by Toby Weston
The captain cleared his throat and then spoke in a strong, projecting tone. “Mayday, mayday. Atlantean Xepplin Balaena. Under attack in international airspace by Forward Coalition aggressors. We are hit. I repeat, we are hit. We are forced to take evasive and defensive measures.”
This time, Keith was sure he saw smoke. The shells puncturing the envelope reminded him of rain on a tent.
***
“King Niato.”
“Doctor Pritchard,” Niato replied, ladling the same scorn onto the word Doctor as Pritchard had poured on King.
“How are you?”
“To be honest, I have been better.”
“Yes, me too. I’m not sleeping well. Perhaps there is something going around?”
“Perhaps. To what do I owe this pleasure?” Niato enquired, trying to keep his voice relaxed. He wanted to hide the reality that, in order to take this call, he had just dropped out of high adrenalin consensus with the captain of the Xepplin Balaena, which was under attack and suffering from multiple punctures.
“Straight to business!?” said Pritchard. “Is Your Highness in a hurry? No compassion for a recent victim of terrorist atrocities?”
“Sorry, Doctor, I didn’t realise you had called for therapy. Please tell me, how did being attacked make you feel?”
“It made me feel very angry. Very angry indeed. It made me want to smash something. Can you imagine that, King Niato? Wanting to smash something to little pieces?”
“No, sorry. But then, I have spent a long time meditating and purging myself of unhealthy impulses.”
“Well, then you are a better man than me. But excuse me if I prefer to keep my edge. We can’t all be pacifists, can we? Otherwise, who is going to stand up to the bad men?”
“A very good point, Doctor. I have also been thinking that perhaps the time is near, when even those who love peace feel the need to stand up and strike back at those bad men.”
“Strike back? Really? I was under the impression that you had decided to strike first? Isn’t that why you attacked us? Your Highness?”
“You seem to be confused, Doctor. I didn’t want to bring it up, as I am sure it is just some muddle, but your war planes have just fired on one of my Xepplins.”
“Not a muddle, Your Highness. The airship was harbouring the bomber!”
“Really? Keith Wilson is the bomber?” Niato asked innocently.
“Yes, as you are no doubt fully aware, as he is clearly an Atlantean agent who is, even now, being harboured aboard your vessel.”
“Keith Wilson, the BHJ old boy? Good friend of Ben Baphmet? Son of the CEO?”
“What?” said Pritchard in surprise. “What’s that got to do with the price of eggs? I told George not to send his fool boy.”
“Just seems a bit convenient, doesn’t it?” replied Niato. “A bit of a coincidence that the son of your greatest ally might have planned the attack? Smells a little of an inside job?”
“What!?”
“You realise that George Baphmet’s son is also on board? Does George know that the Xepplin his son is travelling on will soon be little more than a collection of floating wreckage? Or was he also a target of assassination? Maybe you wanted to clean up all the loose ends before the war?”
“What? No, no, I see what you are trying to do here,” replied Pritchard. “You clearly have an over-active imagination. We are done. This being your last chance. You attacked a peaceful city with a nuclear bomb, then you smuggled the perpetrator out, trying to cover your tracks. You won’t turn this around. Because we caught you red-handed, didn’t we!? Caught you, and will now accept your apology and surrender or we will smash your fairy tale castles into tiny little pieces.”
“Well, thank you for being so frank,” said Niato. “As you can imagine, we see it slightly differently. You are corrupt. You offer nothing. Your only function is to maintain a status quo, enslaving and demeaning everything around you. If it wasn’t for your propagandists, you would have fallen decades ago. But you are falling now, aren’t you, Doctor?”
“Nonsense! You are talking complete drivel.”
“I don’t think so. You are the head of a zombie state, Doctor. Given the choice, the people will see us for the hope we represent, and you for the hate and lies you are drowning in. I think you see this. You knew your days were numbered and decided your only way out was war. So, you sent a dumb stooge, a company man, on a false flag mission to stir up some real hate and then… and that is my question… then what, Doctor?”
“Try me and see, King Niato of New Atlantis. Just fucking try me!” Pritchard said, then rage-quit and winked out.
“Well, I certainly got under his skin!” Niato said turning to Admiral Knight, who had been observing the conversation invisibly.
“You did that. But I’m not sure how that helps us?”
“Me neither,” Niato replied truthfully. “But I think sometimes you just have to tell it like it is.”
***
The Torch had been able to use the Xepplin’s arrays of superconducting magnets to manage the passage of the shells through the dirigible’s body. It hadn’t been able to deflect them entirely, but had managed to steer the high-velocity projectiles between the helical rivers of superfluid looping around the Xepplin’s skin. Unscheduled catastrophic dismantling had been avoided, but the envelope had acquired two dozen new punctures and the vacuum, which gave the craft its buoyancy, was rapidly degrading. The white Xepplin began an involuntary dive. A partial weightlessness gripped the stomachs of the four hundred people on board.
In an attempt to remain airborne, the Sky Whale lowered its tail fluke and extended all three pairs of pectoral wings. Lights flickered out as power was routed away from nonessential systems and to the plasma-shaping magnets in its skin. In ordinary cruising flight, the MHD arrays managed drag; but now, at full power, the thin plasma around the Xepplin was being accelerated down over the Xepplin’s flanks and under its wings to generate lift, charged particles dragging along atmospheric air.
Despite these best efforts, the Xepplin was still falling. But the vessel had been at eight thousand metres when they had been hit and had a few minutes before the inevitable watery termination of its descent.
“Okay, they are now saying that that really was our final warning,” the comms crewman related.
“Perhaps this might be the time to reciprocate? May I prepare violence?” the Torch asked the captain.
The aircraft had retreated a few kilometres, but were now banking away from each other, preparing to come around for another pass.
“We are not a warship, but you have my permission to do what you can,” the captain said, then turned to a crewman. “Prepare the passengers for emergency evacuation onto water.”
Having obtained the necessary authorisation, the Torch spent a few fractions of a second referencing the blob of data, which had been thrown its way by its considerate National Statistics Office colleagues back on Bäna. Although their computers would be grinding through the cryptographic problem space, the aircraft comms keys had not yet been cracked. Voice and control traffic was, therefore, still an indecipherable torrent of noise. It would be impossible for the Torch to attempt any subtle spoofing.
Ironically, the quantum cognition at the heart of its Zeno processor had originally been developed specifically to crack just such decryption problems. However, in the endless game of cat and mouse, cryptography had moved on and found quantum-resistant algorithms, which old-school computational engines tended to be more effective at breaking than the attention-deficit Synthetic Cognition Zeno chips.
The Xepplin wasn’t a vessel of war. The design choices which incarnated the luxurious, low-emission, intercontinental cruiser as a lighter-than-air anime cetacean had given it—in the most literal sense—an expansive attack surface. Offensive weapons had not made it onto the request for tender. The Torch had, therefore, spent a not inconsiderable amount of time weighing its options for repurposing the eclectic collection of kit dotte
d about the Sky Whale’s body. The original autopilot, polite and utterly without ego, was happy to itemise its anatomy and document the APIs of its superconducting magnets, atmospheric ionisation lasers, hypersonic super-fluids and other esoteric bits of equipment which, together, produced the ballet of fluid dynamics that allowed the vessel to glide effortlessly through the sky.
The attacking aircraft were old: Forward military budgets reflected a focus on domestic information warfare, at the expense of capabilities in the quaint, old-fashioned, physical battle spaces. The planes had been built in the last century, to a design which was now fifty years old. Upgrades and refits had extended their active service, but their avionics were laughably primitive. The Torch was, in fact, spoilt for choice. There was an entire thesaurus of attacks and exploits available for these specific models, but the Torch was paranoid and conservative; it would endeavour to choose the lowest-tech cyber weapon, avoiding any flashy zero-day vulnerabilities which might conceivably come in handy at some point in the future.
As the aircraft initiated their banking turns back towards the floundering Xepplin—still copiously leaking vacuum all over the serene blue sky—the Torch considered the grid of lasers which dotted its front surface. Their day job consisted of ionising the atmosphere passing over the envelope to produce a thin plasma, which was amenable to manipulation by magnets for producing lift or eliminating drag.
Even before settling on a specific attack, the Torch made preparations. It located the configuration for the lasers and stepped them down from an atmosphere ionising ultraviolet to more appropriate electronics phreaking microwave wavelengths. It then proceeded to harness the entire grid into a phased array and experimented with conjuring zones of electronics frazzling energy. For an entire second, it practised projecting balls of electromagnetic noise at various distances from the Xepplin’s crippled hull.
Contented with the results, the Torch committed to its final choice. It projected a ball of excitation through the skin of the enemy aircraft and used it to goose its way around inside the maze of electronics, observing the enemy’s response. Just as a neuro-surgeon would run an electrode over the surface of an exposed brain—watching the twitching muscles, grasping fingers, and gasping throat—to determine where to cut, the Torch was seeking one particular wire which ran out from a device between the pilot’s legs.
In the seconds it took for the two aircraft to execute their turns, the Torch observed the external indicators of its electromagnetic molestation; noting how navigation lights blinked on and off, control surfaces spasmed, and then how a spatter of anti-missile flares popped and fizzed away. The Torch responded to these involuntary twitches, using them as indicators to refine the positioning of its orb of electronic excitation.
Keith watched out of the panoramic windows. The aircraft were coming out of their turns, bringing the gigantic, unmissable target of the Sky Whale back into their gunsights.
“Watch this,” the Torch said.
Having located just the right spot, it amped the ad hoc maser array to full power. The golf ball-sized region of intense microwaves could have rapidly boiled a glass of water, and the currents it induced were certainly enough to create a voltage differential along one carefully selected wire—
A current began to flow, activating a power amplifier. A solenoid engaged. It sent a pulse of current along a shielded wire, which ran under the cockpit’s floor to thread up behind the pilot’s head. The cable belonged to the Emergency Canopy Jettison System and terminated at a length of detonating cord, which zig-zagged through the aircraft’s canopy. A fraction of a second after receiving the pulse of current, an explosion shattered the cockpit’s dome and sent thousands of pieces of spinning debris hurtling away.
Watching through the window, Keith noted a puff of smoke and an expanding cloud of glittering shards.
The wounded plane began to dive. Its shocked pilot, suddenly surrounded by a barrage of screaming, freezing air, was heading down towards more clement altitudes.
The Torch, now an expert surgeon, repeated the procedure on the second aircraft.
“Fucking hell!” shouted Ben, punching the air as the second jet suffered the same fate and disengaged.
Keith just looked at him.
***
Delegates had been leaving since midnight, their extravagant corporate subs dropping almost soundlessly below the clouds, touching down effortlessly, and roaring off again with their seats full of high-status human cargo.
Ben stood awkwardly next to Shaun and watched another sleek aircraft taxiing. The thin whine of its jets was barely discernible amongst the chaotic medley saturating the airport.
Ben’s digestive system—currently thousands of miles away on the other side of the planet—informed him that it would need to make an unscheduled discharge. Shaun and the airport faded and Ben swivelled on his butt to let a stream of bile find its way over the side of the life raft and into the sea.
Shaun caught the beginning of the retch—which Ben’s Spex ultimately filtered out as soon as it was clear his movements and vocalisations were involuntary and purely biological in origin.
Shaun looked away from Ben’s avatar. Its algorithms were clearly working hard to suppress the chunder spasms, and Shaun found the resulting abortive juddering disconcerting and a little nauseating.
Ben wiped his face with his already crusty sleeve and let the world of the life raft wash out, to be replaced again by the apparent solidity of St Michael’s airport.
“Christ!” Ben said, catching his breath. “Not good!”
“No,” replied Shaun. “It doesn’t sound like it.”
“You’ve no idea. Megrim’s leaking shit and piss and there’s sick everywhere. Where is my fucking father?”
“Should be along soon,” Shaun said.
The suborbital’s engines had spun down and it was being towed towards a painted rectangle, where several BHJ handlers were waiting next to an orderly pile of luggage.
“Any updates, Shaun?” asked Ben. “Or do I have to sit out here on this fucking raft all night?”
“Nothing yet, I’m afraid. There is quite a lot happening at the moment, Ben…”
“Don’t fob me off.”
“The O’ahu coastguard are out,” said Shaun. “But they’ve got two downed pilots and I’m afraid they are not making you top priority.”
Ben scowled, but perked up as his father rounded a concrete pillar accompanied by a blob of black suits and high heels. A cloud of Sages hovered at the periphery.
George stopped in front of Ben, apparently only noticing his son at the last minute. The entourage responded, enveloping him. It was a formless hybrid entity made up of pseudopods of Sages and incorporeal alts, dotted with physically present security oids, bodyguards and gophers. George was the amoeba’s nucleus—himself remoting in from a zero-gravity intensive care unit, where his mind was sustained while his body’s rebellious flesh was being paired and pruned.
“Ben! What a bloody mess!”
“Sorry, Dad,” Ben said sheepishly.
“But you saw him?”
“Yes. It was Keith.”
“What happened?”
“To be honest, I don’t really know. One minute we are marching through the Xepplin like a hot cock through butter…”
“Ben!”
“Sorry. Like a… well, they were just basically getting out of our way…”
“You know you killed one of the crew?” Shaun asked.
“What?”
“A young steward. Fractured skull, massive internal bleeding.”
“Fuck. I didn’t know.” Ben could again hear the crunch of skull on lectern and see the boy’s eyes rolling back into his skull as his body sagged away. A new wave of bile rose from his stomach, propelled by this recollection and coaxed on by the argument between the rolling sea and the fake stability his eyes insisted on reporting to his brain.
He didn’t get a chance to pivot around. He would have risked spraying sick across
his neighbour like a garden sprinkler. As the airport faded and the reality of the raft reasserted, he found himself coughing chunks of breakfast over the back of Megrim’s corpse. The body was floating, face down, in the filthy water at the bottom of the small, inflatable raft, walled in by the legs and knees of Ben’s fellow survivors. Death, murder, the stench of biology and the bilious rolling of the sea all worked together to propel Ben into a vicious cycle of mindless vomiting, awareness of his disgusting surroundings, followed by more vomiting. When—finally exhausted—it was over, he managed to sit back upright and wipe his face.
Shaun and George had been watching in horror and fascination as Ben’s avatar’s automatic micro-gestures were periodically punctured by partially filtered snippets of violent retching.
“Well, Megrim got his, I suppose,” Ben said, finally, as a dollop of viscous sick slid from the dead man’s hair and the raft again faded into the airport. He looked at his father. “What now?”
