CyberSpace: A CyberStorm Novel (Cyber Series Book 1)

by Matthew Mather

  “As the captain said, we are taking a little—”

  “Why is there no satellite link? Has a war started?”

  “Please, ma’am, why don’t I get you someth—”

  “I don’t want an hors d’oeuvre!” Lauren almost screamed. “I want to know where we are.”

  The young woman’s lower lip quivered. Lauren immediately regretted raising her voice, but it was too late. The flight attendant burst into tears and began sobbing, but bravely kept the bottle of Dom up.

  “I’m sorry.” Lauren pulled down the small jump seat each first class pod had for guests. “Here. Sit.”

  “I don’t know what’s going on,” the flight attendant said between sobs. “They’re not telling us anything.”

  She sat, handed the champagne to Lauren, who set it on the floor and put an arm around the girl. “It’s okay, it’s okay.” She patted the young woman’s back.

  This was bad.

  When turbulence hit, the violent stuff that rocked the cabin and terrified Lauren, she would watch the flight attendants calmly chatting and putting the carts away, getting out their magazines while the plane bumped and jumped around. Seeing them so calm helped Lauren rationalize that nothing bad was really happening.

  Holding this young girl crying in her lap, Lauren realized how serious this situation had to be. The plane was flying smoothly, but she broke into a cold sweat. Her cheeks flushed.

  Lauren looked out the window at the unending sheet of ice.

  Where on God’s Earth were they?

  CHAPTER 13

  “TIMING SIGNALS? SERIOUSLY? That’s why our cell phones aren’t working?” I leaned over the divider from the back seat to get a look at what Damon was doing.

  He had his laptop out, but still wasn’t able to get a signal from the SatCom service. It didn’t surprise me, but he couldn’t understand how the thousands of satellites in the constellation could all be suddenly unresponsive. Even the terrifying images of the space station disintegrating on TV hadn’t entirely convinced him of what was happening up there.

  Terek sat in the front passenger seat of the Range Rover beside Irena, who drove. Damon and Chuck were in the middle two seats, with Luke and me in the cramped third row pop-ups.

  Luke was playing games on the iPad, but complained that he couldn’t connect to watch videos. I explained again that it didn’t work.

  We’d crammed all of Chuck’s gear, Terek’s stuff, and my bags into the rooftop rack. Covered it as best we could with a tarp and tied it down with cord. The small trunk area held all the twelve-volt batteries that Damon used to charge his drones.

  The Range Rover’s interior had a lived-in, musty smell, the floor caked with dried mud and littered with empty coffee cups.

  “Aircraft transceivers, emergency beacons, Babet’s shipping containers down in the port,” Terek said from the front seat. “You would be surprised how many digital devices depend on satellites and timing signals from GPS to work. The most critical is the electrical grid.”

  “Why does the power grid need it?”

  “Power stations feed electricity into the grid, and the output is synchronized to 50 or 60 Hz, depending where you are in the world. Very important, though, that everything is synchronized across the whole network, across a whole nation.”

  “Let me guess. Power stations use GPS timing as a universal clock.”

  “Bingo. We have a winner.”

  “So will power go out?”

  “Not right away, but I’ll bet we’ll see blackouts soon.”

  “There’s a common misconception about GPS,” Damon said. “It doesn’t provide any location information, not by itself.”

  I let go an audible sigh, but that didn’t stop him.

  “GPS is entirely and only timing signals. Here I am, here I am, the satellites announce, beaming down a timer. We figure out location using the delay caused by distance due to the speed of light, and very carefully compiled tables of satellite orbits and positions. You need at least four to triangulate—”

  “One more word,” Chuck said, “and I’m going to make you eat your drone piece by piece, you understand?”

  Damon blinked with his mouth half-open, and then muttered under his breath, “I’m not sure that’s really possible.”

  “Hold on a second.” Luke looked up from the iPad and scrunched his nose upward. “So, you’re telling me that because we don’t have time signals coming from satellites up there a thousand miles away, our cell phones don’t work? And I can’t watch videos?”

  “That’s right,” Damon said.

  “That is the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard.” Luke returned to his game.

  After lunch, we had said a hasty goodbye to Babet, got into Irena’s truck, and drove through the crowded French Quarter of New Orleans. It was surprising to see so many people out, drinking and having what looked like a good time in the middle of what felt like a disaster to me—but then again, what else was there to do? If I didn’t have a family, getting drunk on Bourbon Street might seem like a good idea.

  The traffic wasn’t bad on Canal Street, but as we went north of New Orleans onto Interstate 10 and crossed south of Lake Pontchartrain, it became bumper to bumper.

  Irena had filled up the truck before arriving at our hotel, which was a small mercy as the lineups at the gas stations stretched for blocks. We stopped at a small supermarket, but half the shelves were already empty. The clerk said that no new shipments were coming in, that what was there was what they had. We settled on Doritos and beef jerky and a dozen gallon jugs of water.

  Chuck said the water was the most important.

  At about 3 p.m., as we inched up the side of Lake Pontchartrain, the threatening clouds finally swept over us and unleashed a sleeting rain that made it impossible to see even five feet through the deluge. The already slow traffic ground to a standstill. Red taillights glimmered through the rain in front of us. I passed the time reading a book to Luke.

  We kept the radio on the local news channel, which alternated between warnings of heavy thunderstorms and recapping the loss of the space station and the list satellites going offline.

  “Surrey Technologies reports loss of communications with two more of their Disaster Monitoring Constellation satellites,” listed the radio news announced, “and WorldView 1 and 2 from DigitalGlobe. RapidEye in Germany says it has lost three of their five earth imaging arrays…”

  The rain finally let up and we inched past Louis Armstrong Airport as we reached the outskirts of the city. I asked Chuck to roll down his window. The air was foggy and humid, the running lights of an aircraft approaching the runway shining fuzzily through the haze in the distance.

  Luke studied me as I watched the plane land. “Are we going to get mommy?” he asked.

  Mommy. The way he said it. In some ways he was already growing into a little man, but in others he was still a child.

  After two hours of gridlock, we finally reached the turnoff for Interstate 55 north, and Chuck convinced Irena to take the alternate road up. When that was crammed too, he asked her to go onto the shoulder to skip around.

  Almost immediately, a State Trooper materialized, as if from nowhere. The trooper didn’t even ask for Irena’s license, but told us to get back in the traffic. He said there were accidents further up, and that we would have to be patient. Told us to stay off the shoulder, as emergency vehicles might need it.

  Chuck cursed under his breath, but I secretly found it reassuring that things were so under control that the traffic was still being policed.

  “Welcome to Mississippi,” announced a waterlogged road sign. “The Birthplace of American Music.”

  The steady drumming of the rain against the roof rose to a rhythmic hammering. Out the window, white balls of hail skittered across the pavement and bounced off the car next to us. Seconds later, the hail turned back to rain.

  Luke woke up, eyes wide.

  I pulled his head into my chest. “Go back to sleep,” I whispered to
him.

  “Can I use your phone?” he asked.

  “There’s no network.”

  “I can still play Marble Mixer.”

  “Why don’t you go back to sleep?”

  “I’m not sleeping.”

  “Try. Please.”

  He put his head back down.

  I waited a moment and then whispered to Chuck: “I thought Mississippi was east? You sure we’re not going the wrong way?”

  Chuck was navigating with his hand-drawn map and a headlamp. The map was spread across his knees, and he crossed off the names of towns as we passed them.

  “The great state of Mississippi stretches all the way from Tennessee to the Gulf Coast,” he said without looking up. “It cuts across the top of Louisiana.”

  “What kind of trees are those?” I was bored. “I always thought it was weird how there are evergreen forests in the deep south.”

  He glanced out the window into the semidarkness. “Loblolly pines. You know they used to make turpentine from them?”

  It was exactly the sort of useless-but-interesting trivia I relied on him for.

  I checked my watch. Past seven.

  Wherever she was, Lauren’s plane had four, maybe five, hours of fuel left. Maybe she was already on the ground? That might be a good thing, but then she wouldn’t be home. She would be stranded in a foreign country.

  The sun was setting somewhere behind a new set of towering thunderheads, but the clouds were so low and dark it had been a murky twilight for hours already.

  Irena’s truck had a radio scanner in the front, right under the CD deck. Chuck called it a police scanner. Terek insisted it wasn’t a police scanner, just a private mobile radio. Like a CB. The same kind used by emergency services, which operated mostly on the 800 megahertz band, Terek said, and the newer systems on 700.

  The muffled sounds of two-way radio chatter competed with the steady drum of rain on the hood of the truck. We still had the radio on the local news channel, the volume turned low.

  I pressed my face against the glass of the side window and felt the coolness of it. I looked up. The car inched forward. Rivulets of water streamed down the window like tears. I clutched Luke tight beside me. He was back asleep and snoring softly.

  I needed to get to my daughter. She was with family, but I needed her close by me. Needed to feel her breathing, the same as I could feel Luke’s little chest right now. And we needed to find Lauren. No matter what. No matter where.

  “Planes don’t need GPS to land,” Chuck said, as if he was reading my mind. “Every pilot starts out on a Cessna, starts with the same analog controls and instruments that every single plane always has, even if all the digital systems fail. Every airplane has a magnetic compass floating right there in the middle of the cockpit, no matter how advanced the rest of it is.”

  “And radar is still working,” Damon said. “The weather channel still has all the Doppler radar maps of the storms, even if they don’t have satellite images. Planes mostly use radar when they get close to airports.”

  “Not in the far north,” Terek said from the front. “There’s no radar coverage up there. But Lauren’s plane probably didn’t continue north.”

  It was the first time someone had offered an opinion like this. “Why do you say that?”

  “No radar and no navigation markers. Going over the North Pole without GPS would be almost suicide.” He paused. “I mean, dangerous. It could be dangerous.”

  Chuck held up both hands as if he was trying to hold Terek back.

  I put a hand on my friend’s shoulder. “I thought you said they could navigate with analog controls.”

  “Yeah, but that high up in the north? If you get over the north magnetic pole—”

  “Which is in Russia now,” Terek said.

  “Straight where Lauren’s flight was heading. Over magnetic north, a compass needle spins in circles,” Chuck continued. “You get stuck in clouds, or it’s dark, or you’re over the snowpack without visual markers…” His voice trailed off.

  “What?”

  “There’s a lot of empty space up there.”

  “Didn’t someone think of this?” I said. “That by relying on GPS for timing signals, for position, that everything could eventually go wrong?”

  Terek replied, “They didn’t think through what would happen if billions of people suddenly lost contact, what all the ramifications might be. More and more devices started using GPS, because the signal is cheap and easy to use.”

  Damon said, “That’s not entirely true. Networks like 5G have timing signals built into them. Or, they should have.” He cocked his head to one side. “Implementing timing signals in cables is expensive, and the US hasn’t done it. Places like South Korea and Japan might have their mobile networks working right now.”

  Terek said, “The US government did look at the weaknesses of GPS. There are other ways to provide a timing signal. Antennas, high-altitude balloons, wired connections…”

  “I don’t think anyone will be getting any other satellites up there soon,” Chuck said.

  “That might be true.” Damon shut his laptop. “If we have a full-scale Kessler syndrome going on over our heads, the debris could take hundreds of years to degrade. Some of it might never come down. No more satellites, no more space travel.”

  “No moon base?” I’d read about NASA’s planned Artemis project, which was meant to put a space station around the moon in the coming years. “No going to Mars…”

  “Yeah, forget all of that,” Damon said. “Not in our lifetimes. Not even in Luke’s.”

  “That might be a good thing,” Chuck said.

  “Good?”

  “A whole new space race has started. Going to the moon. Going to Mars. China, Russia, America, Japan, and now India and Pakistan? We have a whole mess of things to fix on Earth, down here.”

  Damon said, “The mess down here is exactly why we need to get up there.”

  “Not a bad idea to have a plan B,” I said. “Maybe we should get to Mars. Sam Maxwell is planning on dying on the Mars colony he plans to build.” Maxwell was a competitor to Tyrell Jakob.

  “If that’s not a billionaire-idiot bucket list wish,” Chuck snorted.

  I ignored him. “Humans need to be on more than one planet to survive in the long run. What happens if this nuclear war starts? Between India and Pakistan?”

  “What the hell are you guys smoking? Are you listening to yourselves?” Chuck said. “We mess up this planet, so we move to the next? The peak of Mount Everest and the deepest reaches of Antarctica are balmy compared to the warmest tropics of Mars.”

  “Just because there are challenges,” Damon said, “doesn’t mean we have to give up.”

  “Exactly! And it sounds like you’re giving up on here already.”

  “You’re the one that doesn’t believe in global warming.”

  “I didn’t say I didn’t believe it. I’m skeptical that people are causing it.”

  “If that’s your logic, then how could we fix it?”

  “Exactly what I’ve been saying.”

  Butting heads with Chuck was an old game. “Look, even if we’re not talking about going to Mars, space-based systems provide communications, GPS, weather imaging and prediction—”

  Chuck interjected, “Tang and memory foam, aren’t those derived from the space program?”

  “They are,” Damon said.

  “So you’re saying Tang is worth an investment of a few billion dollars? Sounds legit. I mean, Tang is a refreshing beverage and all, but—”

  “Of course I’m not saying that.”

  “And what I’m saying, which is exactly what Terek was saying earlier, is that almost all of these things could have been done without needing to go into outer space.”

  Terek said, “So you think maybe this will be a good thing?”

  “Instead of spending trillions of dollars there”—Chuck pointed up—“we could have spent that money solving problems here.” He point
ed down.

  “Looks like your wish is going to come true,” Damon said.

  “Sometimes reality has a way of rearing its ugly head.”

  “Speaking of ugly heads.” Damon pointed at Chuck’s wild hair. “What is—”

  “Hey.” A thought popped into my head. “Damon, does the military use the same GPS as commercial customers and civilians? Or do they have a separate ones?”

  It made more sense if they had their own, didn’t it? Could we switch to using theirs?

  “The military uses the same satellites, but there is a separate encrypted signal.”

  “What does the encryption do?”

  “So that you can’t spoof it. Or, not easily. And it’s more accurate. The Air Force has been sending up new Block III GPS birds, and those have directional antennas that make it hard to jam. They also support the L1C international signal, same as BieDou and Galileo. BieDou is the new Chinese system, and it can even get signals underwater, it’s been a geo-positioning arms race this—”

  “But the location signal is still coming from the same source?”

  “If those satellites are pancaked, positioning for everything from drones to aircraft carriers is gone. Seems like they’re losing imaging satellites now, too. No more overwatch.”

  “Maybe,” Chuck said quietly.

  “Wow,” I mouthed silently.

  Taillights glowed red in a line and snaked into the distance. Traffic had ground to a halt again. Another accident?

  “We could get out and walk faster,” Chuck grumbled to nobody and everybody.

  The hail started up again with renewed fury.

  “Everyone, quiet down for a second.” Terek turned up the radio. “They’re saying something about Pakistan launching another miss—”

  “Turn the radio down,” I asked. What was that noise? Something off to the left of the road. “Please, turn it down,” I insisted.

  Ahead of us, cars and trucks pulled from the road onto the shoulder, some pulling into the grass. Why were they in such a hurry? A commercial about life insurance played as Terek turned down the radio. The announcer’s voice was replaced with a low warbling noise from outside. A rising groan.