by Stephen Moss
Saul: ‘so the man, duly impressed, goes back into the house and says, -how much for that amazing dog?- and the owner says, -twenty shekels.- -only twenty shekels!- says the man, -but why are you selling this amazing dog so cheap?- -because he’s a damn liar, he never worked for mossad.-’
Ayala chuckled quietly in spite of herself, as did Hektor. Niels and Cara slept, along with the two Koreans, while they waited out the last hours of the night.
Minnie: ‘but saul, the dog was amazing in so many ways. surely a lie …’
Ayala put her head in her hands and Hektor suppressed a more powerful laugh at Minnie’s wonderful naivety.
Saul: ‘yes, minnie, he was. But … don’t worry about it, minnie. let’s not bore ayala and hektor with explaining it.’
Ayala whispered to Hektor, “So very thoughtful, that Saul, to spare us the explanation.”
They shared long-suffering looks as Saul blundered on with his seemingly generous donation of humor for their long watch. She knew he was enjoying torturing her, she had sat through one of his diatribes before, by phone that time, when they had filled a line they knew was tapped by a Syrian operative with seemingly meaningless babble in order to frustrate the poor man.
But cruel as it might seem, Saul knew what he was doing now, as he had then, and the hours dripped by just a little faster as he regaled them with yet another of his infamous mossad jokes.
Saul: ‘so margaret thatcher is in israel for talks, and, after a few drinks, ends up in shimon peres’s hotel room …’
“Don’t you dare!” said Ayala in a hoarse whisper and Hektor perked up, smiling from ear to ear and genuinely interested for the first time since Saul had started.
But Saul did dare, and Ayala’s head sunk into her hands once more as he veered into ever worse territory. If Minnie was confused by the last one, thought Ayala, wait till she gets a load of this.
- - -
They left not long after dawn, their clothes clean but drab, their steps brisk. The walk was only three miles, but it was fraught with tension every time they passed one of the many policemen or guards that stood around the government buildings that lined the city.
Jung and Chin’s contact was across town, not far past the massive glass pyramid of the new Ryugyong Hotel, with its strange but striking buttresses that now dominated the downtown skyline of Pyongyang.
Their contact would then take them on an equally nerve-racking car journey to a small office building outside town. Along the way they would be greeted by some horrific sights, as the scale of what was going on within North Korea’s closed borders became clear. Ayala had speculated that the antigen would not have spread here, and she had been right. They had hoped the country would be equally sheltered from the virus itself, but there they had not been so lucky.
While the political establishment, with its slightly more liberal access to travel and foreign interaction, had been touched to some degree by immunity, they had been among the only who had, and the disease that had been intended for the whole world had struck instead at the poorest members of one of its poorest nations.
The rural population, they now discovered, had been halved, maybe worse; what little information they could get was not totally clear. And that had not been the only hard news the team would be forced to suffer that day.
For the lead they had been hoping to pursue would give them nothing except exposure to the horror of a countryside damned. So that evening they returned to their contact’s small apartment, shell-shocked and confused, and slept there until the next morning.
All the while Ayala and her team waited. Waited for them to report something of interest, waited for them to find some evidence of the conspiracy, hopefully in the form of a person, either willing or not, who could tell them what they needed to know.
Ayala was more than ready to abduct anyone they deemed had information of interest to her. Either for interrogation onsite or for transport out of the country aboard the Slink.
But they would get no such lead.
On the second day, Jung and Chin will wait for three hours while their contact leaves to meet with another member of the small but impossibly brave resistance movement. Then the three men will depart again, equally cautiously. Their contact will take them out of the city again, this time to the south, to the small and innocent seeming industrial town of Chunghwa.
A few hours later they will check in via their cell phones, using them as just that, cell phones, if ones that have been modified in very specific ways. They will use a code string to tell Ayala that they went to investigate a source of some unusual activity in recent weeks, then they will give a contact number, which once decoded will convey the coordinates of the disused factory they intend to visit.
And then the two men will vanish. By nightfall, when Ayala has still not heard from them, not even a ping from the beacons built into their cell phones, she will notify Rolas that something has gone wrong.
Chapter 12: Reflex
Neal was not pleased with this most recent turn of events, and neither was Saul, though for very different reasons.
“I need a second team prepped for insertion immediately,” said Neal, “and I want them to have a contingent of the Battle Avatars with them as well. Minnie, please inform William and Mynd.”
She already had the moment Neal had said it, but she nodded her avatar’s head anyway.
Saul looked pensive and Neal looked at him, prompting the old spy to speak up. “While I agree that this is cause for alarm, and that we should be prepared for the worst, I think you should let Ayala investigate further while we get our other teams in place.”
Neal began shaking his head, but Saul went on. “I understand your concern, Neal. And trust me, I have no more desire to send her into whatever trap the Korean agents fell into either. But the rest of her team is much, much better equipped to handle anything she might face out there than they were, and we do not know how long the two Korean agents have.”
Neal made a face that could only be described as ‘I know I am about to come off as a prick, but …’, then said, “The safety of the Korean agents is a concern, but I am afraid it is secondary to the safety of our people … I’m sorry, but …”
Neal held up his hands, but Saul spoke up once more, using an appropriately conciliatory tone. “Leaving aside the fact that Ayala promised to get them in and out safely when she requested their help from the South Koreans, I am not only speaking about protecting their safety, but also the integrity of the investigation.”
Neal was about to chide Saul for the comment about Ayala’s promise of safe passage when he was stopped by Saul’s second remark.
Seeing he had Neal’s attention, Saul explained, “They have almost certainly been taken. Whether this plot really does stem from North Korea or not, the discovery of two South Korean agents will make them nervous. And if they have enough time to break the two men … and trust me when I say it really is only a question of time before they do, given what we know about North Korean torture methods … then the additional knowledge that there are TASC operatives in downtown Pyongyang will send the North Koreans into a frenzy.”
“All the more reasons to get Ayala and her team out now,” said Neal firmly.
“Neal, you know as well as I do that there is simply no way you are going to get Ayala to leave the area with two of her team members unaccounted for.”
The two men locked eyes for a second, but Neal knew it was not Saul’s resolve he had to match in this, it was his security chief’s.
“Okay, so she waits a while longer,” said Neal, after a moment, “but they should move to a different location.”
“To that, she will most definitely agree. Where?”
“Where?” said Neal, perplexed.
Saul’s expression became one of sympathy for Neal, for a man who still deluded himself that Ayala could be ordered to do anything she did not agree with, especially since Barrett’s death. “Neal, my friend. The fact is that—and I reiterate t
his only because it is, in truth, the only thing Ayala will be considering at this moment—if you want to find out what Ayala went there to find out, you are going to have to let her and her team go after the two South Koreans … now, before this gets messy and any hope we have of getting any real intelligence gets lost in the crossfire.”
Before it gets messy, thought Neal. Like everything wasn’t hopelessly messy already. Neal simmered and the two men stared at each other, one stubborn, but the other shrugging as if to say, ‘don’t look at me, I just work here.’
Finally, Neal’s shoulders sank a bit and he opened a one-way line into the heart of North Korea.
Neal: ‘ayala. i guess you have a decision to make.’
Saul joined him in the ether. Minnie was, of course, already there.
Neal: ‘i did not want to make it your choice, but given the … analysis of your head of intelligence, it seems as though you are probably going to do what you think is best anyway.”
She did not respond via subspace for obvious reasons, but her signal came through nonetheless, her voice resounding into their minds like a cheap speakerphone echoing in a concert hall.
“I can imagine very easily what Saul must have said, Neal, and no, he was not wrong. Time is of the essence. By my estimates we can be outside Chunghwa in less than an hour if we move now. That gives us six more hours before dawn to snoop around.”
She was already signaling to her team to get ready. They would leave the Korean’s rebreathing equipment here and Minnie would continue to monitor the area via the boxes that still lined the park.
Neal: ‘now ayala, i know you are keen to get to the bottom of this. i would try to talk you out of it if i thought it would make any difference, but … just be careful, ok. please remember what happened to ben.’
She tensed at the mention of one of her first team leaders, a counterpart to Hektor in their initial reconnaissance mission into Russia. Oh, she remembered what had happened to Ben, she thought, she remembered it very well indeed.
“Understood, Neal. We’ll tread lightly. And in the interests of caution, in case we do run into trouble, how soon can Banu be at our location?”
Minnie:
Ayala smiled at Minnie and Banu’s efficiency, while Neal whistled at what it meant for Banu to be essentially hovering at that altitude.
And above them all, machine eyes watched and waited as Ayala and her team set off.
- - -
Over the past few months, TASC had veritably flooded near space with satellites. It had been an expenditure Neal had been loath to make, but circumstances had forced their hand. With the unchecked power of Mikhail’s puppet Russian Premier and Pei’s cruel manipulation of the Chinese leader, TASC had been unable to stand aloof from the world’s political arena any longer.
So they had engaged, if only out of a need for self-preservation. It had been a whirlwind few months since they had turned their attention to ground, and they had quickly discovered, as every emerging world power had from the United States back to the Egyptians, that trying to police the world was a task so large as to threaten to engulf your every moment.
Neal loathed it, the pettiness and pointlessness of it all when viewed against the greater backdrop of the coming threat, and fought every day to maintain his team’s focus on the real task ahead. Minnie, on the other hand, was fascinated by it, and she stared down now with an ever growing number of eyes spanning the globe.
It was appropriate, her growing network of eyes and ears coming to match the span of her reach around the globe she called home. But what the range of satellites really did was help feed her insatiable appetite for information, for reams and reams of data to comb through. It was the only thing that could nourish the curiosity that defined her.
She shared her discoveries with her cousin, Mynd, and with the small number of lesser Artificial Minds she was growing in incremental stages, toying with different combinations of traits, both ones she had gleaned from her AM parents Amadeu and Birgit, and ones she had developed on her own, to see how each behaved, while also experimenting with substrate formats and designs, seeing which traits flourished more or less as she tweaked processing power, recall speed, stimuli access, and human exposure.
Everything she did was done within the confines of her purpose, both limited and catalyzed by her desire to help humanity survive, but that need to help was a broad mandate, and as she looked for ways to better herself in an effort to better serve the humans she was born from, she could not help but wonder at her more distant cousins, the minds born of the race coming, even now, to eradicate the humanity, minds that would no doubt have representatives among the Armada.
She modeled the coming war in endless loops, as no doubt her counterparts were doing as well, though with a more complete picture of humanity’s rapidly advancing capabilities than her enemies had, a factor she analyzed ceaselessly in an effort to suck every last drop of advantage from it. And when her models led her to probable defeat, as they often did, she inevitably pondered her role in the aftermath.
It was a process that begged profound questions. At what point, she thought, would it become mere hubris to fight any longer? At what point would it be conceited to think that humanity’s history was more important than the planet’s itself? History was filled with men lauded as heroes for fighting a fight they could not win. But when the cost was not the shattered walls of the Alamo but that of the very ground it was built on, what then? Was that still bravery, or was it bloody-mindedness?
Bloody-mindedness. It was a multi-layered joke.
She laughed in her way, then turned her attention to that part of her that was watching over Banu.
The girl didn’t really suffer through any of this. She neither understood nor cared to contemplate the scale of the fight she was embroiled in. She sat on her perch, a perch made of the pure heat of her engines idling to keep her body space-bound.
Maintaining geosynchronicity at near-earth distances required a vast expenditure of power. But it was power the Skalm had to burn, and so Banu hung there, as if sitting atop her eave, once again the barn owl monitoring her domain. She was happy to be away for a moment from the classes. From meeting other young people, but not as young as her, in mind, and therein lay her frustration.
She was supposed to be vetting new pilots, but as of yet no one had been willing to involve candidates as young as she was. It was one thing, it appeared, to involve her, to co-opt one youth, an orphan, a lost child. But to actually take children en masse, that seemed something they were not willing to do yet. Instead they kept testing the limit, bringing in children of higher ages, teenagers with various established skill levels: child athletes, chess whizzes, prodigies, and wunderkinds. They were looking for the ceiling, for the age of perfection.
And she was bored with it. The new kids were both too old to engage with her as an equal, and too slow to engage with her in the air. They were both her betters and her inferiors, and she was relieved to be away from it all for a while.
For the moment her attention was not even on the barn floor below. Minnie would let her know if there was a rodent there that she needed to swoop down upon.
Her eyes were on the stars above, on the void, and her little mind was filled with the expanse of it.
She felt her wings, tensed them, and a ripple of power from her mighty engines made the great star-cross of her machine self flutter in its place.
She could go there. She could, with a thrust from her wings, leap free of the world below and surge out into the stars. She fought an urge to do it. She had a job, she knew; a role she must play. They were looking for others to take her place, or at least to join her, but for now she was the one.
The best.
She smiled, and with no small amount of pride, she flipped her craft in a series of tight somersaults. Seen from below she was but a dot in
the cosmos, perhaps, but she knew she was the master of the planet she soared above.
Minnie watched the girl, both from within the ether from which the Skalm was controlled, and from a multitude of eyes roaming in orbit, Minnie had no doubt the powerful and infamous craft would be obvious to anyone with even a basic telescope looking skyward from the Korean peninsula below, maybe even with binoculars, given the bright flare of her engines.
But Banu was still technically over allied space, hanging over Seoul, over an ally who had, however begrudgingly, acknowledged TASC’s claim to dominion over what it called its fourth district.
And anyway, Banu could happily outrun anything that either North or South Korea could throw her way if they did choose to object to Banu’s presence.
As tiny figures scurried far below, seeking answers, Banu came to a hover and stared out once more, to the stars, and then to the great lunar crescent even now hoving into view. It was apparently about to lose its status as Earth’s only moon.
But it would still be by far the world’s largest satellite, and though Banu did not know it, the great moon was also being eyed to feed TASC’s epic appetite.
Chapter 13: Feng Shui
Madeline’s avatar was bathed in sunlight, her expansive view of Earth’s orbital vicinity spinning around her. In the simulation she was currently hosting, she was joined by a host of team leads from Districts One and Three, and various experts either considering joining their ranks, or fighting with their governments for permission to do so.
“We all know, I think, where we are now, and I think we all know roughly where we must go.” She spoke out loud, for several of her audience were not enabled with spinal taps yet and were watching via computer screens or even via advanced but already obsolete 3-D virtual goggles.
