Tiona (#2 in The Vaz Books)

“Tiona” picks up six years after the end of Vaz. Tiona, Vaz’s daughter, is starting grad school in physics, has a “bad boy” musician boyfriend, and does her own strange variety of charity work at a homeless shelter.
Her professor has her start work on a project to try to achieve high temperature superconduction by doping the graphene membranes her lab partner has figured out how to precipitate. Oddly her experiments are plagued by bizarre movements in the membranes when she applies current to them.
When she mentions the movements to Vaz, typical for his odd autism-spectrum personality, he becomes intensely focused on the movements, disregarding any effort at superconduction. Soon he has determined that her “problem” represents a physics breakthrough that could result in the production of a “reactionless drive” capable of lifting a craft into space!
Not that Vaz wants to go to space, he just wants to build the spacecraft with his daughter, in the garage! Vaz has never heard of flying saucers, but the physics of the thrust effect makes it much more efficient in a disk shape, so, because form follows function…
When they lift from north Raleigh and boost all the way outer space it gets NORAD pretty excited, especially a high-strung general who perceives their saucer to be a threat to the country’s safety.