Fulcrums of the Universe: A TESS NOVEL #2

by Randy Moffat

  “Spill it!” I said abruptly. He shrugged.

  “She went through our program sweet as pie, we monitor them all and she did not communicate anywhere along the way with her superiors that we could detect… but Murray here wisely created a shill at the end. Before graduation we brought them in and handed them a load of ‘technical’ drive related information that looks pretty darn convincing. Each set we hand out is unique as a fingerprint though. Two days later we spotted whole parts of the agent’s packet being pushed to the FBI.”

  Luckily Craig had suggested six months ago that two could play the penetration game as well as TESS’ opponents and we now have a couple ‘friends’ in the FBI—one a was a paid informant and the other an actual true believer in the TESS revolution. Us being an acknowledged revolution with followers and well wishers scattered about made me a bit smug now and then… . until I heard things that stomped on my smugness like this one.

  “We are agreed. There is no question.” Wong said. “We have positive identification on the data. It had to be her. She is an agent.”

  It figured it was a ‘her.’ A female. The female of the species is the deadliest. Peachy. I mouthed a naughty but unoriginal word to prove I was listening.

  “It is our first true threat to all the new TESS’ internal security layers.” Wong rattled on. “We agreed that if anyone penetrated to level V we would have to meet and agree on how to handle the situation… thinking it would never happen. Or at least it would not happen for some time. The time had come—five years before our estimated worst scenario date and here we are. I did not want to use communications that might have the slightest chance of being tapped to talk this over. We are here today face to face to find out how you want to proceed.”

  I mouthed another overused word and stalled like all great leaders.

  “Suggestions?” I asked.

  “Prison on a desert island?” Craig was old school. Women were oddly sacrosanct and to be treated with kid gloves. Another generation. Still, he had a point. TESS actually had been ceded a few deserted islands in the Pacific. Mostly worthless real estate given up in trade by Polynesian nation states for using TESS’ equipment and personnel after they figured out that coconuts were only worth so much as currency. We could literally create a remote gulag and sequester someone out there in the Pacific reasonably easily.

  I rubbed my chin as Wong spoke up in opposition.

  “Craig is on the right track, but I have a couple objections. An earth side island is still too close to deter the bad guys from wanting to recover her. We might get away with it for a while, but the US has considerable satellite assets. If they put their minds to it they would eventually detect the place we have sequestered her. I was thinking a prison further away… out of reach… out on the Boiler for example. Safer from Earth nations than an island earth side. Who is ever going to find her out there? Pretty escape proof too… unless you are TESS and have the MacMoran drive.” Wong rubbed his chin this time. The ‘Boiler’ was actually a series of iron tanks and other hollow items including an actual industrial boiler the size of a turn-of-the-century aristocrat’s house. We had bought the monster along with the smaller bits, remnants of the Soviet era in Russia. Having picked up the whole lot for scrap cost, we’d lifted it up into vacuum a piece at a time, welded it all back together sloppily, but tightly enough to hold air and simply parked the haphazard rig out beyond the moon at the L2 LaGrange point where the gravity fields roughly balanced gravity between Earth and Luna. It was handy to the moon for missions there. We had pressurized it with atmosphere only recently and parked a half dozen TESS accelerated graduate personnel in it as an improvised space station with full time manning. Service station may have been more verbally accurate. Since we built it we had begun to accumulate various forms of useful logistical items at the Boiler including some quantities of water, preserved food supplies and nuclear fuel for ship reactors against a few possible contingency plans when critical materials might someday be denied to us back on the mother world. I had initially called the place “Rainy day” during one of our long range planning sessions. I was in danger of becoming a right old pessimist. Bullets being put violently inside me had that effect and I touched my scars for good luck.

  I looked over at Murray who had been silent so far. Murray looked around at each of us and shook his head in what appeared to be increasing annoyance.

  “OK! I’ll be the bad guy here then. The hardcore asshole.” He finally spoke up. “I don’t love saying this, but it needs to be said. I think prisoners are just too damned complicated. Call me devil’s advocate, but can’t we just whack her? Put a gun to her head and pop caps into her noggin. She is just too dangerous to us and it would be kinder to her in the long run than locking her up for the rest of her life. Easier both for us, for her and for the poor bastards out on the Boiler who would have to watch her forever until she dies of old age. Same goes for the Devil’s Island notion. Any security force we would need to throw together to guard an island down there on dirt-side would be there for the long haul. Any and every way you spell it incarceration just adds up to be a logistical and personnel nightmare, not to mention a growing and ongoing budgetary pain in the butt. Do we really need this on top of everything else we have on our plates? Who could blame us? We are at war for the survival of TESS! Agents like her are enemy soldiers in the fight.”

  I looked at Murray closely with wrinkles between my eyebrows.

  “And who is going to pull this hypothetical trigger exactly?” I asked curiously in a low and rational voice.

  He hesitated and then shrugged. He was reluctant to answer. He visibly overcame his hesitation.

  “I was going to bring you up to speed on this soon… but I have hired the core of a special Brutus team we have been talking about. They are training on our base outside Ulan Bator now.” Murray said with false blandness. I looked at him more closely. He was my head of intelligence and therefore my head of dirty tricks. We had discussed the possible need someday for a small agile counter terrorism force modeled on Earth’s special forces that could possibly help us by using their skills in rapid operations against targets in various countries around the globe to shut down small but serious threats to TESS before they happened. It was a logical proposition considering how much TESS had already been targeted by clandestine and unconventional forces, but we had not finalized anything. I trusted Murray and tried to stay out of his business whenever possible. It came as a surprise to me then that he had gone ahead with Brutus without specifically telling me ahead of time. I glanced over at Craig who met my gaze absently while working split screen to cast annoyed looks over at his cousin Murray… clearly he had not known either. Craig and I were not helpless. He and I had established a handful of personal moles in Murray’s section to guard against him going too far into black operations without our knowing about it. Something like my own Secret du Roi—The guardians guardians or ‘G.G.s’ as Craig called them when we talked privately. The GGs were counterweights balancing the teeter totter of Murray’s power inside TESS least he ever get it in his head to end run the official power structure. Apparently we both had failed to put them in the right places because it was clear in Craig’s glance that neither of us had detected this move by Murray before now. A lesson learned for us. I looked Murray calmly in the eye—pinning him like a bug in a collection.

  “So enlighten me… this Brutus team you built is a bunch of stone killers? The kind of guys who put Kalashnikovs into the mouths of people and pull the trigger before they go off to a nice lunch and a nap?” I carefully kept any sarcasm out of my voice and made it a level headed question. “Put another way are these guys and gals who just follow orders and will just ‘do it’ when you want them to ice this agent in cold blood?”

  Murray looked a bit guilty which I took as good sign that he still had some semblance of a conscience to be troubled by the question. I liked him. We were on the same side and I wanted
to stay that way.

  “Uhhh… . probably not that easily. Look… . I tried to pick straight shooters for the team—level headed psych test passing types… the good guys not the psychos. People who really like the idea of TESS. I think I was successful… but… .”

  “That’s a mighty big ‘but.’ A ‘but’ that implies there is at least one guy on the team who slipped through. One who is going to waste this female infiltrator when you snap your fingers. That is the one and only psychotic in the crew then?”

  Murray deflated a bit under this line of questioning. He held up both palms in negation.

  “No… look… I tried to keep them all sane. A few are ex-special forces and a couple are former SAS with one… . well… one old time SPETSNAZ. They are all chosen to meet a certain profile though. They are cocky… even arrogant. They are also… experienced… in their craft. Inclined to honor violence rather than peaceful intentions when involved in situations of… open warfare. I just thought for a moment it might be possible that one of them… . they might stretch… a point… if I…” He ground to a halt almost in embarrassment trying to frame his already transparent thought.

  I nodded carefully.

  “Imagine my relief that you are hesitating here!” I said letting an IV drip of sarcasm finally leak into my voice. “No-go gentlemen!” I backed the statement up with the iron of my quiet but definitive power of Admiralty veto voice. “I will not have TESS devolve into a band of cold-ass murderers. We have enough on our plates without adding pangs of conscience that keep me awake at night. Fair fights are OK, but just plain dropping someone without notice… creating dead people out of live ones by a wave of the hand resulting in simple acts of execution or assassination… even icing an ‘enemy’ agent found inside our camp is not . . . say again not our general policy… check?” I looked very sternly at Murray and after he backed down visibly from the idea I shifted my gaze to each of the others so that there could be no question of something like an even vote on the topic that could later be misconstrued as permission. I liked them all, we were brothers in spirit if not in genes, but I was the boss here. Each acquiesced with eloquent body language.

  “Good. That is settled!” I made an emphatic gesture. “You want to kill people you can only do it with my permission. To be clear that permission will be really hard to come by. Really difficult! TESS will not murder this agent in cold blood. As a general statement of TESS policy we’ll reserve that kind of thing for guys with guns actually pointing at us… not helpless prisoners.” I started talking faster. “Rear Admiral Wong is right also. I do not want to saddle the Boiler crew with prisoners. Not their job. I also agree that an island on the planet is too great a risk too… frankly we can barely protect the places we are currently using down there without adding more. Instead… for now… we already have a secure locale. M… I want you to hire a small handful of professional turn-keys. Mr. Murray… you will also turn some of the back rooms of your intelligence section at the bat caves into a temporary cell block and lock her up incommunicado there for the time being. While you are at it put in some extra rooms into the brig to incarcerate a half dozen others in if we ever find them poking about later on or encounter the need to take prisoners at another time for reasons I cannot currently envision. I may have a long term solution for holding these kind of threats out in space… . but that is for a later moment… . not right now. Got it?”

  Murray looked curious at that last statement but was too chagrined at the moment to ask. I assumed my most bland expression. Wong and I exchanged knowing looks. This time it was we who knew something Murray did not. We were a young service for two parts of it to be keeping secrets from each other. Welcome to our first taste of Byzantium I thought tritely. The problem with any secrets is keeping them for long. It was really my central problem. Everyone wanted the McMoran drive and only TESS had it. I wanted to keep it that way. Like all tactical situations though… the enemy gets a vote too and apparently we had scads of enemies out there heading to the polls like lemmings to steal the election.

  I lay with Maureen pulled close in the crook of my arm. We were both of us swiven, covered in rapidly cooling sweat and sharing bleed body heat having just made something I could only characterize as frantic love.

  As it turned out the heterosexual primus position took a certain talent in weightless conditions. Every thrust and counter levered kick tended to require at least some attention or as a couple you would spin rapidly in dangerous new directions without intending to—smashing grandma’s crockery left and right. Certainly my attention was sometimes in short supply during the act itself and we had found through dedicated practice in our cosmic Kama Sutra that the best technique was to put a loose safety strap around at least one person’s waist or thigh and to rig a spider web of cargo netting fixed at ceiling and floor to lean against, grab onto or snuggle into. Done right the web absorbed any repeated directional motion vectors we generated and gave us something to brace against for sudden inspirations and innovations. In short, the web acted like an earthly nuptial bed without the historical non-DB nuptial itself.

  We had not planned this assignation. We had met each other by accident when out paths crossed in the exercise chamber. Working-out out in space required discipline, dedication and lots of repetitions. The workouts counteracted muscle atrophy. The exercise regimen was making up for the exercise normally provided to our musculature by gravity itself. I was pumping away on an exercise bike when she came in and began using a thigh machine across from me. I’d speeded up unconsciously. Seductively the machine required her to lie on her back and push against the resistance plate which caused her to spread her legs and strain for long moments which defined essential parts of her repeatedly. I eventually raced my bike even faster and to a level where I expected smoke to come from it and then surrendered. The suggestiveness of all this had been too much for me and in my weakness I swam over to her and urged her to attend a quick conference in the privacy of my quarters. She agreed. Oddly she beat me to the talks.

  Our present position was the result of our intense discussions. The pleasure of it suffused us both and we hung limply naked like aberrant pink grapes on some Napa valley vine.

  I lifted my head weakly and kissed her cheeks, nose and then her lips lightly.

  She smiled, but could not open her eyes, too immersed in what I flattered myself was her feeling of utter satiation after the greatest love making of her life.

  “What is it with you?” I asked wonderingly.

  She gave the tiniest of shrugs—eyes still closed. Only half attending.

  “What?” She asked eventually in a soft whisper, reluctant to break into the sensations she was feeling with idle chit chat.

  “The special… words fall short but the special nature of… of… this. Of being with you.”

  She cracked a single eye, then let it settle shut dopily. A mischievous dimple formed.

  “This? This what? Men find any sex special don’t they? I read that in a magazine when I was twelve. Something about how women feel intimacy and then want sex while men want sex to then feel intimacy. It’s just the sex that is special for you isn’t it?” She asked.

  “Not at all… it’s not a big man-woman survey pattern like that with you.” I whispered. “It is something different about you specifically somehow. Being with you is special in a way nothing else is. It is hard to define. Something that combines with my feelings about you and makes the sex between us the measure of how I feel… rather than requiring the sex to get to the feelings first. Look…” I said very intense. She opened her eyes with hooded lids and looked at me—meeting my eyes. She was interested. “With you nothing is quite the same as with anyone else. It is measurable. My yardstick is my memories of our times together. Memories are strange things. Evoked by things you would never suspect. During sex the sexual feeling of a breast in my hand is beautiful, but ephemeral. It passes. The feeling of vaginal walls grippi
ng my penis is exquisite, but it passes. Sex with women as a sex is utterly entrancing as an act, but not always memorable. But with you…” She opened her eyes a bit more, fully listening now. I grinned. “With you it is utterly different. Special. With you it lingers… it lasts like wine on the palette. Some deeper memory is triggered that is evocative of… us together. The act and its specialness leaves short term memory and moves it over into my long term. From RAM into ROM. The memory is retained every single time with you… it stays with me. It lingers. Like it was programmed in some mysterious way so I can savor it again and again. The trigger isn’t the sex or the foreplay necessarily, though it happens during those times now and then. It might be anything else though. The way the light plays a shadow in your belly button or highlights your mons. The sound of your guts gurgling when I lie my ear on your belly afterward.” She slapped my shoulder smiling girlishly. I grinned more. “Even the tactile feel of goose-bumps on your thigh can trigger a long term memory… but always… always with you…” I cupped her cheek tenderly in my hand as gently as I could and met her eyes. “Always with you there is a long term memory. I retain the feeling of closeness through some magic that is this relationship. This intimacy. There is always one thing that is the same. Your eyes. The magic of your eyes always sticks with me. They flicker from green to brown in my mind, the pupils expand and contract, but they linger there in my consciousness like black holes into your heart. I feel… I feel like I can fall into your eyes… get sucked inside you… cross some kind of event horizon and fall down and down.” I was whispering now. “In my mind I get lost and wander about in your eyes… . can bury myself in them. Feel your heart. Bury myself in your warmth. Your warmth seeps out of the experience somehow and into my mind. That is close to what I am trying to describe I think. Your eyes are like visual pathways into warmth. Like making love to the sun itself. Where I can warm myself even if only examining it as a distant memory.”