Kat nods to a screen. It shows a live-stream of the small camera attached to the belly of Ben’s airplane. ‘They just flew over the observatory; it appears untouched.’
Puzzled, I look at Runner. ‘Didn’t the BSA attack it, kill everyone, and cut off our contact to the island?’
‘Odd, isn’t it,’ he says.
Ben and Yi-Ting have been taking high-resolution images of Taiwan since we arrived at Itbayat. They’ve now scanned more than sixty percent of the southern half of the island. The northern half is so contaminated with radioactivity that little but moss, ferns, microorganisms, and insects thrive there now. Taiwan used to have four nuclear power plants, three at the island’s northern tip and one at the southern tip. The southern plant was modern enough to be equipped with a fail-safe mechanism that forced it to shut down slowly without human assistance. The other three wreaked havoc.
Nuclear power plants were the main reason for the first Sequencers to organise themselves into a task force. They weren’t called Sequencers back then. They were a bunch of engineers and scientists who knew enough about Earth’s technical infrastructure to organise the emergency maintenance. When the world wars began and human maintenance was erratic at best and nonexistent at worst, the older power plants went into overdrive without adequate cooling. The results were identical all over the planet: melt-downs with intense and long lasting fires fuelled by radiation. The radioactive smoke and dust clouds contaminated land and water for hundreds of generations. There were only a few Sequencers and they managed to shut down only a handful of reactors. But the main problem the Great Pandemic and the ensuing wars brought was the sudden loss of knowledge. Whom do you ask how to lead people into battle if there’s no one left to ask? Whom do you ask how to safely do a caesarian section if all doctors were killed while tending to injured soldiers and all midwives have been raped and tortured to death?
As humanity went down the drain, most of our knowledge was flushed as well. Entire cultures, fields of science, and engineering were lost to disease, aggression, and utter stupidity. I learned a bit about our history when Runner and Kat called a council meeting a few days before we left for Itbayat. The one thing I found almost as unsettling as our violent past, was that all we know about combat and warfare today only comes from two high-ranking Russian military guys, a stack of books, and from experiencing war first-hand. I wonder how much the BSA has learned in the past decades.
Runner waves me closer and bends to the mic. ‘Ben?’
‘What’s up?’ crackles through the speakers.
‘On your way back, go farther south and show me the power plant once more.’
‘Okay. We’ll fly to the west shore to cover today’s area then we’ll go down to the plant.’
‘Thanks.’ Then he turns to me. ‘Not one more drop of alcohol for you. Your system can’t take it and I can’t work with someone who’s not in her best possible shape. If you need to calm your nerves after a stressful day, go for a run, do pushups, whatever. If I see you drinking again, you’ll find yourself a new mentor.’ He waits for a reply, his expression fierce.
‘Calm down, man. Nothing happened. I puked and went to bed.’
Abruptly, he stands. His hand flies towards my face faster than I can comprehend. A finger flicks my nose.
‘Ow,’ I say, more pride-hurt than nose-hurt.
‘Your reaction time is one of the best I’ve ever seen, except when you’ve had a drink. Two drinks and you are useless for twenty-four hours. You didn’t even think to move your head.’
I had no idea. Last night was only the third time we had drinks together. Most nights I’m either too tied up in training or too tired to move. ‘I’m…sorry,’ I croak, hot with embarrassment.
‘Good.’ He sits back down in his chair and taps at the screen. ‘Ben and Yi-Ting have finally found a Taiwanese settlement and I want you to take a close look at the footage. Tell me what you think.’
Treetops fly by, then the jungle opens to reveal a group of huts before it closes again. ‘Whoa! Too fast! Can we go back, please?’
‘They flew two circles. Wait a moment.’
The horizon tips as the solar plane flies a loop and soon, the huts come into view again. I squint and strain my eyes but all there is to see are huts and trees. ‘No bodies, but the BSA might have killed them two months ago and animals had time to scavenge. But then…there should be parts, bones, skulls at the very least. Did someone clean up? No signs of explosions, no damage whatsoever. The huts are intact. No signs of a battle. How can that be?’
‘They could have used poison,’ he says. ‘In the water or in gaseous form, but then again — where are the bodies? The BSA could have lured the people out of their village and butchered them in the woods. But why the effort? There might have been survivors who buried or burned the victims if they were killed in their homes, but so far we haven’t seen signs of survivors or the BSA.’
‘Would the BSA clean up their own mess?’ I wonder aloud.
‘Why should they?’ Runner asks. ‘They kill, move on, and let the people rot where they fall.’
Kat coughs and points to her screen with the live-stream of Ben’s plane. Another settlement. There’s a large hole in the centre, huts have been blown aside. We get the full view a few moments later when Ben pulls the machine around.
‘Still no visuals of the BSA camp,’ Ben says.
This settlement is largely destroyed, but we don’t see corpses anywhere here either.
‘Large amounts of explosives might have been used.’ That’s Yi-Ting’s voice. My stomach goes all fluttery.
‘What do you mean by “might have been used?”’ Runner asks.
‘No scorch marks.’
Before us, the huts lie flat on the ground, ripped wide open, pieces strewn away from the centre of the village, away from the crater.
‘Hmm,’ is all Runner says, tapping his index finger against his lips.
Kat takes two steps back, her face a stiff mask. She flicks off our mic and says to Runner, ‘It doesn’t match the satellite images.’
He looks up at her. The silence in the tent is deafening.
I flinch when Runner speaks. ‘I’m going in tonight. I want you to analyse all data you have on your hard drives, all satellite images of the weeks since before the BSA cut off our comm to Taiwan up until today.’
‘What am I looking for?’ she asks.
‘Any activity between the BSA’s entry point and the observatory during these past weeks. If you don’t see anything, and I mean nothing at all, no movements, no people, not even the faintest trace, I need you to run an image analysis on overlays or brush-ups of the area. If you find any, you know what to do.’
She nods pressing her mouth to a thin line, then reaches out to flick the mic back on. I gnaw on my cheeks. This is fucked up.
Half an hour later, we get a live-stream of the nuclear power plant. It, too, appears untouched.
When Yi-Ting and Ben return, things begin to happen faster and more quietly than usual. While we cook and eat lunch, Runner appoints tasks.
‘Ben, you get your machine ready at nightfall, not a minute earlier. What’s the reach without sunlight?’
‘Four hundred and fifty to five hundred kilometres, tops.’ Ben wears a frown. He doesn’t like to fly his machine without the fuelling sunlight. It doesn’t give him much manoeuvring space for the unforeseen.
‘You could get to the continent?’
‘If the winds are good, yes.’
‘Ah!’ Runner says and presses a hand against his forehead. ‘Doesn’t work. They’ll see the plane is missing.’
‘Are we all on the same page?’ Kat asks. When Yi-Ting and Ben shrug, she says, ‘Walk them through, Runner.’
‘What our satellites show us is not what you two showed us today. Neither of the two villages should exist. The last comm of the Taiwanese Sequencers stated that the observatory was under attack. After that, Taiwan was cut off. We have to assume they took control of o
ur satellites, and have been feeding us fake images to conceal their activities.’
Ben leans against the tent’s wall, stumbles a step back when the fabric doesn’t carry his weight, and almost drops to his butt. The rice spills from his bowl. ‘Well, fuck,’ he mutters.
‘Now, the bad news,’ Kat adds. ‘They seemed to have also hijacked the Taiwanese satellite control. Taiwanese satellites are part of the Chinese satellite cluster. Problem is…’ She looks at every one of us. I feel the taste of metal on my palate. I always feel that when shit is about to hit the fan. ‘I didn’t use the Chinese cluster in the past couple of days. I used satellites of the ESA.’
‘They hacked the ESA, too?’ Ben whispers.
‘Can someone please tell me what the heck this ESA thing is?’ I demand.
‘European Space Agency,’ Runner says. ‘I don’t need to tell you that the consequences are far-reaching. We might lose the war before the end of this year. Do you all understand what that means?’
We all nod, our heads hanging low as if an unbearable weight is sitting on our shoulders. How could we possibly misunderstand the consequences? The BSA winning the war means only one thing — the crazy extremists get to wipe out humanity. The only force that stands between them and their goal are hundreds of Sequencers who can observe their every move and intervene. Weird. Shouldn’t we have…
‘There’s one thing I don’t understand,’ I say. ‘Since the BSA exists, Sequencers can see what the BSA is doing. Now, the BSA seems to turn satellites against us and is about to win? How can that be? Why didn’t we win first what with satellite control and all?’
‘The BSA has always been very loosely organised, if at all,’ Runner explains. ‘They don’t have a command structure. If a handful of them decide to invade a city, then we can only see it when it’s already happening. Often it’s too late for us to stop them. We have to move our forces and that can take hours or even days. Then the BSA is already done killing and is moving on. It’s impossible to anticipate their moves. They are everywhere and nowhere. They can be anyone. If you look from far above you see people. Who’s a BSA member? You can’t tell. If they only pull out their black flags and uniforms right before an attack, how would you know who’s who until it’s too late? That’s their advantage — they look like you and me until they pull out their guns and cause a bloodbath.’
‘If they were more organised, their movements would follow a pattern and it would be easier for us to predict their next actions,’ Kat says. ‘But they don’t behave like troops. They are erratic, chaotic and extremely brutal. Each small BSA group is autonomic. Once in a while we get to watch one BSA group attacking another. They have no idea they are both BSA! Can you believe that?’
‘What happens then?’ I ask.
She shrugs. ‘The attacked group whips out their black flags, the attackers stop, and everyone has a party. Sometimes we get there soon enough to take them down, sometimes they disappear before we can move in our forces.’
‘Isn’t that…isn’t that an unusual degree of organisation for the BSA to shut off an entire island and gain satellite control?’ I turn to Runner. ‘Is that even possible? Don’t you overestimate them?’
‘It has happened before. Two…no, three times.’ Ben says. He still sits on the floor, the bowl of rice between his feet. ‘Not the satellite control stuff, but the assembly of a number of BSA subgroups. One man, talented in organisation and leadership, took command and turned BSA followers into soldiers. Trained them in combat. We saw it and took them all down. No problem. We prefer it to this,’ he waves at nothing in particular, ‘…chaos of factions.’
‘And now you can’t see them anymore,’ I note.
We all stare at Ben’s rice bowl as if a solution could be dug up there.
Yi-Ting clicks her tongue and grins. ‘It will work,’ she says. ‘You can fly, Ben. Let’s assume the BSA can control satellites and fake satellite imagery. I don’t quite believe it; it’s way too sophisticated compared to a simple failure of transmission, for example. But let’s pretend for now, it’s possible. So they see we are here and we have fun playing with our airplane, and you have fun with your sharp shooting and torturing Micka.’
Runner frowns at that, but she continues undisturbed. I suppress a smile. ‘So far, we’ve given no sign of knowing they can see us, let alone modify satellite data. So far, all we do is quite boring, except of course, when we fly to Taiwan to search for their base camp. Am I correct so far?’
Kat and Runner nod. ‘Cool,’ she says. ‘They watch from far above and probably want to cover our whole camp, if not the whole of Itbayat. I doubt they’ll zoom in to check if I brushed my teeth this morning, or to count the screws on Ben’s airplane.’ She claps her hands together and smiles at us. ‘So you guys do what you have to do, while I build a paper airplane, or…tarp airplane. I’ll pretend to be Ben fixing his machine which, very sadly, can’t fly for a few hours. I’ll be all of you guys plus myself, walking in and out of our tents, wearing the clothes you usually wear. But I’ll have to find something that looks like your pretty hair.’ She reaches out and tugs at my bangs. My heart goes thump-thump.
‘And I promise I’ll not point my middle fingers up at the sky if I can help it,’ I say. Yi-Ting bursts out chuckling and I have to fight the urge of curling my arms around her slender waist and kissing her neck.
Runner draws his eyebrows farther down, then nods slowly. ‘Excellent idea, Yi-Ting.’ He brightens up and smiles at her. Her answering blush hurts my chest.
‘This is bigger than I can handle,’ says Kat. ‘I’m not a satellite expert, but if I know one thing, it’s this: if the BSA gained control over two systems, what keeps them from gaining control over others? Ben, you and I will go to the continent. I need to talk with the council and a…friend.
‘Whoa! No way,’ Ben holds up his hands. ‘If you want me to fly to Taiwan and then all the way to the mainland, I can’t take everyone. Sorry, Kat, but…no way. Runner, his equipment and me is all the machine can carry that far.’
‘Take out the seats,’ she says.
‘Yes, we’ll rip out the seats. But you, Kat, will stay here. Micka will accompany me.’ Runner throws a glance at me and I will my lungs to breathe normally. Doesn’t work as well as I hope.
‘I don’t like it,’ Kat growls, hands deep in her pockets. ‘I’m the intelligence expert, I know how to handle these things, I—‘ She breaks off, seeing Ben shaking his head. ‘Okay. I’ll write my friend a letter and give you his name and location. Ben, if you open it, I’ll kill you.’
‘What the fuck, Kat? Am I suddenly not trustworthy enough?’ Ben flicks a rice kernel in her direction.
‘Of course you are. I’m sorry. It’s just… This is not the way I want things to happen,’ she answers. ‘I hate being stuck here while you guys get all the action.’
‘You can help me build a paper airplane,’ Yi-Ting quips.
Runner coughs to hide a snort but it doesn’t work. He receives a cold stare from Kat in return. Now, I know what bugs me about her — she mistrusts everyone. I wonder why that is. Does she trust herself?
‘I’m busy with image analyses,’ she retorts.
Rain begins to tap on the tent. The wind picks up and tugs at the fabric.
‘Micka, your apprenticeship might be coming to a very quick end.’ Runner squints at me and instantly I know what he means. It has nothing to do with having learned all my lessons. ‘You and I go in tonight. Ben will pick us up in four days.’
I swallow. Am I even ready?
‘Yi-Ting will prepare provisions for us. And you have precisely ten minutes head start. Two paint bullets only. I want to know how well you function when you’re unprepared.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Sniping practice. The time is running, Micka.’
‘You cannot be serious! We have to pack our things, prepare for…for…’
‘I’m preparing you right now. Eight minutes head start, Micka. Move. Now.�
��
Rain pelts my face; my feet slam through muck. I love this. I’m alive. My confusion waits for me back at the comm tent. It makes no sense to worry about the BSA now, or about what might happen once we reach Taiwan. What matters now, is to win the race, to hunt Runner and not be the hunted.
I left my ghillie on my bunk and he must have noticed it, probably frowned at it in disapproval. How can a sniper ever leave her camouflage behind? Surely, Micka is not made for this job, being so frazzle-brained from recent developments.
I grin, my nerves are taut with exhilaration.
The dimly lit woods slip past me. Scents of blossoms fill the air, of wet earth, and fruits at full ripeness and the rain washing them and making their aroma lighter. I love the hardness of my rifle against my side. Today, my marker will hit its target.
Although my sandals slow me down and create a slop-slop noise, I keep them on my feet. They are part of my plan to get a clean shot at Runner. The swamp is near and the trees begin to change from gnarled to slender and smooth. One of the thickest of them is standing close to the swamp’s edge and I slow my run, slither, zigzag across the mud and fall close to the large tree’s trunk. I rip out a few strands of my hair, stick them to the cracks in the bark, and make sure the new membrane is tightly sealing my rifle’s muzzle — making my weapon water-proof.
I lie down and run my hands over the mud, then stand, just to fall over again. I leave one sandal at the edge of the swamp, take one large step forward and begin to sink. Before the muck can suck in my leg, I bend my upper body flat against the surface and push into the swamp. The heavy mud is brushing my arm while I propel myself forward. My other arm presses the rifle against my side. After a few strokes, I shake off my other sandal, then swim a semi-circle to reach the edge far from where I entered the water. I pull myself up a fallen tree, grab a handful of muck and rub it into my face, my hands, wrists, and feet. Then I scale the nearest upright tree, arranging twigs and leaves so that the foliage provides a thick cover.
Fog: The Climate Fiction Saga Page 3
