[The Fear Saga 01] - Fear the Sky (2014) (7 page)

Assuming a stance not an inch from the face of the taller, younger Pei Leong-Lam he shouted, “Why do you not look at me? Am I not worth looking at? Am I not pretty?” he screamed with phenomenal volume right in the man’s face, his spit flying.

“My eyes are front and center, Drill Sergeant.” shouted Leong-Lam, without hesitation.

The drill sergeant tried unsuccessfully to place the accent on Leong-Lam’s Mandarin even as he reeled at the quick and annoyingly correct response.

“Are you telling me my business, boy?” he said more quietly, with all the considerable venom he could muster.

“No, Drill Sergeant.” shouted the soldier.

“Seems you think you already know the rules here, boy, maybe you think you don’t need to go to Officer Training School?” he shouted, “Do you think you are going to be an officer, boy?”

“Yes, Drill Sergeant.” was the shouted reply.

“Well, we’ll see, won’t we,” said Shih quietly once more, then, back at his practiced and phenomenal top volume he screamed, “On the floor, give me fifty of your most patriotic, boy.”

With the aplomb of the very strong and very supple, Leong-Lam dropped straight forwards, cushioning his fall with his hands, and proceeded to push through forty of his fifty push-ups with straight-backed ease. Drill Sergeant Shih looked on and started to get annoyed; this was not supposed to look this easy.

Sensing anger at his ability, Leong-Lam changed tactics and began to strain at forty, flagging at forty-five, and finally collapsing at fifty, wheezing, and struggling to his feet with feigned difficulty.

Though happy he had broken his new whipping boy, the sergeant also noted to himself that the candidate did not complain or seem even slightly dismayed at the clear injustice of his punishment. Good, he would certainly not go easy on him, but maybe this one had promise. Now the fat tub of lard next to him, on the other hand:

“Do you think you can do better?” he screamed as he brought his guns to bear on this softer target.

“Where did you get your clothes from, you disgusting lump?” he barked, “The zoo?”

* * *

Two days earlier, outside the town where he would eventually be picked up by the army bus and delivered into Drill Sergeant Shih’s loving arms, Leong-Lam had stood at the bottom of a wooden telephone pole. In orbit above him an eye was watching him and his surrounding area, checking for coming traffic.

Lowering his now full bag from his back to the soft, wet soil along the side of the deserted road, he bent and looked at its featureless top. As he stared, a small opening formed on the bag’s surface, revealing a pouch just larger than the inch-long device it contained.

Leong-Lam picked up the crocodile clip shaped device and clipped it to the collar of his white shirt. Sensing his readiness, the eye overhead confirmed that he was alone, and Leong-Lam turned and with the practiced ability of a chimp, or a beach boy climbing a coconut tree in some now defunct Caribbean ideal, he shimmied hand over hand up the telephone pole, eventually grasping one of the fat telephone lines with one iron-fisted hand. In this position he hung in apparent comfort as he unclipped the black object from his collar and attached it to the line.

The feeling of the wire’s thick plastic coating was like a muffled opera to the tiny device, and it immediately reached out its microfiber probes to penetrate the wire’s coating, seeking the meat inside. As they found their purchase within, the connection was complete, and the coursing information within sung through the small device like a burst dam.

The device did not understand its purpose, only its mission, and it hung on to the wire as tightly as Leong-Lam and wirelessly informed the black bag below of the successful connection. The black bag was a repository for a host of devices of varying sizes, but its cylindrical central core was of singular purpose. The subspace tweeter was the only communication device its makers still truly used, and though its inner workings were complex, its purpose was simple. Via the creation of a microscopic gap in what we perceive as space, it was possible to physically affect the very fabric of the cosmos.

The effect possible was, in reality, no more than a tiny vibration, like a radio wave, and it was all but imperceptible. Though theorists and science fiction writers liked to posit that it would one day be possible to open holes like this large enough to allow people or spaceships to step instantly from one place to another, such a thing was, even to our guests, still a dream.

But the vibrations they
could
send through the tiny gaps could be felt instantly, by anyone equipped to listen, anywhere in the universe. All that the device had to do once it had opened the hole was make a vibration significant enough to cover the radius it needed to encompass. The part of the tweeters designed to make these vibrations were referred to as ‘hammers,’ and the only thing simple about the multi-dimensional esotericism of this incredible device was that the bigger the hammer that was used to make the vibration, the wider the device’s range.

The clip on the wire, seeking to relay the signal coursing through the cables in its grasp, needed only to affect a sphere large enough to encompass the bag below, and accordingly, its subspace tweeter was only a centimeter long. The black bag’s hammer, however, was much larger, nearly three feet long and a foot wide. Large enough that three hundred miles above it, the proverbial thud of the bag’s hammer as it relayed the smaller device’s signal was felt by the exponentially larger subspace tweeter at the core of the black pyramid satellites orbiting stealthily above.

Because of the medium through which the signal travelled, the connection was not party to the limits and delays of normal three-dimensional communications, a benefit not even light waves enjoyed. The connection established was instantaneous, and in real-time. It was the same as if the entire fifty-ton supercomputer floating in space was somehow hanging off the small telephone wire itself.

Using this new connection, the artificial mind in orbit went to work executing a series of complex programs designed to hack the networks of several Chinese government agencies. It was able to monitor their progress in real-time, and make adjustments to the programs as they encountered firewalls and barriers. With its vast computational brute force the machine could easily have hacked our relatively primitive firewalls, but this would have set off an abundance of alarms in these heavily monitored networks. Though not nearly as advanced as the machine probing them, the firewalls and other defenses surrounding the databases were far from simplistic. So the virtual tendrils the supercomputer was sending out gently probed each barrier. They were seeking, with infinite patience, subtle and unobtrusive ways into the halls of power, for their whole purpose was centered, above all, on remaining unnoticed for as long as was necessary.

Finding the keys it sought, the computer deftly opened the locks to the People’s Liberation Army’s vast personnel database, and planted a record within. In an organization as leviathan as the million-strong Chinese army, no one could possibly notice the appearance of the somehow preapproved application of Pei Leong-Lam to enter Officer Training School. An administrator at the 26
^th
Group Army Base at Weifang would briefly, but very quietly curse his superiors for adding a late entry to their cadre of new trainees. But the administrator in question would not be so foolish as to question a senior officer’s wisdom out loud as he set up Pei’s base record and assigned him a bunk and a standard-issue equipment docket.

The job at hand was complete. On some level, the supercomputer enjoyed this rich hard-wired access to information, but it would not be wise to leave its small black access point clipped to a wire out here for some telephone company worker to possibly find it. Its first directive was to get the operatives emplaced so they could begin to work towards the positions that their superiors needed them to be in. Soon the AI would have more permanent access points established by each of its Agents, but for now it notified Pei Leong-Lam that he could proceed with the next stage of his mission.

The device was duly unclipped, and then two things happened. The tiny microfibers projecting from its jaws retracted silently into their sheaths, and Leong-Lam released his grip on the thick wire it had hung from.

He promptly fell the thirty feet to the ground, landing with a thud. His firmly placed feet absorbed the shock easily, but were driven several inches into the soil by the force of the impact. Maintaining his balance with aplomb, he wrenched his feet from the soil one by one, with an audible squelch, and returned to his waiting black bag. Replacing the device in its cubbyhole, he lifted the black bag out of the military duffle it had been hidden in.

Though it was far from safe to leave the large subspace relay here, there was no way he could get such an ominous object past the base security he was about to face. So after extracting some of the more innocent looking tools and communications devices from the bag and placing them in his military duffle, he carried the heavy black object a few meters off the road into the muddy swamp of rice paddies that spread out over the surrounding countryside.

No amount of time in the water would harm or even mark the object, but it would not just sit in the shallow water to be potentially found by the feet of a field worker. As soon as it felt the muddy bottom the object started to bury itself, its sheath morphing in waves to move the mud around it outward and then back in over it, making it disappear slowly but steadily beneath the surface.

It eventually came to rest a meter down into the mud, far from curious eyes…or feet, as Pei climbed out of the paddy, gathered his now almost empty military duffle bag and starting to walk down the road.

While Pei’s own internal subspace tweeter could receive signals directly from the overhead satellite, it had not been possible to put a ‘hammer’ inside a human analog large enough to send signals much farther than a few miles. It was for this reason Leong-Lam and his seven colleagues had been given the larger, more powerful tweeters to relay signals to the hub satellites orbiting above them.

It was an inconvenience to have such a large piece of equipment with them, but one that could not be avoided. Unfortunately the larger tweeters’ size also meant that the Agents would often have to leave their relays behind when entering secure areas, but this was also unavoidable.

As Leong-Lam walked away, he left no marker, nor did he worry about the safety of the device. His subspace tweeter relay would be watched over night and day by a far more powerful guardian in orbit, ready to bring to bear a host of unpleasant defensive weapons if the buried relay were somehow discovered by an unfortunate field hand.

Except, perhaps, for the few people who work there every day, it really never gets old driving up to the White House. Pulling up the rear driveway to the parking lot after passing the security gate, Laurie found she could easily recall the giddy excitement she had felt the first time she came here.

It was just such a cool building, you would have to be half dead not to think so, and it wasn’t a dose of patriotism that was driving her. She had seen several seats of government around the world, not least of which the ex-viceroy’s palace in New Delhi, which now housed the entire Indian executive branch, such was its size and grandeur.

It was simply the surging power that emanated from places like this. That, and the fact that she was a part of that power.

Flashing her pass at the waiting Secret Service detail, she walked past them into the building proper and turned left along the row of offices leading to the West Wing. She had called Jim Hacker ahead of time and paraphrased what she intended to talk about. She was not foolish enough not to notify General Pickler that she was doing it either; he was not an enemy to be made if it could be avoided, and he was duly waiting when she arrived, his face passive.

She nodded at the somewhat familiar receptionist, then took a wild stab at her name, “Margaret, can you tell Mr…”

“He already knows you’re here, Dr. West,” the receptionist smiled at hearing her own name, “he will be with you shortly.”

Laurie quietly congratulated herself on successfully buttering up the receptionist, who was, after all, the gatekeeper to one of the most influential men in the world, and took a seat on the waiting room couch beside the general.

Jim Hacker’s office was linked to the bustling hub of activity that was the president’s staff center by a heavy wooden door, but he also had a separate corridor to the reception area. It would not do to have every one of his wildly varied daily guests coming through the president’s nerve center, both for their sake and his.

He finished refreshing himself on the doctor’s and general’s files, a habit that served him well, and then closed his laptop. He had studied the original request of one Neal Danielson that had apparently prompted this meeting after getting off the phone with Dr. West, the Senior White House Scientific Advisor and was, he thought, somewhat prepared for the meeting.

As they sat on the waiting room couch outside, the general, remaining facing forward, said to the doctor, “So I imagine there is some new information to consider on this?”

Laurie mirrored his lack of body language, but said in a quiet voice:

“New information of a sort, General. In much the same way as he did with our mass estimates not long ago, our friend at the Array has not found something new so much as brought a fresh perspective to existing data.”

She turned now to him, and he met her gaze, “Michael, we have worked with each other for six years now, I hope I have always shown you just how much respect I have for the many factors I know you have to consider when making decisions on these things, and the dilemma which that poses for you.”

The general was stunned by the sudden candor of his normally unflappable civilian colleague, but that surprise also opened a small gap in his professional armor for a moment, and it was through this gap that Laurie hoped to reach.