[The Fear Saga 01] - Fear the Sky (2014) (63 page)

She spotted the tech from the missile door walking under the hatchway. The man turned and saw her standing in the small space aft of the cockpit. Jennifer raised her hands like she was being stuck-up in an old cowboy movie, hoping the tech would raise the alarm. The man paused. Good, maybe this guy would figure it out. Wait, no, shit, the tech was walking toward her. Fuck. No! Don’t come up here, you idiot. Go and get help, chock the wheels, sound the alarm you fool, but sure enough the man came over and started climbing the small ladder that folded down from the cockpit hatchway.

OK, maybe when the tech showed his head in the hatchway Jennifer could grab the gun away from the apparently deranged Major Toranssen. Maybe she would get shot doing it, but so be it. The gunshot would bring people running and then at least the plane would not be co-opted by this apparently insane ex-Captain Toranssen. But then Major Toranssen did something that Jennifer did not expect. As the tech’s head and upper body appeared through the hatchway, the major fired.

There was no bang, more of a whoosh, and Jennifer felt a stabbing pain in her neck. Fuck, I’ve been shot, the bastard shot me, her mind raced. What the hell did he do that for? What about the risk of damaging the plane? Jennifer’s hand instinctively came up to her neck to feel the wound but something was wrong. Wait, what the hell was that? She felt her vision blur as she pulled the dart out, but the dart seemed to melt away as the world began to swim and flow around her.

“Damn it, Jack!” said the tech climbing into the cabin as the female pilot slumped forward on top of him. Martin, disguised in the overalls of a technician, heaved under the weight of the unconscious woman while the major reached over the top of them and opened the toilet door at the back of the small space. In it was the already unconscious body of Captain Kellar, and the major helped the straining Dr. Martin to heft the limp body of Captain Falster into the small space with her sleeping colleague. They would attend to the two pilots in good time, but for now, they had to get seated and get this bird airborne.

Martin hastily climbed the rest of the way into the cabin and stripped off his overalls, revealing a flight-suit underneath. Stuffing the overalls in with the two sleeping airmen, he climbed into the unoccupied seat next to the major, where even now the man was performing the final flight prep.

As Jack worked diligently and expertly to prep the plane, he filled Martin in on what was about to happen, “OK, Doc, get your helmet on. In a moment, a ground commander is going to poke his head through that hatch and confirm we are flight ready. Do not turn around, just sit there and move your arms a little, like you are getting the plane ready. From where he’ll be looking from, he won’t be able to see much of you anyway, just the back of your shoulder. When he says, ‘are we a go?’ you just stick your thumb out like this. Once he gets the OK from us, he’s going to order the hatch sealed and we’ll begin our taxi.

“If we can get to the runway, we are pretty much home free. There is pretty much nothing they can do to us once we are airborne as they won’t be able to see us. After all, that is basically the idea of this beauty.”

Martin was about to make a remark about how taking off was the least of their worries when they heard clanks on the hatchway ladder as the ground commander climbed up. Jack and he exchanged a few words over the growing roar of the engines and Martin heard the shouted question, “Are we a go?”

He gave his best Top Gun thumbs-up, reviving some remembered pilot stereotype, and then the man was gone and the hatch was being sealed. Though he would not admit it, a part of him had hoped they would be caught. Deep down he knew that he was probably going to die tonight, or, if he was lucky, spend the rest of his life in a military jail. And he couldn’t help but think that maybe just cutting straight to the military jail bit might have been preferable.

But that option was gone now. Three minutes later they were taxiing into the still warm jet wash of the B-2 in front of them, watching the white burn of his four turbojet engines as they propelled him down the runway. This was no civilian airport; as the plane in front was just lifting off they were already in place and gunning their engines to catch it. Martin was thrown back in his seat as Jack fired the plane’s great engines and the powerful beasts catapulted them forward toward whatever fate the night had in store for them.

The earth below passed by like a wooden globe spun by a child. Hub Satellite Number 3 orbited high above southern China, flying westward as it overtook the sun.

The four AIs that circled the earth operated as one mind. Their systems were thoroughly integrated, the instantaneous communication made possible by the subspace tweeters each satellite was built around making fluid operation a possibility. Therefore the unified artificial intelligence that was the four satellites watched the planet they were orbiting as one mind, its four acute eyes scanning the globe and creating a composite image from all the data that flowed up to them. As one satellite’s orbit took it away from Middle East, to soar out over the Mediterranean toward the Atlantic, another was already coming around behind it, bringing its eye to bear on the object of their attention. The focus of the AIs’ combined mind shifted seamlessly to the next satellite’s eye as it took in the six missiles soaring up out of the atmosphere ahead of it.

As the AI watched the six errant missiles streak across the Middle Eastern dawn, it broadcast the image to its eight Agents on the surface below. The AIs’ eyes also watched eagerly as various nations responded across the planet’s surface. They watched as the US, China, and Russia deployed their long-range bomber fleets. They saw the F-35 strike bombers being fueled and prepped with long-range cruise missiles on French, English, and US aircraft carriers in the Mediterranean.

With computerized calm, the AI hivemind tracked and monitored tens of thousands of ships, submarines, planes, tanks, and battalions of soldiers as they all began to move in an impossibly complex dance. The world was readying itself for potential nuclear holocaust. The earth had stockpiled an estimated twenty to thirty thousand high-yield nuclear missiles: enough to destroy mankind forty-two times over. Each of the fifty or so nuclear submarines that England, France, the US, China, and Russia had in the world’s various oceans had enough firepower to wipe out half of humanity on their own. If any proportion of that arsenal were fired en masse, the satellites could not hope to stop it. Nothing could. It was just this realization that had brought the team of eight Agents to this world in advance of their Armada. The last thing the Mobiliei wanted was a broken and charred planet; they just wanted an empty one. They needed us gone, but they needed to eradicate us methodically, in an orderly fashion.

Their plans were predicated now, as they had always been, on the premise that as long as their presence remained unknown they might still infiltrate the world’s nuclear powers deeply enough to mitigate their might from the inside. But not if there was a war tonight. Not if the insanity of a few insurgents started the conflagration that would render the earth both uninhabited
and
uninhabitable.

Even with the world’s great powers unsheathing their claws and baring their fangs, the AIs operated under the assumption that this could still all end peacefully. Study of Earth’s history as well as their own showed that this was not the first time either planet had been pushed to the brink of nuclear war. Like the Mobiliei, the humans had discovered that the atom was as powerful a deterrent as it was a weapon. Both races had only ever dared to use it once, the sight of the weapon’s power showing each world that if two nuclear capable nations ever went to war it would be the last thing the race ever knew. But even with such a massive deterrent staying the hands of the world’s super powers, events like the Cuban missile crisis had still been one of many events that had taken the world to the very brink of annihilation.

So on this night, as the world once more teetered on the edge of the precipice, the four satellites roaming above were ready to take on the role of unlikely guardian. They would watch over the humans and try to ensure that this was just another false alarm. Under no circumstances would they allow the six Pakistani missiles to reach Russia, but nor would they risk exposure unless it was absolutely necessary.

As Hub Satellite Number 3 continued up over Tibet toward Azerbaijan, it tracked the Pakistani missiles as they left the atmosphere and began their brief, ballistically doomed orbits. Their rocket engines still burned with fury, though now in the silence of vacuum, the sound lost as though drowned out by the expanse of space they were so briefly escaping into. As the satellite eye flew toward the six HATF-VI missiles from the east, it also registered as Russia launched its counterstroke from the north. Out of the heart of Northern Asia came thirty-two flaring rocket signatures. The big missiles, known as Gorgons, were the long-range component of Russia’s massive missile shield. They were capable of exo-atmospheric travel, and they were armed with the latest kinetic cluster warheads. They were blunt tools, they were huge, and they were lethal.

The stealthed AI satellite came surging over the horizon, and watched the two great arcs forming just ahead of it. At this rate, the hub would be right over the surging missiles in a matter of minutes. As it watched, the two arcs continued to form like sides of a massive bridge coming to meet in the middle, a bridge of fire large enough to connect Moscow to Pakistan, over two thousand miles to the south.

The HATF-VI rockets had reached their theoretical peak altitude, with a documented range of two thousand miles they were about eight minutes from disengaging their rocket boosters and beginning their plummet back to Earth. But instead of leveling out and preparing for their freefall, they continued to rise.

Mikhail Kovalenko had spent the last two hours convincing first his superior, then several of that man’s superiors that the missiles could make it to Russia, even though it was outside the effective range of the weapons. So sure enough, the Russian missile control was ready when the Pakistani missiles continued to rise.

Their own missiles adjusted accordingly and they continued their meteoric rise out of the atmosphere to lay their spectacularly destructive munitions in the path of the onrushing missiles. The AI watched the two trajectories continue to angle farther and farther upward, until its own subroutines started to alert it to a new possibility. The paths: they were going to intersect. The Russians had indeed fired high and wide enough, and the giant Gorgon missiles’ onboard tracking systems were now able to plot an intercept course that would lay them in the path of the six aggressors.

But the AI satellite would also be in that path. The machine laid route plan after route plan but the closer it came to the missiles, the plainer it became. The Pakistani missiles were not leveling out. They were continuing their rise. The missiles’ powerful boosters were sending them up into the path of the orbiting satellite, and the thirty-two Gorgon interceptors were coming to meet them.

The AI computed its options, it called the Council, it had simply not accounted for an option where it could be destroyed accidentally. In the event of an attack it was allowed to defend itself. It had a protocol for that. But no scenario had been envisioned where it would be faced with the fact that defending one of its four satellites against attack might result in detection. In all its scenarios it would only have to defend the satellites
after
they had already been detected. This was outside its parameters, and without a preset and preapproved response pattern it called the Council and waited.

If it had been capable of being frantic it would have been scrambling to get the seven Agents whose whereabouts it knew together, but with the infinite machine patience it calmly sent the summons to the Agents. With one Agent unaccounted for, it needed all the remaining seven to attend in order to reach a consensus, such were the limits of its mandate.

John Hunt busied himself on the deck of the HMS
Dauntless
feeling the urgent summons to Council from the AI ring in his head. He smiled. He knew that for a satellite to use its active weaponry while under close surveillance it would need a unanimous consensus. With Shahim out of pocket all John had to do was take his time. In a few hours the other Agents would no doubt all know the truth anyway. Might as well stick it to them while he still could.

Eventually, though, he knew he had to respond to the AI’s calls, otherwise the Council could vote him unavailable and count his vote in proxy. So, sighing a little, he politely excused himself from the group of sailors he was standing with and stepped to the ship’s railings. They were at sea, about two days outside Sembawang Naval Base on the island of Singapore. Looking out over the afternoon waters, he was struck by the magnificence of the planet. No wonder his race craved it. It was, without doubt, an exquisitely beautiful world. He knew this abstract of himself that lived in the Agent’s body would never see Mobilius again, but he could not deny it was a fine consolation. Worth his life, should it come to that.

For no matter how beautiful the prize, it was not worth genocide, nothing was. Somewhere behind his machine eyes he braced himself one last time, and then his eyes stared out over the water and glazed over, his mind connecting with the other Agents in Council.