Rhapsody For The Tempest (The Braintrust Book 3)

by Marc Stiegler

  Jam rolled to her knees, expecting at any moment to be struck by a shot from Vasily.

  He couldn’t miss, not with his Spetsnaz training. Her only real chance was to take the bullet and kill him while she bled out. Julissa could then get Gleb’s family home.

  So, with more determination than hope, Jam sighted her gun on the limited part of her target not blocked by the mother. If he just held off shooting for another moment…

  Then Vasily jerked his arm and tossed his gun into the snow. He raised his hands and slid to his knees, mimicking her. “Jam. Please. Take me with you.”

  Jam almost lowered her weapon in surprise, but then she remembered who she was dealing with—one of Dash’s kidnappers. She held the gun steady on his chest.

  The woman spoke. “Please don’t hurt him. He’s been protecting us.”

  Jam knelt speechless for a moment. Not only was the victim defending him, but it dawned on her that if she left him behind, the Premier would vent his wrath on his failed guard. If Jam didn’t take him along, he would end up in the gulag’s cemetery.

  In the end, there was only one thing for Jam to say. “Ok.”

  After zip-tying Vasily, Jam led them all back to the copters where the real problem awaited her. She was about to play the old game of carrying a chicken, a fox, and a basket of corn across the river. Unfortunately, her boat was even smaller than the boat used in the game. She addressed the mother. “Tatiana, can you fly a copter?”

  Tatiana shook her head.

  Jam persisted. “How about your daughter?”

  Tatiana snapped at her. “You are not going to make my daughter a copter pilot.” She reflected. “Well, not today. She has no idea.”

  Vasily offered, “I know how to fly a copter.”

  Of course he did. Well, it would have to do. She sliced the zip ties from his hands. “Disobey my orders, and I’ll find you and gut you.”

  He rubbed his wrists. “I wouldn’t have it any other way.”

  Jam stepped back and spoke to her companions. “Okay, those of you who are numerically gifted will have noticed that we have two copters, each able to carry two people, and five people. Julissa, you’ll fly the copter with Misha. Vasily, you’ll fly the copter with Tatiana.”

  Julissa beat the others to the punch in asking the obvious question. “But what about you?”

  Jam took a deep breath. “Don’t worry about me. I’ve made my way across more hostile terrain than this. The last time I had nothing but the clothes on my back.” She forced a cheery note into her voice. “This time, I’m much better equipped.” She looked to the south, across the bleakness that went on forever.

  Vasily coughed. “I don’t think even I could make it across that countryside, and I can at least blend in as a Russian.”

  Jam jerked her head up and down. “Which is why I’ll be the one who goes on foot.” She wiggled the gun pointed at him. “Don’t make me tell you again.”

  Vasily raised his hands. “Whatever you say, boss.”

  As they lifted off, Jam wrapped her coat tighter around herself, pulled her scarf low, and headed south.

  As the meeting on liftoff schedules broke up, Matt saw Dash standing humbly outside the conference room. He waved her in. “Dash. Good to see you. What can I do for you?”

  Werner had risen to leave, but when he saw Dash, he stopped. “Hey, how’s it going?”

  Dash entered the room smiling. “My main research continues to make progress. And I think we’ve made some progress on your request as well.”

  Matt looked back and forth between the two conspirators. “Werner, what request is that?”

  Werner blushed. “I’ve been meaning to tell you. I asked Dash to look into making the Heinlein-class ships faster. Like all the isle ships, the Heinlein at full thrust makes about four knots. It would be great if our ships could move faster.”

  Dash added, “you’re not the only ones who want faster ships. Of course, the most basic requirement of an isle ship, namely stability while stationary in high seas, is in conflict with the needs of speed. Even though the ships have plenty of power for more propellers, fluid resistance grows as a cube of speed. Trying to just push harder through the water would create large waves but little speed. To go faster, you simply must achieve better streamlining.” She synced the wallscreen to her tablet. “Fortunately there is a solution.”

  On the screen they could see the outline of a standard isle ship, with its barge-like prow and the two reactor modules underneath. “Alex’s folks from the Argus who figured out how to grow isle ship hulls the way clams grow seashells have been studying ice.”

  Matt blinked. “Ice?”

  Dash covered her mouth to prevent a giggle. “I didn’t expect it either.”

  She started an animation on the display. Copper-colored lines formed a frame from the bow to the stern, caging the nuclear pods in a shape that looked like a traditional ship hull. “They were trying to grow a temporary hull out of ice using a copper wire frame, but the wiring was too stiff for setup and disassembly, it tended to break. We equipped the Prometheus fleet with it anyway, they had such a long way to go. It helped them tremendously, but it just wasn’t practical for widespread application.”

  Now most of the copper lines were replaced by black lines that waved slightly in the current though they were anchored to the remaining copper lines. “Then I introduced Alex’s team to the fellows on the Dreams who made the Graphene Reinforced Carbon tiles for your launch pads.”

  Matt nodded; GRC was the first invention Dash had introduced him to.

  “One of the reasons graphene works so well for the tiles is that it is an incredible heat conductor. So incredible that they had to modify Fourier’s Law of heat transfer to explain it.” Now the copper disappeared completely from the animation, replaced by thicker black lines. “We figured out how to make a folding skeleton of graphene that could create an ice hull in hours rather than days. The ice hull is highly streamlined. And since ice floats, it actually lifts the ship itself out of the water. Only the highly streamlined shape of the ice remains. The Prometheus experiment suggests we might get fifteen or sixteen knots, a factor of four.”

  Werner leaned forward eagerly. “How soon can I get it?”

  Matt corrected the question. “How soon can we get it without paying a rush order premium?”

  Dash laughed gaily. “We can put the Heinlein second on the list. First will be the Haven since they’re willing to pay a premium.”

  Werner headed to the door. “Good enough. Thank you again, Dash.”

  Matt waited until Werner had departed before looking at Dash. “Ice hulls are not the reason you’re here, is it?”

  Dash sat down next to Matt and placed her tablet before him for a more intimate presentation. “No. I need urgently to speak with you about cell phone satellites.”

  Matt looked at Dash curiously. “Cell phone satellites? What does that even mean?”

  Dash brought up a new animation on her tablet, of a chunk of Earth with satellites zooming at various altitudes above it. “You already have a fleet of broadband satellites, StarLink.”

  Matt nodded. “My predecessor built it quite a while ago. It was never as profitable as we’d hoped—too much competition. By the time we had ours full up, three other companies were well on their way to completing theirs.”

  Dash raised an eyebrow. “Was that the only problem?”

  He added reluctantly, “And too much equipment needed on the ground.” He held his hands out to outline an object the shape of a pizza box. “Even though the ground relay was small and cheap by Western standards, it was a considerable hurdle for most potential users.”

  Dash highlighted a StarLink satellite on the tablet, then highlighted a satellite in a much lower orbit.

  “This is the proposed Starry Night cell phone satellite. Think of it as a cell tower in the sky.”

  Matt studied the screen. “So your cell phone could hook directly into the satellite? No ground station
at all?”

  “Exactly.”

  Matt shook his head. “There are so many problems with this I don’t know where to begin.” He swept his finger up and down from the Starry Night to the earth and back. “You need really low latency for a cell phone.”

  Dash nodded. “And that’s a really low orbit satellite. Much closer than StarLink.”

  Matt frowned. “Which means it’s so low that atmospheric friction is bound to be a problem.”

  Dash fingered the tablet and blew up the image of the satellite into a schematic diagram. “Which is why it has ion propulsion jets working continuously, and a set of chemical propellant thrusters for periodic high-G corrections.”

  Matt whistled. “Those are big fuel tanks for the thrusters.”

  Dash shrugged. “Colin muttered something about needing to be able to dodge space junk as it reentered atmosphere.” She paused. “Professor Dillion and I both thought the tanks could be smaller, but Colin was adamant.”

  So Colin was involved. Interesting. “Power?”

  “Strontium-90 batteries.”

  Matt had no idea what that meant, but Dash was so confident, he let it go. Finally, he got to the core problem. “It looks fabulous, Dash, but I don’t have the money for a project this large. Not anymore. My R&D fund has been pretty well depleted.”

  Dash gave him a big grin. She pulled out her cell. “Ben, Colin, Keenan, you can come in now.”

  Matt ran his tongue over his teeth. “Sounds like you have a plan for the financing as well. You are the complete hand, Dr. Dash.”

  Dash covered her mouth with her hand. “I will take that as a compliment, even if it is not.”

  Matt wasn’t sure himself whether it was a compliment or not, so he said nothing.

  When Colin, Ben, and Keenan arrived, a round of comfortable haggling began. Matt was determined to force his investors to take a full forty-nine percent stake. Colin, on behalf of the BrainTrust, offered a thirty-five/sixty-five percent split. Ben wanted a piece and insisted Dash take a tiny slice as well. She had the money, he explained, and she needed good investments.

  Dash easily agreed, on one condition. “Before we put all the money in, we need to do some experimenting. As it happens, Professor Dillion and his grad students have a prototype of the Starry Night satellite. We should launch it immediately, and see how it performs.”

  Werner, who had been recalled to the room for scheduling and technical assessment, concurred. “Absolutely! We won’t know the real cost until we have the real satellite in our hands and some experience with maintaining and refueling the damn things.”

  Everyone agreed to these terms and went back to haggling.

  While Colin and Ben argued over the split of the forty-five percent Matt had compromised with them on, Matt negotiated with Keenan on financing the half of SpaceR’s fifty-five percent that couldn’t come out of his R&D budget. Matt and Werner kept looking at their current cash flow, which had improved significantly since moving to the BrainTrust, to see how much they could fund out of future profits.

  Dash showed Matt her calculations on how profitable it would be to bring direct cell phone connections to every person on earth, bypassing government monopolies and taxation policies: with a direct satellite connection, the governments wouldn’t even know there were phone calls to be taxed.

  The profit numbers were huge, so huge Dash apologized at one point. “I know this sounds like a ridiculously large amount of profit, but I cannot find anything wrong with my calculations. I keep trying to find a reason to make the numbers small enough to be believable, but I cannot.”

  Matt kept pondering those numbers. He couldn’t see anything wrong with them either. It would be very profitable. He needed more.

  In the end, Matt negotiated his investors into taking only a thirty-three percent stake. Goldman Sachs offered SpaceR a line of credit for anything they couldn’t pay for out of current savings and future profits.

  As people departed, Matt muttered, “Did I just out-negotiate everybody in the room, or did I just hang myself?”

  Colin slapped him on the shoulder. “If I knew, I wouldn’t tell you.”

  Dash yelled at Werner. “I want to get that prototype up as soon as possible. Any way we could launch it tomorrow?”

  Werner stared at her. “What’s the rush?”

  Dash smiled mischievously. “I need to make a phone call.”

  On the way into his home office, the Premier passed one of his general-purpose bots on the way out. That was a little unusual, though not so unusual as to set off any alarm bells. In the Russian Union as in so much of the civilized world, GP bots were illegal…but of course, he’d made an exception for himself. The things were quite useful, and his human staff tasked the bots as often as he did. And he preferred the bot to his human staff for coming and going from his office: it felt more private.

  Reaching his desk, the Premier discovered a small cardboard box sitting dead-center on top of the closed lid of his laptop. He stared at it for a moment, saw in tiny writing in the upper left corner a sender address of sorts: “The BrainTrust.” It was addressed to “The Premier.”

  Surely his security detail had examined it already. But if it was really from the BrainTrust perhaps not, perhaps the BrainTrust had circumvented…well, if it were from the BrainTrust it would be harmless, of that at least he felt confident.

  The BrainTrust continued to irritate him in numerous ways. He found himself daydreaming more and more often about how much less problematic all those half-baked geniuses would be if just a few key people mysteriously died. But he had a rule: don’t kill someone unless he woke up dreaming about their deaths every morning for two weeks in a row. His BrainTrust death dreams had only started eight days ago.

  He ripped at the tape on the box. It opened easily. Inside he found a dull gray lead vial, diligently sealed. The Premiere felt a chill run down his spine.

  A blank manila envelope accompanied the vial. He reached under the flap with his index finger to tear it open.

  Ouch! The edge of the flap sliced his finger. He stared at the thin red line. He supposed he couldn’t really blame the BrainTrust for his clumsiness. Of course, he was the Premier. Perhaps he could blame them anyway.

  The letter inside the envelope contained nothing but a page of gibberish: random letters, lowercase and uppercase and numeric and alphabetic. Cyphertext.

  Would he have to drag his best decryption experts all the way out here from their Cozy Bear headquarters in Red Square?

  Another chill went down his spine as he became convinced he knew the decryption key. At least, his computer knew the decryption key—the super-key used to breach all the computer chips not made on the BrainTrust.

  He scanned the letter into the laptop and set his software to transcribing it. Sure enough, out came the cleartext, demonstrating that that bastard knew he had the super-key.

  Premier,

  I have been terribly remiss and tardy in sending you a congratulatory note on your new title. I thought the occasion deserved an appropriate inauguration gift.

  As you may have guessed, the vial contains polonium. One of your people seems to have misplaced it on the BrainTrust. We thought you might like to return it to an appropriately secure holding facility.

  Forgive me, but as a member of the BrainTrust, we are always seeking new markets and new opportunities. As you may know, we too have the ability to manufacture polonium. If you find yourself running short, we would be happy to sell you more at a price I think you will find attractive.

  We can deliver it in raw form, as we have presented it here, but we can also deliver it prepackaged in hypodermic syringes, in metal tips for walking canes, and of course on the edges of manila envelopes for convenient delivery.

  How should we deliver it to you?

  No signature accompanied the missive. Unnecessary. Only one person would send a package like this.

  Sweat burst out on the Premier’s forehead. He looked at the thin line of bloo
d welling on his finger. Death came so easily disguised. He forced himself to take a deep breath, to calm himself. He was confident there had been no polonium on the envelope. This had merely been a warning. But he would now have to rush to the hospital just to make sure.

  Not that his doctors could do anything if he had been poisoned. The only person who had a cure was thousands of miles away, and she had good reasons to cheer his poisoning along. It was all damnably irritating.

  How the hell had that bastard delivered it to his private office?

  The GP bot had of course brought the box the last few steps. The BrainTrust had of course manufactured the bot. All GP bots came from the archipelago. Could they have put a backdoor into all their chips, and used that to subvert the bot?

  No, no, their reputation was too precious to them. That bastard would not do something so obvious and harmful to the archipelago’s long-run interests. Surely he had simply exploited human fallibility: the deliveryman thinks the box is high priority, he gives it to a new employee who hasn’t yet fully internalized the importance of the security team’s inclusion in the mail protocol, he hurriedly gives it to the bot…and voila, a simple loophole in the man/machine interface opens up.

  Another aspect of this still nagged at him. Ah, yes, the encrypted letter. Did that bastard also have the decryption super-key? Could he read and subvert all the computers in the world the way the Premier himself and the Chief Advisor could? If the Premier remembered his limited encryption knowledge correctly, it was easy to encrypt such messages without the decryption key.

  Besides, how could the BrainTrust acquire five of the seven keys needed to build the super-key? Bribery and blackmail seemed outside the domain of their prissy morality.