Fulcrums of the Universe: A TESS NOVEL #2

by Randy Moffat

  “What kind or work is it?” Tanya asked trying to hide her delight. Anything was better than staring at the same four steel and stone walls every single day.

  “You any good at gardening?” Captain Johnson asked cocking her head.

  Chinese army units loyal to the Chinese communist party struck quickly into a hundred villages and small towns that guarded the north east approaches to Changzou military district. The mayors, city councilors, police chiefs and department heads were handcuffed instantly. Less obvious people like businessmen, public works employees and the odd farmer who held his face wrong were added to the mix for flavor. Anyone walking about in a nice suit or dress that might indicate economic success under Hú were added willy-nilly. In many cases anyone showing the slightest trace of personal charisma was also thrown in on the theory that this was no time for leadership among the peasants. The whole lot of those arrested were then brought into what passed of the central square of the population center at gunpoint and made to kneel with their foreheads on the asphalt. Whatever remained of the rest of the population in the area was assembled at the end of a bayonet around the edges of the square and forced to squat with their hands on top of their heads and watch. They got to listen too as the lead Army officer shouted a list of generic charges against the group in the center of the square through a bull horn. A few people were reckless enough to stand up to protest and defend themselves or their loved ones. They received a sharp rap on the skull from the butt of a rifle that lay them back down for their troubles. More often than not they woke up handcuffed beside the rest. It didn’t happen often though. Chinese peasants know how to keep quiet.

  Most towns the army entered were found to have anywhere from a half dozen to twenty people already locked up in what passed for a hoosegow who had been arrested by Hú as communist party sympathizers or under the nebulous accusation of being anti-Chinese. Most had them had been prisoners, though in a dozen places with an overdose of Hú zealots the army found mass graves instead. Any of the living among these recently imprisoned were brought out and told to identify anyone who were Hú supporters among the crowds. They had not been treated well by Hú’s Militia and they were eager to comply. In most cases the troops already had their foes kneeling among the detainees. But usually a handful had been missed and were immediately pointed at by the former prisoners and added to the unlucky team of kowtowing arrestees.

  After this process the Army officer then climbed onto the hood of a truck, towering over the prisoners and appearing to read from an official looking document declared every one of them guilty of disloyalty to the state. They were yoked together, loaded awkwardly into a truck and driven away never to be seen again. Their former prisoners were then placed in the center of the square. One was chosen almost at random and appointed the new mayor. Others were appointed as the council of the village. These loyal representatives of the communist party were assigned a squad of ten soldiers to act as enforcers of the new communist party will and the trucks drove away.

  It was a successful tactic. In the wake of the advancing communist army that was loyal to Beijing the Militia for Work and other Hú followers suddenly started to vaporize. In their hearts Chinese peasants had not really changed in millennia. Their olfactory nerves whiffed the ill wind blowing, knew it for the rotten smell that was coming from corpse of Hú’s dying political ambitions and they suddenly became fierce communist sympathizers again. They knew what was good for them.

  Gradually, as the army advanced they began to enter more and more towns where the local population had already arisen and undertaken basically the same actions as the army to prove their loyalty so that the army merely had to slow down long enough to load up the revisionists, drop a squad of troops to police the village and move on. The countryside began to pass back to CCP control. The Chinese people would abide.

  Of course a certain percentage of Hú supporters were more loyal, or heard about what had happened elsewhere nearby and simply got out of town. They all headed toward Hú as if he was a human magnet. These peoples acts of self preservation were all according to General Fun’s plan. By design these fleeing Húists worked in the army’s favor since they ended up forming a wall of refugees who fled into the ever shrinking limits of Hú controlled space. The math was in Fun’s favor. More mouths to feed and less and less food supplies to feed them with. With a population of almost 1.4 billion people China has long been a net importer of food. Those imports largely came through the big harbors along the coast. During the contraction of his troops Hú had by now lost touch with most of the coastline though he still had a theoretical and meandering contact with Macao the route was interdicted hourly by the People’s Air Force that hit anything bigger than a passenger car trying to drive north along it. Supplies were almost choked off. As always, logistics it the mother of strategy. More and more of the Lau Army were brought back into logistical touch with their supply base and were now well fed. This was less and less the case for Hú’s people. Now it was time for Hú’s supporters to learn what hunger did to an army.

  Twenty three days after Fun’s “night of the commissars” the UN HCR, the United Nations commissioner for refugees and displaced persons officially protested to the Hua communist government that they must stop all military operations to save lives as conditions were becoming intolerable in Changzhou military area with shortages of water, food, shelter and medical supplies. It turned out that the communists did not give a damn for the UNHCR and duly informed them so. The CCP were showing their true colors. By design a Marxist-Leninist state had little sympathy for counter revisionists. Their business was to suppress opposition using any tool at hand in the name of the proletariat. By definition proletariats understand tools. Food was a tool. They got on with the business of rebuilding China into the worker’s paradise it was supposed to be using the tools at hand and damn the consequences.

  China is densely populated country. The density in the Chongqing pocket increased and then increased again as it contracted under pressure from the army. Shelves inside the pocket emptied early. Only a tiny trickle of new supplies flowed in since the pathways of the Yangzi and Pearl rivers had been cut. Prices soared until nothing remained to buy at any price. Hunger stalked through Hú’s followers like an alley cat. Military forces were given top priority for toast and rice. By that math non-military were last. Soon large numbers of civilians began to flee into the arms of the Communist Army begging for a meal. The army received them gently according to Fun’s strategy. They gave them three days worth of food to fatten them up again and fill them with hope, then he put them to work in labor parties at gunpoint building barriers to seal any and every exit or entrance into or out of the Chongqing pocket and preparing high speed avenues of approach into the pocket. The people worked and worked and kept on working until exhausted they lay down. The army got them on their feet with bayonets and then worked them until they began to drop. They were never fed again. Dutifully they began to die in numbers and in much the same manner that the peasants who had built the great wall had died. Their dead bodies were thrown into the road beds that the army was improving preparatory to driving tanks forward along them. Markers were placed by the mass graves after bulldozers plowed them under. Essentially the signs said ‘Here lie Hú traitors atoning for their treason by holding up this road for the Chinese Communist Party.’ Word eventually got out.

  “Damned if they did or damned if they didn’t” wasn’t much of a choice. Many more chose to stay in the pocket with Hú even though it was suicide. Chongqing became a hell hole with more and more people crammed into every corner until they ran out of corners.

  It was bad.

  Chinese bad.

  I was only half aware of the horrors unfolding in China. Mentally I was done with the Chinese. They had kidnapped, Jeeter. I had gotten him back. It had cost me. Craig was still in intensive care.

  I had caught a glimpse of my face in the mirror this morning. It wasn’t
pretty. But I had my duty. My responsibility again was TESS overall. I was in uniform on Earth for a conference and trying not to pick my nose while thinking vaguely about the TESS monster I had created.

  The essential security problem with my TESS construct was that we had quickly assumed the role of a cargo carrier… rather like oceanic cruise or cargo vessels of years gone by. Like oceanic surface ships we had to move loads of people and material for various countries to a variety of locations in space. This business model meant that we necessarily had assumed a published schedule of operations to meet all our customer’s needs. We had learned early on just how vulnerable we were when we landed for pickup and we had developed complex tactics to ameliorate the risks by moving our landing sites about in a random manner around the globe. In addition, we demanded and received protective naval and air support for our landing and launch sites on Earth—bartering cargo capacity for outside assistance if our customer lacked a navy or air force of their own. This methodology had protected us to some extent. Thinking it through we had installed a last line of defense when we had mounted radar guided guns on our ship to supplement our outer rings of a protection umbrella against missile threats fired from close by. Our theory and experience over the last year was that our primary defense against any attack made from outside these protective circles of weapons could be negated by us simply firing up the McMoran engine and exiting the scene for planetary orbit where we felt safe.

  We had even continued this logic to its limits during conversation a couple times. In a desultory way we had batted about the fact that some of the locations for some missions put us out in space at specific locations when dropping cargos off in orbit—positions just as fixed as a pick up point on the Earth. The question was raised as to whether this put us at risk very much like our landing operations on planet. We had dropped the discussions though. Our concern about interception way out there in space seemed basically impossible for anyone using standard earth-space technologies. As always, we had other fish to fry. We accepted the risk. We were complaisant.

  As usual we were wrong.

  Hú tracked down Zeng. In the chaos of the war he had begotten he had forgotten about his scientific leader for a while and when he bothered to think about him at all thought that the ‘Scientist’ might be somewhere around Dongfeng Aerospace City, trapped firmly behind enemy lines far to the North. Zeng was a survivor though. Hú finally got word that Zeng had made his way to the Xichang Satellite Launch Center in the mountains south west of Chongqing before the Communist Army cut him off. Hú breathed a sigh of relief. Zeng was safe inside Hú’s pocket of loyalists and still capable of supporting him. He called Zeng at the Xichang Center.

  His orders were clear. Zeng was to continue his operations. Support Sho’s space team with everything he had left. Ask for any help and Hú would move the earth to provide it.

  Hú outlined his strategy. He was going to hold out until the last man in the Changzhou/Chongqing pocket. He was positioning himself. Husbanding the assets he would need to make his appeal to the Chinese people once he got his hands on the TESS drive secrets. He would make it clear that China was his only interest. That Lau and the Communists had sold out China by dealing with TESS when they should have been simply taking the secrets of the MacMoran drive and gifting them to Mother China instead. Lau would not make China a true space power. Only Hú could do that. Only Hú and the courage and vision to do that. He would still be a national hero. Zeng must remain poised to take the data sent by Sho after he attacked TESS, interpret it swiftly and quickly provide it to Hú for his propaganda. This data would trigger Hú’s announcement.

  Zeng’s fate was cast with Hú. He hesitated only for a few moments and then nodded like a toy dog on a dashboard and agreed. It gave Zeng focus. He arranged for a live feed of video and audio between the space center and Chongqing to be maintained at all times so that the information would flow no matter what happened. He had a mission. A purpose. They would still win. It made it possible for him to overlook the chaos that country was sliding into around him. But he was loyal.

  Premier Lau looked at General Fun with pleasure in the manner most men do when they are given good news. Fun was pointing at his map. There were four ragged red lines on the overlay. One was in Western China, a second was in far North East China and a third loop was in Southern China. The fourth was by far the biggest and comprised a huge ragged oval that surrounded Chongqing and a large area south to include Hainan Island, west deep into the great snowy mountains and to a lesser extent into the mountains east of that city. These ragged red squiggles on the map were the front lines between Hú loyalists and CCP troops loyal to the state. Hú controlled only a fraction of the ground that he had held only three weeks before. Even more exciting though was the fact that there were two enormous red arrows pointing directly at Chongqing—one from the Northeast and the other at that fish-hooked south from Shanghai and curved back north into the Sichuan Basin. They were the axis of advance of the army attacks that would begin as soon as Lau gave Fun the nod. The attack would have as its objective neither the Military forces opposing it nor the city of Chongqing. Instead it had as its purpose the capture or destruction of Hú. Hú was the center of gravity of the resistance. The charismatic leader is always the center point that must be eliminated to collapse any cult of personality.

  Lau was looking lovingly at the map and its arrows then glanced up to see that Fun was standing and watching him patiently with his hand clasped over his crotch.

  “Shall I order the attack, Premier?” General Fun asked.

  Lau nodded.

  “Attack with everything you have, General. Bring me Hú standing up or on a plank… but bring the bastard to me.”

  General Fun nodded and half bowed subordinately. He decided on the old form of address appropriate to ideological battles like this one had become.

  “As you say, comrade.”

  “Long live the revolution.” Lau finished also in the ancient way.

  Lieutenant 3 Woo was in the nerve center of TESS Space Station L5 poised to make history.

  “Watson, Come in… I need you… . Are you ready?” She had sent the message out a several minutes ago by ordinary radio, paraphrasing Alexander Graham Bell.

  It had continued to surprise Antonin Petrovski whose chair at the L5 command center was immediately behind hers and up one tier so he could look down slightly at what she was doing. He had never associated a sense of whimsy with Tina Woo before, but then he realized he had never associated genius with her before either and when he had arrived yesterday from an extended lurk in the Bat Caves and been shown what she had accomplished he had changed his opinion. He had actually revised every opinion he had ever possessed of her stratospherically upward during the last day. The huge effort just to mount her massive antenna onto L5 so that she could leverage the use of phased array technologies to gather in and assemble repeating packets of information that would have traveled huge distances, trapped inside the artificial stasis of her nested MacMoran fields had astonished Petrovski. He had never contemplated using the field to move not matter, but captured electromagnetic energy fields instead. Then there were her modifications and extension to the engines themselves used to generate the data packets in the first place that had absolutely knocked Petrovski back on his heels. Finally she had delivered her final gut punch this morning when she had revealed to him the methodically gathered tables she had developed that showed her workmanlike investigation into the results of the field’s interaction with ordinary matter and he had instantly grasped that she had been working quietly away down at the opposite end of the hierarchical spectrum of the Petrovski-matter interaction that he had been working on too. She had build a beautiful body of work that answered many of the key questions about the interaction of TESS’ MacMoran engines with baryonic matter while he was busy fussing about on the Dark energy end of things. She was an empiricist not a theorist; as such she had m
issed many of the ramifications of her own findings and how they extended into the regions of known quantum mechanics, but she had still taken Petrovski’s breath away with her elegant engineering solutions to solve her problems and their wider applications to the now developing field theory. At a glance Antonin had seen that her work in communications would answer many of the Admiral’s concerns around the space drive’s primary mission of moving mass across the wider regions of space-time. Petrovski might be on a path that would eventually answer the widest ramifications of the effect, but Woo had just produced a practical application that Antonin had never even thought about and which would fit into his own work like an interlocking piece of puzzle.