CyberSpace: A CyberStorm Novel (Cyber Series Book 1)

by Matthew Mather

  Where the hell was Lauren? Had they turned her back?

  I checked my phone. Full bars, but no luck when I tried using it on the cell network. It was connected to the hotel Wi-Fi, but no text messages. No messages from Lauren, but then I assumed she was in the air.

  I tried calling her mother again, but got a busy signal. It wasn’t that the line was busy—the cell networks weren’t working. Not connecting.

  “I met him while I was at school,” Damon said. “What’s the big deal? I thought you would be happy. And she’s got a truck. Isn’t that what you wanted?” He pointed at the aging Range Rover.

  “You were playing games with him? And what, you decided to meet up?”

  “I met him on the gaming boards, but he’s an amazing hacker. That’s how we got to know each other.”

  “A hacker?”

  “I mean he can build things, not break into banks. He and his sister came here by themselves after their mother died a few years ago. Immigrated. Irena pretty much raised Terek—I mean, since she was the older one. Their father took off when they were young.” Damon stopped at that. It seemed like he was uncomfortable about saying more.

  But it quieted Chuck down. He and I had each lost both of our parents early. “You know, Aristotle said that there were three types of friends.”

  “Aristotle, the old philosopher guy?”

  Chuck nodded. “Ones you find useful, ones that give mutual respect and admiration, and ones for pleasure—”

  “What are you worrying about? Exactly?”

  I heard the TV announcer say that all the airports in New York were closed.

  Chuck said, “Do you trust him? Or is he just useful, or fun to hang out with?”

  “You mean unlike you?”

  “I’ll take that as a compliment.”

  I said, “Chuck, that kid might have saved my life.”

  Damon said, “I’ve known him for a year. He’s always been straight with me, and he and his sister are hard workers. Honest to a fault. If you don’t want to take them up on their offer to drive you to Nashville—”

  “I’ve got eleven hours until Lauren’s plane lands.” I checked my watch. It was 11:35. To Chuck I said, “I’m going with them, whether you come or not. I need to get to DC as soon as I can.”

  The chances of Lauren’s plane landing in DC were slim. It didn’t matter. I needed to be there, no matter what. I needed to get Olivia. Start to get my family back together.

  “You decide,” Damon said to Chuck. “I gotta go back inside and see if I can get my friend at NASA online.” He slipped past us and went in, but left the door open.

  Chuck said to me, “We could still take Babet’s car.”

  “We can’t take her car. I don’t have time to stay here and debate and come up with some other solution. I’m going. If you need to stay and fix the Jeep, I understand, but Luke and I are going with Damon and his friends.”

  The volume on the TV was low.

  The screen showed riot police in Prague. A train had crashed somewhere else. Lineups outside grocery stores in Argentina. A news crawl scrolled along the bottom of the screen, announcing that global stock markets were suspended. The TV shifted to a video of a citizens’ militia roadblock in the Midwest.

  The last image was of a fire raging in California. The news anchor said that emergency services were crippled by the loss of GPS, and that mobile networks were down across the country.

  I logged into the hotel Wi-Fi.

  The flight tracker website still listed the same takeoff and landing times for Lauren’s plane. Unchanged. It didn’t say canceled, which was what often happened when a flight crashed or disappeared.

  Sometimes, no news was good news.

  At least the flight was still there.

  My phone had full bars, so I tried calling Lauren’s uncle in Washington. I lifted the receiver to my ear.

  Busy signal.

  Damon and Terek were on their laptops at one of the side tables. Babet and Irena sat on a couch, while Luke played with his Legos in the bedroom.

  Luke called to me, “Dad, can I use the iPad?”

  “I think Uncle Chuck is busy with it,” I said.

  “He’s been using it forever.” Luke pouted for a bit, but then returned to his Legos.

  Chuck was cross-legged on the bed, busy taping together scraps of paper he’d scavenged from the hotel’s front desk, our iPad in front of him.

  I paced back and forth.

  “I thought you said cell service would get better once the initial rush was over,” I said to Damon.

  Terek answered, “GPS has been spotty since yesterday, and has been completely down since last night.”

  “I don’t need to know where I am, I just need to use my phone.”

  “What he means,” Damon said, “is that GPS isn’t only for location services. Timing. Timing is probably even more important than location.”

  “GPS provides time?”

  “To pretty much every mobile network. GPS signals are used to provide universal timestamps. The information sent over the cell networks is digital. It’s not analog, like on landlines. When you digitize information, each packet needs to have a timestamp. When those packets arrive on the other end, you can use their timestamps to put the information back in order and re-create the audio or data stream.”

  “But it worked sometimes last night.”

  “Cell towers have their own timing mechanisms. Quartz oscillators. When they lose GPS, they can work for a few hours, maybe even a few days. But eventually, if they’re not updated by GPS signals, the network loses coherence. Data packets can’t be reconstructed. And there are thousands of systems that require those timing signals.”

  “Systems that are all failing now?”

  Damon waved me over. He turned his laptop around. “My friend gave me access to the space debris tracker they’re running at NASA.”

  An animated graphic played over and over. In the center was the blue Earth. An outer circle was labelled GEO, with the circle right around the Earth labelled LEO. A red bloom spread steadily toward LEO.

  “So that’s the debris?” Chuck said.

  “The anti-satellite hits spread maybe millions of fragments into descending orbits.”

  “How do they get the information?” Chuck asked. “Radar? Or something else?”

  “So far, this is purely modeling, based on reports of what’s happening up there. The DOD does radar imaging to generate the Space Surveillance Network data, but that takes time and needs objects bigger than most of these fragments. But it doesn’t make sense.”

  “Sure it does,” Terek disagreed. “That’s taking out the satellites, one by one. Kessler syndrome. They’ve been warning of this for years.”

  “Taking out GLONASS? All the Russian geopositioning satellites, in less than a day? That’s twenty-four satellites at nineteen-thousand kilometers of altitude. And then GPS?”

  “They’re both in medium Earth orbits,” Terek pointed out.

  “Yeah, but GPS orbits a thousand kilometers above GLONASS. And there are thirty-one satellites in the GPS constellation. Twenty-two in the European Union’s Galileo. Thirty-five in the Chinese BieDou system. The Indian NavIC system only has three of their seven in geostationary orbit—”

  “You said that’s coming from NASA? They should know, if anyone.”

  “That’s not imaging. We haven’t seen any actual debris yet. It’s too small to detect at that distance and speed.”

  “What else could be causing this?”

  “I have no idea. And the Indian military is still denying that it sent up any anti-satellite weapons.”

  Chuck walked into the living room, holding a folded stack of papers under one arm. “The American, Russian, Chinese, and British militaries have all confirmed that the anti-satellite missiles were launched from the Indian base off Chennai, and the Pakistanis aren’t denying their attacks. They confirmed the Indian launches as well.”

  “I trust our military,�
�� I said.

  “I trust none of them,” Chuck said. “But, in this case, I believe them. Who exactly do you think is lying? Everyone else, or the Indian government? They’re trying to cover their asses as this whole mess gets worse and worse. When the space dust settles, someone’s going to be paying for this. They don’t want to be the ones holding the bag.”

  “Still better than an all-out nuclear war between India and Pakistan,” I said.

  “I haven’t heard any fat ladies singing yet, have you?”

  “Quite the optimist, huh?”

  “Pragmatists drink the water whether the glass is half full or half empty.” Chuck taped his newly constructed map to the wall by the TV. “I drew this as best I could. From here we go north on I-55. We head up to Nashville and pick up Susie, Bonham, and Ellarose.”

  “So you’re coming with us and Irena?”

  “Does the pope—”

  “I’m pretty sure the pontiff doesn’t defecate in the woods.” His go-to joke was getting old. “But I’ll take that as a yes.”

  A not-insubstantial weight flew from my shoulders. My bravado about heading out on the road without Chuck had been sincere, but I was relieved to know he would come with us. “And then I continue on from Nashville with Terek?”

  “I’ll go to DC, too,” Damon said.

  “We all go together,” Chuck said. “At least as far as my cabin.” He stabbed a finger at the midpoint of Interstate 81 on his map, next to the squiggly line of the Appalachians, the backbone of the East Coast. He looked me square in the eye. “We go to the cabin again? Take Susie and the kids there?”

  The cabin.

  I was hoping he wouldn’t say that. Those two words brought back a rush of sensations and images. Of pain. Starvation. And Tony. Our friend Anthony had died protecting Luke at that cabin. I never told Chuck, but I swore I would never go back to that place. I swore there was no way I would ever...

  I felt like I wanted to vomit, but instead I said, “Can we leave now?”

  It was past noon already.

  Eleven hours till Lauren’s plane had to land, one way or the other. A sixteen-and-a-half hour flight. I’d checked, and 777s couldn’t stay in the air for more than eighteen hours. Modified ones could go up to nineteen at cruising speed, maybe even longer at low speeds and with low cargo. I’d become an expert on 777s in the last twenty minutes.

  “No traffic, it’s a fifteen-hour drive from here to my cabin.” Chuck traced a line across his map. “Once we get there, we secure everyone and everything. I’ve got my own truck up there. Then we go in both vehicles, and we can take Highway 66 into Washington. Another hour down the road.”

  An hour’s drive in a car, but last time it had taken me a whole day and night to walk down that road, alone, afraid, in the cold and dark and rain—my mind keening on the sharp edge of insanity.

  Chuck said, “It might take us more than a day to make the whole drive. There’s a lot of confusion out there, but even if we have to head off the main roads, we follow sunrise to the east. As long as we don’t cross the Ohio River to the north, eventually we’ll get to the edge of the Appalachians. Interstate 81 cuts north to south all the way from New York to the Carolinas. We can’t miss it.”

  Chuck produced a round bauble that looked like it was from a dollar store. A north-south needle floated in the liquid within it. “Even if we have no GPS, we still have these old things called compasses.”

  “Aren’t there fires in there somewhere?” I pointed vaguely at the middle of the map.

  “We’re going to head up past Kentucky, all those fires are down—”

  “Quiet for a second,” Damon interrupted.

  He grabbed the TV remote and turned up the volume.

  The screen filled with an image of clouds and ocean, but from high above. From orbit. Huge solar panel arrays reflected the sun in a glimmering wave as the Earth slowly rotated beneath the space station. It was silent.

  “The crew successfully evacuated the station over two hours ago,” the CNN news anchor said. “These images are from exterior cameras, and we have reports that…oh…oh my…”

  In total silence, part of one of the solar panels seemed to detach and shear away. Shimmering fragments filled the space around it, thousands of tiny mirrors reflecting the sun in a sparkling glitter.

  A dark hole appeared in one of the crew compartments, and then another. After a few seconds, black dots littered the station’s pressure shell amid a growing haze of debris.

  The steady progression of the blue Earth and distant clouds below the station tilted. The viewpoint spun and the crescent edge of the atmosphere became visible.

  The field of view became cluttered with wreckage, the entire station coming apart like a toy model dropped two floors onto an invisible pavement.

  Luke reached out to hold my hand. I squeezed his.

  Chuck said, “Guess that’s enough proof the debris field exists.” Dumbfounded silence as the space station disintegrated. “That’s two hundred billion dollars down the toilet.”

  “Is there a chance some of that could hit us?” I asked.

  “Only the biggest chunks of that would make it to the ground,” Damon said.

  Somehow that wasn’t reassuring. “What about something in the air?”

  CHAPTER 12

  LAUREN PEERED OUT of the 777’s window. The pane was frosted over at the bottom. She wondered what that signified, if anything. From the corner of her eye, she thought she saw a flash high up, but it didn’t persist.

  The sky was bright and cloudless, dark blue straight overhead fading to baby blue at the horizon. The sky merged almost seamlessly with a sheet of white that stretched unbroken from one side of her window to the other.

  Not quite unbroken.

  If she squinted and concentrated, Lauren could make out cracks in the ice sheet forty-plus thousand feet below her.

  It had been four hours since the Russian jets had disappeared. For two hours they had ferried the passenger jet, hugging the wingtips of the Boeing aircraft. They had forced the plane to turn left, which meant...further north?

  At first, the captain had said it was a security measure.

  That hadn’t stopped the passengers from asking what exactly was going on. After the fighters left, the captain had finally spoken over the intercom. We would be extending the flight by an hour, he said, but the plane had more than enough fuel. The flight needed to gain altitude to keep a ceiling over Russian bases. He didn’t explain why. He only repeated that these were security measures.

  Security for what? No answer.

  Just another round of drinks served up by the flight attendants.

  That was three hours ago.

  Passengers, Lauren included, kept asking for the flight tracker to be turned back on. She heard requests muttered—some almost yelled—asking where exactly the plane was.

  One man in business class, a few rows behind Lauren, got up and belligerently demanded to see the captain. A male flight attendant confronted him after the man shoved one of the female attendants, at which point it became a chest-thumping contest. The male attendant told the man to get back to his seat. Or what, the man asked, glowering.

  At that point, another passenger got up from his seat. Not threatening, but quiet and swift. He said something to the man, who then sat down. Lauren guessed he was the air marshal. They had guns, didn’t they?

  The tension in the recycled air became something Lauren could almost taste, like cardboard stuck to her tongue.

  After the near-altercation, the captain came back on the intercom, and in a drawling, Southern-accented voice, explained that they couldn’t turn the flight tracker back on because they had lost the satellite uplink. The same reason the in-flight internet wasn’t working.

  This didn’t have the calming effect he might have hoped for. Whispers and rumors began circling the cabin.

  Lauren heard people saying that a war had broken out, that GPS was lost. That all the satellites were gone. A man
behind Lauren grumbled to his wife, saying that this far north over Russia, we were directly over the north magnetic pole. Even a magnetic compass wouldn’t work here, but would spin aimlessly.

  We’re lost, he said.

  His wife told him to shut up.

  Lauren checked her watch again. For the millionth time.

  It was 4 p.m. in New York.

  Nine hours in the air so far, give or take.

  Eight and a half hours to go, according to the captain.

  Even if there was no compass, there was still the sun, right? Except up here, east and west ceased to matter. Only south became a thing.

  Still.

  If they had turned west, Lauren reasoned, then they would have been following the sun. It would probably have been dark right now if they had followed that path. The bright sunlight meant the plane had gone either north or east, except she hadn’t felt the aircraft’s wings tip right. So, more northerly, which explained the endless expanse of white.

  The purple twilight out her window had never gone away, but had rotated toward the front of the aircraft and grown brighter until three hours ago, when the sun had burst over the horizon. A few people had clapped to see it rise.

  When Lauren looked out the windows on the other side of the plane, she could just see the sun. It stayed toward the nose of the plane as it rose into the sky over the next few hours. Which meant they were heading east, right? Toward the sun? And if the sun came up at 1 p.m. East Coast time, what did that mean?

  She had no idea.

  Her head felt like it was spinning.

  “More champagne, miss?”

  Lauren turned from the window.

  The attractive female flight attendant with the red-white-and-blue kerchief held a bottle of Dom. She lifted it up. “Champagne?” she asked again.

  Lauren shook her head and looked toward the window.

  “Can I do something else for you? Maybe freshen up your—”

  “I’ll tell you what you can goddamn do for me.” Lauren’s voice rose as she turned back to the young woman. “You can tell me what the hell is going on. What’s happening out there? Where are we?”