by FX Holden
She had gathered the two of them in her office at Kennedy Space Center to discuss the problem of the day – a crippling shortage of pilots with combat experience. The X-37C relied heavily on quantum-computing-supported Hyper-Dimensional Data-Enabled Neural Network AIs for launch, landing, navigation and systems management. And the existing complement of mission intelligence coordinators and atmospheric specialists were more than competent. But she still required pilots and weapon officers in the virtual cockpits, calling the shots. Rodriguez had put Kansas and Zeezee on the job with orders to comb the ranks of existing Air Force combat drone units to find the personnel she needed.
“They will have the AI to hold their hands and they can learn the finer points of piloting drones in space when they get here, but I need crews who have proven combat experience,” she said. “Pull whoever you can from existing personnel, of course, but I need them tested for suitability.”
“That’s a big ask,” Kansas had warned her. “I’d say maybe one in five of the current personnel has the temperament and skills you need.”
“I’d say one in ten,” Zeezee corrected him. “The rest we will have to beg, borrow and steal. I hope you have friends in high places, ma’am.”
But they’d come through, and after six months had recruited and vetted 24 personnel from across Air Force, Navy and Space Force who could manage the highly demanding roles.
“Most have a background in drones; a lot of recon, a few combat. No such thing as space ‘top-guns’ that we could find, ma’am,” Zeezee said with typical bluntness. Alicia enjoyed the fact she always spoke with a slightly amused smile on her face, whether she was delivering a briefing to Rodriguez, a dressing down to a junior rating, or an ultimatum to a Cuban captain at gunpoint. “We’ve got them working side by side with the existing X-37 drivers in the simulators, but it’s going to take time we don’t have before they are as good in space as they are in atmo.”
“Speaking of which,” Alicia said, “have you tracked down that contractor I was telling you about? Like you said, I need a training officer who can turn this unit from a transport squadron into a fighting force overnight.”
“Lieutenant Karen O’Hare?” Zeezee Halloran asked. “Yes, ma’am, it took some work, but I found her. DARPA had her details, though she hasn’t been on contract with them for more than a year now. Thing is, I’m afraid she’s…” Zeezee paused and looked at Kansas, apparently hoping he’d finish the sentence for her. He kept his expression neutral, though, and let her hang.
“Don’t tell me,” Rodriguez smiled. “She’s in Bali surfing and told you to go screw yourself. Well, she and I go back a ways. Did you tell her who it was wanted to engage her?”
“No, ma’am,” Zeezee said. “I didn’t actually speak with her. I thought it would probably be a waste of time.”
“Because…” For the first time in almost two years, Rodriguez saw Zeezee was lost for words. “Because why, Sergeant?” she asked.
“She’s, uh, she’s in a convent, ma’am.”
Karen ‘Bunny’ O’Hare was indeed in a convent. As Alicia and Zeezee were discussing their personnel issues, oblivious to what was happening outside Alicia’s office, Bunny O’Hare sat glued to the sofa in the North Sydney Sisters of Mercy community house watching the world go to hell.
“Where is Abqaiq?” Sister Margaret asked her. She was a dear old retired nun who did most of the cooking for the other nuns in the community because the only cooking she trusted was her own. Her repertoire didn’t extend much beyond beef, chicken and lamb with three vegetables, but she occasionally did a pumpkin soup which O’Hare had grown to love, and she had a bowl going cold in her lap as she watched the Saudi processing plant disaster unfold on TV.
“Middle East,” O’Hare told her. “Big crude oil processing plant.” It had been twenty or more hours since the meteor strike, but the complex was still burning. The others in the community had drifted in and out of the TV common room to catch up with the news, but O’Hare had more or less taken up residence on the sofa.
“Of all the places for a meteor to hit,” Sister Margaret tut-tutted. “Desert to the left and ocean to the right, but it hit just there. Strange, isn’t it?”
“Yes, isn’t it,” O’Hare agreed, raising one pierced eyebrow. “God works in mysterious ways, Sister.” And so does the devil, she said to herself. Because I’m willing to bet God didn’t have much to do with this.
At that moment, O’Hare’s cell phone started buzzing in her jeans pocket. The Mercy Sisters didn’t wear habits – the women in the community dressed as they wished, which in O’Hare’s case meant torn black jeans, a torn black t-shirt and torn black hi-top sneakers. It didn’t exactly chime with the plain brown skirt, brown stockings and cream cardigan that Sister Margaret was wearing, but then again neither did Bunny O’Hare’s many tattoos and piercings. The Sisters of Mercy North Sydney was a diverse community, though, and it had accepted O’Hare turning up on its doorstep without either surprise or judgment.
O’Hare leaned back and fished her telephone out of her pocket. Not a number she recognized. But the prefix showed it was a US number. Probably another damned recruiter. She kept her eyes on the TV as she answered. “This is Karen O’Hare and I’m not interested, sorry.”
“Is that any way to greet an old sister in arms?” the voice at the other end asked.
O’Hare sat up, nearly spilling her soup. “Ally? Is that you?”
“It’s Colonel Ally now, Lieutenant,” the woman at the other end said. “How you doing, O’Hare?”
“Oh, you know … keeping busy,” O’Hare told her. Sister Margaret reached out for her bowl and headed out to the kitchen to make their ritualistic evening pot of tea. “Flat out actually, yeah.”
“In a convent? What the hell, O’Hare?”
Yeah, what the hell, O’Hare, she asked herself. She had no answer to that. It had seemed like the right idea at the time. “Oh, well. I’m … on a retreat,” O’Hare told Rodriguez. “Contemplating my navel kind of thing.”
“For the last six months, I’m told?”
“Yeah, well, it’s an extended retreat,” O’Hare said sheepishly. On the screen, the news program cut to shots of Saudi Air Force F-35s taking off from a runway in Riyadh and blasting into the sky. “But enough about me. Would I be right in guessing this phone call has something to do with what’s happening in the Middle East right now?”
“I hadn’t planned it to be, but I guess it is now,” Rodriguez admitted. “I need your help, O’Hare.”
“Ma’am, the last time you said that I ended up buried alive under five hundred feet of basalt and Arctic ice,” O’Hare said. “Which, by the way, makes sitting here sharing pumpkin soup with the charming Sister Margaret a much wiser lifestyle choice than whatever you’ve called me about.”
“Just hear me out,” Rodriguez said. “You know I wouldn’t have bothered you if it wasn’t important.”
“Oh, well then,” O’Hare said with a sigh and leaned back in the sofa. “If it’s one of those ‘Bunny O’Hare is the only person who can possibly save the world’ kind of situations…”
“I wouldn’t go that far,” Rodriguez told her. “But you might be able to save my ass.”
O’Hare closed her eyes. There was a reason she’d walked into the Mercy Sisters’ house. Actually, she’d just been out wandering aimlessly and she’d walked past it, not into it. But then the next day she went back and signed up for a month-long ‘retreat.’ That had turned into three. And then, six. Because she’d tried everything else to help her move on from her last combat tour – from therapy to drugs and even a halfhearted attempt at suicide. Now she’d tried prayer too. And the Mercy Sisters had taken her, literally, at face value. Cropped hair, tattoos, combat boots, facial piercings – they hadn’t even blinked. They’d put her to work, of course, helping out in their soup kitchen, on the streets at night handing out blankets and clean needles to people, keeping kids away from the predators … it had been exactly what
she needed.
But she couldn’t shake the dreams. Of being buried alive, like she’d said. Of waking up floating in a green-lit sea of bodies. Of being chased by a formless, unstoppable undersea thing hell-bent on killing her.
Well, O’Hare, she told herself. Maybe it’s time. Maybe this is moving on. Accepting the dreams are who you are.
“Alright, ma’am, it’s not quite as epic as saving the world, but saving your ass is still a worthy cause, I guess,” O’Hare told her. Sister Margaret shuffled in again with two steaming mugs of tea and handed one to O’Hare, sitting down on the sofa with a gentle sigh as she put a plate of pink iced cookies on the table in front of them both. O’Hare put down her mug and picked up a cookie, cradling her cell phone on her shoulder as she mouthed a ‘thank you’ at the old nun. “Keep talking.”
“What’re you watching?” Soshane asked, walking into the lounge room. Ambre quickly shut off the TV images from the Middle East.
“Nuthin. Just something for grownups, not for a nosy ticklish baby girl,” she said, looking sideways at her six-year-old daughter.
“Not nosy. Not hardly ticklish,” Soshane said, holding up her arms. “Try me!”
Ambre leaned forward on the sofa, wiggling her fingers. “You thinking of dead fish?”
“Nuh-uh,” Soshane said, eyes closed, smiling.
“You got to think of dead fish or something gross, or else you’re going to be tickled into a coma,” she warned.
“Nuh-uh. You got nothin’,” her daughter said dead-pan. “You’re all talk.”
Ambre reached out and started slow, running her fingertips around the girl’s midriff, then working her way up her ribs, expecting Soshane to collapse, but she was holding it in this time. Wriggling a bit, but she was fighting those giggles like she was leaning into a big wind. Ambre went for the kill zone, the little chubby bits under Soshane’s armpits. But eyes closed, mouth pursed, she held it until her breath gave out and she slapped Ambre’s fingers away and jumped in the air. “Winner! I made it all the way to the end of my breath.”
Ambre sat back. “I believe you did, girl. Maybe you just about did.”
The girl ran to the window. “Can we walk up to the park today? Do you have to go to work?”
Workdays had been a fluid thing during the build phase of her surveillance system, and Soshane was still in the habit of asking. “No, honey, it’s Sunday. I don’t work Sundays anymore,” Ambre said.
“I want to throw rice to the ducks,” she said. “That rice from last night. They’d like that.”
There goes dinner, Ambre thought. “A little handful,” she said. “Yeah, we can do that. I’d like that.”
“Yes!” Soshane yelled, pumping a fist in the air and running back from the window to jump on Ambre’s lap. “I know what you were watching. I already saw it.”
Ambre sat her up and turned her to make sure she heard right. “You saw what?”
“The meteors hitting that place in Arabia,” she said, not sounding at all like it was a scary thing. “That’s where Aladdin came from.”
“That’s right,” Ambre said, wanting to change the subject. “Hey, you want to watch that new VR Aladdin tonight? After supper maybe?”
Soshane didn’t answer, hopped down and squatted at a coffee table that was piled with pencils and coloring books and picked up on a drawing she’d started the day before. Ambre watched her work with intense focus for about five minutes before she looked up. “It looked like the place you work. The place that blew up. With all the towers and things.”
“A different place,” Ambre told her. “A long way away. And it was a place that makes oil, which is why it burned up. Where I work, we send rockets into space.”
Soshane went back to her drawing, tongue sticking out a corner of her mouth. She was a normal six-year-old, with chubby cheeks and puppy fat and braids and a gap where one of her front teeth had been until a week ago. “Rockets explode and burn up,” she said.
“Hardly ever,” Ambre said quickly. “It’s not the same. And meteors hardly ever hit the earth, and plus, I don’t work anywhere near the rockets.”
“When can I come to your work?” the girl said for about the hundredth time. “Did you ask your boss?”
“It’s not the kind of place people take their kids,” Ambre said. “It’s a military base. You need special permission and you can usually only take kids on family days.”
“Then I’ll ask him,” Soshane said, not looking up from her drawing. “If you’re too scared.”
“I’m not scared, Soshane.”
“I told Bethany you work at a rocket base and she doesn’t believe me and I said you do too and I’ll get a selfie with a rocket in it to prove it and she said go on I bet you can’t and that was weeks ago and now she teases me all the time like where’s the selfie of you and the rocket Soshane?”
“I’ll ask, alright,” Ambre sighed. It wasn’t that she didn’t think she’d be allowed – she worked every day with the security team. It was … she had this weird feeling. She couldn’t explain it. Like it just wasn’t a safe place for kids. The Cape Canaveral Security Forces Headquarters was out in the Industrial Area of the base, surrounded by Space Force and SpaceX logistics buildings, processing control, vehicle assembly … for Soshane to get a picture of a real rocket Ambre had to wait until they were readying one for launch and then get one of the police officers (they called themselves ‘Defenders’) to take her out somewhere where they could get a picture with it in the background. A shot from inside the visitor center wouldn’t work, it had to look like a proper rocket, not just a piece of a rocket – enough to convince a skeptical Bethany beyond any reasonable doubt. “We have a launch coming up soon. I think they’re getting the crawler ready this week…” she said, mostly for her own benefit.
“This is for you, for your office,” Soshane said, holding out the drawing proudly. She turned it to look at it and then pointed at it as she explained it. “This is you, and this is the rocket. And this is me and I’m taking a selfie and this is a meteor and this is the rocket blowing up and going BOOM!”
The chairmanship of the OPEC Plus Board was awarded by conference vote on a two-year rotating basis, and at this moment, fortunately for the Saudis, it was held by an ally, Tunisia. The Tunisian Minister for Energy and Resources was greedy and therefore pliable and acceded readily to the Saudi demand for an emergency session. And to the terms demanded by the Saudis: a maximum of three attendees per country, no formal minutes, any public disclosure of the discussion in the closed forum session to be met with automatic suspension.
The Tunisian was gnomic in stature, and his ill-fitting brown suit slid across bony shoulders as he stood and raised a hand to hush the chatter around the room. The twelve nations were arranged around an oval table, with the heads of delegation seated at the table, and their two allotted staff or colleagues on chairs behind and either side of them. The meeting room at Le Bristol hotel was opulently appointed, with polished parquet floors, velvet curtains, side tables overflowing with fruits and pastries, coffee, tea and mineral waters. And the latest in signal jamming devices to ensure that even if one of those present had disobeyed standing rules and brought a telephone or listening device into the room, or, Allah forbid, a radio-controlled explosive device, it would be rendered useless. Simultaneous translation was managed via hard-wired headphones attached to the large conference table.
“The head of the Saudi delegation has the floor,” the Tunisian said. “To address the urgent and tragic matter of the damage to the Abqaiq processing plant and the proposed Saudi response. He will make a prepared statement. After this statement, each delegation will have five minutes to speak on the matter. Any concrete proposals or responses can be tabled for further discussion after this session concludes. Do all agree?” He looked quickly around the table for any signs of dissent but was met with mostly nodding heads. “Good. Prince Al-Malki.”
D’Antonia caught a nervous backward glance from the bearded Prin
ce as he stood and adjusted his robes, then the papers in front of him, and she inclined her head and smiled in encouragement. Her lips were already silently forming his first words, as she knew them by heart. She’d spent the morning writing them, aligning them with the House of Saud and its Riyadh bureaucrats, and had covertly transmitted a copy to AISE just before joining the meeting. Italy and its closest allies already knew exactly what the Prince was about to say, even before those in the room knew it.
Come on, D’Antonia urged him. Gentlemen and ladies, the following statement…
Al-Malki coughed. “Uh, gentlemen and ladies, the following statement has been authorized by his Royal Highness King Mohammed bin Salman. I regret to inform you of the complete destruction of the Abqaiq oil processing facility and the loss of more than 500 lives.” A murmur went around the room, chiefly among the aides sitting behind the heads of delegation, as they leaned forward and whispered in their masters’ ears. Most had no doubt seen satellite imagery and intelligence reports from their own services indicating the scale of the destruction at Abqaiq, but it was another matter entirely to have it confirmed. Al-Malki continued, hand shaking slightly as he held the paper higher so he could better read it. “As you would well know, we have already announced that we are releasing product from our strategic reserves to cover the short-term gap in processing plant capacity. I must however inform you that at projected demand levels, this reserve will be exhausted in two hundred and eighty-eight days, after which there will be a global shortfall in sweet crude availability unless processing plant capacity can be increased elsewhere.”
