by Randy Moffat
The WMSL Miller was well found. She’d been made tough to take everything the north Atlantic could throw at her and her nose rose again as she shook off the green water that still inundated the front deck and buried the forward quarter of the ship in white foam until she righted—a wet leviathan. There were a series of secondary waves that passed under her keel then but they were no match for the big first one. Dillard was astonished momentarily to see the sea was full of dead sea life and birds floating everywhere. Suddenly the Boson was standing dutifully beside him and his Master Chief materialized from somewhere below with a small scar bleeding through bandaging on his left wrist and looking grim. Dillard began barking orders while his mind absently recorded the fishing boats, shielded from the wave somewhat by the Miller’s bulk still more or less afloat, but counted five fat tourist fishermen slapping about in the water and shrieking like little girls between the hulls while the day-tripper’s crew were flinging whatever would float in the direction of the land lubbers.
A light rain began to fall from all the water thrown up in the air. It sheeted across the cracked wind screens. They had a lot to do and Dillard still had a report to make to headquarters about what a man made meteorite strike looked like close up.
Li shook his head to clear it and leaned back in his chair. His opinions were confirmed.
They were idiots over there in Hú’s Beijing underground. They had been raiding every source of intelligence they could reach and in six years they had accomplished less than Li had given them in six weeks—and now they wanted more!. Greedy bastards.
Li flattered himself that they had no other people who were as smart as he was and he was damned if he was going to become their trained monkey and deliver what they asked on demand. He would wait and feed them information slowly. Piece by piece. It must appear to be the result of great labor even though he already had considerable material he had gathered since TESS was formed about the topic they were interested in. He needed to make himself invaluable. To build an image that he was hopelessly valuable where he was. It would keep him safe from harm for the time being at least, but not out from under their thumbs by any stretch of the imagination.
In the mean time he’d gotten something out of the relationship he wanted… . free access to their files under the guise of his needing to understand precisely what it was that that their conspiracy needed from him. Zeng had been only too eager to let him see the totality of their goodies. What Li had actually wanted out of the arrangement was to see what Hú and Zeng had that he did not. After all, they access to a broad spectrum of ELINT and HUMINT that Li rarely got to see in his corner of intelligence.
As it turned out those sources did contain some of the gold nuggets of information he craved. There were two photos and a short video that had yielded him some critical additional data he had longed for. One of them clearly showed a control panel on a wall through a half closed door that was reputed to be the room where the main drive was. The photo was very clear. The panel was obviously for running air conditioning aboard SS Gaia. LI knew that panel well and knew its part number through and through.
Li smiled contentedly to himself and snuggled into the new information like a little girl to a plush teddy bear.
Time for phase two of the Li plan.
Tanya’s door opened quite suddenly. The noise of the ventilation system and the TV she kept on almost constantly for company had drowned out the sound of approaching footsteps so she was caught by surprise.
She started to her feet. It was the only time the door had been opened fully in the many days since she had been thrust into her particular purgatory.
Standing in the doorway was the heavyset guy in the aloha shirt they had passed on her way in. A couple black clad goons stood behind him, but the big guy pulled the door shut behind him leaving them alone together.
He looked grim.
She recognized him now from an early FBI briefing she had gotten. It was the Mannie or something guy… the TESS head of intelligence. She scrambled to reorient herself quickly. This must be important for him to come himself and she might never get another chance to influence him. Her heart was instantly running at high revolutions per minute.
“My name is Murray.” He said glancing at a cell phone ap on a screen in his palm. “Your heart is racing. Calm down. I want to talk, but I want you lucid and rational.”
‘Murray!’ That was the name. She had suspected they were monitoring her body’s rhythms. This was a nugget of confirmation.
“Look Mr. Murray… this is… all of it a mistake… . and strictly illegal… I am a US citizen and I want to see the US Amb… .”
“You are a United States citizen. To be specific…” Murray interrupted rudely but calmly—raising his voice a bit to override hers. “You are Agent Tanya Matthews… Federal Bureau of Investigation. The FBI is a governmental investigative body of the United States of America. Not precisely what you put on your application to TESS. During your TESS induction and training you were informed repeatedly of the confidentiality of ALL TESS materials. When you were provided with clearly labeled TESS classified materials… . you simply gave them to the FBI. To shorten all this up. You were caught and you are here because of it. Let’s not play about with anything disingenuous Tanya. Committing crime against TESS on TESS soil, caught on TESS soil, found guilty by TESS on TESS soil and jailed on TESS soil. Why? You lied to us… . lied to TESS from beginning to end… done! Essentially you are a traitor to TESS; if an extraterritorial agency can have a traitor… which if you want my opinion it certainly can. You are certainly not our first traitor, but the others are dead.”
Tanya swallowed and it was painful to watch, but Murray was here to perform a job and he hardened his heart.
“I need to be clear, Agent Matthews. Point one… Admiral McMoran hates arresting you… . to be frank so do I. My own recommendation was that we kill you and put you out of your misery.” That got her excited again he noted on his cell phone ap hooked into remote monitors in the cell. Respiration and heart rate sky-rocketed. It wasn’t a fool proof lie detector, but it certainly told him things about the target’s state of mind. “Point two…” He droned on. “Both the admiral and I have one goal. We want to protect TESS above all things Ms. Matthews… . luckily the high Admiral has a softer heart and kinder sensibilities than I do. He has elected to let you live… but in time I think you will find that letting you live is a very small favor since there is absolutely no end in sight to this…” He looked around at the cell. “. . . . incarceration. The only thing missing in here is an iron mask. Nor am I talking about Alexndre Dumas’ gentle treatment in his prissy little novel, but the actual L’Homme au Masque de Fer. A woman could rot away in here. For life. So if I ask you for a trade I recommend you take that trade and I will give you what consideration I can as part of it.”
He emphasized the word ‘consideration’ enough that he saw the spikes in her eye movement that told him she had certainly heard the word and was interested. Murray fancied he could read her thoughts. She wanted to be stubborn and resist manipulation like any good young agent, but it was perfectly obvious to the meanest understanding that the steel cage she was in could hold her for seventy years and that no one would ever find her. These caves were now TESS property. Soil as sacred as any embassy or nation. More than that the space program support that TESS offered was cheap, convenient and increasingly vital to the US. In short, there were agencies in that government who were interested in getting their hands on the drive secrets, but they were unlikely to threaten an increasingly important national economic interest by trying to use force to get her out, even if they knew precisely where she was at the moment. Worse, five minutes consideration would tell her that even if the US acted unilaterally, most of the nations of the world were now using TESS for their own space operations and they would back TESS against any such action by the US to advance their own interests. She must feel very small and v
ery alone in this box. Murray set out to use that feeling.
“What is it you want to know?” Tanya tried and failed to keep the tiny quaver out of her voice.
Implacably Murray looked at her.
“I want to know about the entire plan was to have you enter TESS and what other elements it may have contained.”
“Other elements?” She asked quizzically. “What other elements?”
“Elements that included Mr. Jeeter.” Murray said trying to keep the anger out of his voice. He liked the crazy old fart too damn it. He was part of team TESS. His teammate. One of us.
“Jeeter?”
Matthews looked so genuinely confused that it made Murray very thoughtful, but he began to ask his questions anyway.
CHAPTER 5
A Hú done it—The cocked lever on a smoking gun
Hú looked critically at his Chief of security.
The man was southern Chinese. A thug. He was small and had the dark taint of the Vietnamese in his skin coloration. The scar along his face made him uglier still. Hú knew the type. Although Hú had been born and raised in the western regions he did not look the same. Hú looked more Han Chinese than anything else. Though he liked to present himself as a man of the people, in his heart and mind he looked with Han racism on peoples who were not the Chinese racial ideal. Being Han was how you got ahead and Hú was all about getting ahead.
Still, the man was generally very competent. And loyal. Hú could not afford to waste a useful tool. Not quite yet.
“Is he dead?” Hú asked.
“No.” The man with the scar said. “Not quite.”
Hú trusted that statement. It was the man’s one true talent. Once he cocked the lever of his arm he could deliver its fist with accuracy. Give him his due, the man knew how to beat people up.
“How long until he recovers?” Hú asked.
His security chief pursed his lips thoughtfully. It was as near to a conciliatory gesture as Hú was likely to get from him.
“He is old. Many days. Perhaps weeks.”
Hú flushed. He suppressed an emotional surge of anger that he longed to let free. That estimate of recovery time would also be right. His security chief also knew how long it took people to recover from his beatings. But Hú wanted information now, not corpses and the chief was a fine gauge of that particular line—treading just along its razor edge during interrogations. Still, Hú did not care to wait weeks while the Lǎowángù recovered and he let his discontent show around his tight mouth.
“Why did you do it?”
The man looked at Hú. His eyes were dead as usual. He was capable of perceiving Hú’s anger but incapable of understanding its origins. He was a man with a singular lack of passions. Beating people to a pulp was merely a scientific exercise for him. A means to an end. Nothing personal.
“The lǎo gǔdǒng was resisting us—playing with us—being a stubborn curmudgeon. Acting like a… an American. A wise ass. I wanted to make him think. Realize he is not immortal. Remind him he can feel pain. Perhaps when we begin again he will hesitate to respond with anything but the truth I seek from him.”
Hú thought about this, using the time to cover his astonishment that the man understood so esoteric a concept as immortality. Hú felt the red hot rage rise along with stomach bile in him again—it was the madness that always overcame him when his plans were resisted or broken by incompetent insubordinates. He consciously suppressed it again. This man was trustworthy. He had shown that repeatedly as Hú’s favorite lever to extract information from those who were reluctant. Hú would be patient for the time being. This was no time to burn up assets unnecessarily in the forge of his passions.
He turned away with an abrupt writhe of his body that somehow communicated a command to continue and dismissal at the same time.
Antonin Petrovski sat on the edge of darkness.
A faint light caught on the small diamond of his lip piercing and his long hair fell back in a limp mass of poorly washed tangles as he interlaced his fingers across the Anthrax logo on his black T-Shirt that swooped from his chest to the top of his meager belly. He rested his head on the back of the ratty bark-o-lounger he had found in one of the darker corners of the ‘bat cave’ complex where TESS had been born and thought.
He was good at that.
He had a lateral thinking mind. To exercise it he would sit for hours in the near dark wearing out pencil after pencil on a big yellow pad. Then he would break things up and walk a bit. Explore one of the nearly endless rooms in the cave complex. Then return oddly refreshed and ready for more. Mixing things up was part of his process. One moment he could be listening to Megadeth on his earphones and writhing his entire body about lathered in sweat strumming an invisible guitar while ten minutes later he would plug in Shubert and sit still for hours with tip of his pencil barely moving as his mind roamed across the universe on the wings of music. The change ups gave him inspiration. He needed some now. There was a lot of crumpled balls of paper laying about and his mind was wrestling inside a Möbius strip.
The drive based on his Petrovski effect which warped space time itself clearly had some limitations. Perhaps challenges was a better word. The little mountains or paper balls were a sign that he was trying to solve them. Unsuccessfully so far.
It was the Admiral who had originally defined his latest challenge and Petrovski had gone to work. Things were going downhill. From his original problem definition Antonin had now figured out that he actually had three challenges.
The drive was a happy miracle of intuition and chance that converted electro-magnetic energy into gravitic energy by generating messenger particles of gravity. That new energy then warped the fabric of the space time continuum itself. As it moved the McMoran drive field interacted with the threads of energy that made up space time since the gravitons it emitted were communicating a gravitational message they interpreted. The gravitons formed a shell around the ship and that Alcubierre field interacted with the Baryonic ‘normal’ matter in its path. This was the proton-neutron based matter that humans were composed of and actually understood to some extent. But this kind of ordinary atomic matter made up only five percent of the universe.
Petrovski thought arithmetically. Though the Baryonic interaction with the Petrovski Effect under motion was the challenge that Admiral MacMoran had originally framed, that interaction was actually the smallest of Antonin’s problems. His middle problem was actually the interaction of the drive with Dark matter. There was likely some baryonic dark matter in the universe… but the vast bulk of it would not form atoms. It did not interact with ordinary baryonic matter at all since it carried no electrical charge. It therefore did not influence and was not influenced by electromagnetic forces. If did however interact with gravitational forces. Gravitational forces was precisely what the gravitons of the Petrovski effect used to hoodwink space-time into allowing ships to surf across space. What then would be the effect of Dark matter on the field. More importantly what would be the effect of the field on dark matter?
It got worse. Dark matter of that kind was still only another twenty seven percent more of everything in the universe. Which left him with his really big problem. That was the remaining sixty-sixish percent of the universe that was made up of Dark energy rather than Dark Matter and Baryonic Matter. What would be the long term effects of levering a ship at or above the speed of light through a wine dark sea of dark energy?
Having a certain amount of Mathematical training Petrovski had naturally gravitated his priorities towards solving the biggest number first. He had leapt over Baryonic Matter and Dark Matter to go straight to the Dark Energy problem. What was dark energy and how would the McMoran drive interact with it if it ran into any? Actually it was clearly inconceivable that it was not already doing so already. How could they have missed it? What then would be the short term and long term effects of that interaction? For that matter, wher
e the heck was dark energy anyway?
That was a really big question. It meant he had to achieve a vision of what dark energy really was. He pondered on, doodling on his pad until he snapped a sharp lead point. He put the pencil down carefully and scratched his nose as only a genius can.
The irony of thinking about dark energy in a dark room was lost on him. Antonin was a private person when he was doing his best thinking. He liked to leave people behind him and work in quiet corners. It was geocentricism. Because of this anti-social aspect to his particular genius it did not occur to him that another member of the TESS team was also thinking about the matter-Petrovski interaction too. So even though she had asked him several cogent questions over recent weeks when he encountered her in the dining facility, he had answered her questions baldly without examining the reasons behind them. Focused on the what was perhaps the biggest question in the universe, he remained essentially unaware that someone else was coming at the same problem from the exact opposite direction as he was.
