by Randy Moffat
Woo’s face was not very expressive so Maureen could not tell if her sense of fun had penetrated. Too much hanging about with Admiral McMoran and sharpened her sense of cutting humor and she sometimes forgot others lacked a ready laugh gene.
“It is an AM radio station.” Woo said placidly. “A real dinosaur—built in 1962 or 63… no one is really sure. It was very powerful for its time. Licensed at up to 50,000 watts. They intended to transmit all over the northern part of the state and into several others. State of the art for its time. I’ll bet it even made some money for a couple decades and built a certain amount of audience share, but I am guessing that over the long haul the infrastructure probably never paid for itself. It undoubtedly got elbowed aside by FM later. Now with satellite radio—terrestrial radio stations are going the way of the dodo. It does however have the unusual feature of being equipped for phased array AM. Why? I have no idea. The set up they built here was way over-engineered for the back of beyond. Phased array AM is more targeted at big cities, not way out here in the boondocks. I suspect the original owners did not have a clue what they were buying. The salesman saw a sucker coming a mile away. It’s the phased array equipment that I am after. My communications technique requires multiple copies of messages be sent simultaneously. They move out like a shotgun blast. They scatter out at range. Phase array gathers in their tatters and reassembles them. It will be useful in capturing and recreating a scattered signal. That and the antennae itself is maximized for that.”
Maureen glanced up again at the behemoth.
“How the hell we going to get all that up to space?” She said.
Woo followed her eyes.
“I have already contacted a building firm and a trucking firm in Salt Lake City. They think they can just unbolt the thing. Break it into pieces and ship it to the coast. We should be able to get the pieces up a few at a time. My current estimate puts the load at five flights by the SS Gaia . . . and perhaps only four on the Tellus assuming she flies OK when we test her. No sweat.”
“Couldn’t you make it easier? Maybe have found something a little closer to the coast?”
Woo wrinkled her nose.
“Not in this shape. There is no water out here in the desert. This thing has barely any rust on it anywhere. Under the dust and dirt the antennae is in almost in pristine metallurgical condition. Almost perfect considering it’s so many decades old anyway. Rust is the enemy to iron and steel. Anything near the coasts gets eaten up exposure to water… and if it’s really close by… sea spray salt.”
Maureen regarded Woo for a moment critically.
“You are really smart, Tia. Thank the stars we have you.” Maureen said frankly.
Tia looked down at the ground, embarrassed, but Maureen thought perhaps she was pleased too somewhere deep inside her calm facade.
“OK.” Maureen said accepting the logic. “So what’s that thing over in Sausalito we are going to see early tomorrow? Is it related?”
“Yes.” Woo confirmed in her flat professional voice. “A roughly seaborne counterpart to this.” She waved at the antennae. “An early version of Phased array radar, but I think I can repurpose it’s components to support one of our ships and allow it to talk to this one.”
The car was nearing the top of the hill where they were standing.
“This car looks a bit used too.” Maureen said tritely.
The ‘car’ was a beat up Ford pickup that looked barely functional—as if it had been through a crash scene in Smokey and the Bandit or Speed . . . . two or three times. Woo looked dispassionately at the vehicle.
“They told me in town at the diner that he inherited the station from his father who died intestate. It took more than a decade and a half of wrangling with two other brothers to clear ownership through the courts. He’s has been trying to unload the station since 1995.”
“Fascinating.” Maureen said as the car ground to a halt and she closed her mouth to avoid breathing in too much grit from the cloud of dust.
“At a guess we are going to be his first serious offer to buy the station or its equipment in twenty years.” Woo said in her unflappable observational voice impervious to the dust cloud. “Do not offer him too much. We should get it cheap.”
Maureen looked over at her in surprise.
CHAPTER 7
China invented the levers of state
Premier Wěi Lau looked around curiously. His normal venue of the weekly politburo meetings and the monthly State Council meetings in overall control of day to day Chinese decision making were too unwieldy and far too open for what he was trying to accomplish here. Many of the others present here looked just as surprised at the small size of the group and its makeup which unevenly spanned the three interlocking branches of Chinese power which in addition to the State Council of the People’s Republic of China included the Communist Party Congress of China and the People’s Liberation Army. What was curious was the obvious gaps made by who was not there.
Politics makes strange bedfellows. The Vice president of the National People’s Congress, Mǐn Chén looked rather uncomfortable—he was the sole direct representative of the Presidium of the National People’s Congress… which essentially was a key subset of the ‘elected’ body of the Chinese Communist Party. He felt naked without the President of the Congress to hide behind. From the ruling state council the single Vice Premier present was a long time supporter of Lau’s, but Chén was wondering where the other three Vice Premiers were—Especially the most recently prominent… Bo Hú. The presence of a certain number of Ministers was to be expected too, it was after all they who tended to get the routine business of government done, but the overall selection here seemed anemic and rather eclectic. The Minister of Finance. Also the Minister of State Security, but not the Minister of Public security—odd since their headquarters were nominally in the same building and had some overlap in powers. It was Public Security who controlled the police. As he thought about it Chén realized that the current public security minister was a protégé of Hú. Hú again. Missing. That was strange since most of the people here represented the dimensions of physical power. That was the unifying theme of the meeting he realized quite suddenly. Military power, information power, political power and money power. Not a social program in the bunch. Thinking along those lines Chén tried to catalog the five People’s Liberation Army Generals scattered about the table. The senior one was a Vice Chairman of the Central Military Commission which controlled the military overall. Another one commanded the Air Force and the third was not well known to Chén. He thought about it and could not place him for a couple of minutes until suddenly a distant memory rose to the surface of his musings. His name was General Fun and he was commander of the People’s Liberation Army General Political Department. One of those Generals you rarely saw; but one who always hovered in the background shadows of awareness. General Fun was responsible for the political reliability of military leaders. The other two were the commanders of the Beijing and Jinan military regions. Chén thought about that for a moment. Those were regions that surrounded and were adjacent to the capital. All in all it was a curious group selection. The rest of the meeting was composed only of a number of Ministry functionaries, underlings and none of them were particularly well known to Chén. They did not really count.
The key players were all long time communists and party members. Being Chinese and bureaucrats with solid credentials the group waited to see what Lau had to say. To let the Premier commit himself before they did.
Lau did not waste too much time other than to make a modest cautionary statement. It was enough to make everyone’s blood curdle. Anyone discussing the subject of today’s conference outside the room would be hung, drawn, halved, quartered, chopped into eighths and then ground up into sausage to be fed to the pigs. It would have been funny if it had not been in the least bit funny. This was a communist country and these were the elite in it. They wer
e realists. People disappeared here only to reappear in chains with rude signs hung around their necks describing them as the ‘four dunghills’ or the ‘seven cockroaches’. Typically such people wore their scarlet letters for a long and monumentally boring show trial that could only end in an obligatory guilty verdict. After the trial they would invariably disappear. Almost always forever. The fact that the premier of China felt compelled to make such a strong statement to his first string about what everyone already knew made them swallow hard to a man. There was serious danger here.
Lau waved negligently at one of the functionaries. The subject matter expert as it turned out. It took two minutes of artfully phrased and respectful statements by the state security briefer to establish that the particular cockroach up for discussion today was the missing man… Hú himself. It turned out that the functionaries in the room were largely all State Security personnel and it took a while for those boys to build up their picture that had begun with routine inquiries from field agents about whether the kidnapping of a certain TESS poster boy called Colonel Jeeter, might possibly be a blind to mask something else. Rumors had come to light in the international community that China herself might have kidnapped him while maintaining a facade of innocence. This had led to a classified internal security investigation into the possibility on the assumption that where there was smoke there might just be fire. It turned out that rumors in so small a village as the entire world usually held some kernels of accuracy. The results showed strong indications of a brushfire and State Security agents had followed those rumors into the heart of the flames. Two and a half hours later; at the end of a well organized and professional briefing that had stacked a mountain of logical dominoes into a pyramid it was apparent to Chén and the others they had a rough diagram of what gentleman Hú was actually up to. Reading the stated lines and then reading between them though made Chén flush. It came together mentally as a shock that the people in this room were the only people that Lau currently trusted. That scared the hell out of Chén. The Hú rot had spread far. It had taken him a while but Chén finally realized that by their absence it was implied that his own daily companions in government, the President of the Congress, the other Vice premiers on the Council, thirty plus of the ministers on the Council and a lot of military personnel were under suspicion of being disloyal to the communist party and its duly constituted authority epitomized by the Council itself and its head, the Premier. Certainly they were not trusted enough to be included in this meeting. Chén mopped real sweat from his brow. Hú’s actions had the awful potential of becoming another Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution or blowing up into another civil war if they were not very careful. It was insane.
Chén met Lau’s eyes and realized with a shock that beneath his outward calm he was just as apprehensive. Lau had called them here to set the nation’s response. A group of trusted agents. This meeting was a divergence point in time. It was the moment to choose sides. China was an old civilization who had seen it all. China invented all the levers of state. At one time or another they had created and used every military, economic and psychological lever known to man and used it as an instrument of national policy. Many of them had been used to lift political loads a millennium or two before most other nations had even existed. The trusted core of people in this room were here to decide which side, right or left they would yank down on the lever of the political one armed bandit. Their decision would tumble China into the future. Time to decide who your friends were. Time to unify behind Lau or… . behind Hú.
Chén blinked. He had a sense of bèi jǐng lí xiāng—new horizons opening with nothing familiar in them. Except perhaps Lau. Lau sat on the rock of the communist party. The fulcrum of the last 60 years of CCP rule. Hú was… something else. The new thing. Beneath the table top Chén held out both his palms like the weighting platforms on a scale. New or old? Chén quickly decided he would go with what he knew and let the right hand descend.
Rear Admiral Wong, TESS Deputy Commander for Operations stood on the deck of the patrol boat wearing a pair of heavy earphones with a bulky mike suspended in front of his mouth and flexed his knees to account for the oceanic chop without conscious thought. He had been a US naval officer before TESS was formed. His gyros remembered the lessons of his youth.
His current steed was one of a dozen big patrol boats that TESS had purchased, armed and positioned in various harbors around the world. At any ordinary TESS launch from Earth these days at least a pair of them formed the inner ring of a naval protection that formed an armed circle around any loading and launch sites. Today was special though. They had four boats today. They cruised aggressively like sharks in interlocking circles. The boats were not just focused on the surface of the sea either. They were tending a series of sono-buoys that were constantly searching under the water, pinging sonar actively while the boats themselves were also running radar scans overhead. The boats had light SHORAD anti-aircraft systems and SRASW anti-submarine systems. They only needed the short range stuff. The TESS owned boats were always accompanied by an additional outer circle of national naval vessels outside their own orbits. By arrangement with TESS these ships were intended to protect any TESS launch being made in their particular nation’s interests. Wong searched and could make out a destroyer just hull up this side of the horizon.
A slightly larger wave bobbed the deck about violently and Wong compensated like an old salt, but he heard a shriek as a lubberly civilian tumbled onto their butt behind him amid laughter and giggles from other reporters. Wong ignored them.
Glancing overhead Wong was reassured to see a single TESS aircraft that also circled on an inner circle while he caught a glint off a cockpit on a local national fighter circled well outside that. These were the defense measures developed over time. All meant to put up layers and protect the TESS space craft during any operations down here on earth. Today was unique though. Instead of a routine cargo mission TESS was launching the SS Tellus herself. Security was extra tight because of it. The last time that a TESS Space Ship had been launched it had been attacked and nearly destroyed. They were damned if it would happen again.
“One minute.” Dixon transmitted authoritatively from inside the new ship and Wong glanced over as she wallowed as best she could through the slight swell. The Tellus had several improvements over her predecessor, the SS Gaia. For one thing she had two rotary cannon. One aft and one forward which gave her a predatory air. For another the cargo compartments on her we not old tractor trailers converted to use, but were instead made to order cargo pods with several improvements to aide loading and unloading including small cranes stowed along the side of each. She also rode higher in the water than the Gaia since TESS had been given more time in preparing her weight and balance for space and in the water. Though she was still a converted submarine hull she looked altogether more polished and finished than her flagship—the product of more time to design and work on her rather than rushing her into space. She reminded him of a racy 1950’s car. Huge and bulky but essentially more sleek. Put a couple fins on her and you would have a T-bird.
“Roger.” Wong responded over the radio. He sucked in his gut and poked out his chest a bit when he caught a camera centered on him in his peripheral vision. Several news organizations had people aboard including two rather nice looking decidedly female talking heads from some media outlets. He wanted to look heroic, but being a realist he settled for confident.
“Good luck, Captain Dixon.” He said, loud enough to be heard and in his best Basso Profundo. “The hopes and dreams of all of earth go with you.” He finished lamely resisting the temptation to let his pupils roll to the side of his eyes to see if the two cuties had caught his history making bumper sticker or needed a redo. Personally he’s thought it sounded a bit pompous when he thought it up on the john this morning. Still, posterity was a fat matron and might just fancy round phrases uttered by round men.
The loudspeaker began to sound off a countdo
wn in Dixon’s flat and impersonal sounding and strangely exotic Yorkshire accent as they energized the McMoran engines. Apparently ignoring Wong’s historic words Dixon seemed more focused on mere professionalism than the march of ages. Twenty one seconds later he reached zero, the audience heard the world “act…” and the ship simply vanished along with the bottom half of an egg shape of water beneath her. Minor waves cut the surface as the ocean rushed in to fill up a space the size of the bottom third of an Alcubierre bubble that was needed to surround the Tellus and launch her into space.
There was a collective gasp from the reporters as the TESS magic trick that never got old executed and Wong smiled with satisfaction as he turned to address the world officially.
Wong was relieved and it translated into the easy and mellow tones in his responses to the media’s questions. TESS now had an operational fleet for the first time in its history.
An e-mail hit Qin Li’s in-box and nestled itself among the other 96 that had come into his business mail today. Li spent three hours in the morning dealing with intelligence issues and turned to his alter ego cover as a scion of American technology and a fairly wealthy man. He had efficiently deleted two dozen offering penis enlargement and cheap Viagra. He had then opened, researched and answered 32 more. It was actually six hours later that he opened an unremarkable e-note with the subject line “An invitation to meet and discuss an important business matter…”
He was not too excited since he had a couple more with similar titles; he assumed they were simply fishing expeditions from sales personnel in most cases and he had a finger poised to delete it.
