He had debated contacting Admiral Nilal and warning him about the possibility of rogue Fleet elements. The admiral and Allard had been friends since their first day at the Academy nearly fifty years earlier. There wasn’t a person alive that he trusted more implicitly, and Nilal was one of the handful of people that was briefed-in on Omega. He had ultimately decided that the risk was simply too high that someone close to Nilal could be compromised. He would wait to bring in his comrade until they were ready to take action.
He raised his tumbler to take another sip and suddenly the lights went out. That should have been impossible, as this facility ran on its own independent power supply. Alarmed, the Omega director attempted to connect to the security AI and found that all signals were being jammed. Actually, jammed wasn’t the right word for it, as there was no active interference. The security system simply wasn’t responding. Allard quickly found that all of his local and planetary network connections were likewise unresponsive.
Allard activated the nightvision mode of his OHUD and leapt to his feet. The expensive whiskey fell to the floor with a thud; the glass too thick to shatter. He quickly crossed his office to his desk and pulled out a pistol from a drawer, placing it on the desktop. Then he reached underneath the desk and flipped open a spring-loaded button guard, stabbing at the button beneath it.
A loud clank reverberated throughout the room and a heavy blast door fell down to seal off the office’s only entrance. The thick metal door was entirely mechanical in nature, relying only on gravity to lower it into place, and was therefore immune to whatever disruption the unknown enemy had carried out. Still, Allard knew that it would only delay them from gaining entry. He had to assume that any adversary that was aware of this facility, let alone had the skill and gall to attack it, would have near perfect intelligence on every aspect of Omega.
Only the Directorate could have ordered such an operation, which proved beyond a doubt that Pearce’s investigation had hit close to home. Allard had no questions about what was happening. Omega was burned, to be not simply disavowed but completely eradicated down to the last shred of evidence. They would hunt down every last agent and asset, extract what information they could, and then eliminate them. Credit accounts would be drained, safe houses destroyed, and data banks expunged. When completed, there would be no record the organization had ever existed. He had to get a warning out.
Allard was out of options and knew that he didn’t have much time, so he quickly made his way over to a picture on the wall and tore it off its hanger, tossing it to the floor. Behind it was one of the office’s several in-wall safes. This one was very different than the others, however, and the Omega Director had only ever opened it once.
He passed the biometric checks and entered the proper combination, which popped the lock on the safe audibly and allowed him to swing the heavy door open. Inside, rather than documents or weapons there was only a single handle that reminded Allard of the ripcords on his parachutes from his younger days in the Marines.
Allard hesitated for only a moment before he reached into the safe and yanked the handle. He felt the safety mechanism snap and his arm jerked back even further, and then it was done.
The connected battery pack sent electricity down a dozen dedicated lines, completing circuits nearly instantly. Some of those circuits were attached to secret detonators in the data warehouse, and Allard felt the building shake slightly as their small but powerful charges vaporized racks of hardware.
Others connected to four hidden rocket pods that were similar in function to a starship’s escape pods, only smaller. They lit off solid fuel boosters and blasted out of hidden launch tubes built into the structure of the building itself. They erratically swerved out into the early evening sky where they would hopefully survive long enough to transmit the warning message to the rest of the Omega organization.
This was a completely undocumented failsafe system that Allard had personally installed during the facilities construction. Not another living soul knew of it, and therefore there was no way to anticipate it. The Director had many such secrets stashed inside his skull, and there was only one last thing to do to ensure that those secrets didn’t fall into the wrong hands.
He grabbed the pistol off of his desk and sat back down in his favorite chair. He retrieved the fallen tumbler and poured himself another two fingers of whiskey. As he swirled the contents and admired the fine liquid one final time, he heard the muffled sound of more explosions and gunfire from beyond the blast door. In less than a minute the enemy had defeated all of the exterior defenses and was already outside of his inner sanctum.
He felt a pang of sorrow for the good people dying or already dead on the other side of the door. He raised the glass in a silent toast to the fallen and then slugged the entire drink down in a single gulp.
He didn’t flinch as the bright flare of a plasma torch began cutting through the blast door, but merely turned his head away from the blinding sight. He carefully raised the pistol to the awkward position required to place the muzzle against the base of his skull, where his VIA implant was located. He had to be careful so that his aim included both the implant and the center of the brain behind it.
And then Zachary Allard, Director of Omega, veteran, patriot, and master spy, exhaled a slow burning breath of exquisite whiskey and pulled the trigger.
***
The attacking force had been anticipating all sorts of tricks. Allard had been a spymaster second-to-none with decades of covert experience. They had absolutely considered the possibility of ships or drones launched to warn others or escape, and so had stationed several gunships strategically to intercept. They shot the four pods down within seconds of launching.
It took another fifteen seconds for someone to notice the balloon. While everyone had been busy chasing down the rockets, a solitary high-density balloon had shot from another hidden location and skyrocketed towards the clouds. It was covered in stealth coating that made it invisible to the enemy’s sensors, and attached to the bottom of it was a tiny but powerful transmitter.
It wasn’t until it started transmitting outside of the communication suppression zone that anyone discovered it. Even as the gunships closed on the small and primitive device, it completed its burst transmission, and the alert was transmitted to every Omega listening station in a matter of seconds.
ALPHA PROTOCOL IS IN EFFECT.
Dargo Pearce will return in Alpha Protocol!
Dear Readers:
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The Science Behind the Fiction
I have been fascinated by technology as far back as I can remember into early childhood. My Dad worked for IBM for over 30 years, and in the early 80’s he would take home an IBM 5155 Portable PC on the weekends for us to use when I was only 4 years old.
It wasn’t until we got our very own beloved IBM PCJr (it was only much later in life that I realized how maligned it was in the “public”) that my interest really took off though, and I’ve never looked back.
In the three decades since then technology has advanced in ways that not even Star Trek predicted, and I imagine that in three more decades we’ll be looking back in a similar amused manner. I’m a voracious reader and try to keep up on as much technology news as possible, and when I started out to write this book I wanted to include as much plausible tech as possible.
The spark for this book came from a 2012 news article that summarized research from the Unive
rsity of Sydney showing that while an Alcubierre “warp” drive was theoretically possible, it could potentially wipe out all life when the ship stopped at its destination.
Now that’s interesting, I thought, imagining how an established human colonial empire would deal with the ramifications of such dangers. From that came the concept of the “flash” drive and the PAN system designed to mitigate the risks of it, similar to today’s air traffic controllers (or perhaps more accurately, the positive train control systems being deployed today).
And once you have devised such a solution, what happens when someone breaks it. It is sort of a super-charged version of Jon’s Law, which states “Any interesting space drive is a weapon of mass destruction.”
The gravity drive is based on an obscure amateur physics book called SlipString Drive by Andrew L Bender, which I read long ago while blowing through a few books on String & Unified Theory that were generally way above my comprehension level.
The concept of gravity has always appealed to me because despite massive leaps in physics our understanding of it is almost comically nonexistent. Gravity is the only force of nature that scientists just can’t seem to explain and it doesn’t appear to play by any of the known rules of either relativity or quantum mechanics. While Newton’s Apple fell centuries ago, scientists have searched for “gravity waves” for a hundred years and only very recently confirmed their existence.
As a relatively unknown but undeniably critical force in our universe, I view the mastery of gravity as a possible tremendous evolution in human technology. When Bender postulated a faster-than-light drive that utilized gravity waves, I felt it was the perfect plot device to showcase human civilization struggling with that mastery.
The VIA is based on real technology currently in use and under development today. Way back in 2013 scientists first connected the brains of two mice on completely different continents together, demonstrating the ability to share sensory information and knowledge across a data link.
Optical implants are already being used to allow blind people to see for the first time, and DARPA is working on an integrated heads-up display directly embedded into the eye like the OHUD. Several prominent and very rich individuals are working on advanced BMIs (brain machine interfaces) including Mark Zuckerberg, Bryan Johnson, and Elon Musk (for an eye-popping idea of what Musk is up to check out this long-form but incredibly worth reading Wait But Why post).
It is not a matter of IF we will have BMIs like the VIA but when, and just how much they will do.
Artificial General Intelligence will likely eventually come to pass as well. We’re flirting around with smart AI assistants in our mobiles and homes already, and it is only logical that we would eventually install them in humanoid forms. In fact, following the general rule of sextech leading the way in technological breakthroughs (see VHS, DVD, internet), robotic “Dutch Wives” are already a reality, and some already include limited AI in them.
There are obviously morale and ethical considerations to consider as we develop strong AI (aka AGI). What is sentience? What is a person? How much individual will should we give a machine that is created by man? Should we let machines create machines? I actually predict a much higher integration with AGIs than I portray in this book but for the purposes of narrative I invented some laws and restrictions on them to make things interesting.
Bio-engineered soldiers are already under heavy research & development today and they will be deployed on the battlefield in the next decade or so (if not secretly deployed already). All of the things that Dargo Pearce can do in this book, from extreme physical feats to the on-the-fly adjustment of body chemistry, are in the scope of current research fields. Modern bio-hackers are already experimenting with subcutaneous armor. And we haven’t even seen the full extent of what Agent Pearce can do; much more to come in future books.
Finally, in a world of interconnected BMIs, “Syncing” will absolutely be a thing, as will much more. The recording and sharing of memories will eventually be commonplace, which can lead to all sorts of ethical dilemmas. Great care must be taken to safeguard against hacking and data theft of such things, as well as how they are commercially used.
If you think today’s adult video industry is big business, imagine being able to download the complete sensory experience of another person and “relive” it. And this is really small thinking on the subject…if you can link two minds together, why not 100? Why not all of them?
I’d love to hear your feedback on these and other technologies used in the book and even suggestions for future inclusion.
To see the hyperlinks included in this section, go to https://davidnfrank.com/blog
About the Author:
David Frank is the author of Impact Event and the founder of NASH AWARE, a blog dedicated to raising awareness of the deadly liver disease NASH. He has worked in the tedium of the financial markets for over 15 years while biding his time to pursue his lifelong passion of writing. He’s also a tech geek, gamer, advocate, landlord, tinkerer, husband, and father. He lives in New York City with his wife and daughter.
Impact Event (Dargo Pearce Chronicles #1) Page 28
