkness without relying on heat signatures for mapping." He shrugged. "It's not a weapon, and there's nothing here that should have caused an explosion."
"What does it say about how to get them back?" Jo asked. "Do they come home on their own when they're done taking pictures?"
"Ooh, good question." Fargo looked excited. "If they just need a homing signal or something, maybe we can get them back before I have to tell Mansfield that they're gone." He skimmed through the file and then shook his head regretfully. "Nothing about it here. We'll have to find Kwon's notes. Did you see a laptop in his barn?"
Jo looked at Carter questioningly and he shook his head. "Me, neither," she said. "But that explosion was pretty destructive. If he was working on his computer at the time, I'm not sure there'd be much left."
"Well, he must have had some way of getting the bats to come back. Maybe they're on timers, and will return to the barn automatically?" Fargo suggested hopefully. "It's not as if they're real animals that have escaped. They're just robots."
"Creepy robots," Jo muttered under her breath.
"Would he ever have tested them, though?" asked Carter. "I mean I assume the reason for the big barn was so that they could fly around in that space. If they were top secret, would he have let them out on longer flights yet?"
Fargo's mouth twisted. "Good point. No, he shouldn't have. They weren't scheduled for an active flight test for..." he scrolled through the file, "...another two months. "
"So why haven't they just kept flying and flown away?" asked Jo.
"It's probably the electromagnetic umbrella over the town. They can't get through it."
"Oooh, are they dumb enough to try? Maybe there's a pile of dead bats at the border of Eureka?" Jo liked that thought. It was perhaps unfair of her to be blaming the giant robot bats for the destruction of her evening, but she couldn't help thinking about that very pleasant picnic that had gone completely to waste.
"No, no, no," said Fargo adamantly. "That's a terrible idea. We don't want dead bats, we want captured bats."
"What difference does it make? They're not really alive. They'd just be zapped."
"This is a multi-million dollar project, and if the circuitry in the bats is fried, it could cost almost that much to try to fix them. No, we want to take these bats alive."
Jo sighed. The only thing she'd had to look forward to in her day was the possibility of shooting some bats, and now Fargo had stolen even that away from her. Whining was becoming more and more inevitable. She stared glumly into her Vinspresso.
"All right, so we've got some goals," Carter said. "I already sent Andy out to the barn to run some tests on the chemicals and see what Kwon was messing with out there. It's possible that the explosion isn't connected to the bats at all. We also need to find Kwon's computer, and see what his system was for retrieving the bats. And then we need to find Taggart and…ah, nice timing."
Jo looked up. Taggart had just come through the door of Café Diem. With Emily Glenn. She was smiling and he was laughing and it was immediately apparent that this was Saturday night continuing with Sunday breakfast, not a chance meeting or even a planned Sunday brunch. Jo looked away.
She wasn't jealous. She wasn't. Not of Taggart. But maybe, she admitted to herself, maybe of that first night romantic flush. Things with Zane just felt so complicated. Well, not to mention that she still hadn't gotten that first night romantic flush.
"You okay?" Carter asked her quietly.
"Yeah," she said, surprised ."Yeah, no, I'm fine. It's just…stop me before I start to whine." She pasted a smile on her face. How embarrassing to be caught moping.
