CyberSpace: A CyberStorm Novel (Cyber Series Book 1)

by Matthew Mather

  The engines roared again.

  And then silence.

  “Oh my God, oh my God.” A young man bent over, his face inches from his knees, tears streaking his face. “Please, God, please tell my family—”

  The plane bucked to one side and then back.

  Out the window, the whitecaps grew. Individual surging waves rose out of the deep blue, the seas roiling and heaving in the storm. No sound of the engines anymore, just the whistling of wind past the airframe and quiet prayers and groans from the passengers.

  “Please, oh my God—”

  The image switched to the view from a hotel balcony overlooking a beach. Thundering breakers crashed on the shore. A sudden gust whipped palm trees. In the distance, the Sukhoi jet turned in the air. One wingtip caught the water.

  It disappeared in a flash of white.

  “Turn that off,” I said.

  Chuck put the iPad screen down and said, “I gotta hit the head.”

  Luke was still asleep in the bedroom. During the night he’d gotten up to go to the bathroom, and instead of getting back in the bed with me, he had snuggled up with Uncle Chuck. Damon and Terek had gone back to their place for the night, as had Grandma Babet.

  Damon was already back. He knocked on our door, a tray of coffees in one hand. The sun was up. I’d set my phone’s alarm to wake me, but I hadn’t really slept. Our flight to Washington was in a few hours, and I wasn’t in the mood for watching an air accident on YouTube.

  Even less in the mood for Luke to see it.

  I asked, “What happened to that plane?”

  “That was four hours ago.” Damon closed the door quietly behind him. “An Aeroflot flight from Moscow to Zanzibar. When the GLONASS network went down last night, it sent the Russian aviation system into chaos. Most planes can switch to GPS or Galileo, but those positioning systems went down last night as well.”

  “Jets don’t need GPS to fly,” Chuck said as he came out of the bathroom.

  “But not having it does slow them down.”

  “Slow them down?” I said. “Like airspeed? Why?”

  “What I mean is, without GPS, airplanes have to be spaced further apart when they’re heading into airports. The pilots are still able to fly on analog controls and dead reckoning, but there’s more opportunity for error.”

  “There was a big storm around Zanzibar,” Damon said. “That plane was circling for hours before it ran out of fuel.”

  I glanced at Luke, who was still sleeping in the bed. “Don’t let him see that video, okay? Have the cell networks improved?”

  Damon offered me a coffee. “Gotten worse, if anything, which is weird.”

  “Has anyone checked the TV news?” Chuck said.

  “Don’t turn it on,” I said.

  I didn’t want to wake Luke yet. I had a feeling today would be a long day. He needed all the rest he could get.

  “Took me an hour to download that Zanzibar video,” Chuck said. “The hotel internet sucks. Forget trying to FaceTime over it.”

  I checked my cell phone for the hundredth time.

  Text messages from friends, but nothing new from Lauren. No overseas phone calls. I tried Skype, WhatsApp. Nothing. Tried calling her number again, but got the busy signal once more. Worse, now my text messages came back with angry red “undelivered” notifications with exclamation points.

  As I was putting my phone away, it pinged. A text message from a number I didn’t recognize. The contents of the message, however, explained who it was from.

  “Damn,” I muttered.

  My flight was canceled. I showed Chuck.

  He said, “Not sure I would get on a plane today. Why don’t you and Luke come with me to Nashville? I’m going up to the garage right now.”

  If flights were being canceled, I doubted I would get a new one. The airport would be pandemonium. “Yeah, I think that might be a good idea.” I turned to Damon. “Why is it weird the cell phone networks are worse?”

  “Because the volume of calls should have gone down since yesterday. That explains why all the VoIP services are almost unusable this morning. No cell service means everybody is trying to get on them at once.”

  “You think that’s why I can’t get Lauren?”

  “I think that’s something more than simple congestion.”

  “What about the hotel phone?” I’d tried it the day before, but with no more luck than my cell phone.

  “I’m not sure how the hotel phone is routed. It could be VoIP. It could even be going to a mobile network. What we really need is a landline. Something that gets into the phone companies’ analog systems.”

  “Lauren’s uncle called from his landline yesterday,” I said. He was about the only person I knew who still had one.

  “What about a pay phone?” Chuck said.

  Damon frowned and looked at the ceiling. “You know, I didn’t even—”

  “Too young to remember pay phones?” Chuck said. “Twenty years ago there were millions of them, but there must still be some around.”

  Damon did a search on his laptop. “Look, here’s a list of active pay phones in the French Quarter. And their phone numbers.”

  “In a disaster, pay phones are usually the last things still working.” Chuck leaned in to look at the list of addresses on Damon’s screen. “A few here close to the garage. I need to go get my Jeep.”

  “And I need to do some testing,” Damon said.

  The wrought iron gate squeaked on its hinges. Eight in the morning and the air outside was as sticky as a Café du Monde beignet.

  “You go ahead,” I said to Damon.

  He held one of his drones in both hands. Luke ducked under it and shot past him, running shrieking ahead of us past a gnarled live oak sagging with fronds of hanging Spanish moss. We’d decided to walk the two miles from Frenchmen Street to Canal Street along Bourbon to Chuck’s garage.

  “How far ahead do you want me to go?” Chuck said.

  “I’ll launch the drone from the middle of the park,” Damon replied. “How about we go back to Dauphine Street, and then you go the next block down to Royal?”

  Damon’s meshnet app was already on all our phones. An updated version of the same technology he’d used six years earlier, when massive storms had hit New York in the dead of winter. The app made it possible for one cell phone to contact another that was within Wi-Fi or Bluetooth range, without needing a connection to the cell network. A point to point network that expanded as more people joined.

  Creating the meshnet in New York had saved thousands of lives. Earned him international recognition. Made him something of a cult figure in hacker circles.

  Since yesterday, he’d been online and had encouraged masses of people to install his mesh-networking software on their phones. There were already a few hundred with it on their phones in New Orleans.

  Now he wanted to take it to the next level.

  He stopped past the branches of the first live oak, set the drone down, and then stepped back. It came to life and levitated into the air.

  He had attached one of his phones to the bottom of it to use as a mesh-networking relay station, like creating our own cell phone network. He wanted to test it on the walk over to the garage.

  The drone rose two hundred feet and became a small dot.

  Chuck was already at the other end of the park.

  Damon opened his mesh-networking app and selected Chuck’s number. A second later: “Hey, it’s working!” Chuck’s voice came clearly over the speakerphone.

  Damon said, “Now walk down the next block and I’ll try calling you again.”

  I waved at Luke. “You going with us, or Uncle Chuck?”

  “Chuck,” Luke called back.

  Doesn’t want to be with his old man, huh? “But you stay close to him.”

  “Deal.”

  My son ran off after Chuck, who waved and waited.

  I turned to follow Damon. “What’s happening up there?”

  He pointed at the
blue sky. “You mean the satellites?”

  “I don’t mean the pope.”

  “The Russians claim an anti-satellite weapon hit one of their heavy old birds at an altitude of nineteen thousand kilometers. There was an impact at a closing speed of forty-two thousand kilometers an hour, and the resulting cloud of debris hit their other satellites in the GLONASS constellation.”

  “What was that news anchor talking about earlier? The Kessler syndrome?”

  “An uncontrolled cascade. Hit one satellite and it blows into a million pieces, and then one of those fragments hits another satellite, which blows into more bits, and so on. Before the big SatCom constellation, there were maybe two thousand operational satellites in orbit, ten times that many discarded rocket parts, and other odds and ends big enough to track. Add to that millions of marble-sized fragments that aren’t tracked. There’s a literal swarm of stuff flying by over our heads at six miles per second.”

  “Communications with the SatCom network are down as well, right?”

  “With customers, yeah, there’s no service, but they’re still in comms with their fleet. They sent out an email this morning saying they’re repositioning their equipment. I guess that makes sense.”

  “You guess?”

  “I tried to contact a friend of mine there to find out more, but I couldn’t get through.”

  “I’m sure they’re busy.”

  We exited Washington Square Park, opened another wrought iron gate, and crossed Frenchmen Street toward Dauphine Street. The roads were deserted. Nobody out, no cars driving along, not even any dogs barking.

  It felt a little bit eerie, and struck me with more than a little déjà vu. At least this time it wasn’t freezing cold.

  With the sun rising in the sky, it felt like it was over a hundred already. Sweat licked down my back.

  Damon held one hand up to block out the sun and searched the sky for his drone. He looked back at his phone.

  “Did you get in touch with your friends at NASA?” I asked him.

  “I did, but they get their data from the DOD’s Space Surveillance Network. I’m getting a direct connection.”

  “Any idea why Russia and China shut down their internet? Is India closed off as well?”

  “They didn’t shut down, exactly. They cut off outside connections.”

  “And this has what to do with the space problem?”

  “Space and cyberspace are more connected than people realize.” Damon looked up into the sky and narrowed his eyes. “When Sputnik launched in 1957, it changed everything. Satellites broke the link between a nation’s physical territory and its ability to gather global information and project power. You know what did that next?”

  The question was rhetorical, but I answered anyway. “Cyberspace?”

  He handed me the phone. “Try calling Chuck.”

  I opened the mesh-networking app, and was about to ask Damon how to get into the address book when I realized he wanted to see if I could figure it out myself. It took me twenty seconds of fussing around with the app to find Chuck’s number. I selected his name. A second later, his phone rang.

  Luke answered. “Hey, guys!”

  “Taking care of Uncle Chuck over there?”

  “You’re the one that needs taking care of.”

  I smiled. “Okay, hang up the phone, buddy.”

  We reached the corner of Pauger Street and turned left. Another block and we passed Esplanade, and Pauger turned into Bourbon. The normally boisterous avenue was as empty as Frenchmen Street.

  “Space and cyberspace are both entirely technological domains,” Damon said. “Without technology, you can’t get into either of them. And they were both once seen as global commons, domains that were shared between all nations.”

  “That doesn’t seem to be working anymore.”

  “We’ve gone from the World Wide Web to the state-wide web. Not the internet, but the splinternet. And where space used to be the realm of wealthy nations, now we’ve got wealthy individuals sending up thousands of satellites and owning whole chunks of space. It’s the Wild West up there.”

  We passed two of the pay phones on the list Damon had scribbled down, but there were a few or more people in line at each of them. We decided we could wait until we got to the garage.

  While we walked straight down Bourbon Street, Chuck veered another two blocks further south. As the drone hovered two hundred feet up, it relayed phone messages from us to Chuck. Damon had four drones in his apartment, and he figured he could set up a local communications network that could cover a few thousand feet if he needed to.

  Our optimism dried up the moment we arrived at the garage.

  “It’s something to do with the computer,” the mechanic said. “I would order parts, but I haven’t been able to contact my supplier.”

  “The computer?”

  “Something in the ignition sequence.” The mechanic shook his head. “It’s not like the old days when I could take something apart. I can fix it with a replacement, but you’ll have to wait until all this blows over.”

  A small TV in the corner of the shop had Fox News on. “GPS now appears to be down all across the country,” said the news anchor. “For more on this story…”

  A woman in cut-off jean shorts and a frilly top was at the pay phone outside the small garage. Two young men stood behind her, hands in their pockets and fidgeting like they were in a hurry. I waited a few feet behind them and listened to Chuck talk with the mechanic.

  Luke was down the road on Canal Street, bringing the drone down out of the sky with Damon. Chuck was trying to convince the mechanic to rip out the ignition circuit board and hot-wire it.

  The frilly-top woman finished her call, and one of the young men got on the phone. I heard him tell his father there was no way he could get home today. I turned away and tried not to eavesdrop. Two minutes later, he hung up, cursed at the phone, and then said it was all mine.

  I pulled the scrap of paper with the senator’s number from my pocket, slipped some quarters into the phone, and dialed.

  “Do you have any cars I could rent or borrow?” Chuck asked the mechanic.

  “They were all taken last night and this morning. I got nothing left.”

  I held the receiver to my ear.

  “What about rental places?”

  “There are some up and down Canal,” the mechanic said, “but I wouldn’t hold much stock in that. I doubt there’s cars to rent or steal left anywhere in New Orleans by now. Maybe you heard all flights in and out were canceled this morning.”

  Someone picked up on the other end.

  “Hello?” I said.

  “Mike, is that you?”

  It was my mother-in-law. “Yes, Susan, this is Michael. Listen, I’ve got some bad news. Our flight was canceled. I’m not going to be getting to Washington today. I’m going to drive to Nashville with my friend—”

  “Did you talk to Lauren?” Her voice was shrill and tense.

  “Haven’t been able to reach her yesterday or today. Did you talk to her?”

  “Mike, she’s on a flight.”

  “What flight?” A creeping fear prickled the hairs on my neck. Down the street, Luke and Damon retrieved the drone. “When did you talk to her?”

  “I didn’t. I received a courtesy message from American Airlines after the plane had left the ground.”

  “Left the ground?” I stupidly repeated what she’d said while my brain tried to assimilate and comprehend the meaning of her words.

  “Lauren left late yesterday. I mean, last night Hong Kong time, but early morning here. About three hours ago. Direct. With everything happening between India and Pakistan, and the riots breaking out in Hong Kong, she decided to leave early.”

  That was probably a good idea, but—“To where?”

  “Here. To Washington.”

  “Direct? She got a direct flight?”

  Was that even possible? She had connected through LA from New York on her way to Hong Kong. If
her flight wasn’t direct, then what country would she connect through? The floor felt like it disappeared beneath me, the air sucked from my lungs.

  On the other end, Susan sounded like she was on the edge of tears. In a strangled voice, she asked, “Do you have the news on?”

  “Turn that up,” I heard Chuck say from inside. The volume on the TV increased.

  “We now have a announcement,” I heard a news anchor say, “that the president has ordered the closure of American airspace.”

  Susan said, “An hour ago, the president shut down our borders, just like after 9/11, just like when the virus hit. Most European countries have shut their borders as well, and so have Russia and China, India, Pakistan—”

  I asked in a panicked voice, “Wait, wait...so where is my wife?”

  CHAPTER 9

  “MA’AM?”

  Lauren pulled her eyes away from the airplane’s window. As twilight faded to night, she caught glimpses of what looked like patches of snow on the ground forty thousand feet below, but it was hard to tell.

  “Another glass of champagne?” asked the flight attendant, an attractive young woman with her red hair pulled back in a bun. Her skin was pale, and she was dressed in blue pants and a matching blazer over an open-necked white shirt. A red-white-and-blue kerchief was tied around her neck.

  Lauren twizzled the empty glass flute in her hand and considered it, but finally said, “Thank you, but no.”

  “Are you sure? I opened a fresh bottle of Dom Pérignon.” The flight attendant hovered and smiled.

  Was that a nervous smile, or was Lauren projecting?

  Lauren handed over the glass. “I’m trying to get the flight tracker working, but it seems to be frozen.” She tapped the flat panel in front of her and illustrated the point.

  “I’m very sorry, but it’s been turned off.”

  “Turned off?”

  The young woman crinkled her nose. “Because it’s not working.”

  “Why isn’t it working?”

  Now the attendant’s eyes widened theatrically. “Technical problems. I’ll talk to the captain, how about that?”