by Randy Moffat
He had been sitting staring at the back of her genius head in a brown study for the last thirty minutes only to be exposed to the new notion that she might even have something like a sense of humor in there too. He shook his head just as the radio burst back with Rivera’s radio response from the SS Gaia arrived over the speakers having taken many minutes to return.
“Let’s do it Tia. New message inbound.” Her voice echoed tinnily. Enough with the standard radio.
Suddenly the big screen that dominated center stage at L5’s control center came to life and the flashing cursor that had hung unused until now suddenly began to lay out English and numeric characters…
ID: 00000001
Code: Gaia
In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree:
Where Alph, the sacr_d river, ran
Through caverns measu7eless to man
Down to a sunless sea.
There was a collective gasp as the message stopped. After a heartbeat, Lieutenant 3 Tia Woo began to type swiftly on her own keyboard. Her response flowed across the screen below that of SFC Rivera’s message.
ID: 00001000
Code: L5 Station
So twice five miles of fertile ground
With walls and towers were girdled round;
And there were gardens bright with sinuous ri…
She paused.
It was a test. They were stopping at random places in the poem to show that the other station was receiving and understanding by picking up the next bit of the famous meter. No cheating here. Almost instantly more words flowed across the screen for all to see in response as Rivera typed aboard Gaia somewhere in close Earth orbit.
ID: 00000001
Code: Gaia
. . . lls,
Where blos*omed many an incense-bearing tree;
And here…
Tia picked it up swiftly and typed in the next words like water flowing across smooth stones driven down from the height of the Presidential mountains. It was as pure and cold as those streams and sent the same chill down the spine.
ID: 00001000
Code: L5 Station
. . . . were forests ancient…
There was huge cheering swelling from every throat in L5 and for a moment Petrovski felt his own throat catch in pride too. TESS had done it again. Woo and Rivera had entered the history books. At such a moment there was nothing but open and candid pleasure in their achievement and he was on his feet yelling with the rest.
ID: 00000001
Code: Gaia
. . . as the hills, . . .
TESS was communicating at the speed of the Petrovski effect. Faster than anyone had ever communicated before. There was no apparent time delay. Each was responding to the other as if they were in the same room. Tia clattered keys.
ID: 00001000
Code: L5 Station
. . . . Enfolding sunnny spots of greenery.
Woo could not type another line of the romantic poet Coleridge because her arms were locked to her sides as Captain Johnson was busily crushing her in a bear hug and a line of people were in line to mimic her… Including Antonin. He thought of her like a scientist would. There were three classes of lever in science. Type one was the most efficient, requiring the least effort, but requiring the fulcrum be between the user and the load. Tia had based her new lever of communications firmly on the unmoving fulcrum of the existing MacMoran engines. In doing so she had moved the universe almost easily… again. Antonin used an elbow to cut the line shamelessly, pried her loose from Johnson and wrapped her in his own arms.
“This is one ‘A number one’ tool you have built here to leverage the Petrovski effect… you are fantastic…” He whispered in her ear and he embraced her. There wasn’t time for more. There was a line waiting and someone moved him aside with a shove to take his place.
Woo and Rivera had just given mankind spooky action at a distance communications. While humanity raged against itself the human race had once again lurched forward unawares except of a tiny group of people.
A copy of Spruance’s slides to his General hit Murray’s e-mail about eight days after the Major’s briefing from one of his contacts who got them second hand from a guy he knew in the JSpOC. Murray was still tired from his Chinese operation and had opened them as the fifty second attachment he had gotten that day and was quickly and absently scanning through them. He chose that moment to accidentally spill salsa on the front of his aloha shirt from the burrito in his paw. As a result he was only half paying attention as he flickered slide after slide past his eyes using the arrow keys on his keyboard absently and cursing in three languages while mopping tomato and pepper off his shirt with a napkin. Distracted, he was missing most of the slide’s contents. Eventually he realized resignedly that the salsa stains pretty well blended invisibly into the pattern already on the shirt and he tossed the napkin in the wastebasket.
By sheer luck he lifted his head and his peripheral vision caught the footnote mention of ‘28 personnel aboard Tiagong Station’ and it made him pause and lift his finger off the keyboard. What on earth could motivate the Chinese to man their station at that kind of strength? Most space stations had a crew of three or four with small surges to six usually around resupply missions and crew changeovers. It was a ridiculous enough number that he began to thumb back through the slides and reread them carefully. He ended up peering at them myopically for a minute to make sure he understood and agreed with Major Spruance’s logic and data.
He did. Murray leaned back rubbed his jaw thinking for a moment. He wondered just why someone might want to have 28 personnel crammed aboard a single space station. Why the Chinese might want to do it. Then he thought of a reason.
“Uh-Oh” He said and jumped to his feet calling loudly for his second in command.
CHAPTER 10
A class three lever of action with lots of effort and guns
There was a resounding thump overhead and Hú ducked a bit unconsciously as though expecting the ceiling to fall in. He shrugged his shoulders a bit more as dust drifted down onto his neck from overhead.
Hú glanced at his security Chief who stood by him as impassively as ever. Explosions meant nothing to him. Give him his due. The man knew very little of personal fear… only caution. He had just returned to Hú from the Jeeter fiasco in Shanghai. What should have taken a day to return from had instead taken weeks. His chief had fled west from that city only to be forced to turn south in the face of a solid wall of Communist loyalist units sweeping along the coast from the north and pushing everything they did not like in front of them. They did not like much at that point including the hoards of refugees blocking roads. Fords and VW’s tended to lose out to determined tanks in traffic jams.
People’s army units to the northwest were in active combat with Hú army units, but the communist army wasn’t really planning to duke it out face to face with Hú’s entrenched defenses. They were making an end run around instead. Their forces were rushing along the face of China’s coastline and appeared intent on not stopping until they held Macao. Then, as they approached Hong Kong, they suddenly changed direction to due west. An idiot could understand the plan. They had already locked down and isolated the northern end of a pocket that held the bulk of Hú forces. Now they were completing a maneuver that slashed across the south end of the same pocket… to seal it off. Hú’s strength was to be trapped inside a vacuole surrounded on three sides by Chinese military units and on the fourth by some of the most intimidating mountains in the world. When the maneuver was done Hú was essentially surrounded and cut off from the sea altogether. Nor was he in any position to break out with millions of increasingly hungry people on his hands.
His security chief had only just avoided capture three times in the last week. For a time he had just been staying a few hours in front of communist army’s th
rust while slanting laterally to the west, as if riding the curl of the wave of refugees being pushed forward across the front of advancing troops. He’d just completed his maneuver and begun to relax in an eddy when the CCP forces chose that moment to send their armor units forming the front line of the CCP army past him and then abruptly began their ninety degree wheel to the west along the north bank of the Pearl river. Only by quick thinking and fast movement did he avoid becoming embroiled in their leading battalions. He managed to reach high ground in the Nanling Mountains which armored vehicles were avoiding and which nominally trapped him inside the Hú pocket, but he was on the far south eastern edge of it and had a long way to backtrack to reach Hú. Chongqing was far to the north across the mountains so that he had to beat back, most of the time on foot across ridges and mountains equivalent to the Appalachians. It had taken days to make his way through obscure byways along the more porous hills that framed the eastern side of the egg. The rugged terrain broke up the continuity of the enemy’s formations and he persevered through untold dangers of war until he finally reached the heart of the Chongqing pocket to reach his master Hú’s side. The CCP had been busily sealing routes behind him and what he had accomplished was likely now no longer even possible. The man was a survivor.
He found Hú much diminished. The leader looked tired and worn. What the American defenders of Corregidor must have looked like after almost five months of nearly continuous bombing and shelling by the Japanese in 1942.
Hú’s primary command bunker was a hastily dug fortification thrown together by his best remaining engineering units and hidden under a farmer’s barn east of the city. The bunker’s disguise had worked for some time. For twenty days the Chinese Air Force had been attacking targets further west and north of them; unaware of his refuge. That had changed in the last 36 hours. Hú still controlled most space assets so Hú had expressed the thought that the change had not been due to their discovering him by using orbital satellites. He conjectured they had instead gone old school and used aircraft based aerial photography. The downloading of pictures and interpretation of the data had taken them some time. It explained the delay, but it was inevitable that they would have discovered various visible discrepancies between older data and the current configuration of terrain around the farm no matter how well his men had covered their tracks. A field headquarters implied lots of foot and vehicle traffic and those things left pathways that were impossible to hide completely. If nothing else the electromagnetic spectrum he used to communicate instructions to his forces would have marked the general area and given them a broad piece of terrain to look in. Finally they had found the sweet spot. Once they had a solid target his already weak air defenses were taken out immediately leaving smoking ruins wherever a missile or gun reached up for a plane. The Chinese Air Force were now enjoying complete air superiority over most of the Changzhou military district and had abruptly changed tactics from air-to-air and begun air-to-ground attacks aimed in the direction of the bunker over the last two days. The jig was up. In the last ten hours strike after strike had disintegrated the barn and begun excavating the ground near it through the simple expedient of adding one crater on top of another crater. They were digging a hole bomb by bomb down towards the haven of Hú and his command group.
Hú’s engineers had anticipated a need to move him early and had begun an alternate locale for Hú to retreat into deep within the impenetrable western mountains. The secondary site was supposed to have been finished two days ago. Four days ago though they had lost communications with the engineer units preparing it. A ground messenger had come through yesterday to inform him that the communist Air Force had discovered the bulldozers at their work and obliterated them. Estimates were of 72% casualties in engineers at the work site. The new bunker was a total write off having been smashed into wreckage. It made it impossible to leave this bunker complex now. The frequency of attacks from the air was escalating too. Air Force aircraft had been striking every few hours in the beginning, but now were striking every half hour or so. Aircraft also struck anything trying to leave the bunker within minutes. Everyone knew they must have planes in continuous racetrack orbits overhead awaiting for any target at all. Their advanced systems could see through most smoke, dust and obscuration and could not be easily fooled. Airplanes detected heat signatures of machines and even individual men trying to depart and smashed them with anything at hand. Even if it meant ridiculous force disparities. Two hours ago two men traversing a ravine had been attacked with a thousand pound bomb. Equivalent to shooting a mouse with an cannon. Lau’s army meant business. No one was getting out of the hole.
Another crump shook the walls and more dust drifted down.
It was only a matter of time now.
It was odd, but it turned out that Hú was no coward. He had discovered a vein of inner strength within himself these last weeks and days. He felt on a plane with his Security chief now. He had no fear anymore… only a growing sense of fatalism. What would come would come. He would fight on until it arrived.
There was still some hope. They might yet gain a victory if Sho succeeded in space. Luckily several armored hard wire feeds from outside the bunker were as yet uncut by the air strikes including the one with Xianchang Space center. He could still send out his story when Sho succeeded. He still had some chance of success.
He contemplated his head of security impartially and made up his mind. If anyone could make their way out of the underground trap his bunker had become it would be him. He was an implacable survivor who rumor had it was having an affair with all three of the sisters fate. The man was apparently indestructible. Without preamble he turned to his chief of security and handed him several data drives, each labeled cryptically in Pinyin Chinese. He opened his mouth to call him by name and suddenly realized he could not recall it. He was merely the perfect instrument for a leader. A tool. Always there. Always in reach. It had been a long time since he had needed to call him anything at all.
“I am sorry.” He said politely. “I cannot recall your name.”
Another lesser man would have been insulted. The security chief’s emotions were such a remote memory that he was incapable of being offended.
“Jiu Jiameng, Leader.” He replied unruffled in a polite voice that belied the ugly scarred visage.
There was no wonder left in Hú anymore or he would have been amazed at his chief’s lack of offense. They had worked with each other for years. Hú paid him a compliment on instinct, wanting to influence him and to cover his gaff. A compliment was something he had never offered him before. For this pair it was the moral equivalent of blubbering, gushing and throwing their arms around one another.
“Jiu. You have done well. I want you to go west and south from here. I will send out several men and vehicles at the same to time to mask your movements. It should confuse the enemy and perhaps buy you some time. They will target the highest priority targets first including those with vehicles and multiple personnel. Find Zeng if you can, but it is important that you survive and escape. There is a village…”
As Hú spoke the word ‘village’ to Jiu under the earth Sho launched his Soyuz knockoff Shenzhou capsules in the direction of nothingness. It was a particular piece of nothing however. One that contained a theoretical point over Africa where TESS was shortly scheduled to release a satellite commissioned by the Zambian government.
Designed and built by a French firm the satellite was a primitive spy system that the local Zambian lunatic dictator planned to use to spy on his own people. Obviously it was to be placed in a published locale where the spy systems would work best. TESS had been requested to provide the delivery service by South Africa as a favor to the South African government rather than the Zambian. During the household political infighting that went on inside the mud walled hut shared by the nations of the southern portion of that interesting continent a three way deal had been cut between Zambia, South Africa and China. China had p
roposed the deal originally. Their demands were reasonable enough. They wanted greater security guarantees for expatriates working in South Africa and a 10% increase in profitability for certain engineering projects they were conducting inside South Africa’s border. In her turn she would double her loans for underwriting of additional infrastructure construction in South African resource development projects in exchange for her participation acting as broker in setting up the three way deal for Zambia. Everybody won. Zambia gained the satellite she coveted and agreed in her turn to aggressively pursue using it to shut down cross border incursions and violence from gangs, guerrilla groups and smugglers that poured over its borders periodically from her territory and into South Africa. For her share South Africa got not only the big economic gains and grants from China, but also got the benefits of greater peace and policing from its idiot neighbor. Of course, Zambia was too poor and too chaotic to even have envisioned buying a TESS mission, let alone having one given to it by a neighbor with whom she had considerable friction and jealousy. Then, after a single diplomatic dinner at the Chinese embassy though its Gonzo dictator suddenly got a space borne bug that began to approach paranoia about what his own population and the guerilla’s inside his country were up to. Zambia was onboard the deal over night. No one was particularly fooled by the furtive looks on his face which spoke volumes about his desire to re-task the machine later to spy on his neighbors instead of native Zambians and rebel forces. Of course unlike him, the South Africans were sane and while Zambia actually got their satellite, they did so without the knowledge that it held a self-destruct code inserted by South Africa who could terminate the satellite at will if Zambia failed to deliver the promised peace or ever decided to try and reorient it towards her neighbor. It was easy for them. Zambia was such an asylum it was very likely that were less than half a dozen people in the country who had enough math to figure out the satellite’s orbit let alone find a few lines of self destruct code buried in the machine’s 350,000 lines of programming. There was equally no way the Zambians had anyone who could spot three small tiny charges that looked like chips buried in the complexity of its wiring diagrams. Collectively the code and chips would make the machine go inert on command. South Africa on the other hand was the dominant technological country south of the Sahara and for them it was child’s play. Predictably, in all this gamesmanship neither of the African nations looked too closely at Chinese motivations for putting the deal together in the first place. They just assumed their stated economic objectives were true. After all, they stood to make considerable money on the deal.
