Fulcrums of the Universe: A TESS NOVEL #2

by Randy Moffat

  Murray looked unhappy and silent. I could see he was caught between my passionate feelings, whatever love he felt for Jeeter and the hesitations in his own mind.

  “Murray!” I called him back sharply to what was important. Me. “He is an old man dam it! There is no way he can survive extended treatments!”

  Murray nodded at me with a face like a spanked beagle’s.

  “I know you are worried, Bear. I have to tell you. There is something wrong with all this… or at least not quite right with your idea… but I do understand your logic pattern and will follow up hard.”

  I tossed around the peculiar notion that I might be wrong for a few moments and then shook myself like a wet dog. I was too worried about Jeeter to second guess the voices in my head.

  “Don’t check for too long. Get her to talk. I am going to give them a day or two and then go ahead with plan ‘Accidental Echo’ . . . just as a prelude. A warning shot across the American’s bow. See if that shakes some cooperation out of them.”

  Murray looked unhappier still… which took some doing. He opened his mouth as if he had something to more to say then stopped himself visibly.

  “I suspect it will certainly piss off the US.” He finally said ironically.

  “Good!” Was all I could think to add. “Misery loves company. That will make two of us. People need to realize we have feelings… and teeth.”

  I cut the connection anxious and angry. Anxious and angry are no way to make far reaching decisions and I knew it. I was too anxious and angry to rethink though. What’s the point of being a leader if you cannot lead? If you do not lead? I hunched my shoulders and pushed on.

  Li looked at his classified message traffic lodged in an e-mail account on the internet as a saved message where it could not be traced and shook his head. The idiots had kidnapped the old man. He was in the company of mad men. Hú and Zeng were lunatics to make such a high profile snatch. The TESS pilot who had flown the original TESS spacecraft to the planet Mars was an internationally recognizable figure who was actively courted by the press and much loved by publics around the globe as a “feisty old bugger.” It had been clever of the Admiral McMoran to use a senior citizen to fly the earliest Petrovski flights. Jeeter’s piercing blue eyes, still thick shock of white hair and cranky but sharp and lovable persona had struck a chord with audiences worldwide. His profile was just too high for his disappearance to be passed over. TESS would come looking. Li shook his head.

  Hú should have at least staged a high profile accident to mask the snatch and grab maneuver rather than just stealing him away in the middle of the night. It was astonishingly arrogant and stupid. Nazi tactics. Li realized again that his fate was in the hands of idiots as bad as the ancient No Pants Po that had almost stained Li’s image irretrievably when he attacked TESS with hired guns and mercenaries—luckily getting himself killed in the process and saving Li the trouble. Li briefly considered alerting TESS that Hú was responsible and then abandoned the thought. It would not help him and Li was more worried about himself right now. Li needed to squirm out from under the thumb of Hu’s ultra-violent assholes as quickly as possible.

  He pursed his lips… he had a plan to get that done but it would be some months in the making. In the mean time he was stuck with his dangerous and stupid allies.

  He leaned back in his chair and counted to ten.

  Rubbing his chin he pondered how to turn this to his advantage. Ten minutes later something occurred to him and he smiled for the first time in a week.

  CHAPTER 4

  The penultimate ultimatum—A violent lever buried in mass times acceleration

  I logged into the Tele-circuit to the Secretary of the State of the United States. I got lucky. He was in his office. The screen lit up to on a secure line that only three dozen people on the planet and two people off planet had. A private line.

  The remnants of his look of surprise was instantly masked by the Secretary. He was too old a diplomat to show true emotion for long and though he was momentarily caught off guard by unexpected contact from the head of the extraterritorial and extraterrestrial TESS organization who was a de facto head of state and had never called before, he was far too wise to allow any astonishment to become a lever that could be used to his disadvantage. He stuck with urbanity instead.

  “Admiral McMoran! How delightful to see you! How can the United States of America help our TESS partners?”

  I quirked the corners of my lips in as a sign of regard for a display of polished Savoir-faire, . . . something I was getting better and better at recognizing among diplomats when I saw it. Practice makes perfect. My teeth were rotting from all the saccharine platitudes I had received in recent months.

  “Mr. Secretary. I would not have bothered you, but one of our people is missing and I wanted your help in returning him to us.”

  I had to give it to him. He had the decency to looked surprised.

  “Who on earth are we talking about Admiral?”

  “Colonel Jeeter. He has disappeared and I wanted to enlist the help of the United States in finding him as quickly as possible. I fear he may be the victim of… foul play.” Something about the Victorian turn of phrase seemed appropriate.

  The Secretary frowned.

  “Tell me about it!” He said with every appearance of concerned candidness.

  “I will…” I said as evenly as I could considering how angry I was. “But I have to warn you I am personally extremely anxious that he be found in the next twenty four hours… . TESS is deeply concerned with me. I would be disingenuous if I did not tell you that we are at the “spit’en mad” level of concern as my old grandmother used to say. TESS is fast approaching the “Getting my hog-leg and goin huntin” kind of concerned if you get my drift. “Hatfield and McCoy” kind of angry if you take all my clever colloquialisms at face value Mr. Secretary.”

  I could see he was considering taking them. Judging by the working of his face he wanted to take them far; dragging them up and down rather roughly over gravel and spitting them out into a banjo ditch for burial, but I watched with grudging admiration as he put away his automatic angry response diplomatique. It died on his tongue in the face of my sadly unhappy scowl. He had heard enough threats in his time to know all the disguises they could wear. Perhaps it made him think suddenly of what daggers might lie hidden behind the backs of an organization that commanded the entire heights of space. As far as I was concerned that was all to the good.

  At least there was no hurried response, but an extremely long diplomatic pause instead.

  I bared my teeth in a non-grin, certain it held all the charm of a smiling Doberman.

  The pause got more uncomfortable since neither of us spoke, but I was leaning hard—applying a lever to get Jeeter back and I was damned if I would blink first.

  The silence dragged out and spoke volumes. He flinched first. It went along with the diplomatic territory.

  “Let me get back with you, Admiral. I will see what I can find out.” He finally said.

  Li used a back channel agent he had purposefully kept as a telephone. The man had a low profile and he sent Li’s message as a routine inquiry through to Chinese Intelligence in Beijing to see if anyone had heard of the possible kidnapping of a member of the TESS and whether China had been responsible for it as the agent had heard a rumor to that effect and like a good agent he did not want to let his denial of the rumor ruin the objective of the operation if it was in fact a Chinese operation of consequence. The name Hú was dropped in as potentially linked to it without making any accusation. The whole thing was very subtle of course. The message served three purposes.

  In the first place it would alert the regular Chinese intelligence channels who received it that there had been a kidnapping of suspicious nature that even low ranking and barely acknowledged members of main stream Chinese intelligence suspected of being the work of the China h
erself. This would raise a red flag at intelligence headquarters who were always concerned when Chinese intelligence was implicated in anything with worldwide implications. They would get curious.

  The second objective was to force feed the name Hú to the regular intelligence community which would do one of two things with it. The message might possibly alert ordinary intelligence that Hú was actually in business, setting up and running some kind of parallel intelligence gathering organization—something the primary agencies were possibly not aware of and raising him into their consciousness. This would be good for Li. Alert his current bosses. More probably though Li simply assumed that Hú had already successfully infiltrated the regular intelligence arms with his own right wing fanatics. This meant that he would detect the inquiry and then do everything in his power to intercept the query and suppress it. Either way Li won. The relative success of Hú ‘s efforts to suppress the information would allow Li to gauge just how deeply Hú had penetrated and controlled “official” Chinese intelligence channels which would allow Li to understand the truth of his own formal chain of command forming the intelligence landscape back in the ancient homeland.

  The third function of the inquiry would be to force some kind of action. If regular Chinese intelligence agents were still free to act without Hú ‘s interference, than they would now wondering if Chinese intelligence itself were the ones holding Jeeter. They would likely start enquiries. A formal investigation of that nature might force Hú’s brown shirts to realize that the relatively high profile of Jeeter was a risk too far and return him quickly which might actually foil Hú’s plan. From what he had seen so far Li assumed his intent was interrogating the old man about how much he knew about the McMoran drive and the Petrovski effect. Li also assumed that Hú would not risk killing the old man since it would raise the profile of the action to new and even astronomical heights of public awareness and Hú would not want that. Li would find forcing the old man’s return ahead of Hú’s schedule personally amusing since it would discommode Hú while more importantly slowing down his plans which appeared to be advancing dangerously far and fast the more he dug into them. That would all be a plus to Li. Li needed time to get out from under Hú’s heel.

  Besides, from what he had seen of Jeeter Li rather thought he liked this old man and a less professional corner of him did not want to see him in Hú’s hands.

  Jeeter lifted his head groggily. The bastards had given him some serious juice that made him sleep a lot and dream about his dead wife. He did not mind that part at all. He missed his mate even though at age 76 his recent TESS notoriety had allowed him to attract a 58 year old girlfriend who he genuinely liked. Liking your present companion did not change the emotional hole that was still in him for his wife though. It was the nature of men that they can love more than one woman at a time, but they tended to love the ones they knew the longest best. The drugs seemed to expose an emotional vacuole where his long years of relationship with a soul mate still lived and had summoned his deceased other up into his dreams. The trouble was he kept half waking up from dreams of her to be hammered with endless strings of questions made by rather ugly men. He was ex-military. He knew it for what it was. Routine interrogation technique. Sleep deprivation mixed with softening drugs. Questions put to him repetitiously by shifts of interrogators who would slap him awake at intervals to ask him the same questions again. Jeeter knew his limits. He was dopey and losing focus. He tended to answer despite himself. The drugs talking.

  What he resented more than those questions on happy sauce though was waking up with a string of drool that hung from his open mouth. There was a big one there now that hung right down from his lower lip onto his chest. It made him mad. This time they had strapped him to a straight backed chair. It came to him slowly that they’d done that a few hours ago. Time was an accordion which stretched in an out on him. His currently position was frustrating because it meant he could not move his body away to wipe the drool off. He tried to focus on his rage, but his head nodded down instead.

  He spent a few minutes drifting in and out. He could not stop spitting on himself in his half conscious state. He needed a tool. He focused on the injustice of it. Every waking moment he tried to focus on his rage. It finally pissed him off enough that the anger sent a shot of adrenaline through him which counteracted the drugs enough to wake him up more fully again. His body jerked in the cable ties that pinned him firmly to the chair as he did so. He shook his head like a dog fresh out of a pond. Droplets of spittle flew.

  The dope still kept him slightly fuzzy, but he felt more awake than he had in weeks and he realized that some deep level of his mind had been steadily recording what was going on overall. He knew they were asking him a lot of questions that he tended to answer more or less honestly because the drugs were making him extremely mellow and suppressing his mental resistance centers. It was humiliating, but he took what satisfaction he could from the responses he still had the will to manipulate in those short periods when the drugs weakened their hold on him. It gave him the power now and then to alter things away from truth in the direction of deceit and at least give the bastards some misdirection. His favorite was when they asked him how the drive worked. He had managed to mutter the comedic words “urinic acid” that had floated up from his 6th grade subconscious and then he had struggled hard not to say any more. They had caught the apparent deception and persisted. “What was urinic acid?” They asked over and over. He had grimily replied from inside his truthful straightjacket that urininc acid was powerful stuff. To use the drive required buckets full of urininc acid by its operator. The drive was, he assured them, a total pisser. His interrogators were not native speakers of American English. One or two knew proper school-taught English quite well, but the oddities of idiomatic English from a previous generation eluded even the best training at times and “Pisser” was certainly low slang. They shifted focus and spent a couple hours demanding to know what a pisser was and requiring detailed information on how it functioned. Even under the influence of drugs Jeeter had been free to use enough imagination to describe the need for acres of porcelain and chrome valves and then using his memories of diagrams in “How things work” he had described how the valve for the pisser functioned in fairly good detail. His interrogators had persisted for a few more hours on gathering exact details for the pisser valve operations and what role it played in TESS secret hyper drive. Jeeter smiled as he remembered how their random questions trying to figure out function from description had freed his imagination under the influence of the dope, allowing him to expound on the TESS quantum drive theory that drove the ship through several vector phases. The phases of the pisser lay on a spectrum that reached from the ‘Achilles jiggle,’ passed through the ‘Closet Cantor’ and arrived at the culminating ‘Cosmic Flushout.’ But his mental faculties and creativity was waning by that point. Eventually he had drifted off and though his sense of time was not functioning properly, he estimated it had been a couple days since that particular punch line.

  Jeeter was a realist. By now they would have found the time to cross check his information and figure out they had been had. Perhaps they had recognized the word ‘flush.’ In any case he could feel aches across his body that informed him they’d just cut off the great drugs they’d been pumping into him for the first time since the interrogation had begun. Gauging the amount of spit on his face and chest, his general thirst and whatever remained of his internal clock suggested that he had been unconscious for about two days or so. His peripheral vision caught a flicker of light and he managed to lift his head up and look up at the face of one of his interrogators. It was the darker oriental guy with an ugly scar down one side of his face. He was the worst of them. The strongest and angriest. Strength and anger tied to skill though. A craftsman at this kind of thing and therefore the most dangerous. The scar said he meant business and the memory of three blows he’d landed briskly on Jeeter’s kidneys early in the interrogation backed up
the idea.

  “You lie!” The guy said dispassionately, his head cocked to one side a bit like a parrot looking at a nut to be pried open.

  “Never!” Jeeter denied sloppily around his drool.

  The guy looked something like an ugly Jackie Chan on a darker scale and his broken English actually sounded a bit like the actor in his early movies.

  “You lie.” The guy said leaning in close to Jeeter’s face, their noses three inches apart. A threat without any threatening words.

  “Sure. Sure. But I only do it to protect you. Too dangerous for you to have the knowledge that’s in my head… think of all the girls… !” Jeeter leered at him, blinking his eyes.

  The guy smiled back. The smile is the universal gesture, conveying happiness and pleasure across all Terran cultures. Somehow this guy’s leveraged exactly the opposite feelings. A perversion of a smile. An evil smile. A smile that offered the pleasure’s antithesis.