Expedition

by Ralph Kern

  “Before I say,” Kendricks held up one hand, “I invite you all to have a taste.”

  With varying degrees of enthusiasm, each of them took a bite.

  “Muroidea is something we seem to have an inexhaustible supply of...” Kendricks paused dramatically. Here goes nothing. “Rat.”

  He gazed around the table. Donovan and Solberg blanched. Jack and Bautista simply shrugged and had another bite. Laurie could barely keep the smile off her face. It had been one of her team, cultivated from the ranks of the passengers, who had come up with the idea of using the fleet’s diminutive stowaways as a food source.

  “Well.” Wakefield chewed, seemingly less affected than even the Marine and former pirate. “I’ve eaten some pretty weird stuff from all around the world, and this tastes better than a lot of it.”

  Steeling himself, Kendricks had a try himself. As he chewed, he had to admit it didn’t taste half as bad as he was expecting. Kind of like an intense lamb cutlet.

  “So, Laurie,” Reynolds started speaking in a clear attempt to distract them away from the thought of what they were eating. “How goes the surveys?”

  Laurie laid her fork to one side and steepled her fingers over the plate. “We’re making some interesting progress. The laboratories we have set up through the fleet are rudimentary, but nonetheless, you’d be surprised at the sheer range of talent we’ve got among the passengers. Everything from rocket scientists to brain surgeons, many of whom are really pulling their weight.”

  “And we have those that aren’t,” Solberg said scornfully. “Some still think they’re on a damn holiday.”

  “That’s a debate for another day. But yes, that is something we are starting to consider in terms of room allocation,” Reynolds interjected.

  Kendricks grimaced. That was going to be another unpleasant task. Some of those who had paid the most and had the best cabins aboard were actually the least productive in helping out. Soon, that balance would have to be addressed. Those who worked would have to be rewarded as an incentive. And those that didn’t had to understand that also carried a price.

  “But anyway, Laurie.” Reynolds gave a wave of his hand. “Please continue.”

  “We have restricted our expeditions to the immediate vicinity. The flora is fairly homogenous, but the interesting factor is the sheer fertility levels of the soil. It is as near perfect as can be. Full of nutrients. We haven’t seen much evidence of animal life; it is mostly keeping away from us, albeit we have managed to capture a few bugs. They are somewhat simple, I suppose we’d call them uncomplicated. It’s quite clear to our scientists that animal life simply hasn’t had the time to evolve to the diversity of our own time.”

  “Sounds good. And what are your proposed next steps?” the admiral asked. Kendricks knew Reynolds had been keeping on top of the reports, but he was teasing the information out of his daughter for the benefit of those at the table.

  “Simple, we want to penetrate deeper into the mainland and see what is in there.”

  “And I think that would be most prudent.” Reynolds smiled at his daughter. “Perry, I believe you have some interesting news yourself.”

  “Oh yes.” Donovan nodded enthusiastically. “But I propose we save that for the after party. Then I can show you.”

  Chapter Nine – The Past

  Grayson idly tapped away on his smartphone game of poker. He gave a grunt of frustration as he was forced to fold again. Good thing he wasn’t playing for real money or he’d be down to his underwear by now. Bradley lay curled beneath a sheet on the opposite settee—the gentle sound of her breath the only noise in the room beyond what was coming through his headphones.

  He’d made an overture for her to just use one of the beds... hell, she had a choice in the huge suite, but she’d refused. That was something he most assuredly wouldn’t be doing. Years of sleeping in muddy ditches and on squeaking military camp beds meant when he had the opportunity to sleep on a luxury super-king-size bed, he was damn well going to take it.

  The first few hours had gone with little more than listening to Reynolds pottering around his room, the TV on, hearing him go from listening to CNN to watching some god-awful old movie.

  It was strange, Grayson had contemplated a few hours before. The nature of his role meant he had a fair amount of contact with the top brass. He wasn’t intimidated by them anymore, not like when he was a young second lieutenant fresh out of Fort Benning when the thought of talking to anyone with anything intricate on their epaulettes would turn him into a bag of nerves.

  But this was the first time he’d been observing a flag officer when they were off the clock, and the sheer mundane normality he was exhibiting was somehow refreshing. John Reynolds liked to watch shit movies while swirling a glass of brandy. He visited the toilet just like anyone else and generally seemed like a human being. In other words, he wasn’t giving the impression of being a nefarious gunrunner.

  Yet.

  The ringing of a phone came over the headphones causing Grayson to sit upright. It was the first call in he’d heard.

  “Reynolds,” a deep, cultured British accent said.

  Standing, Grayson picked up the spare headphones, leaned over, and shook Bradley. She blinked, looked at him, then wordlessly took the headphones from his hands and slipped them on. Grayson walked onto the balcony and knelt down, sighting down the telescope.

  The view through Reynolds’s window was good, which was the reason they’d managed to swing booking this exorbitantly priced suite overlooking Reynolds’s own hotel. He watched the retired admiral stand up from his armchair, walk to a desk, and flip open his laptop.

  “Yes. It’s a secure line.”

  Grayson turned and looked at Bradley. “Get onto SIGINT, see if they can get us any information on who he’s talking too.”

  Bradley nodded, pulling out her own phone.

  “Okay, 2100 hours.” Reynolds said. “Yes, just looking up the address now.”

  “Anything?” Grayson said as he focused on Reynolds. Frustratingly, he was obscuring the laptop.

  “No, whatever encryption he’s using is tight.”

  “Damnit,” Grayson growled as he looked at the man’s back. “Move out the way.”

  Reynolds stubbornly stood in front of the laptop screen. Grayson slowly swept the telescope left. There, that was what he was looking for, a mirror reflecting the screen. Reversed, it was difficult to read. He glanced down, checking the camera attached to the telescope was set to HD record. It was at an angle but it was enough. They would be able to manipulate the footage later. From what he could see on the screen, some kind of map was on the browser.

  “Fine, I’ll see you tomorrow.” Reynolds put the phone down. He stood leaning over the laptop, his composure one of weariness. He stood like that for a long moment, before savagely and without warning slamming his fist into the desk.

  Grayson gave a start, the sharp sound piercing his ear.

  Reynolds rallied himself, standing from his lean.

  “Tell me SIGINT got that?” Grayson turned to look at Bradley.

  She glanced back, still on her phone, listening for a moment before shaking her head, a confused look on her face. “Negative, it’s showing nothing.”

  “Nothing?” Grayson turned to look back through the telescope. “How the hell can we have nothing? We should at least have a carrier line or call data going through his phone.”

  Reynolds had resumed his position, sitting and staring at the television screen.

  “GCHQ is showing no activity on that phone. At all.”

  “Fine.” Grayson plucked his own phone out of his pocket and dialed Dillon. GCHQ was good, he knew. He’d done some work with them before, but they didn’t exactly have the reach of good old US talent. “Hey, Max. Can you run Reynolds’s phone through the NSA? Let’s see what they can do with it.”

  “On it,” Dillon replied concisely.

  Bradley stood, looking at her phone, the confusion evident in her face. “
GCHQ is supposed to have a listening watch on flag officers’ phones. I don’t understand this. At all.”

  ***

  Midnight came and went. The pattering sound of the bathroom shower abated and the old man came back into the lounge area, rubbing his hair vigorously with a towel.

  “You know, when I’m his age,” Grayson muttered, “I hope I’m in half as good of shape.”

  “You want to be a silver fox someday, huh?”

  Grayson had spent the time comparing the map shown in the laptop screen with sites from around the island. It wasn’t as easy as it should have been. The island wasn’t huge, but it was still a test of patience, comparing the green of fields and the blue of waterways with what he could spot on Google Earth.

  Reynolds grabbed his laptop off the side and set it down on the coffee table and began tapping on the keyboard.

  Grayson turned to Bradley. “Get Max back on the line, see whether he’s having any luck?”

  She fired up the laptop. Dillon appeared on the secured video chat. “Folks, I didn’t get shit through regular coms tasking.”

  “NSA and GCHQ are still struggling?”

  “Yeah. Fortunately, I called in an old favor and got some E-time authorized.”

  Grayson raised an eyebrow as Bradley asked, “Got some E-time?”

  Pursing his lips, Grayson considered for a moment what to tell her. Sure, the UK was one of the Five Eyes, the intelligence alliance made up of the US, UK, Australia, New Zealand, and Canada. But confirming the full extent of US capability was a step beyond his paygrade.

  “I presume,” Bradley pressed. “You’re talking about—”

  “I’ll stop you there,” Grayson interjected. “You know as well as I do I can’t talk about it.”

  “About ECHELON?” Bradley grinned. “We do get the Discovery Channel back home, you know. I just never thought I’d see it directly in action is all.”

  Rolling his eyes, he looked at Dillon. “Do it. We need to break the back on this one and quickly.”

  “Roger that, be back in five.” Dillon’s face disappeared from the screen.

  Drumming his fingertips on the table, Grayson waited for Dillon to get back to them. After a moment of consideration, he turned to Bradley. “What do you know about ECHELON?”

  “You mean beyond its status as the biggest, most intrusive intelligence gathering operation ever?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Not much. I know it feeds of intel sites and hubs all over the world, gathering, processing, exploring and exploiting data from a variety of sources. There is some conjecture it has penetrative capabilities, able to plant fake news and intelligence reports in target mediums. It’s fairly common knowledge there are folks cleared in MI5, SIS, and our military to request information from it, but that isn’t exactly advertised. The way I hear it, if you’re working up a job, one day, boom, an info packet might appear in your secure email which may be enough to make or break a case.”

  That sounded a lot like Grayson was used to when it came to ECHELON. He’d been on more than one operation in his time in which mysterious intelligence packets had arrived out of thin air. “Yeah, that’s about it.”

  A chime sounded on the laptop. Answering the call, Dillon’s face again appeared alongside a blinking envelope of an attachment. “Got it. Sending through a replay of this guy’s screen now.”

  Opening the video file, a replay of Reynolds laptop screen appeared covering the last few hours.

  “Shit,” Bradley muttered. “If we’d had this earlier, that would have made our life easier.”

  Grayson scrolled the replay, searching for the time they’d observed Reynolds looking at the map. “Whatever he was looking at here seriously must have been pissing him off.”

  On the screen was a website browser showing nothing more than the BBC.com weather report. Surely that wouldn’t have made him angry enough to start hitting stuff? Grayson frowned and picked up the camera, a thought occurring. He flicked through the replay, just in case the clock on the replay was different to the clock on the camera.

  It seemed the same.

  “Look at the image on here.” He showed Bradley the tiny screen. On it, the reflected screen showing the map could just be made out. He gestured at the laptop. “Now, that isn’t corresponding to what we’re looking at here.”

  “That must be some bloody good counter-intrusion software he’s got running if he can mask his computer from ECHELON.”

  “Yeah.” Grayson set the camera down. The implications that Reynolds had the ability to so effectively spoof the most advanced surveillance technologies in the world were... troubling. “It’s the first time I’ve heard about the system being wrong.”

  “I guess that’s where good old fashioned human intelligence comes in.”

  “Yeah.” Grayson looked back at the map displaying on his screen. They had a clue where he would be at 9pm tomorrow.

  They just had to find the exact location the hard way, by comparing the map with Google Earth until they found it.

  Chapter Ten – The Present

  Hundreds of people crowded the neon-lit deck. Soft music from bands spilled out from the bars, where home-brewed alcohol flowed freely.

  The area near the flow rider at the stern of the ship had been set aside for a special presentation though, the light pollution blocked by screens. Here, Donovan had spent the last thirty minutes setting up for his showpiece event.

  The telescope he had been calibrating was large and crude, the optics salvaged from a variety of sources. But it worked, and that was the main thing.

  “Unfortunately, over the last couple of years, our capacity to do research has been seriously curtailed by the simple need to stay alive. But now, thanks to the arrival of Atlantica, we have the time and ability to do some.” Donovan continued sighting the telescope, aiming it up into the night. The waxing moon loomed large, leaving only the brightest stars in the loosely speckled sky. He gave a nod of satisfaction. “As a boy in Wichita, Kansas, I was always fascinated by the planets.”

  He finished making his adjustments and gave a nod of satisfaction.

  “As expected, over the ten million years which have elapsed, many of the stars have shifted around. Some are nearly impossible to recognize and we will eventually have to recategorize them. Maybe even create new constellations.” Donovan had clearly rehearsed his speech. “Likewise, as the imperfections in the planets’ orbits in the Solar System have propagated, even finding them again has been tricky.”

  He stood and looked at the small, select, crowd. “But I’ve found one now.”

  Donovan waved Reynolds over. “Please, sir. Take a look at Mars.”

  Reynolds leaned forward and pressed his eye to the scope. A second later, he pulled back and rubbed his eyes before looking again. “That can’t be right?”

  “Oh it is.” Donovan smiled.

  “What does it mean?”

  “That’s something we need to find out,” Donovan responded. “It could mean a lot of things.”

  Reynolds waved Laurie over. “Darling, take a look.”

  Laurie stepped forward and replaced her father. Looking through the eyepiece, she saw the black expanse of space, specks of light twinkling. But what was at the center? That’s what caused her breath to catch.

  The circle was small, little more than the size of a cent. But it was unmistakably made up of two colors. Blues and greens.

  Like her father, she pulled back in shock. “How?”

  “Same answer, I’m afraid.” Donovan grinned.

  The others queued up, each gasping as they saw the formally red planet.

  “Well, shit!” Wakefield exclaimed. He was too focused looking through the telescope to see the distaste flash across Donovan’s face. “You think it has life?”

  “That’ll certainly be one explanation.” Donovan nodded. “Now, bearing in mind that the majority of my knowledge of what would go into terraforming Mars comes from Kim Stanley Robinson novels, it sugge
sts some kind of significant adaption to the planet.”

  “Well, shit,” Wakefield repeated, his voice low. “Maybe those crazy cats succeeded.”

  “The ones who tried to escape to Mars, you mean?” Laurie asked. Wakefield had told them when they’d first arrived there had been many projects to try and sidestep the Perses extinction event. Not the least an attempt to colonize Mars. But, as far as Wakefield had told them, it had been considered to have one of the lowest probabilities of success.

  “Yeah.” Wakefield frowned. “But their plan was a total gamble. There was no way they could have succeeded. Could they?”

  “Our only evidence that anyone made it is here.” Donovan lightly stroked the top of the telescope, careful not to disturb its position. “I can’t think of any processes short of divine or human intervention which could have somehow given life to Mars. So, as our resident expert on the Perses survival missions—do you think there would be people up there?”

  “How the hell would I know?” Wakefield resumed looking through the scope. “We got any way of communicating with them? Maybe listening for if they’re speaking?”

  “We’ve been as successful as we have been listening for the other Loci you claim exist. Which is to say, not at all,” Donovan said with a shake of his head.

  Laurie smiled that Donovan had managed to slip in that barb. Wakefield’s original claim that there were other Loci in the world, presumably with other refugees from the past, hadn’t panned out—although the technical experts agreed that they weren’t set up to listen for them. Personally, Laurie couldn’t see why Wakefield hadn’t brought the technology with him to link in with them. But, either way, he denied that he had heard anything from anyone else.

  “I took the liberty of tasking the AN/SPY to try and listen, but it’s not built for monitoring interplanetary communications, and predictably, it heard nothing,” Donovan said, referring to one of Ignatius’s radar systems. “But I’d suggest that would be one interesting project to figure something out. The question remains though, no matter how good a job they did, why haven’t they come back once Earth settled down after the Perses strike?”