by Randy Moffat
Wong was tired because of last minute glitches in transfer of the Tellus and one of her sister ships from Russian suzerainty to that of TESS. He laughed and smiled. He had foxed them.
The one original Q-Kink team member he had always found really hard to take was Dr. Albert Feathersgait. To Wong his head always seemed bigger than his reputation and he kept trying to puff up the latter to match the former. Wong was the Executive Officer of Q-Kink at the time and during one of the few sessions when he was not distracted by his dislike he had listened fairly carefully many months ago while Feathersgait had described the Byzantine regulations associated with moving atomic materials around earth-side. As always, Wong eventually ended up annoyed and butting heads with the bureaucrat and it tickled him to remember that after he had stopped listening he had simply ordered Feathersgait out to prepare the ground with US agencies like the Nuclear Regulatory Agency and global administrators like the International Atomic Energy Agency on behalf of TESS. He remembered how shocked Feathersgait had been that he had been pressed into this service himself. In Feathersgait’ worldview he was far too important to be wasted on actual work. His assumption had been that some menial would be press-ganged into the job. Wong had disagreed. Wong had primarily seen it as an opportunity to get rid of Feathersgait’ constant complaining for a few days and kicked him out the door to build a few Andes of regulatory agency paperwork that he had described. Things had been heating up fast at Q-Kink at the time and Wong had only a glass eye fixed on future plans. This was done before Q-Kink had achieved its final ground shaking results and become the agency called TESS. TESS had since become a rising world power in her own right while most of the paperwork that Feathersgait had created continued to float downstream through the bureaucratic sewage system, well below the Wong’s radar. In fact, he had frankly forgotten about it until the quietly napping ‘Green’ movement suddenly stirred like a sleeping dragon and began painting protest signage. The Green demon had lifted their head just as the Russians completed TESS’ multimillion dollar modifications to the Tellus’ hull and had gotten ready to transfer the ship to TESS. The Russian transfer had been intended to be a quiet affair, accompanied by soothing words and a nice little mountain of cash to bolster their always struggling naval industry. The transfer stalled when a hoard of angry protesters suddenly materialized at various gates worldwide.
It was too convenient.
Wong began to smell a rat when he realized they were waving remarkably similar signs against the proliferation of atomic materials by TESS out into space. Wong didn’t get the logic of the protest in any case. It seemed to him to be self evident that the presence of transuranic nuclear materials that already existed on the narrow limits of a tiny planet 12,756 km across at the wide bit would be a lot safer if they were moved off the planet and into an outer space that was on the order of 1.32422 KM across and currently expanding at a gallop. But strong logic and an easy recognition of hypocrisy were not always humanity’s strong suit. The vast mass of humanity could not really comprehend that an exponent superscript of 22 meant twenty two zeros added to the end of the number and created something bigger than most human minds are prepared to comprehend. The myopia of the Green’s theoretical position was instead focused on the ‘danger’ of radiation to a space that was essentially limitless and full of radiation already. Wong kept his emotional outrage in careful check and the tried to frame his responses to the protests logically.
He made a point of mentioning and then repeating the fact that TESS was in a unique position of being able to dispose of atomic wastes by putting them back where they came from in the first place—launching them into our star—the ultimate incinerator.
No logic was any good of course. For the key paranoiac people who appeared to be in charge outside the gates, the mere whiff of a vanishing point probability and a basically imaginary danger are much more compelling than the cordite smell of common sense. They proved so intransigent to reason and their actions were so clearly being coordinated across the globe that Wong smelled a very large rat. This kind of rapid organization to slow the transfer of a ship to TESS control seemed a little too convenient to him and he sicced Murray on the groups who were doing the marching. After a bit of investigation it turned out Wong’s instincts were right on. Money was flowing in sudden quantity into the coffers of the lead green organizations involved. The money was from anonymous sources—a sure sign puppet strings were being pulled.
Puppets or not, it was having an effect. The Russian political machine had waivered in the face of a host of Punch and Judies shrieking on the five o’clock media. Passionate and angry pickets contorting their faces in apoplectic rage are always more compelling than news about kittens and puppies. The Russians were wavering and Wong could feel them leaning in the direction of calling a halt as the neatly orchestrated campaign picked up momentum. The unseen opponent behind the financing ramped up the attack even more two days later. Simultaneous to the video news bites a tandem and beautifully planned internet hatchet job with few facts and plenty of innuendo and fear demanded that TESS’ progress be slowed until ‘saner heads’ could be consulted.’ According to this nonsense the TESS monster was at the heart of a vast conspiracy to pollute the solar system if the Service was successful or most of the planet if their ships exploded on takeoff. These largely imaginary dots were connected with lines that meant nothing, but were believed by those who liked to be believe.
Wong was familiar with warfare. The campaign plan was clear. The enemy had changed tactics from overt attacks with guns that had been tried in the past to covert action though intermediaries. Anything to stop TESS.
By chance Wong had been casting about for countermeasures when Feathersgait wandered into his office to coincidentally ask about the progress of his applications from many months before which Wong had forgotten. After being presented with a picture of the ‘difficulties’ Wong was wrestling with, Feathersgait had picked up his mobile phone and pinged the International Atomic Energy Agency about his paperwork. Wonder of wonders the whole mass of paper had been approved by the IAEA in the ensuing months without anyone quite realizing it.
Wong had grinned openly, walked around his desk and kissed Feathersgait on both cheeks unannounced. Feathersgait had been stunned, but Wong explained to him what it meant to the service. Feathersgait began to preen his plumage. Wong left before he could say the first ‘I told you so’ and gear up to claim his genius.
With lots of flourish’s and a lot more innocent noises Wong and Feathersgait had presented the approved AEC packet of papers to the Russians at a carefully orchestrated press conference of their own. At the sight of approval by the International Atomic Energy Agency the Russians had rapidly dabbed at their political foreheads with hankies, made muttered apologies to TESS and OK’ed the transfer of the submarine instantly. When the hired mob at the gates watched the nuclear powered ship disappearing in the distance behind a tug it whined at a higher decibel level. The Russian leadership felt free then to simply shrug their shoulders in exaggerated Slavic helplessness and stand dumbly pointing at the heap of paperwork while explaining that the International organization who essentially licensed atomic power around the world had allowed it and they were unable to ignore their demand that the submarine change hands to a non-territorial organization. The sign toting folk outside various gates worldwide were non-pulsed. There was an odd collective pause in action by them, presumably while they waited for further orders from their hidden brain and milled about aimlessly.
For Wong it had been an utterly foreign feeling to have wanted to kiss Feathersgait. The man had appeared to be hopeless bureaucrat but his very early marriage to bureaucracy had finally borne useful fruit all these months later by presenting the tool that legitimized release of the needed ships to TESS and provided a lever at the fulcrum of international opinion.
Wong had acted swiftly while their unseen opponent’s stooges dithered in confusion. As further trade
for spaceflights, TESS now owned several pieces of extraterritorial real estate scattered about Earth that no protesters lived on and no protestors could easily reach. These bits of land were automatically and legally extraterritorial. The property of the service. The Tellus was furthest along in the conversion towards becoming a space craft and was now shifted from Murmansk to a locale in front of a large green screen that implied it was somewhere in mid-Pacific. Its images were seized upon and quickly publicized authoritatively as being somewhere among the Islands of Melanesia. Covertly and over many dark and moonless nights it had instead been sequestered here at Groton.
Simultaneously and literally in the middle of the night Wong had sent in oceanic tugs, flashed the same stack of IAEA paperwork and towed away a second Russian hull they had bought at Valdivostock, another older American submarine in San Diego and an Old British hull in a harbor near Clyde along the Gare Loch… all with more or less working nuclear drives. The tugs physically towed these latter ships off to distant lagoons at to actual TESS islands in the Pacific, as far from any place with population as possible. They lay there now under camouflage netting while their guards camped out, sipped pina coladas and worked on their tans out of sheer boredom.
The physical protests around the globe fizzled out when the reenergized puppet organizations found their rapidly repositioned loyal members waving placards and shouting themselves hoarse outside several other birdcages from which every avian had already fled before they arrived. They tried to reorganize, but Wong had fooled them. There was few if any people to mobilize where the ships now lay even if they mobs an known reliably where to look—they were safe well outside the pale of civilized protests that could make any more five o’clock news.
As the intended second TESS ship, Tellus had already had all the primary hull work done in Russia before the contested delivery so there was actually relatively little to do here at Groton. This visit to Connecticut was for some final fine work and more importantly the top secret final stages of installing the actual MacMoran drive components. Security here was absolutely tight. It was the same, but much improved shed where the original Gaia had launched many months before. Drones who approached the restricted airspace around it were intercepted by fast attack drones that would swiftly ram them out of the air. Electrified netting blocked entrance under water to stealth approaches by remotes or humans. The dock’s shed structure had now been triple walled and each layer was itself triple scanned daily for bugs and cameras. The hull was likewise checked for listening or viewing devices to ensure that no one would watch easily there. It was already unlikely since there was only a short list of perhaps fifty personnel who even had access to the inside of the building where she lay. As a final security measure, there were barely twenty five people out of those fifty who could enter the ship’s hull itself with guard holding biggish guns making sure of it. In the end there was one more layer. Actually entering the McMoran engine spaces of the ship was strictly limited to Q-Kink team members and the four new academy people who had been hand selected to learn the core mechanics and installation of the space drive.
Down in the Tellus’ guts Captain Johnson, Dr. Aziz and Dr. Petrovski were right now busily installing the McMoran drive components, calibrating them and coaching Captain Dixon’s crew in how to make it all come together. This was the absolute final step in making her space-worthy.
In total numbers they would have made a poor showing at a cocktail party, as far as TESS went though they were a gigantic leap forward in trust. The training being given to these newcomers was the next step in TESS expansion that would begin spreading the secret of the Petrovski Effect outside the original core of the Q-Kink team that had discovered it in the first place. Wong had the same mixed feelings about it that he knew Bear did. Every new person who knew the five ‘w’s’ and the dread ‘h’ of the drive was one more potential weak link in the TESS chain. One more person to be bribed, or threatened or coerced into revealing the drive’s secret. Every human was a person who could compromise what had not yet been compromised… protecting it at the cost of sweat, blood and lives. It was a horror they all feared. Wong shrugged his shoulders in annoyance. That kind of thinking never ended. It had to come. Dixon and his team had been vetted again and again. It was time to trust someone! It was that sometime! Wong smiled. The fatalism of the resigned.
He shook himself and moved on. Twisting awkwardly around the new smoke screen launch canisters and the rotary cannons that circled the curvature of the sub’s rather short sail superstructure and dropping through a hatch, slid down a ladder, dodged through the former bridge of the machine, trod across the cavernous feeling reactor compartment and into the engineering spaces where Captain’s Johnson and Dixon were both lying side by side on the deck on their backs under the new main drive control console. It reaffirmed his faith that he and Admiral Bear McMoran had chosen well. Dixon’s face was dirty and smeared with grease through which neat little rivulets of sweat ran—having obviously been working hard for some time. Wong grinned. If he was engaged in manual labor with a wrench as well as his head he was clearly TESS material. Not afraid of getting his hands filthy. Another good sign was that he was arguing with Johnson who was responding in her rather sweet way to his abrupt comments about the simplicity of the drive components that he was pointing at and shaking his head in clear denial. Like most elegant things she was simple. A cyclotron to accelerate particles from a Casimir plate arrangement to excite virtual particles into rapid motion and change their spin into Gravitons, messenger particles of gravity that ‘tricked’ the tapestry of the space time continuum into sending a message of matter in great quantities that did not really exist. The cosmic con job convinced the fabric of an uncaring universe that space should obligingly ‘bend,’ creating a leading dip and a following wave form in the fabric of space-time itself. The dual waves allowed the ship to surf inside a bubble of ‘warp’ that existed outside the surrounding universe. The drive was based on a mathematical oddity called the Alcubierre metric. The whole thing was so unlikely that most people met its reality with mental denial since it seemed to contradict ‘common sense.’ At first. The denial tended to last only until their ship flickered out of reality at one place and into reality someplace else with them still inside it. Then they quit arguing about its simplicity or unsuitability and realized they were in the hands of something utterly remarkable that simply worked. A mysterious fulcrum able to lever the substance of the universe itself at human will.
Wong walked over and his shadow fell over them. They both started and looked up at him. He smiled.
“How’s it looking Captain Dixon?” Wong asked casually.
Dixon sat up.
“Damned if I know, Admiral.” He said… his northern English accent smelled of the metaphitic ooze beneath Coniston Water or some other reeking tarn in the Lake District or the far Northwestern Yorkshire Dales. It sounded sweetly exotic to the two former Americans. “If Captain Johnson is to be believed this is thing is… fuckin magic… and I don’t believe in magic!”
Johnson was lying on her back beneath the console with her fingers clasped behind her neck and the rather fond look she shot Dixon told Wong everything he needed to know. He kept his eyebrow from going up through sheer effort. He was rooting for her.
“Well however much of the weirdness there is in it… whatever the fey . . . Admiral McMoran sends his best compliments and desires your black magic of science be ready for space no later than next Wednesday.”
Dixon gaped at him.
“Wendesday next? That cuts four days off my schedule! Is he mad? We haven’t even begun to finish the power link ups, the electronics manuals were barely started and then there is the whole simulation runs schedule even to start… he can’t be serious?”
Wong laughed out loud.
“This is TESS, Captain.” He said casually. “In TESS we expect the impossible as a matter of course. But to answer your questions… . Wed
nesday? Yes! Is he mad? Probably. Is he serious? No question. TESS has officially announced we will test launch Tellus a week from Saturday. We therefore intend to mix up the opposition by putting her in space four days early. Throws the plotters off. Makes it hard to target you.”
“Makes it bloody hard on us too!” Dixon said with British bluntness.
But the word ‘target’ shut him up quickly enough. He was as familiar as the rest of the world with the story of the launch of the SS Gaia and knew it was not used lightly by the old timers. Wong went on absently running a finger over bump in the center of his eyebrow that reminded him of lying there under fire at the gate to this very facility and a ricocheted bullet fragment that had scoured a shard into his eyebrow before they had managed to raise ship of that day. She had managed her maiden flight seconds before an enemy wreaked havoc on them. A neat reminder he would carry for his lifetime of the value of faking out potential attackers with misdirection whenever you could.
