by R. K. Syrus
Bryan finds the girl they rescued in Khorasan, Anis, on a playground.
Juanita Debelle accompanies Bryan into the elementary school that serves the sprawling military community. “A few of the teachers speak Dari better than we do. With all that’s been going on in that region for decades, it’s not an uncommon language anymore.”
Bryan has known Juanita and her husband Clarke many years. He likes to joke Juanita spoiled the capable signals specialist’s chance of being a permanent member of the Dogs by housebreaking him.
“Are you okay taking care of Anis?”
“Bryan, she’s so sweet,” Juanita says. “No trouble at all. We’re in the new south complex mixed in with the civilians working on that glider contraption. We’ve got four bedrooms and three baths. If they had a show called Army Cribs, we’d be on it.”
Bryan smiles. “Good to know.”
“Clarke’s head of base security now. No more overseas trips. Will you and the gang be around? Maybe you can use a home-cooked meal. We know you had a bit of a rough time on the last one.”
“All I can say is things are looking up. Thanks for asking.”
From the playground, Anis spots Bryan’s ivory face and glowing liquid-gold eyes. She isn’t the only one. The other kids drop their toys, poke each other, and point. One chubby little fellow in train engineer overalls and chocolate on his face looks as though he’s going to start crying.
“Bryan! Bryan!”
Anis comes running into his arms.
“I am Koala Bear now.”
Juanita straightens out the girl’s small flower-print dress.
“That’s what they call them at base schools. Kindergarten through fifth grade are the Koalas, intermediate students are Jaguars.”
Bryan plops Anis back onto the ground, and they walk toward the soccer field hand in hand.
“At her age, they pick up languages so fast,” says Juanita. “She’s very bright. Though they did find her wandering away from the grounds into the woods yesterday. We had a little talk about that, didn’t we?”
Anis looks suitably mortified.
“How’d she get out?” Bryan zoom-lens surveys the fence line. “I had to go through three body scanners just to get in.”
“We’re pretty secure, but Ramstein’s no prison camp. This is basically a integrated with a German suburb. With all the new construction, there are gaps. The real outer perimeter is way up there by those wind turbines. This place is huge.”
Other kids press their faces to the playground fence. They’ve gotten over their shock at his appearance. The strange being with shiny eyes is not there to haul them off to an alien spacecraft. They look at Bryan with wonder and at Anis with a little envy. Especially since the extraterrestrial seems to be handing out gifts.
“I nearly forgot. Here.” Bryan hands Anis a heart-shaped box of candies he picked up at the gift store.
“What do we say?” Juanita prompts.
“In this case, I’m pretty sure I should be thanking you,” Bryan says to Anis.
She says something in Dari that sounds like a question.
“Tell her all her friends are going to be fine.”
Juanita nods. The chime sounds, ending the play period. Anis is mobbed by her playmates. She is an instant pint-sized celebrity with outrageous adult friends and candy.
Clarke Debelle rolls up in a hydrogen JLTV with more chrome than camo paint. He has an earpiece and talks into a handset.
“No, just hold him there,” Clarke says into his comm unit, winking at Bryan. “I have to deal with a serious Army troublemaker and his gang who just dropped in out of the blue.”
After exchanging fist thumps and shoulder bumps, Clarke sizes him up.
“Prison on that ship has been good to you, man,” Clarke says. “If you don’t like the rooms the higher-ups made me assign you, we got an even worse one here converted from a Cold War bunker. It’s called der Schloss.”
“We’re okay bunking our very spacious construction site.”
“Just as well. We have a really special guest to check into maximum security. Some nutjob claiming to be a most-wanted terrorist just turned himself in at the front gate.” Clarke rolls his eyes as he gets to what he thinks is the most absurd part.
“Get this, he comes to the biggest American Air Force base outside the States demanding to talk to someone from the Army. Claims he’s this officer’s cousin and won’t say another word until he’s face-to-face with Colonel Sienna McKnight. Say, isn’t that your—”
Bryan doesn’t hear another word. He’s already running to the front gate and the line of taxis there.
Thank you for reading
NEW PRAETORIANS 2: SHETANI ZERU BRYAN
The next volume is:
NEW PRAETORIANS 3: YAMA | YAMI
In St. Albans, England: After an accident with an experimental weapons system gives her extraordinary and dangerous powers, Sienna McKnight has been suddenly torn away from everything she knows. She awakes and must unravel mysteries in her father’s house.
Meanwhile:
In Germany: Why has her cousin, a terrorist, turned himself in at a US Air Force base demanding to speak only to her?
In Europe: What really happened down in the supercollider levels of CERN, now the privatized Lichtstrom Corporation?
Where is the alien artifact, the Ansible?
Two hundred miles above Earth: Two Eurasian twins, their extraordinary skills, and their twisted past are at the core of answers to these questions and many other shocking revelations in this, the third installment of the New Praetorians sci-fi technothriller series.
Read it soon on amazon.com / Kindle Unlimited
This book is part of the New Praetorians series.
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New Praetorians Wiki
SUPPLEMENTAL
(updates for this volume)
Glowforge: a brand name for a laser cutter / engraver. Insert materials like leather, wood, metal or acrylic into the machine and it carves out the desired shapes using laser light.
Joint Battle Reconnaissance Command Equipment (JBRCE): colloquially known as a JabberCocky unit. A wearable personal communication device employed by military units. A flexible organic light-emitting diode (OLED) screen is mounted on the forearm and serves as the primary user interface including touch keypad.
Liar's poker: originally an American bar game that combines statistical reasoning with bluffing. It was first played with the serial numbers on US currency. Today, variations are played worldwide, often using checksum digits of virtual currencies like Lichtcredits.
The term also refers to someone living by their wits and aggressively exploiting weaker people.
The Nicaraguan Canal: formally The Nicaraguan People’s Liberation Canal Project. A shipping route through Nicaragua connecting the Atlantic and the Pacific Oceans. At completion, it was approximately three times as long and twice as deep as the Panama Canal.
The canal is 269 kilometers (167 mi) long and comprised of three sections:
The Brito valley section links the Pacific Ocean and Lake Nicaragua up the Rio Brito valley, crosses the continental divide.
The Lake Nicaragua section measures 106.8 km and includes precise routes where significant dredging was required to deepen the lake to accommodate the drafts of vessels too large for the Panama route.
The third section is the Rio Tule span, which terminates in the Caribbean Sea.
The use of experimental dynamic waterway locks—needed because the lake is approximately thirty-two meters above sea level—required a significant increase in electric power availabi
lity. Coal-fired generator plants were employed to make these function. The design was intended to increase the speed of ships through the waterway. However, when combined with the trenching of Lake Nicaragua, most experts concluded the result was both an ecological and economic disaster even before the volcanoes Ometepe and Zapatera violently erupted.
Currently local militias operate jury-rigged locks in exchange for “pay as you go” tolls, known locally as “pay and we let you go” taxes. Vessels longer than 200 feet or with a draft of more than twelve feet are unable to make the entire journey.
Worldwide Help ranks the Nicaraguan Canal among the planet’s most dangerous waterways, citing the risks from piracy, vessel grounding, poisonous snakes, piranha fish (in freshwater zones), sharks (in saltwater zones), malaria, yellow fever, and white leprosy, among other hazards.
Redundantly Invasive Projectiles (a.k.a. RIP projectiles): are a group of complex frangible antipersonnel ammunition products. They typically range in bore diameter from .22 caliber to shotgun gauges. The fired projectile, once it impacts flesh or other solid substances, splits off into several fragments. Each fragment also carries a small embedded chemical charge. Sometime later (seconds or minutes) these explode inside or outside of the target’s body.
British SAS units were some of the first soldiers to be issued such bullets. Because of the increased danger of “friendly fire” injuries due to the unpredictable secondary charges, use is limited to highly trained military and poorly trained irregular combatants.
Rodent Automated Training System (RATS): A portable training system currently in use by United States military and allied forces. The system comprises a progressive maze with rewards and punishments used to train various rodents to detect buried and otherwise concealed explosives. Animal rights groups have filed protests against the system due to harsh penalties for failure, which include drowning and electrocution.
These animals also have the advantage of being of far less mass than humans and canines, therefore are less likely to set off small antipersonnel mines.
Historically, giant pouched rats were trained to sniff out chemicals like TNT in landmines in Mozambique and Tanzania by APOPO. They were called HeroRATS.
S-BUG (Sferics-Based Underground Geolocation): The DARPA name for a system extending GPS underground.
GPS and Galileo satellites can only triangulate positions above the earth’s surface or as deeply as standard radio waves will penetrate ground or water.
S-BUG uses natural and artificial lightning strikes to generate pulses that penetrate far underground. These low-frequency waves coming from at least two known directions are detected by the underground mobile receiver, which calculates the S-BUG location.
DARPA denies the invention was inspired by the Kendrick “cave radio,” which used PVC tubing and coat hangers to send messages from deep within a New Mexico cave.
The US Navy is independently developing Positioning System for Deep Ocean Navigation, a.k.a. POSYDON. It uses inertial and acoustic data. Satellite GPS is of limited use to subsurface vessels.
Licht/Net neutrino waves penetrate the entire planet and coordinates are available for free at WhereAmI?/licht. Some government agencies use this service, while military agencies seek to develop proprietary systems.
The Globalnaya Navigazionnaya Sputnikovaya Sistema (GLONASS), Russia's version of GPS, is advertised as having underground capability. The subsurface location system is proprietary but is reportedly based on technology from the Duga over-the-horizon radar system (a.k.a. the Russian Woodpecker) and is based in tunnels under the Ural Mountains.
Volocopter (e-volo VC200 + ser.): single or multi-passenger electric multirotor helicopters. The term is also used generically for any flying taxi or civilian conveyance that can carry a person. Airbags and rapid-opening parachutes and are standard safety equipment.
URBAN SLANG WIKI
Upper decker: defecating in the upper tank of a toilet, which sends fecal residue into the bowl upon each flush.
Best theory of origin: While the prank is undoubtedly as old as flush toilets, the nomenclature is often said to originate with John Waters’s 2004 film A Dirty Shame.
NEW PRAETORIANS WIKI
(collected entries)
Adaptive Execution Office (AEO): A division of DARPA (the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency of the US Department of Defense). AEO accelerates the transition of DARPA technologies from concept to active use by the military and private-sector partners. Rumored to be headquartered at the Cheyenne Mountain Complex bunker in Colorado Springs, Colorado.
Ansible: Popular name for an artifact recovered by the exploration team of Everett and Akan. Its dimensions, known properties, and exact location are classified. There are no known photographs of the object, only artists’ renderings.
Ursula K. Le Guin coined the word “ansible” in 1966 (Rocannon's World) to refer to a system of faster-than-light communication.
How this term came to be applied to the object in question is not clear. However, the term began to be used shortly after its retrieval from the Bentley Subglacial Trench in Marie Byrd Land, Antarctica.
According to Tor FREENET conspiracy blogger &ORWELLLIVES!, the object defies photographic recording, both digital and analog. Everyone claims to see a different glowing shape inside a so-far-impenetrable shell.
&ORWELLLIVES! also claimed governments are developing weapons systems and mind-control devices using Ansible-based technologies, as well as employing it as a beacon to offer wealthy interstellar species visas to come live on Earth.
Other names include Antarctic meteorite Everett-Akan MBL/BST 00001, The Aleph, The Spirit of Rajan, and Elemental Squark ñt.
Bellingshausen Station: A Russian Antarctic station at Collins Harbor on King George Island. It is rumored to be home base to the next generation of nuclear subs and specialized Arctic cyborg units of battalion strength.
EEL round and launcher: Electrostatic Enveloping Ligature. A nonlethal ballistic round.
The projectile employs a combination of electrostatic epoxy resin, nano-charges, and a small internal mechBrain to disable enemy fighters at up to one hundred meters.
The concept is a combination of the Mossberg X12 and the M320 40 mm grenade launching platform. EEL rounds are also known as “Sea Cucumbers” or “Goober Rounds” due to their gelatinlike appearance. US Army designation: M588.
IceCube Neutrino Observatory: A neutrino telescope near the Amundsen–Scott South Pole Station in Antarctica. Its thousands of dark-matter energy sensors are distributed over a cubic kilometer of volume under the ice.
Joint Worldwide Intelligence Communications System (JWICS, pronounced JAYwicks): is a Top Secret/SCI artificial intelligence computer network run by the US Defense Intelligence Agency.
Khorasan: A new nation in Central Asia. Its constitution requires it to have open borders and accept all refugees regardless of origin, race, or religion.
Geographically, Khorasan incorporates the former Afghanistan and a section of previously uninhabitable wasteland connecting to the coastline, ceded by Iran and Pakistan under a secret agreement with the UN, which is rumored to have involved significant financial and political concessions. Historically, from the Middle Ages to around 1750, large parts of the former Afghanistan were known as Khorasan.
Administered by Worldwide Help International (WWHI), the south of the country, which connects to the coastline, has been transformed into an area often referred to as the Fertile Spear. This is the last sanctuary for many desperate refugees from all over the globe. The north retains its traditions and stubbornly resists change.
• • •
#noind-marg-top Licht/Net: A photon- and neutrino-based communication network. In most countries, it has replaced the internet.
Many people surveyed were not aware they were using the system because mobile devices and computers connect automatically, without charge. It is a single network but known by different names in different countries, notably Lux/Net
in English-speaking countries, Réseau/Lumineux in France, and 光ネットワーク (Hikari/Nettowāku) in Japan.
An early demonstration of the principle that every light bulb in the world could be a communications node was documented in a 2011 TED talk in which modulation of the light from a single LED transmitted far more data than a cellular tower.
Licht/Net is now ubiquitous due to cost factors and the network being entirely wireless. Handheld and other devices connect via light emitted by Licht/Net-enabled bulbs or panels. Inside the light sources, photons interact with a neutrino stream generated by Lichtstrom particle colliders. Data is transferred to the central switching hub—the privately owned supercollider formerly known as CERN (Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire), then the process is reversed, completing the network.
The most distant member of the network is the Chinese space probe Adventurer 冒險家, which is on a mission to Eris, ten billion kilometers distant from Earth.
Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP) still exists, mostly used by gamers, pornographers, and fraudsters.
Lichtstrom: A corporate nation between Switzerland and France.
Based on top of the physical structures of the privatized CERN supercolliders, it serves as the world’s leading information hub. Dr. Wolfgang Licht’s most high-profile project is a space elevator system, currently under construction.
Often translated into English as “light storm,” Lichtstrom translated from German means “luminous flux.” In photometry, this is the measure of the power of light perceived by the human eye.
mechBrain: A portmanteau slang term for any mechanical device or system that demonstrates interactive behavior but does not qualify as an actual artificial intelligence The term mechBrain is often used disparagingly.
From fitness monitors to the robot pilots that land spacecraft, mechBrains are ubiquitous. While not true AIs, mechBrains collect experiences and can form strong connections with the people they serve.
