Orthogonal Procedures

by Adam Rothstein

  The ship was large in Mackey's vision, superstructure partially damaged from machine gun fire, but still moving quickly. The cannon on the foredeck was firing rapidly, spraying shells out across the water at the Beta hovercraft, which dodged the plumes of spray from the exploding rounds. Coming about towards them as the cutter attempted to reverse direction, Mackey saw their opening.

  They were too far away for a good shot, but Mackey fired a quick burst across the bow of the cutter to get its attention. It worked. The ship made a line for them as they raced towards it, its cannon turning to engage.

  "Well, it's seen us now," Mackey said. "Full speed ahead! Beta unit, now's the time!"

  He watched as the Beta craft, now free of the fire that had been pursuing it, cut in quickly at an angle from the rear of the cutter. But there wasn't time to watch, as shells began to explode around him and Thompson.

  Without needing to communicate, they split up, again forcing the gunnery crew to pick between targets. They slid side to side, oscillating their angle of approach, ducking back and forth amid the lines of explosions reaching out across the blue water, the shells searching for the rubber hulls of the hovercraft. The distance was rapidly closing.

  Then, the Beta craft reached the target. Flying across the water in a white gust of spray, its guns let loose armor-piercing rounds in the hundreds and thousands. Ripping into the steel plate, the rounds found a fuel line. A blossom of orange flame jetted from the side of the ship, peeling back into a black cloud of thick, oily smoke. The ship quickly changed course, turning into the wind, and the hovercraft beat a hasty retreat back out to sea. Mackey and Thompson, also peeling off in their arcs, watched as the cutter heaved to, engines disabled. Crews raced about the cutter in order to battle the licking fire crawling up the side of the ship towards the deck.

  The last ship, now surrounded by Parsons and two other hovercraft, had turned around and was headed back the way it came.

  "It looks like they're breaking off," Mackey said over the channel.

  "Same here," Ross' voice came over the air. "One ship disabled, one retreating."

  "Excellent. All groups make your heading 190, form up on me. Let's get on with it."

  There were only fifteen hovercraft that rejoined the box formation. Mackey wondered how many troops and sailors were on board each one. His various indicators told him many things—the location of each group, the heading, his targeting information, and how many rounds he had left for each gun. But nothing about the number of lives that were under his remote care.

  As they approached the beach, the craft formed two columns, one behind Hopper, and one behind another craft labeled with the indicator "Able 2."

  "Autopilots will now re-engage to put us in formation as we navigate the tracks," the Assistant Secretary announced.

  The columns of hovercraft hit the beaches at speed, kicking up spray and sand as the down-drafted air propelled the craft over the obstacles. Mackey's view was blocked temporarily by the clouds of dust and moisture, a fog of particulate haze that shrouded the sun. A good thing the autopilot was in control, he decided. Soon, they were on tarmac, and the debris diminished. Mackey felt a bump as his hovercraft climbed the short concrete edge of a P-car track loop in the beach parking area. Felt was a misnomer—his vision jostled, and his body, disconnected and yet still present, reacted with a jolt. But there was no sensation, only awareness of the terrain his vehicle was mounting.

  Soon, they were rocketing down the P-car tracks, past the large stands of Upper Peninsula conifers. The hovercrafts were slower perhaps than P-car travel, but impressive in their size, overlapping four lanes of tracks easily with the large black cushions as they raced in single file.

  Where was the traffic? Mackey wondered. A four-track route would not simply be devoid of cars. It must have been shut down, somehow.

  The area was rural, few buildings were visible along the route. The hovercrafts rushed past the apparent vacancies in a maelstrom of noise and dust. He saw no one—no P-cars, no pedestrian walkways, no windows that anyone might see through.

  After some miles, the convoy of hovercraft hopped off the edge of the tracks, each massive craft sailing over the embankment of the raised track grade before coming down in a cushioned splash onto a graveled lot. Before them was a massive hole nearly a mile wide—a surface mine of some kind, possibly iron, judging from the blackish red color. This must be the National Mine that Hopper mentioned. It was abandoned, empty, a black scar in the wooded landscape. Looking across the gap cut into the earth, Mackey saw another hole, and another, extending off into the distance. Racing along the edge of the mine works, he peered down from the remote view into the angularly sliced depression, terraced with tracks for the giant ore trucks. Below, there was a collection of water in the bottom of the mine, colored an unnatural aqua, rich with mineral runoff.

  Ahead of them were some collapsed warehouses and elevators, where the larger interstate automatic trains must have been loaded. They shot by, kicking up a brown-red dust, passing slag heaps nearly one hundred feet high.

  There was an explosion. At the head of the column, two hovercraft flipped into the air, breaking into pieces as their metal frames landed on the ground again in uncomfortable angles, sending the shards of propeller blades flying back through the column.

  Out of the pit in front of them rose a small helicopter, painted bright white. Very small. Too small to contain a pilot. The bulbous nose of the craft contained no windscreen, and the body was a mere thin strip of metal, holding two wings onto which were mounted the aircraft's only cargo: a pair of rocket pods.

  The helicopter fired again. As the column of hovercraft speeding across the ground could not deviate from its course while on autopilot, the rocket easily found another target. Impacting a hovercraft's fan nacelle, the warhead exploded, sending a fireball skyward and the hovercraft spinning off course, to plummet into the abyss of the open mine on the right side of the column.

  "Hello, Assistant Secretary and associated bureaucrats!" an new voice crackled out of the speaker behind Mackey's head, sounding over-modulated, too close for comfort, spitting through the electromagnetic signal in a wizened voice, tinged with accent. How could it be? But he knew it had to be. It was the voice of Nicholas Roerich, invading their channel.

  Hopper ignored the greeting and spoke to the hovercraft group. "Prepare to take evasive action! Autopilots disengaging in three, two—"

  Suddenly Mackey was no longer in the hovercraft. He was in a P-car—that is to say, above it. He was speeding through the commercial center of a small city in the rain. Looking to his left, he peered into a pedestrian mall, with busy shoppers hurrying to and fro with umbrellas. He blinked involuntarily at the drops of rain that were smeared across his vision.

  Now he was in a different P-car, heading across a bridge. He knew this view—it was the Bay Area, and he was heading from Oakland across to San Francisco, in heavy traffic, cutting in and out of clouds of fog.

  Now he was back in a hovercraft, but a different one. This one had damage, was operating slowly and shakily, cutting across a field of grass before looping around a small lake, orange with iron ore residue. He heard Hopper's voice again on the communication channel: "—trying to break into the data link, stand by for countermeasures! Those still in control, take your—"

  And he was in a car again, approaching a residential block. But above it, as if he was on the roof. As if he was the radar sensor pod, installed above the ovoid bubble of the car. The trees in the complex were flowering. Magnolias, he guessed, judging from the large leaves. What was going on?

  Mackey tried to gain control, looking around him for any sort of indicator. He demanded to stop, putting his entire will against any further forward motion. The P-car stopped on the track, other traffic rapidly reducing speed behind him. It was an odd thing, to see cars stopped on a track. Motionless, frozen, like a film paused on a sing
le frame, while the rest of the world continued by. He looked down through the glare of the sun on the Perspex below him, and saw a pair of occupants below him, fiddling with the control console inside the car.

  And he was in a hovercraft again, speeding under a network of high-voltage power lines, across the brush-covered right-of-way, cleared of trees. Looking behind him, he saw the white helicopter giving chase. He pointed, and to his relief the gun reticles came alive, a deep red, and he fired in the air, spraying bullets across the Michigan sky. The small helicopter dodged, banked to the left, and disappeared behind the pine trees.

  "This never would have happened in a real aircraft!" Mackey heard Parsons yell, to apparently no one in particular.

  Mackey was in a P-car again. He was traveling at high speed along a coastal arterial, rising above the floodplain on a constructed causeway. Which coast, he had no idea. He traveled in complete silence, watching the traffic coming in the opposite direction at relative speeds of what must have been five hundred miles an hour. On his right, the ocean side, waves broke against shattered rock piled against the causeway to minimize erosion. On the shore side, there were large oaks, green beasts with twisting branches, extending off across the floodplain as far as he could see. Such an extent of trees!

  "Can anyone hear me?" Mackey tried the communications channel.

  "I can hear you." It was the voice. Roerich. No one else responded. There was no other sound.

  "I know who you are," Mackey hazarded. But not wanting to bet it all yet, "You're the old man, from the temple in the Sierras."

  "Ah yes," the voice responded, not displeased. "And I know who you are. You must be our new friend in the fine grey suit."

  Mackey was not displeased either, but buried it. "What is it you are trying to do?"

  "Trying to reclaim some stolen property. My apologies for putting you in this strange place. It must be disconcerting. But we will soon be in a different place."

  Mackey watched the surf spray lightly against the rocky embankment as he traveled rapidly along the ocean. Along the tree-lined side of the tracks, he saw rows of odd, ramshackle construction, tucked in among the overhanging branches. Plywood, shipping crates, tarps and other scraps too difficult for him to process at the speed that the P-car was moving had been hastily or shoddily piled into some sort of low, messy buildings. It appeared like stacks of palletized building material, left to moulder in the weather. It must be a Rooseville, Mackey suddenly realized. His father had always hated the name, and would not let him say it in the house even though it was commonly spoken. And then it was gone, and there were only trees, and the ocean.

  "What is it," he tried, "that the Department of Commerce believes it has lost?"

  "That is our business, my friend. But I am sure you will learn about it when it is time…when your superiors desire that you know about it. That is the business of all of us who work in government, is it not? We know what we are supposed to know when we are supposed to know it."

  Mackey thought about the bodies he had seen launched from a disintegrating hovercraft into a high-speed impact with the water. He thought about the long knife that had been held at Thompson's throat on a hilltop in California. He thought about satellites snapping photos, about Parsons' strange tales in the Thermosphere Club, told while the most important technocrats in the world sipped cocktails nearby.

  "There's more to it than that, though, isn't there? I think we both know that."

  The voice chuckled, but suddenly sounded distracted. "There always is. But I'm afraid we must put that off for later. It is time for us to go."

  Mackey was in the laboratory at the NATSB. He was looking down from a table at five bodies, in five tanks. With a sudden rush of discomfort, he realized that one of those bodies was him! He was in the remote, the one they had inspected before teleporting off into this strange network of hovercrafts and P-cars. There was no one else in the room.

  "Why have you brought us here?" he asked.

  But there was no response. Either the voice of Roerich had gone, or he was not answering. Mackey seemed to be trapped. No thought he made seemed to have any effect. On his chest, he felt a strange vibration as if something was crawling across him, and he squirmed in reaction, oddly watching his body in the tank squirm at the exact same time. It was the electromagnetic amulet that Hopper had insisted that they wear. It was under his suit, pressed up against his skin. Suddenly, he had become aware of its presence, in the way that someone might suddenly become aware of their heartbeat. But now the sensation had stopped. Perhaps it was only Mackey's imagination.

  And then he was back in a hovercraft, slowing as it approached a low-slung building surrounded by a barbed wire fence, up against a cluster of very tall pines. Was it the same hovercraft, or a different one? Mackey wasn't sure how he would know. His craft stopped, deflated, and dropped to the ground. Doors opened on both sides, releasing a squad of twenty helmeted troops carrying submachine guns, dressed in Postal Inspector tactical uniforms. They rushed the fence, broke open the gate, and surrounded the building.

  Another hovercraft pulled up, dropped, and disgorged more troops. And then another, and another. A total of ten arrived, and finally from the indicators, Mackey was able to see that Hopper, Parsons, Thompson, and Ross had all made it. Or, were at least back in a hovercraft.

  "Is it over?" Mackey asked. "Is he gone?"

  "I'm told it's over, but be on your guard." Hopper's voice came through the speaker, clear and distinct again. "There was an attempt to mimic the authentication of our projected consciousnesses, in order to get back into the NATSB computer system. The attack failed, and my techs isolated it and shut it out. But they might try again."

  "I saw some weird things," Ross commented. "I was in the bottom of the ocean, and then out in space."

  "I was trapped in a navigational buoy," Parsons lamented, "for what felt like hours."

  "When they mimicked our authentications, the computer responded by routing your projections to other points on the network. By creating a flood of routing traffic, they were hoping to overwhelm the limiting safeguards, and convince the computer their authentications were one of our projections, and ride it back to the origin, so to speak."

  "It seemed," Mackey said questioningly, "that my remote was being put into a number of different P-cars. Like, I was above it. In a place that seemed to be near the radar node. But P-cars do not have cameras in them."

  Hopper hesitated before responding. "It is not widely known . . . but some do have cameras. It is a limited rollout, no more than ten thousand units, across the continental United States only. We are doing a test of remote video transmission to see if the Postal data systems can handle the throughput."

  "These cameras are transmitting video from random cars, all the time?" Thompson asked.

  "Without the owners of the cars having any idea?" Ross was incredulous.

  "The security risk is low," Hopper explained. "The purpose is for safety only. The video feed is anonymized, and there is no way to tell who is in the P-car below the video camera."

  Mackey thought about the occupants of the car he had seen below him, and how it seemed as if he might even have had control over the car. But he changed the subject, not wanting to bring up the further details of his experience speaking with Roerich quite yet. "We are at the site, correct? What happens now?"

  "The Inspectors are securing the facility, and then we'll be released to enter."

  Moments later, the call came over the channel, "Assistant Secretary, site is secured. It appeared to have been evacuated of personnel."

  Mackey watched as the remote ball perched on the front of Hopper's hovercraft popped into the air and began rolling along the ground. "Follow me," she said.

  Before he could form the question, he felt himself tossed upward, and he landed on the grass. He moved in the same way he had piloted the hovercraft, by thinking i
t. His vision was now only a foot from the ground—the images shook back and forth as the image feed passed from camera to camera, scattered across the surface of the remote as he rolled forward. It provoked a bit of nausea at first, but soon he was able to ignore it, just as he ignored the bounce of his footfalls while walking.

  He caught sight of the other remotes rolling along, their triangular edges popping in and out in order to thrust them forward, following the remote indicated as Hopper. She bounced up the steps of the facility, through the door held open by a Postal Inspector.

  Mackey tried to bounce the remote, and quickly discovered he could.

  The five remotes rolled down a hallway inside the building, and into a laboratory.

  "This is probably the control room for the ELF radio apparatus," Mackey realized aloud. "Those cabinets are step-up transformers. There will be additional transformers nearby, the size of whole buildings. The ELF radio requires a lot of power."

  Parsons' remote hopped onto a countertop and moved along it. "Mary, look at these up here."

  Ross' remote followed, and paused while she scrutinized the consoles. "This appears to be a data receiving station. It's getting some sort of downlink, and feeding it into a computer."

  "There are astrological charts," Thompson said, his remote on top of a desk by the wall. "Printed out of the machine here."

  "Well, those are the pieces of the puzzle so far," Hopper announced. "It seems that we can verify that they are receiving information in response to their use of the astrological charts, and then re-broadcasting it via ELF. But to whom?"

  "It would have to be to a submarine," Mackey concluded. "We know the ELF can't reach satellites. And anyway, if it was any land station, there would be a hundred other better frequencies to use than ELF."

  "But why transmit them to submarine?" Ross asked.

  "Assistant Secretary," the commander's voice broke in on the channel. "You should come out to the hangar."