Nexus (44 page)

 

Sam leaned against the stone balustrade, gazed south as she finished her third bowl of stew. Her body demanded calories, demanded protein to heal the damage done to it. She flexed her injured leg. It felt noticeably better after less than a day. The miracle of modern science. A mere muscle tear was nothing to her body's augmented ability to heal. She gulped down more stew, more fuel to power her body's accelerated recovery.

  What was she doing here? Where to next? There was something wonderfully tranquil about this place. Something had settled over her here, something she hadn't expected, a calm, an acceptance.

  It brought with it no answers, though. Nor would it deter an ERD attack squad.

  Sam needed to leave. She needed to keep moving. And, if by chance she evaded capture and death, she needed something to do with her life. She needed a purpose.

  She'd embraced the ERD with a passion at a young age. They'd been the ones that fought evil, the ones who would stop the men who'd do what had been done to her and her sister and her parents. But now…

  Mai is dead because of me. A little girl.

  It was too late to change that.

  Her job now was to stay alive. She'd need a new identity, a new face, new prints, everything that came with that.

  And then? Sam wondered. What do I do with my life?

  She kept thinking of Mai, of her sister Ana, of the young Sam that she'd been.

  I want to protect them, Sam thought to herself. Above all. I want to keep them safe.

  She turned and faced south. Out there, somewhere near a village called Mae Dong, there were more children like Mai.

  "Samantha?" It was Vipada, the young nun who'd been assigned to Sam. "It's time for meditation."

  Sam turned, suddenly aware of what she looked like with her nearly bald head and her white robes – a Buddhist nun. It brought a smile to her lips. She brought her hands together in a
wai
to Vipada.

  "Thank you, Vipada," she answered in Thai. "Please lead the way."

  She headed into the hall, to meditate with the nuns, to feel their minds in the practice called
vipassana
, the observation of self, in the meditation called
metta
, the state of loving-kindness, of compassion towards the self and others. They would meditate, and they would become one.

  She couldn't remember ever having experienced anything so beautiful in her life. The touch of another's mind in that deep serene state, the touch Nexus enabled… How could it be wrong? How could she have fought so hard to stop it?

  
Who am I becoming?

 

At 2249 hours, under a dark, cloudy night sky thirty kilometers off the coast of Thailand, a portion of the radar and sonar absorbent upper shell of the
Boca Raton
began to open. Fissures appeared on the rounded foredeck of the submersible covertoperations ship. The fissures defined previously invisible panels. The panels became depressions as the ship drew them in. They slid slowly, silently to the side, opening to reveal a combat deck below. As the stealth hull retracted, rounded launchers on the combat deck canted up, tilting from their horizontal resting positions up to an angle thirty degrees above the horizon, pointed north towards the Thai mainland.

  For a moment, all was still. The dark ship bobbed silently in the tropical swells of the Gulf of Thailand. Then the first launcher fired. A dark elongated shape streaked out and into the night sky. Seven hundred and eighty milliseconds later, the second launcher fired, then another, then another. In under ten seconds, the
Boca Raton
put twelve Viper class UAVs into the air. The recon/combat drones opened their stealthed, downturned wings one second into flight, activated their own jet engines, eased into level subsonic flight ten meters above the waves, and scattered.

  As each Viper streaked into the night, its attendant launcher began to tilt back towards horizontal. Within seconds of the last launch, the radar and sonar absorbent panels of the stealth hull began to slowly slide back into place, obscuring the combat hull. Secrecy must be maintained.

  In the air above the waters of the Gulf of Thailand, the AI in control of Viper 6 got its bearings and compared them to the plan. The drone banked its wings, turned to head north by north-east, angling around Bangkok's crowded airspace and traffic control radar and towards Saraburi and the mountains to the north-east. It had payloads to deliver.

 

[ EXCERPT FROM TRANSCRIPT:

Face America with David Ames
, Saturday 4/21/2040 ]

 

  Host: …and welcome back everyone to
Face America
. We're here this morning with National Security Advisor Dr Carolyn Pryce. Dr Pryce, thank you again for being here.

  Pryce: It's a pleasure, David.

  Host: Dr Pryce, let's move on to the situation in Thailand. A fire and multiple shootings in Bangkok yesterday reportedly left more than thirty people dead in a location connected to distribution of the street drug Nexus. The Thai government alleges that US forces were involved. What can you tell us about this?

  Pryce: David, our hearts go out to the families who lost loved ones in that fire. Of course, the US was in no way involved in this. Thailand is a close ally and an important partner in regional issues, and we hope that as emotions cool the Thai authorities will realize that they're mistaken.

  Host: What do you make of these reports of heavy gunfire in the area?

  Pryce: Well as you say, David, this building was apparently being used to distribute illicit drugs. We've seen drug-related violence in Mexico, in Afghanistan, in Columbia. Quite possibly this was a turf war between rival syndicates. These well-armed crime syndicates are part of the reason that President Stockton has made cracking down on the drug trade one of his top foreign policy priorities.

  Host: The Thai authorities are saying the DNA evidence has identified an American at the scene, a man named Michael Lee, who they assert was an undercover American agent.

  Pryce: Well, David, while Mr Lee lived in the US for a number of years, he's actually a child of Chinese immigrants to Thailand. So to use his presence to allege that the US was involved, when the same evidence provides a tighter link to China just to the north, is a bit odd. I hope the Thai authorities are asking Beijing some hard questions.

  Host: So this man was not a US operative?

  Pryce: Absolutely not.

  Host: And there were no US operatives there?

  Pryce: None whatsoever.

  Host: I'm going to play you a clip here, from a press conference this morning in Bangkok, where Thai authorities showed off evidence found at the scene of the fire, which they say conclusively links the US military to the event. Roll film.

  

  Host: What do you make of that?

  Pryce: David, I think that film speaks for itself. Those guns are so warped and melted, it's difficult to even tell what models they are. And unfortunately, it's far too easy to acquire weapons of all sorts, from any country, on the black market today. That's why President Stockton has made combating the international arms trade, especially of the newest, most high-tech weapons, one of his highest priorities.

  Host: Let's move on the situation in Turkmenistan…

 

[ END TRANSCRIPT ]

 

Viper 6 banked after its sixth drop, circling to the left to come around north by north-west towards the mountains north-east of Bangkok. It flew low, barely five meters over the rice paddies and sugar cane plantations, under the radar. Its AI steered it clear of villages and farmhouses.

  It flew past Rop Mueang, past Nakhon Nayok, past Phrommani, paralleled Highway 33 at a safe distance until it saw the village of Ban Na, then curved around north and east, hugged the terrain as it went from flat to rugged, followed a ravine carved into the stone millennia ago up towards greater heights.

  At twelve hundred meters it popped out of the ravine, acquired its target with its onboard optics, calibrated against its internal GPS. This was target seven, its AI confirmed.

  Viper 6 opened Weapons Bay 2, flew low and slow over the monastery, and launched a spray of tiny eight-limbed surveillance robots out and into the night air.

  One by one they drifted down and onto the target.

 
 

Kade woke to the sound of dawn bells. Sunday morning. Just over a day since everything had gone wrong, since Wats had died, since Narong had died, since Ilya and Rangan and so many others had been arrested.

  The meditation had soothed him last night, for a while.

  Then had come sleep, and with it, dreams. Dreams of rage, of destruction, of breaking Warren Becker in half, of burning Martin Holtzmann alive at the stake, of tearing black-masked agents limb from limb as they charged into that apartment. They'd been cold dreams. The death he'd meted out had been cool, methodical, satisfying.

  He was cold inside. Cold and full of rage. That was all he could feel.

  There was a knock at his door. "Come in," he replied.

  Bahn entered. The young monk had brought him a bowl of porridge for breakfast. He placed the bowl on the table, then made a wai to Kade with this hands, smiled, said something in Thai which might have been a joke or a happy comment.

  There was so much joy in this place. What did it feel like?

  Was there joy for him, on the other side of this rage? On the other side of this numbness? Was there anything?

  Perhaps destroying the ERD would give him joy. The thought brought a small smile to his lips.

  The doctor came to see him shortly thereafter, changed his dressings, checked his wounds, injected new growth factors to knit bone to bone, heal skin, restore damaged lung tissue.

  The eye was still gone.

  It was still so much less than he should have lost. He should have been the one to die. Not Wats. Not anyone else.

  His hand clenched around the fob hanging on a chain around his neck, beneath his orange robes. Its hard edges bit into his palm painfully.

  You should have lived, Wats. This wasn't worth it.

  He rose, crutched himself towards the meditation hall again. He'd learned much last night. The monks had learned to integrate Nexus 3 into their minds. They hadn't reprogrammed the Nexus cores, or scanned the radio spectrum and mapped Nexus's responses, or reverse-engineered its underlying instruction set.

  No. They'd meditated. They'd sculpted their own minds to the Nexus, found ways of thinking and being that gave them deeper control over it. And in so doing, they'd learned to achieve a synchrony that he'd never experienced. They'd learned to let thoughts flow smoothly across the boundaries that separated individual minds. They'd learned to merge into something larger and more sentient than they were individually.

  It impressed him deeply. He had much to learn here.

  He reached the meditation hall early, situated himself in the back, closed his eyes, focused on his breath.

  Monks filed in. He felt them. Heard them. They sat as they entered, cross-legged, spines erect. They breathed. Kade felt his own breathing synchronise with theirs. The connection between their minds firmed. The greater mind began to coalesce.

  Kade could feel them all. He was aware of the tiny ripples of thought that passed through their minds. Every tiny thought, every word, every snippet of song, every momentary fancy, every thought of chores, every question of teachings, every itch, every urge to move… the room felt them all. Together their collective consciousness observed itself. As each thought or sensation arose it was perceived, acknowledged, released. Attention returned to the communal breathing.

  It was hypnotic, serene, crystal clear and coherent. The room sparkled with their shared attention, with an almost physical sense of the collective mind they comprised.

  Their minds were so quiet. Kade's was so loud in comparison. The same thoughts kept returning.

  Wats. Ilya. Rangan.

  Narong. Chariya. Niran.

  Lalana. Mai.

  The dead and the missing. The uncertainty of the future. The guilty who'd done this.

  There was no grief. The software in his mind kept that at bay. His emotions were as hard and sharp and brittle as ice. Only anger. Only rage, cold rage, impotent rage.

  Every time the thoughts arose, the collective mind observed them, acknowledged them, released them, returned its awareness to the rhythmic breathing of their bodies.

  And every time they returned.

  They meditated together until lunch. Kade ate in the mess hall in silence, lost in himself. The monks finished their meals, headed off to their afternoon chores.

  Kade crutched painfully back to the meditation hall. There, seated at the far end of the hall, facing Kade, the giant golden Buddha statue behind him, was Professor Somdet Phra Ananda.

  The old monk's eyes opened at Kade's arrival.

  "Child," he said in his deep sonorous voice, "come and sit with me."

  Kade crutched himself across the room, reached the pillow Ananda indicated, slowly lowered himself, ribs aching. He could feel Ananda's mind, buoyant, radiant with calm and clarity, fluid, flexible, relaxed. His own mind felt icy, numb, frozen in a single thought.

  "How are you, child?" Ananda asked.

  "I'm healing," Kade said. I'm angry, he thought. "Thank you for letting us come here. This must be a risk for you. We were out of options."