Flaherty had promoted Burke, the director of the SoD project, to director of NASA. Burke had chosen the name of New Hope for this launch facility. Flaherty thought Last Hope would have been more appropriate, but he kept that to himself. He valued Burke, after all, for his dogged optimism.
The Vehicle Assembly Building was the larger of the twin towers that represented America’s new hope / last hope. The other tower, actually a scaffold, supported a Falcon Heavy rocket in two Strongback cradles.
“Stick around and you can watch the launch,” Burke said, gesturing out his window in the VAB.
“That’s what I came for,” Flaherty said, although it wasn’t. He’d come to see for himself just how bad the security situation was. The VAB’s elevation above the sea gave him a good view. A smudge in the distance was the Louisiana coast. The Earth Party flotilla stood off at a distance of half a mile. A single Coast Guard cutter threw up spray.
“If this one goes down …” Burke said. “Every launch is crucial, but this launch is more crucial than others.”
“I hear you.”
Flaherty took a turn around Burke’s office. He stopped in front of a picture on the wall facing Burke’s desk, where the NASA director would see it every time he lifted his eyes from his work. A publicity shot of the Spirit of Destiny’s crew, taken the last time all eight of them were together on Earth before entering pre-launch quarantine. The rainbow of different-colored jumpsuits proclaimed the mission’s international character. The crew’s smiling faces made Flaherty’s eyes humid, and he wasn’t a sentimental man. How did Burke stand to look at that every time he glanced up from his computer screen?
Kuldeep sat on the corner of Burke’s desk, talking about the latest episode of the Hannah Ginsburg Show. Sounded like Burke had already watched the new video himself. His interest was understandable. Apart from the intrinsic whoa-shit factor of the videos, Hannah had been a favorite of Burke’s. A protégée even, going back to their days working on the Juno probe.
But obsessing over the Hannah Ginsburg Show was Kuldeep’s job. It was not Burke’s.
Flaherty needed Burke focused on his own job.
Saving humanity.
He took the crew picture down from the wall, slid the photo out of the dusty frame, and laid it flat on Burke’s desk. The other two men fell silent, gazing down at the photo as if they’d never seen it before. Plucking a Sharpie from Burke’s kid-made pottery penholder, Flaherty drew fat black Xs over the faces of Katharine Menelaou, Qiu Meili, and Xiang Peixun.
“They’re gone.”
He hesitated, then X’d out the face of Hannah Ginsburg. Burke started to speak but stopped, shaking his head.
“She is gone.”
Flaherty circled the faces of Jack Kildare, Alexei Ivanov, Giles Boisselot, and Skyler Taft.
“These are the guys who’re gonna save the world.”
Gotta think positive.
“You hit the jackpot with them, Burke. Would be nice if we could say the selection process worked like it was supposed to, but in all honesty, there was an element of chance in all four of these selections, right? Doesn’t matter. We got four guys who went through hell and came out stronger. It’s a credit to your judgement, and to the enduring power of the human spirit.”
Burke said, “We always strive to select people who score well on the Antonovsky scale—” a measure of the ability to stay mentally healthy under stress— “but what these guys are going through is off the charts. So why don’t we tell them the truth?”
Jesus H. Christ.
“Can’t risk it, Burke. If the squids find out, we’re cooked.”
“So AES-512 isn’t secure, after all?” Burke’s tone was gentle but probing.
Flaherty looked to Kuldeep to get him out of this. Kuldeep embarked on a numbingly boring explanation of how the new AES-512 crypto worked, and how it was probably secure, even against a quantum computer, but no one could be sure, because there weren’t any quantum computers on Earth to test it against, but the eggheads at the NSA said that it should hold up, for at least the next couple of years … and all they had was twenty months, anyway.
The truth was, Flaherty would rather not have given the SoD’s crew AES-512 at all. He’d ginned up worries about their existing crypto on purpose to put a chill on communications. Then Burke had convinced him they had to have a secure channel to exchange technical data. Fine. Flaherty got that. He just didn’t want anything else being exchanged.
It was hard enough keeping the media in the dark. Helped that New Hope was way out here in the Gulf, but all it would take was one person on one of those boats with a good phone camera, who knew what they were looking at. The guys on the SoD could surf the internet, too, after all. That’s how they’d found out about the Hannah Ginsburg Show.
Well, hopefully they had less time to waste online these days, with a spaceship full of squids. Three hundred of the fuckers. Jesus.
Burke steepled his fingers in front of his moustache. It was still brown, but the hair on his head had gone completely gray. “The squids are going to see what we’re doing,” he pointed out, “regardless of what we tell the boys on the SoD.”
Flaherty said, “There’s a big difference between what the squids can deduce observationally, and what they would know if we spill top-secret information over the radio.”
“So you’re saying AES-512 is not secure.”
Flaherty would have torn his hair, if he had enough of it left. “We’re up against technologically superior aliens here. We do not know what they can or can’t do, but that doesn’t excuse us from handling classified information in a responsible manner.”
Burke nodded grudgingly. He would do as he was told, Flaherty thought. Institutional obedience went deep in the man. But it was plain to see he was uncomfortable with the deception they were weaving. He had an emotional attachment to NASA’s old ethos of transparency and openness.
Too bad. The world had changed. The Lightbringer had changed it, without even crossing the asteroid belt yet.
“How’s the family?” Flaherty said.
“They’re settling in in Houston.” Burke grinned, evidently grateful for the change of subject. “You know, I’ve been trying to convince Candy to move to Texas for years, starting in 2012, when I was first assigned to the SoD project. It was always no. The kids’ schools. Our church. The dogs … When they stopped picking up the garbage in Santa Monica, she changed her mind inside a week.”
California had seceded in May, making good on years of threats. Uncollected garbage, wildfires raging unfought, and the Earth Party’s plan for a statewide universal basic income had dominated media coverage, but from NASA’s point of view what hurt the most was the loss of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena. Nearly all the JPL staff had joined their colleagues in Houston, but there was no replacing those R&D facilities.
“I was like oh, shit,” Kuldeep said. “There are JPL refugees sleeping in their cars in the JSC parking lot. At least you guys have a house in Houston, right?”
“Yup,” Burke said, making no big thing of the irony that he wasn’t there. He was stuck in the Gulf of Mexico.
Because Florida had followed California, declaring independence in June. And maybe Flaherty should’ve told the president to declare martial law, maybe they should’ve opened fire on the pacifists rampaging through downtown Miami—but he’d blinked. He had fucking blinked, because a voice in his heart cried that American soldiers don’t shoot at American citizens. And there went the Kennedy Space Center and Cape Canaveral.
It could not have happened at a worse time.
Even the Russians were too horrified to gloat.
Flaherty had found himself on the receiving end of furious phone calls from Moscow and Tokyo, the USA’s only remaining partners in the space business. President-Emeritus Putin had threatened to cut NASA out of the Victory project altogether, but that was just bluff. Even the two new launch pads at Baikonur could not make up for the loss of Cape Canaveral.
Hence New Hope, a launch facility built of string and sealing wax on three fixed-leg oil rigs.
Welcome to the USA, Flaherty thought. We’re running low on states, but we got plenty of second-hand drilling platforms.
Faint shouts came in through the open window along with the sea breeze. Three platforms made up New Hope: the VAB platform, an intermediate platform, and the launch platform. Hard-hats clambered over the scaffold on the launch platform, connecting the Falcon Heavy’s leads and hoses to generators and supply tanks.
Of course, the sea-launch idea had been kicking around for thirty years. But New Hope avoided the fatal flaw of the original Sea Launch platform, which was the need to transport rockets horizontally and then jack them up to the vertical, requiring extra structural reinforcement that constrained their capabilities. Here, rockets were stacked in the VAB and crawled across to the launch platform in their upright position. The crawler sat on the intermediate platform, looking like something out of Star Wars. Sea water corroded everything.
A faint hissing noise came in through the window.
“They’re purging the fuel and LOX tanks,” Burke said. “In about an hour we’ll start the automated countdown sequence. If you want to go out and take a look, now’s your chance.”
“I’ll take you up on that,” Flaherty said.
“I’m gonna stay here and distract the launch director from his job,” Kuldeep said.
“Nothing for the launch director to do right now,” Burke said. “It’s all computerized.”
CHAPTER 13
“So,” Kuldeep said, as the door closed behind his boss. “Beer.”
Richard Burke said wearily, “No alcohol at the facility, although I did hear a rumor that the Gulf Commander may have brought a case of Coors.”
“Sounds good,” Kuldeep said. “Maybe later. But I was talking about the new video.”
Kuldeep Srivastava had started his career at the CIA fifteen years ago. Got fired five minutes before the Miscellaneous Reports Desk turned into the NXC. Kuldeep had not looked back. His combination of SIGINT (signals intelligence) and HUMINT (human intelligence) skills turned out to be in high demand in the computer games industry. He’d bounced around from startup to startup, making truckloads of money for other people, getting more and more cynical about humanity … but the cynicism had flaked off like dirt in the shower when the Lightbringer started its voyage towards Earth. Kuldeep took for granted that the alien ship was coming to destroy humanity. The only thing that puzzled him was that people were actually debating this.
So when he got a call from Director Flaherty, he’d jumped at the chance to return to the NXC. Now he was among people who got it. The view that the Lightbringer represented an existential threat to Earth—a minority view, for which more than one former friend had labelled Kuldeep an extremist nutjob—was not a ‘view’ at the NXC; it was a fact. It felt great to work among people who grasped the danger and were trying to do something about it.
However, they were failing hard at countering the Earth Party’s narrative that the squids were lovable interstellar visitors.
Kuldeep was working on that.
Find cracks in the narrative and exploit them to induce cognitive dissonance. Same thing he used to do as a game designer, in reverse. Instead of building a seamless player experience, he was looking to screw with the player experience created by the Earth Party social media bubble.
Naturally, he focused on the Hannah Ginsburg Show.
“Beer,” he repeated. “Hannah referred to beer at the end of the video. Remember?”
“Yeah.”
“I believe that’s a coded signal for something else.”
Burke frowned. “What’s your theory?”
This was a bit touchy, as Burke was Hannah’s former boss. “Well, here’s the thing. Hannah is an alcoholic.”
“What the heck? She is not.”
“A high-functioning alcoholic. Sorry, but we’ve established it with a high degree of conviction through background interviews.”
Burke shook his head. “She used to refuse drinks at office parties.”
Because she needed to fool you, Kuldeep thought. He said, “Well, all I can tell you is what her sister, Bethany Ziegler, told us. She said that Hannah promised her she would get help. This was after an incident at their house where Hannah drank too much and endangered their younger child. So Hannah’s alcoholism has been a major issue in her family.”
“I don’t believe it,” Burke said.
“And now Hannah is asking her brother-in-law to lay in supplies of booze? It doesn’t fit.”
“You think it’s code for something else? ‘Lay in supplies of ammo’?”
“It’s just wrong.”
“So what’s she telling us?”
“That something’s wrong,” Kuldeep said. “The whole situation is fucked. We know this. But this still strikes me as important. Hannah’s trying to warn us that all is not as it seems.”
Burke looked down at the crew photograph that still lay on his desk. He touched the X over Hannah’s face. “I’ve never believed she could be a traitor.”
Kuldeep winced. The word sounded strangely old-fashioned. “We try not to, um, politicize it. We call it self-alienation. It’s the same thing happening with those knuckleheads out there.” He gestured at the window. “Smart people are not immune. In fact they’re often more vulnerable. The need to identify with the squids comes from the same place, psychologically, as the need for affirmation. But that doesn’t make it any less dangerous.”
“I don’t believe it,” Burke repeated.
Key word, believe. Burke didn’t believe Hannah was self-alienated. He didn’t believe she was an alcoholic. That and $1.50 would buy you a Coke, if there were any vending machines that still worked. They had to operate in the world of facts. And it was a fact that Hannah Ginsburg’s funny, informative video blogs were converting millions of people to the belief (there was that word again!) that the squids were friendly.
“Have you made any progress finding her family?” Burke asked.
“Unfortunately, no,” Kuldeep said. Hannah’s family had dropped off the map. After California declared independence, the NSA’s ability to monitor the population of the Golden State had taken a hit. People were cutting up their credit cards, throwing away their smartphones. “We’re still trying.”
If they could find Hannah’s family, that might give the NXC a leg up in the battle of the narratives. Bethany Ziegler had seemed all too eager to smear her sister, the Earth Party heroine—
A gunshot cracked outside.
Kuldeep dropped to the floor and crawled under Burke’s desk. His face wound up inches from the knees of Burke’s wrinkled slacks. The man hadn’t moved.
“They’re going to stop this launch if they can,” Burke said. “And if they do? We all die.”
*
Outside the VAB, the sun slammed down on Flaherty’s head and shoulders like a griddle wielded by some mad grandma. He walked away from the insulated aluminum silo. Coast Guard officers fell into step. Flaherty did not avail himself of a Secret Service protection detail, although he could’ve. The day he let the Secret Service control his movements would be the day he lost touch with local law enforcement, and that would be fatal. If he was Caesar, the various special ops units were his praetorian guard, but the police, the National Guard, the Coast Guard—they were his legionaries. They were holding the rump of America together.
Flaherty had been caught flatfooted by California and stunned by Florida. He’d been ready for Montana, but who gave a shit about Montana? Right now he was concentrating on Texas and Louisiana.
In other words, New Hope.
“You got any more boats coming?”
“Sorry, sir. All our assets are in operation blocking the port of New Orleans.”
“I hear ya.” The NSA had picked up chatter about using a New Orleans ferry to ram the New Hope launch platform.
Swell licked against the
legs of the platform, swallowing the sound of their footsteps. The clatter of generators on the launch platform got louder as they crossed the intermediate platform in the afternoon shadow of the crawler.
A speedboat dashed out of the flotilla, towards the platform. The Coast Guard officers dropped into firing stances. No nonsense, no drama. They trained their sub-machine guns on the speedboat, tracking its approach. Flaherty wondered if it would dare to zip under the platform. There was plenty of clearance, but that would be crossing an unspoken red line. He sweated, wondering if this would be the next Paris.
Late last year, French riot police had opened fire on an Earth Party ‘walk’ that had besieged the Élysée Palace. When the smoke cleared, France had become the first country in Europe with an Earth Party government. The intermediate steps—media outrage, snap elections—had become optional since, and could be skipped.
At the last possible moment, the speedboat’s pilot yanked the helm over. The people on the deck launched a volley of party poppers. If it was dark, those would have been firecrackers, or laser pointers aimed at the Coast Guard officers’ eyes. Extremely fucking dangerous.
The officers lowered their weapons. “These fools are playin’ with fire,” one said.
Flaherty watched the speedboat flee back to the flotilla. “They sure are.”
The youngest Coast Guard officer, just a kid to Flaherty, pushed up the bill of his cap. “What they tryin’ to do, sir?”
The kid reminded Flaherty of Lance Garner. When Lance died, it had felt to the childless, unmarried Flaherty like losing a son. The memory softened his normally gruff voice. “They’re trying to stop this launch.”
“Why, sir?”
“They think it’s an act of war.” Japan had the same problem at Tanegashima. Russia did not have the same problem at Baikonur. Just shoot ‘em. Works. But you can’t do that in America. Can you?
Flaherty gazed up at the 80-meter obelisk of the Falcon Heavy, reminding himself of the precious payload it carried up top. An engine exhaust assembly, built at JSC in Houston. A critical component of the big deception that might save Earth.
Shiplord: A First Contact Technothriller (Earth's Last Gambit Book 3) Page 9
