Orthogonal Procedures

by Adam Rothstein

  They arrived at the Weapons Prototype Section at exactly the same time as Hopper. The Assistant Secretary's small departures and arrivals were odd, one more thing that Mackey had yet to understand. The guard allowed them to enter after Hopper showed her pass, although he eyed Thompson's Forest Service coat warily.

  Hopper brought them through as if she was familiar with the facility. It consisted of metal racks and shelving extending from floor to ceiling, filled to capacity with metal crates, ammunition boxes, and wooden packing containers stenciled with complex series of paint-encrusted designations. Looking down the rows between the shelves, Mackey could not see the end. Nor any way of sorting this material. It felt mundane, like these containers could house dry biscuits. But it also felt deadly, as if a thermonuclear weapon could easily be misfiled within any of these identical shelves.

  "Please point me in the direction of the explosives," Parsons said, rubbing his hands together.

  "Only what you can carry discreetly on your person," Hopper cautioned. "I'm not carrying a bag full of bombs for you." She wrote out for Parsons a series of designation numbers, and list in hand, began searching the various bin and aisle numbers looking for something dangerous.

  Ross went to a nearby cabinet she seemed familiar with, and from one of its gaping mouths produced a second sub-machine gun like the one she carried under her flight jacket. Opening some hand-labeled ammo boxes, she began filling magazines with odd-looking ammunition. "All of my own design," she explained.

  Hopper brought Thompson and Mackey over to a smaller bin. "I—don't have much familiarity with weapons," Mackey stammered, suddenly nervous.

  "Not a problem," Hopper said, handing each of them a small handgun produced from the padded storage bin. "This is a dazzle pistol. Lasers set for temporary blindness, about three minutes full recovery for most individuals. Aim generally towards the head—and try not to shoot any of us."

  She produced a small metal box, six inches long, three inches wide and a half-inch high, attached to a short rod, with a folding metal stock. Underneath was a rudimentary trigger. It looked like a steel mouse trap attached to umbrella handle—not any sort of combat equipment. "This is a electro-blast gun. Ought to wipe any mercury memory, magnetic tape, disk, rope, or charged memory circuit within ten feet of range. Won't do a thing to humans, at least as far as we know. But be careful—it fires in both directions, forward and reverse, due to the radiator's properties. So don't fire it with your back to any data or computer you particularly like."

  She handed them each a shoulder holster that comfortably concealed the dazzle pistol and the electro-blast beneath their suit jackets. The leather holster was stamped "Data Enforcement Section," a nonexistent Bureaucratic Level in any Bureau or Service Mackey was familiar with. That was odd, but regardless, Mackey did feel a bit better knowing he wasn't going to be carrying firearms. And yet, no matter how well concealed the weapons were, he felt heavy, encumbered.

  For her part, Hopper opened a small, thin crate, and from a bed of packing hay produced a thin metal walking stick with a bulbous black metal knob for a handle. On the knob was a cut design of three lines at equal angles from each other, passing into a circle, and intersecting a single line.

  "Is that a transistor symbol?" Mackey asked.

  Hopper nodded. "I call it a transistor staff. My own design."

  "What does it do?" asked Thompson.

  "No time for that now. Hopefully I won't need it." She waved to Ross and Parsons, who made their final selections and came over.

  "I would have hoped for more Semtex throwing bars, but I am pleased to see they have some of my new hyper-extrudables on hand," Parsons said, nudging Mackey and showing him a small satchel that he had filled with items. "My own patent." He winked.

  Hopper opened a small box and withdrew a number of small round metal rings, each suspended on a length of cord. She handed one to each of them, and took one for herself, putting it around her neck, then tucking it into her suit. Mackey pulled it up to his eye for a better look. On the front were a number of markings—an electronics diagram not immediately recognizable to the engineer. The ring was wrapped in copper wire, and on the back was a small bit of circuitry, though with components smaller than he had ever seen, and completely alien to him.

  "The lab has been calling them ‘electromagnetic amulets,' but all joking aside, they defend against some weapons effects that I am not at full liberty to discuss."

  Parsons put his on, examining it. "That doesn't make me feel much better, Grace."

  "Oh, not to worry, Jack! As long as we're wearing them, you should regain full control of your limbs within a year."

  Mackey stared, open-mouthed, only to see Hopper grinning. The Assistant Secretary had just told something like a joke. "It's not as bad as all that. But never take it off, for any reason. I am serious about that."

  They stood in a small circle, fully equipped. "Should we, I don't know—develop a team motto?" asked Parsons. Ross kicked his ankle with her boot, making him jump.

  "Let's just get on board the plane. Johnson should be calling through to it any time now."

  The Valkyrie was impossibly large, with white delta wings, thin as a razor blade, shining bright red in the setting desert sun. Polygon intakes large enough to drive a truck through lay underneath the wing form, feeding a cavernously large duct of engines, each nozzle at the end of the craft as large as a person in diameter, six arranged in a single row. Forward from this giant, triangular phoenix of a wing form extended a thin neck of fuselage with a cockpit on the tip, and then reducing to a needle point at the leading edge, like a loaded syringe. On either side of the great bird's throat were small trapezoidal stabilizers.

  "Never flown one before," said Parsons, scratching his head, "but I'm willing to give it a shot."

  "No you won't," Hopper replied curtly, as Mackey breathed a sigh of relief. "Thankfully, we have a pilot fully trained in supersonic flight to do that task for us. We all need our rest even if flight time is just over an hour, because it will be early morning by the time we land at Dulles, and we have many tasks ahead of us tomorrow."

  The neck of the PE-70 had been fitted out with a small executive cabin and a series of six bunks extending down the length of the jet, which one entered from the end, feet first, like a one-person space capsule. Lined up with rounded Perspex portholes, they looked not unlike the row of six supersonic engines at the rear of the plane.

  While they taxiied down the runway the call from Roy Johnson, Secretary in Charge of the Advanced Research Projects Bureau, came over the video monitor. The Postal Bureau video phone logo faded into the image with the slightest hint of fuzz, that Mackey read as a sign of circular polarization in the signal—meaning it was being relayed by satellite. The man was thin, angular, with wire-frame glasses, his suit straight and neat, but having the unmistakable look of being worn for more than twenty-four hours.

  "What's the situation, Hopper?" he asked, his voice coming through the plane's interior speakers.

  "My people say Commerce has at least four Crystal birds, and an unknown number of other satellites. No idea of their purpose or make, but we do know a likely timeline—less than twenty-five hours."

  Johnson put his hands on the desk and leaned forward towards the lens. "Well, there's one way to find out. I'm going to call a piloted assault against the Crystals and sweep the outer orbits until we find something. We'll snatch them up, bring them into the space station, and then we'll get to the bottom of it from there."

  Hopper raised a finger. "Not yet. That sweep would take time, and would alert them that we know something is up. It might advance their timetable."

  The man on the screen pursed his lips. "You have another plan, I take it?"

  "I do. An agent I've used before with some success."

  Johnson sniffed. "‘Some success' is not an option here, Hopper. I'll hold off the ass
ault for now, but you'd better have some more information soon."

  The screen clicked to static, and then turned off. The jet accelerated, leaned back, and the ground dropped below them as the triangular wings improbably managed to conjure a physical envelope of pressure and lift, pushing the vast machine against the force of gravity and up into the sky. Spiralling west, the Valkyrie gained altitude, so that it could hit its afterburners and go supersonic.

  Hopper distributed heavy goggles, each with a pack of electronics attached over the lenses, and then a small white tablet. "Put these on while you rest. They're for long-haul astronauts, and should get you into REM sleep in under twenty minutes. That, combined with the time-release amphetamine sheathed with switch-engineered melatonin, will help you feel like you've had six hours of sleep in under an hour."

  Crawling into the sleep chambers fully dressed, each of the team swallowed the tablet and donned the goggles. Mackey lay back, feeling the subtle accelerations as the jet maneuvered into a vector aimed at the nation's capital. Colored lights spiraled in his vision, and the soft vibrations of current circulating the speakers' electromagnets above his ears filled in the gaps of the roaring engine and slipstream with white noise. It was the sound of riding an ocean wave, cresting on the peak of the collapsing curve. Or more correctly, Mackey knew, a random distribution of wave amplitudes, within a finite range of audible sound frequencies. Somewhere, on the ocean of human-perceptible sound, Fred Mackey roiled up and down from a relative point, hissing in and out of lucid consciousness.

  Out over the desert, a rolling boom echoed over the evening sky.

  Broadcast transcript begins:

  "In a terrible accident, sixteen people in Denver were killed today when the radar scopes on two P-cars malfunctioned simultaneously, resulting in a horrific collision. Traffic throughout the central Colorado area is backed up as far as Boulder while emergency crews tend to the wounded, and engineers try to estimate the extent of the damage.

  "Although accidents involving P-cars are rare, in this case a double failure between two different P-cars' radars caused a three-car collision at a relative speed estimated by authorities at sixty miles per hour. Our resident engineer, Dr. Patricia Underwood, explains:

  "‘Under normal conditions, each P-car's computer only controls itself. It relies on the changing radar signal from the cars around it to know what they are doing, and to react to it. If the signal is delayed in any way, or gets distorted, sometimes the cars come together a little fast and bump together, like pedestrians jostling into each other on the sidewalk. It can also happen if a track signal is distorted, and the P-car tries to make a navigational adjustment to switch tracks too fast.

  "‘As you can see in this diagram, the front car is transmitting a radar image to the rear car, augmented to include a bit of extra information. In addition to looking for other cars, it broadcasts information, and listens for other cars broadcasting in turn. Each broadcast is unique, so the receivers can tell them all apart. Its "shape," so to speak, is the adjustment of the broadcast image, augmenting what the other cars "see," if you follow me.

  "‘The rear car can sense not only how far away the front car is, and its speed relative to ours, but also whether that car is in a formation with cars ahead of it, and how far it thinks it must travel before its next track switch. The rear car will only get behind it if it is going less distance than it—therefore preventing the entire formation from slowing when it decreases speed to change tracks. The cars behind it will do the same. That way, formations of cars build that can assemble and disassemble without any centralized control.

  "‘In this case, both cars' passive mode radar failed. The cars could see each other, but they couldn't tell their distance to switching. They both attempted to take a switch at the same time. The rear car hit the front car, and derailed it on the switch, sending it crashing into a third car, here, on the right-hand switch track. Then, the rear car impacted that collision. Debris from the collision caused several other derailments in nearby cars, which then were hit by more cars piling up, unable to stop in time due to the speed and extent of the damage.'

  "Thank you, Dr. Underwood. A rare and scary situation indeed, as well as certainly tragic for those in Denver tonight. At this time, the Assistant Secretaries for Safety of the National Automated Transport Safety Bureau, the Mass Transit Bureau, and the Postal Bureau are on the scene of the investigation in Denver, where they will make a combined public statement. We now take you live to Denver . . ."

  Chapter 8

  Open to Potentiality

  Mackey awoke as the wheels of the Valkyrie touched the runway. Somewhere conductively connected and yet distant to his sleeping body, he felt the harsh friction of ten tires releasing a cloud of rubber smoke into the pre-dawn air. In his prone position, he felt the G-forces increase rapidly along a single vector as the drag chutes popped and the aircraft decelerated. There was no immediate sensation of changing pressure against his skin, no light to be seen. Nothing except the rough metal edge of the electromagnetic amulet Hopper had given him against his chest, as he lay pressed against it at an odd angle, between his skin and the solid mass under the force of inertia.

  One by one, like indicator lamps on a console, awarenesses were presented to his consciousness. Location—the capsule in the Valkyrie cabin. The pressure against his chest—that was downward. The heavy inertial vector—forward, the plane slowing along the runway. Time—likely Eastern Postal. Hour—perhaps only an hour into the future, jury still out, sensors still looking for data. Vision—distorted, blaze of colors. Ah, but of course: the REM goggles were still on his face, displaying a soft blue light. Removing them, the rest of his senses returned. He had a body—fatigued, a bit sore, with limbs, head, torso, and skin.

  Turning over, Mackey released the stress of the amulet against his chest, and the object, the same temperature as his skin, seemed to disappear. He popped open the capsule door and crawled out into the cabin, along with the rest of the team, smoothing his clothing, making sure he was as dressed as he could possibly be.

  He needed a mirror. The reflective glass on the end of the capsule, just glossy enough to give a slight reflection, allowed Mackey to straighten his tie, by habit. And there he was, the familiar image, recalled from memory and substantiated. Fred Mackey, aboard a supersonic Postal Bureau aircraft, amongst a quintet of secretive, possibly occult, engineering-oriented spies.

  Ross was rubbing her eyes. "It's not a clean sleep, but it's surprisingly effective."

  "I could have used a little bit more amphetamine on the exit," Parsons commented, yawning. "Maybe combined with a bit of serotonin extension, or maybe a light empathogen for added dream sensitivity."

  They collected their new, weaponized possessions. Mackey buttoned his jacket over the shoulder holster. Thompson decided to leave his coat on board. It was a warm night, and the Forest Service patches were attracting unnecessary attention among Department of Transportation personnel. They descended to the dark tarmac and entered the deserted terminal.

  "That reminds me," Parsons said, taking a deep breath of the early morning air, still cool and crisp, not yet humid. "I had a dream that was possibly relevant. We were in a vast underground labyrinth, struggling to collect the last of a series of sixteen artifacts, each representative of a different goddess from a variety of traditions. I was piloting a mini-sub in a subterranean lake, but the viscosity of the water was being altered by some sort of telepathic octopus. And then Fred said to Gene . . ."

  Hopper interrupted the narrative as they approached the parking portal. "We'll head straight to the NATSB, and see if Eliza is awake."

  The Assistant Secretary's P-car was waiting, of course, doors open and ready for boarding. They all climbed inside, Ross pulling the doors closed behind them.

  Thompson ended up in the middle of the bench next to Mackey, with Ross on the opposite end. Hopper gestured to Parsons, who was next to her,
to find the right card in the atlas binder. He inserted it in the slot, and the car took off. "What's the NATSB?" Thompson asked Mackey.

  "The National Automated Transport Safety Board," he explained. "The Postal Bureau builds the P-car system, the Infrastructure Bureau runs the track, and the Mass Transit Bureau handles the switches. But the NATSB certifies any technology carrying passengers and handles safety investigations. I've worked with them a number of times, providing some technical analysis in cases where sensors and track signals had interference issues."

  "Electromagnetic resonance." Parsons nodded, to himself as much as the others inside the car. "Orthogonal Procedures through wave space. Got to keep that third ear open to the etheric music."

  "Complicated stuff," Thompson murmured.

  After passing through Tyson, the tracks met the Potomac and swung southeast towards the capital. Mackey looked out at the looped tracks of the suburban developments, glowing slightly under amber lights, pushing up against the tracks and the river. That synthetic Bach track that had been playing on the radio—now almost two days ago, in the Assistant Secretary's P-car—suddenly looped back through Mackey's mind. Quite vivid, almost as if replayed, not as a memory.

  The city was dark, almost entirely asleep, and yet with a thin trickle of traffic as if the metropolis was turning over gently in dreams. The city of bureaucrats slept, off-duty, but undergoing that necessarily dormant phase that would enable procedures to begin again at nine o'clock. Any one of the glowing apartment buildings housed people, now in states of rest, who were just like himself. Its citizens traveled in cars from home to office, each and every day, and then back again at night. The whirling loops of tracks were part of the federal circulatory system, and naturally engaged in their own rhythms. The inhalation of the day was countered by the exhalation of night, when those cells were returned to the far-flung organs of the suburbs, allowed to recharge in sleep, exchanging the gases that allowed the very metabolism of government. Were the bureaucrats the blood? Were they the nervous system? Or were they the nation's thoughts themselves, released from the protocols of wakeful identity, to lapse into semi-consciousness for eight hours, retreating to the dreamscape of their apartment towers, before being called back into the more highly regimented, logical systems of the federal bureaucratic consciousness . . .