Storm Killer

by Benjamin Blue

  These two computers would be running multiple models of tropical weather simulations and forecasting. The lead scientists onboard could determine the impact of Storm Killer’s technology on the storm with only a ten-minute delay from real time.

  The Admiral reviewed the current plot of the positions of his fleet and nodded his head. “Perfect position. We’re ready to complete our mission!”

  Olsen thought to himself with glee, and once this mission is successfully completed, I should make Vice Admiral.

  He chuckled happily to himself as he walked off the bridge. Little did he know what awaited his ship and his fleet in the next few hours. If he had, he would have ordered the ship turned and headed for home. But he had no such foreknowledge. He went happily along his way not realizing that death awaited him, his crew, and his ship in less than twenty-four hours.

  17

  Incident Or Accident

  Brad was waiting for them in his office when Adam and Greg arrived at the control center. Brad waved them to a small conference table at one corner of his office and shut the door. Taking his seat, Brad sighed and then looked at the two men sitting opposite him. “This was no accident.”

  The two men looked at each other and then back to Brad. “What have you found out?” asked Adam, an alarmed look on his face.

  “The techs got to the sub-processors and found the hardware intact, but the both main and backup input feeds had been reversed. The inputs were telling the system that the airlock and reception area doors were closed. This was not an accident. Someone had to manually reverse those circuits,” Bolino reported. “The computer service module was also taken offline so the diagnostics could not execute. This was a planned, coordinated attack that could have killed many and set our timetable back months or even years.”

  “What does Security think?” asked Greg.

  The “Security” that Greg mentioned was the onboard team of security agents paid for by CORDEX, the prime contractor, but reporting to the office of the NASA Inspector General.

  “They agree that this wasn’t any accident and strongly recommended a formal investigation be launched,” Brad responded. “In fact, the most ardent security officer is waiting in the outer office for authorization to commence.”

  Adam asked, “Brad, do we have anyone on the station security team that has any criminal investigation experience? We’re certainly out of our depths, unless one of you has a hidden past.”

  “I’ve asked myself the same question,” Brad replied. “Yep, our onboard CORDEX security force contains a person who was a detective on the Kansas City Police force prior to joining our project. She’s the one waiting outside. A real ball-buster type.”

  “She? Do you mean Kim Danby? What’re her credentials?” queried Greg.

  Brad scanned the screen on his personal wristband computer and replied, “Apparently she was hired because of a paper she wrote on dealing with crimes in space. Seems the international nature of our space program leads to some interesting twists and turns in jurisdiction and adjudication. She started out as lawyer and became a police officer after the disenfranchised minorities uprising of ’09. Her family was murdered during the Los Angeles riot that year. The murderers were never caught. She, herself, was badly injured by the perpetrators. Her successfully closed case rate as a cop is over ninety percent.”

  Adam smiled and stated, “Kim is going to earn her pay this week. Let’s get her in here and brief her. I suggest we let her run the investigation and get the hell out of her way.”

  To this both declaration, Brad and Greg nodded their head in agreement. Brad added, “She can have what ever she wants and needs on this.”

  Adam said, “Call her in.”

  Security Officer Kimberly Danby entered the conference room with no fanfare. She was an above average looking thirty-eight-year-old woman. There was just a hint of gray streaks in her brown hair. She wore no makeup and dressed in the dark blue and white unisex uniform of a CORDEX Security Officer.

  She wasted no words and tersely summarized the current situation and then asked for the authorizations to start an immediate investigation. She never smiled nor frowned. She was thoroughly professional and no nonsense in the eyes of the three men.

  Adam nodded at Brad. Greg made a thumbs-up sign. Brad moved to his desk and spoke as he was typing on his keypad. “Officer Danby, y’all are hereby authorized to investigate the incident that just occurred and you may utilize any resources of this station in that mission. Adam, Greg, myself, and the various department heads will defer to your experience in this matter and take orders from you related to furthering the investigation. We will continue with our current schedule to begin Storm Killer’s attack on Hurricane Edna while you mount the investigation.”

  The laser spit out a formal order from Brad to Kim covering the items he was discussing verbally. This written order was instantly transmitted to the department heads.

  Kim took the paper, folded it, and placed it in her pocket. She looked at each man in turn and then simply stated, “Gentlemen, we have a saboteur in our midst. Let’s flush him out.”

  18

  Storm Killer Attacks

  On command, Storm Killer slowly turned herself, positioning the reflective web to best capture the unfiltered sunlight of near Earth space.

  The three remaining webs of magnifying films began to slowly flutter as the SKIDs worked to move the webs to the optimum-computed positions. At exactly eight hours sixteen minutes ten seconds, all the webs were in perfect alignment. The entire bottom third of Storm Killer was ablaze with backwash white light so bright anyone staring at it for more than a few seconds would be forever blinded. No laser had ever generated such a large intense beam of light.

  The brilliant beam of light arched down toward the boiling storm named Edna. Specks of dust trapped in the upper atmosphere sparkled as they almost instantly reached their flash point and boiled away in the intense heat contained in the concentrated sunlight. As the beam traveled the thousands of kilometers to the storm cloud tops, it widened until at the target area, it was a circle of light four kilometers in diameter.

  Water vapor within the cone of light and intense heat boiled away and immediately condensed in the super cold air outside the cone. Tremendous quantities of cold rain and ice began to fall into the upper clouds of the hurricane for a distance of three to four kilometers beyond the cone. This cold rain and ice would continue to fall into the storm until Storm Killer stopped its generation of the super concentrated light beam.

  The computer projections were that over the next thirty-six hours, the chilling rain and ice would begin to wreck havoc in the hurricane’s weather engine. The super cold rain would penetrate deeper and wider into the storm clouds and moderate the updrafts and downdrafts of air that assisted in generating much of the storm’s energy.

  Storm Killer’s positioning thrusters were now commanded to fire, maneuvering the station into a slight circular motion causing a sway of one quarter of a degree in six minutes. The cone of light began to move slowly in a counterclockwise direction around the eye wall. At this rotation speed, the light/heat cone would take two hours to complete the entire circuit around the top of the eye wall.

  While the addition of the intense, icy precipitation was a major factor in the projected dissipation of the storm, the overriding factor was the super heating of the upper cloud layers that would cause the temperature gradient from the ground level to the upper level of the storm to decrease by one to one and half degrees centigrade every twelve hours. Sufficient reduction in this temperature gradient would shut down the internal weather engine driving the storm.

  Storm Killer would attack the hurricane for nineteen hours a day until the storm showed signs of weakening. The remaining time, it would be in the Earth’s shadow as it and the Earth rotated through the day.

  The computers on Storm Killer were continuously calculating and recalculating the angle of the platform and film webs, the speed of the hurricane’s forward
motion, and the circular motion required to play the light beam across the entire eye wall. An additional two hundred flight variables were added to the calculations to keep Storm Killer targeted and the full power of the sun focused on the job at hand.

  At input variable one hundred and sixty-eight, a decimal point was shifted one position by a worm program hiding in the input processor operating system. At each succeeding input variable, the worm introduced a minor variation.

  The controlled oscillation of the platform slowed and the light beam coned straight down into the center of the eye of Edna. As soon as the targeting anomaly was detected, the control center staff began diagnostics to determine the cause of the glitch. Unless something was done quickly, the surface water in the eye of the storm would begin heating which could lead to an even stronger storm being produced.

  The worm remained undetected for the first twenty minutes following the start of the anomaly until an astute computer engineer detected a minor mainframe storage increase that was not there in any of the prior system test runs. Once detected, it took less than a minute to introduce and execute a scrubbing program that removed the worm. Control was restored.

  Storm Killer continued her attempt to kill Edna.

  19

  On The Rabbit’s Trail

  Kim wasted no time after receiving authority to launch the investigation into the air lock sabotage. She ordered all memory stick recordings of the security cameras for the entire twenty-four hours prior to the airlock incident to be delivered to the security desk. No camera was located in the exact spot where the sabotage occurred, but the entrances to the computer system rack rooms were covered.

  With some legwork and mental prowess, it should prove fairly easy to determine who the probable offender was.

  Kim set up a desk within the Control Center building. This allowed her to coordinate the investigation, have immediate access to the department heads, and be able to easily meet with Brad, Adam, and Greg for scheduled status meetings.

  They all preferred face-to-face meetings in the Control Center rather than teleconferencing from various sites within the dumbbell. Even with encryption, someone who really wanted to overhear such electronic meetings could break the cipher and listen in.

  Until more was known about the criminal or criminals, security measures would stay at the highest levels.

  Currently, Brad, Adam, and Greg were taking shifts to act as a guard at the mainframe computer complex. As personnel cleared interrogation and a rapid but thorough background check by ground-based CORTEX and governmental agencies, they would be assigned to this guard duty. Until then, only the three trusted executive personnel would do the guard duty.

  Since Brad had come down with a bad case of the flu, Adam and Greg had split his shift. Brad had gone to Dr. Cruz, was checked out, given a medication, and told to go to bed for twenty-four hours.

  Lt. Randall James outranked her, but with the orders written by the Storm Killer Director, Kim assumed full command authority. Lt. James was not happy about this, but he did his duty.

  Lt. James had experience and background with electronic surveillance. He’d been an operative from one of the numerous intelligence agencies that had sprung up in the years following the earliest terrorists attacks in the United States. His special area of expertise was electronic surveillance. He had perfected this skill spying upon the various radical organizations in the western United States.

  He’d left the intelligence organization after what most people called the ‘Waco II incident of ’15 occurred. He’d never been able to shake the feeling of guilt in his role in the death of all of those people.

  Even though his role had been minor and he had not raised a weapon against them, he was haunted by the cold, calculated way his field commander had ordered the death of over sixty save-the-Earth cult members whose only apparent crimes were failure to pay taxes and possession of a small cache of ancient automatic rifles that no longer worked.

  He was already hard at work reviewing the sticks’ memory using computer technology that scanned each recording and only displayed images when movement was detected. Each recorded scene of movement was being copied to a chronological file by location.

  The third member of the Storm Killer security team was Dan Hoch, a strapping six foot six inch shaven head former beat cop from New Orleans. He had resigned from the police department after the televised beating of an elderly man after Hurricane Katrina had devastated the city. He had participated in that incident much to his sorrow.

  After Katrina, he had lost his home and young family to the floods. He worked over two weeks with only a few hours of sleep. The pain and hurt in his life had welled up in him until finally, just like New Orleans’ levees, his mental levee had broken. He snapped and, with the three other police officers at the scene, had beaten the man, causing extensive internal injuries and broken bones.

  After lengthy therapy, he understood his loss and his fragile mental state. He went to the man he had beaten to apologize and seek his forgiveness. The man had looked at Hoch and saw his anguish. He raised a hand to stop Hoch in the middle of his apology and simple said, “Be well. Go, my brother, and do some good.” The man had dropped the charges pending against Hoch. The police department had allowed Hoch to resign with nothing being placed on his immaculate record. After a lengthy rehab period, Hoch felt he was ready to ‘do some good’ and sought employment with CORDEX security.

  Hoch had investigated several warehouse pilfering cases and had been key in breaking up an international ring of thieves responsible for millions of dollars in lost warehouse assets belonging to a number of large corporations.

  He had been astonished when CORDEX had approached him about taking one of the security positions aboard Storm Killer.

  With his shaven head and weightlifter build, most of the contingent on Storm Killer referred to Hoch as “Mr. Clean” from the old TV cleaning detergent commercials. His size alone offered an intimidation factor that many thought important to the Security department.

  Hoch was drawing up a working list of those personnel who were on duty during the twenty-four hour period. This list would be used to verify the recorded images of those authorized to be in the area. These would be the first people interrogated. If their stories proved true, the people listed who were in the area for no authorized reason would be detained and interrogated.

  Hoch had already set up a containment area in one of the twenty-man dormitory areas that had been used to house some of the recently departed construction personnel. The dormitory was a separate module that had a cycling hatch that could be locked. The dormitory was to have been jettisoned after the construction crew departed, but it now would serve as a temporary jail facility. Only Hoch had the newly entered access codes that opened and closed the dorm’s hatch door.

  Just as Kim began to feel she had the investigation moving along well, the second attack on Storm Killer occurred.

  20

  Incident Re Dux

  The department heads were in attendance at the emergency meeting called by Kim to review the latest effort by the saboteurs. She now believed there was more than one person involved. No one who had been identified as nearing the computer complex around the time of the airlock incident was anywhere near the three workstations identified as the only ones capable of allowing a worm to be introduced to the system.

  This information she gave to the station executives at the emergency meeting. She was interrupted by Brad’s fit of coughing and sneezing.

  “Damn. Sorry, Kim. I went to the doctor’s office and got a vile potion she guaranteed would cure me quickly. I took it last night, went out like a light, and actually feel much better today,” Brad apologized with a raspy voice.

  The technician who had found and removed the worm was being used as the computer forensics expert in Kim’s investigation. Kim deduced that if this tech had introduced the worm, he would have done everything he could to hide its existence. Instead, he had detected it and re
moved it quickly enough to avoid it doing serious damage.

  The technician reported that only the three identified workstations had the security access levels required to get to the system location the worm had inhabited and they were the only ones with external memory stick readers. These readers would have been required to allow the perpetrator to download the worm program into the system.

  He’d initially reported that only a knowledgeable computer person could have gotten around the login and activity logs, as was apparently the case. No suspicious activity had been found in the logs. But then the tech also noted that the created date of login and activity log files did not match that of the other logs in this part of the system. The entire set of log files should have all been initially created at the same time. But these two logs carried a creation date and time stamp exactly matching the time of the worm introduction.

  These logs had been intentionally altered at the time of the worm’s introduction! Very poor cover up attempt, opinioned the computer tech. He now changed his previous opinion and stated that the perpetrator was probably rather naïve about computers and was more than likely just following a simple set of instructions provided to them.