Airship Nation (Darkworld Chronicles Book 2)

by Tom DeMarco

  Loren didn’t remember. A voice behind him said, “Here, let me.” He stood aside to let Kelly sit down at the console in her white robe.

  She keyed in the command. Loren turned away from the screen. He waited for her to say who it was. She said it without emotion: “Sonia.”

  When they had first accessed SHIELA from Baracoa, Edward had instructed the system to deny access to all users except themselves. No one could sign on to SHIELA without giving one of the five remaining IDs: Kelly, Loren, Homer, Edward and Sonia. Use of the ID would only be possible for someone who knew the associated password. When Lamar had begun using SHIELA, Edward had created a new ID for him. But no one had thought to remove Sonia’s access permissions.

  Loren was aware of the young woman Yazmin, coming up behind him. He took her by the arm and sent her out to wake Edward, who lived just a few minutes from Monterreal. Then he picked up the phone by the door, and used it to call the Proctor. He explained what had happened. Buxtehude had a small pavilion moored over his roof with a crew on board. He said he would be at the castle within twenty minutes.

  “Look at this,” Kelly was saying. “She has signed on dozens of times since about eleven last evening. Sometimes she’s only connected for a minute or two. The longest period she has been on is less than a quarter hour.”

  “She’s having trouble staying connected,” Loren guessed. “Her power might be unsteady or she may have a marginal link up to the satellite. So she keeps getting bounced off. But she has managed to make some sort of a change to Revelation-13. Let’s print the program.”

  Armitage stepped over to a unit that was four feet wide and looked like it might weigh as much as a ton. When he operated the power switch on its side, it began to give off a whining, grinding sound.

  “What the hell is that?” Loren had to raise his voice over the noise.

  “Our printer,” Armitage said ruefully. “The Revolutionary Government of Cuba was not exactly on good terms with the nations that made sophisticated technology. This is a Russian product, made as an exact copy of an IBM 1403 line-printer from about 1960. But it prints. You can’t hear yourself think while it’s printing, but it prints.”

  After a few moments of warm-up time the printer was ready. Kelly entered the command to have it print a copy of Revelation-13 as Sonia had modified it. The racket when the printing started was extraordinary. The unit shook visibly each time the hammers made contact with the metal print belt. When Edward arrived, Loren had to take him outside to explain what had happened. Armitage stepped out with them.

  “I can’t believe we forgot to cut off her access,” Loren finished up.

  Edward shook his head. “We couldn’t have. Her priority is the same as ours. SHIELA won’t let you change the access permissions of a peer.”

  “But that can’t be. You removed the access codes for everyone else, all the Pentagon people. They had the same priorities as us or even higher.”

  “I didn’t remove their codes. I couldn’t. You used to know this, but you have just forgotten. They are all still there. Even Rupert Paule has a current ID and open permissions to use SHIELA.”

  “But I thought I remembered…”

  “We allocated all the memory to ourselves. That’s how we have kept them from ever being able to sign on. Every bit of memory, every single byte of it, is assigned to our subgroup, Cornell. So users in any different subgroup can’t get logged on, because SHIELA can’t find even enough space to write their passwords down. Once she identifies them as part of a group other than Cornell, she locks them out. It was a dumb omission in the security subsystem that let us do that.” Armitage looked pained. He had designed the security subsystem himself.

  “And Sonia is part of subgroup Cornell,” said Loren.

  “Right. So she still has access. I don’t know what we could have done to cut her out.”

  The sound of the printing suddenly stopped. They turned to go back into the laboratory. “Ed, I want you to look at the program,” Loren explained. “After four years, I suspect you’re the only one still competent to read the code and figure out what she has done.” Edward nodded.

  “I have a little bad news for you boys,” Lamar said. “The printer has a Cyrillic print bar. So even though the words are in English, the characters aren’t, if you see what I mean. They’re Russian characters.” Edward groaned. “Oh, it’s not so terrible. It takes you ten minutes or so to get accustomed to it. After that, you don’t even notice. Like Pig Latin. I’ll help you.”

  Edward and Lamar sat down to decipher the listing. The others stood by the terminal, watching the log being updated. Sonia had not signed on since they had been watching, but there had been unsuccessful attempts to connect. Each of these aborted “calls” was logged by SHIELA.

  Proctor Buxtehude arrived and was filled in by Loren. They spoke outside again, in the courtyard, so as not to disturb Edward and Lamar. By the time they came back in, Ed was ready to explain the change Sonia had inserted.

  “She’s done two things that matter. The first is that she has put a temporary lock on the program. That means SHIELA has recorded that she is working on it and won’t let anybody else change it. I say it’s temporary, but there is no time limit. She’s got it until she gives it up. And she’s not going to do that. The result is that we can’t undo the changes she’s making.

  “The second thing is that she’s put a limit on the vertical angle the HBs can direct their lasers. I have no idea why she would want to do that. Before she began, the lasers could be directed at any angle. Now they can’t fire above themselves. Only it makes no sense to me. It doesn’t really limit us: we can still fire on any target on earth. Why would she care about stopping us from firing out into space? There is nothing that we would ever want to shoot at that is above the HBs.”

  Kelly was the only one who was sitting down. After no one said anything for a long time, she spoke. “There’s SHIELA herself. SHIELA is in orbit another 60 miles out from the Hard Bodies. Sonia has re-programmed Revelation-13 so we can’t use it to destroy SHIELA.”

  It still wasn’t clear to Loren. “But why? Why should we want to destroy SHIELA? Even if Sonia now has access to Revelation, even if she tries to use it against our fleet, it is still an invaluable weapon to us. We can stay miles ahead of her in access technology. We can fire the lasers faster and more accurately than she can. She can’t even maintain a link. SHIELA is still a huge advantage to us.”

  “No. SHIELA is a terrible threat to us. We have got to destroy it.”

  “The Princess is right, of course,” Proctor Buxtehude said. “If we can, we have got to fire on SHIELA tonight.”

  “Don’t you see, Loren?” Kelly went on. “We can’t use SHIELA against Sonia because we don’t know where she is. But she knows exactly where we are. We are sitting ducks. She can sweep the lasers back and forth over Baracoa and St. James. She could sweep methodically over the entire island. When she was done, every living thing on Victoria would be dead.”

  The fact that Sonia kept trying to connect to SHIELA indicated that she had more work to do to accomplish her goal. Loren postulated that the fix she had made to the section of the program that set the HB firing angle might have only been one of several changes needed. Edward went back to the printout. In another quarter hour, he had found what he was looking for.

  “Here it is,” he said. “She’s only protected against us setting the initial vertical angle above the horizontal. There’s nothing to stop us from using the sweep commands to move from the initial setting to any angle, even straight up. So we can set the initial angle to as high as it will go and then make the laser sweep upward on an arc that will eventually intersect with SHIELA. SHIELA will keep instructing the laser to shift it’s angle up an increment and fire, and then shift up further and fire, until it finally fires directly into the command satellite. And then SHIELA will be no more. If I were Sonia, I would be trying to sign on now to modify the sweep command so we couldn’t do that.”


  “So we have to decide,” said Loren. “We can still destroy SHIELA. But do we have to?”

  “What else?” said Kelly. She turned to the Proctor, who nodded.

  Loren had a sick feeling that if SHIELA were destroyed, they would suddenly think of an obvious way to have avoided it. But there was no time. He calculated the sweep himself, and Kelly keyed it in. Three minutes later the screen in front of them froze. SHIELA had gone silent. The satellite and all equipment on board had been destroyed. It was over.

  10

  THE GOOD SOLDIER

  Among the Academy of Arts and Sciences people who had been at the awards dinner in Ft. Lauderdale the night the world went dark was a woman in her mid-fifties named Cynthia Jouvet. She was a sculpture artist who had pieces on display at the Metropolitan in New York and in fancy galleries in Georgetown and San Francisco and Newport Beach. It was she who had designed the medal that the Society awarded to Homer on the night of May 15. In the unusual aftermath of that awards ceremony, she had made the trip from Ft. Lauderdale to Baracoa on board the yawl Kiruna and begun a new life. If her exact circumstances had been better understood, she would never have been included on Homer’s list. She wouldn’t have been included, because he had tried not to include anyone who would leave ties behind. Though the Society handout had listed her as Miss C. Jouvet, she was in fact Mrs. C. Jouvet. The tie she left behind was her husband.

  It had crossed her mind as she packed her few things that night in the Marina Hotel not to go, but to try instead to find her way north to be re-united with her husband. It had crossed her mind, but only briefly. They had had a horrid fight the evening before her departure for Ft. Lauderdale, and it still rankled. It began to seem like fate that circumstances were driving them apart. And so, Cynthia Jouvet had finished her packing and left with the fleet.

  Back in the plush suburb of Millersville, Maryland, Emile Jouvet was assembling an early and surprisingly informed understanding of the events of May 16. He had connections in the military establishment, having been a contract officer for his company, providing electronic equipment to the Naval Procurement Office and to the Marine Command. As soon as it was clear that his Porsche was not going to start and that nobody else’s car would be running either, he had pumped up the tires of Cynthia’s bicycle and wobbled his way over to Admiral Zahniser’s home in Annapolis for a chat. By the early part of June, not three weeks after the Effector had been turned on, he was clear on two things that most people outside government hadn’t yet learned: First, that Ft. Lauderdale had been the site where the critical action had taken place (he was still not sure just what that critical action had been); and Second, that the Academy of Arts and Sciences members there, including his own wife were somehow involved.

  In mid-August, Jouvet got a tip from a friend in the administration that the government was about to requisition all private sailing craft. He had a sleek Erickson 40, Le Petit Cygne, which he kept in a yacht club anchorage at Oxford, Maryland. Loyalty to country and to the administration he had served ran strong in Jouvet, but not strong enough to make him give up his lovely yacht. So he packed some food and gear in a backpack and biked down the peninsula to Oxford. When he cast off, he headed south.

  In the back of his mind, Jouvet always intended to catch up with his wife and finish the argument. She wasn’t going to get away with having the final word and then disappearing. He had been thinking for the past three months all the things he should have said that night. Some of them were devastating. He expected that Cynthia would be soundly bested by the good sense of his discourse, if not its volume. Then, after she had been forced to concede, he would apologize abjectly for having been such a jerk. Or maybe he would apologize first and then astound her with the clarity of his logic. One way or the other, he would find her and resolve their fight. They had been married for more than a quarter of a century, and were still in love, even when they were hating each other.

  But once on his way, the urgency of finding Cynthia left him. She was a self-sufficient woman, so he had no doubts she would prosper in the new order of things. From what he had learned from his contacts, she was likely to be somewhere on the island of Cuba, a place where there were no harsh winters to worry about and not too much hassle to finding your next meal. The last thing he wanted to do was arrive immediately, all concerned, and show that he had been worried about her. He thought he would give her a few more months to wonder whether he was coming at all. In the meantime, he poked through the Bahamas, camping and fishing like a gentleman of leisure. It was finally more than a year before he turned up at Baracoa Beach.

  “The business of business is business,” Jouvet liked to say. In casting about for some useful function to perform in the community, he realized that the business to be in was money. There was no money in Baracoa at the beginning; the community was run like an extended school for which all the tuition and fees had been paid in advance. But by the time of Jouvet’s arrival, it was clear that something more formal than the present barter arrangement would be nice for the future. Jouvet petitioned Chancellor Brill for a monopoly on the minting of money. He spent the next year scrounging gold from the villages and towns in the vicinity and experimenting with casting techniques. Before long he was ready to make an initial distribution of coins to all residents. He announced that the only ways to get more were to trade for them or to deliver more gold to the mint (this took care of his future raw materials problems).

  The success of the Jouvet money was not only due to the need the economy had for a payment mechanism. The coins themselves were remarkably handsome things. The large ten dollar coin had the image of a pudgy bare infant on one side, smiling and holding onto one foot. On the other side it said VICTORIA —TEN DOLLARS. The smaller one dollar coin had as its device the infant’s chubby hand, partly open with its fingers extending upward. It implied Peace, but also conveyed a gentle reminder to back off. That was a message that Victoria felt very comfortable sending to the rest of the world. The twenty dollar coin, when it came along, had a picture of Monterreal Castle on the back, opposite the same fat baby. All of the sculpted images were designed by Cynthia Jouvet.

  Within a few years Emile had a business that was literally coining money, and a handsome bank building with his name on the cornerstone in St. James. But he was bored. He wandered around the centers of commerce and government in the city, looking for someone to give advice to. The principal someone he selected was Chancellor Brill. Brill complained about it to Chandler Hopkins. The latter listened sympathetically and did nothing. A Chancellor with Jouvet bugging him half the time and Suzikaya the other half had very little time to bother Chandler.

  It seemed likely that Rupert Paule still had no knowledge that Victoria had lost her principal weapon, that is, unless Sonia had informed him herself. No one had any idea of what Sonia’s motives might be, but they were assuming she hadn’t joined forces with Washington. The Proctor believed that she was an independent, pursuing still unknown goals of her own.

  The priority subject for the defense of the island was to develop some replacement for the laser weapons. Loren was at the center of this effort, all the more so since Ed Barodin had become so involved in the private sector. Loren had cajoled and tried to entice him into the defense effort, but Edward was having none of it. In a less maddeningly libertarian society, they could have drafted him and probably would have.

  Loren set up three research projects oriented toward three alternative weapons. The first was the easiest to conceive of, but the hardest to pull off: re-establishing contact with the Hard Body satellites, and controlling them directly from a ground station. This would involve putting together a computer center to replace the functions that SHIELA had performed in directing the HBs. As Armitage pointed out, the HBs had a sophisticated lockout mechanism to prohibit anyone from seizing control of them. The Victoria ground station would have to be more sophisticated still to outwit the lockout. It was a long shot, but they had to try it, if only to stay ahead of t
he other side’s attempts to seize the HBs themselves.

  The second project was to build a guided projectile that could be controlled by light wave radio. The projectile might be as unsophisticated as a lead weight propelled from the firing pavilion by some sort of human-powered catapult, but guided after launch toward its target. It was a step up from the brick throwers that Loren had experimented with a year before.

  The final project was a drone pavilion, operated by remote control, that would sail at altitudes as high as thirteen miles to focus the sun’s rays on a target by controlling a huge array of lenses.

  All three of the projects pointed toward Victoria’s weakness in computer technology. For the third project, for example, the array of lenses Loren envisioned would need a micro-computer on each lens platform to manage its local Effectors and another one to direct its lens accurately on the target. In addition, there would be computers on the drone pavilion to receive instructions from below and to manage sails and Effector indexing, and more computers on the battle pavilion that controlled it. Finally, there would be a substantial ground support effort in St. James to write the software for all those computers. The other projects too required multiple computers.

  Loren spoke before the council on the need for more modern equipment. “We need the technology of the twenty-first century,” he told them, “but what we have is the technology of the nineteenth.” He described the Russian printer that shook itself nearly to death each time it ran, printed painfully slowly, and then gave them a printout in Cyrillic pig latin.

  As soon as Loren sat down, Armitage stood up to describe the computing center he had assembled at Johns Hopkins. It made even the Cornell facility sound primitive. The key to productivity that the Johns Hopkins group was just beginning to achieve, he said, had been the switch to a new kind of computer, an advanced form of workstation manufactured by Apple Computers. He explained that these “jMac” workstations and servers had been delivered with an extraordinary library of reusable program components, so that the construction of new applications often involved nothing more than assembling together components with literally no new programming. Armitage believed Apple had been years ahead of the rest of the world. Finally Proctor Buxtehude stood up and emphasized how critical it was for Victoria to assemble the kind of facility Armitage had just described. He asked the council to make a one-time exception to the embargo rules to allow a “shopping expedition” to go to into American territory and bring back the computers. They would send six battle pavilions altogether, three to clean out the computer center at Johns Hopkins, and three to raid a distribution center in New Hampshire, the richest concentration of Macintosh computers anywhere. Buxtehude said they could expect little or no resistance at either site, since it was unlikely that anyone was thinking very seriously about computers in an America that was so starved for electricity.