Before she became Chamuel, as a younger woman, she’d seen Raiders of the Lost Ark. The story took place before WWII, during the tension of a building conflict. At the end, the ark is boxed up and put in a vast warehouse full of other unknown, world-shattering mysteries. Then she joined project Genesis as an associate researcher. She hadn’t known 1/100th of what she knew now as a member of the Heptagon. But even then, she knew the warehouse existed, though it wasn’t quite as simple as the one shown in the movie.
Over her time with Project Genesis she’d been to three warehouses in the United States. After joining the Heptagon as Chamuel, she’d learned there were 13 of them. She also knew other governments, big and small, had dozens more. The lifeblood of a nation was secrets, and the United States had gotten very good at keeping them. They were so good, they’d probably forgotten more than they remembered. Apparently, they weren’t as good as the Soviet Union, though.
The directed energy weapon had been an unfortunate surprise. When the Vulples’ ship came around the moon and tried to communicate, it had taken long days for anyone to realize what was happening, and more for the US’s glacially moving intelligence agencies to understand. Eventually, they activated Project Genesis and initiated contact.
After seeing someone on an east coast weather satellite, Chamuel called up some data from the NRO, the National Reconnaissance Office. The delay in response was appreciable, making her narrow her eyes in consternation. Ever since Gabriel had killed the civilian internet and military MILSATCOMs, her connectivity had slowed. She’d estimated a 29% decrease in throughput, and it had ended up being 22%. Lately, it was down to a 33% loss. She pulled up one of her files on expected orbital asset degradation to correlate the decrease.
A few minutes later, she was still investigating the anomalous amount of throughput degradation. When Michael had her look into something, her habit of chasing squirrels (as she called it) drove him mad. It was one of the ways she found things other analysts didn’t. She let her mind take her wherever it wished. Those squirrels led her to conclusions others would never find. It was a trait of her particular flavor of Asperger’s, and it suited her line of work.
The answer appeared to be a missing telecom satellite which had been carrying some of her data. Only a single channel remained after the computer virus shut down the satellites, so she’d shared her data over dozens of different satellites. A monitor showed the typical mission control display with the missing satellite’s orbit. A flashing, miniature explosion showed where it was when it experienced LOS, or loss of signal.
Chamuel stared at the location for a long time. In the dark recesses of her mind, connections came together. She pulled the satellite data log to verify when it went offline. It hadn’t faded, it just stopped. The satellite was a relatively low altitude one, part of a special series of telecoms with limited use. It rode in a 655km sun-synchronous orbit. Or at least it had, until it appeared to hit something. Something in orbit a few hundred miles west of the southern California coast.
She ran back the video of the last satellite passes over the Pacific coast. There were no NRO birds due for hours. The best weather satellites didn’t have the resolution. However, a civilian imaging satellite used by a map company had done a California pass minutes earlier. It was supposed to stop recording shortly after passing over the ocean, but it was worth a look. Like everything else, it took longer than she would have liked for the imagery to come up.
The picture dominated one of her monitors when it arrived, so Chamuel could enhance and review it. She’d been imaging the so called “Flotilla” since it was first identified as a group of survivors. When the military arrived, she’d flagged it for Michael as a development to be observed. Because of the shortage of orbital assets, the pictures were from different angles, altitudes, and resolutions. But she had programs that would compensate for incomplete or badly angled data. The far west extreme of the new image was the target area.
Chamuel turned the newest image over to the processing software and went back to the data slowdown. Before long, another frame was added to the time lapse view of the Flotilla. Flipping between views revealed exactly what she was afraid of. The distinctive form of a supercarrier had first appeared a day ago, then it had disappeared, and now it was back. It simply was not possible. A 100,000-ton ship couldn’t move far enough on her view to disappear and reappear in just a few hours.
She did something she rarely did; she gave the image gallery her full attention. Her screens were dominated by pictures from all over the planet. In minutes, she’d filtered the images to North America. Again, she lamented the lack of domestic surveillance capabilities. Maybe she’d ask Gabriel about ‘borrowing’ Russian assets? A half hour passed, and she had dozens of suspicious images, and a single damning one. She touched the intercom control on her mobility chair.
“Michael, Chamuel.”
“Go ahead.”
“We need a meeting.”
“I’m talking with the facility manager at San Nicolas about our arrival. Can’t it wait?”
“No,” she said.
There was a slight pause before Michael replied. “Okay, give me five minutes.”
As usual, Chamuel didn’t travel to the conference room. The former NOAA ship didn’t have any ramps for her chair, so she attended virtually and listened while Michael explained that Chamuel had called the impromptu meeting. “I assume this is important?” he asked as he finished and looked at her monitor/camera.
“Yes,” she said. “The last 24 hours have seen a number of developments.” She remotely accessed the conference room screen and began her slide show. Even at the end of the world, Powerpoint dominates. As you know, our parent organization used the alien technology gifted to us by the Vulpes on their first visit to facilitate a considerable technological advancement period leading to our space program, the information age, and medical innovations, some of which were never released to the public.
“We’ve carefully monitored how the technological ‘gifts’ from out of town affected planetary technological development.” She could hear several of her fellow Heptagon members chuckle. “Possible spin offs and unexpected side effects are the prime reasons the high-end medical treatments were not released. I consider this a mistake.”
“Your position on this is well known and debated,” Michael interjected.
Before she’d been made part of the Heptagon, Chamuel had been confined to a full mobility chair and could only control it with puffs of air. She had been born with part of her spine outside her body, and the medical treatments she was talking about had given her the use of both arms, improved vocal capabilities, and even movement in her legs. The miracles she’d experienced were something she’d lobbied to make available to others a hundred times.
She made a face but continued, “As I was saying, we’ve always monitored for signs of unexplained technological jumps. On the screen, you see a United States supercarrier, the USS Gerald R. Ford. This carrier is part of a group labeled the ‘Flotilla’ and is where the prisoner Lieutenant JG Grange came from. We know this grouping wasn’t planned but resulted from the ships’ proximity to San Diego. It, in and of itself, was not a concern of ours until the president came on site.”
“I still think we should have shot her plane down,” Michael said.
“I advised against it, and as you see, the situation resolved itself. I never ascertained if the collision was an accident or not. Either way, the president and her surviving cabinet members were all killed. With NASA and CDC personnel being the only serious concerns, I reduced surveillance on the Flotilla. This proved to be a mistake.”
“Chamuel made a mistake?” Jophiel scoffed. “I need to make a note of this on my calendar.” Of the Heptagon, Jophiel liked Chamuel the least.
You’d think with only three women, I’d get a little comradery from her. “As I was saying, this was a mistake. You’ll observe, on this frame, the Gerald R. Ford is more or less in the center of the Flotilla. In the
next frame, the carrier is gone, and two small ships are sinking. We’ll finish with the final frame in which the carrier is back. However, as you can see, the C-17 on the deck is gone.”
“I fail to see why a ship sailing around matters to us,” Raphael snapped. “I was in the middle of a cellular analysis run on the Vulpes’ immune system.”
“Why don’t you all shut the fuck up and let her explain?”
They all looked at Azrael in surprise, even Michael. You usually needed to ask Azrael a pointed question to get any kind of a response. Between his earlier conversation with her and this outburst, Chamuel was at a loss to explain the change in the normally quiet man’s behavior. Michael chuckled and gestured for her to continue.
“As Raphael said, this, by itself, doesn’t mean much. However, a satellite also went missing last night—directly above San Diego. While I have no visual evidence, I’m forced to conclude someone in the Flotilla has salvaged one or more alien escape pods, and to make matters worse, figured out how to use the drives.”
“How could they manage that?” Gabriel asked. “There might be some tech-oriented people there, but the majority of those people come from various freighters, pleasure craft, and military ships. Certainly no scientists.”
“All except this ship,” Chamuel said and called up a more detailed orbital picture of the OOE mobile launch ship. “This is the mobile launch ship that was customized by Jeremiah Osborne for his Oceanic Orbital Enterprises.”
“A goddamned rocket scientist,” Michael spat. “Great. Are you sure they figured it out?”
“I dug into recorded intel while I waited for this meeting,” Chamuel said. “A couple weeks before Strain Delta went global, there was an emailed offer from Theodore Alphonse Bennitti III, a director at NASA, to Jeremiah Osborne. We knew NASA had noticed the escape pods entering the atmosphere despite our covering up the Russian shootdown of the ship we later captured. However, the unusual reentry paths made it unlikely they’d find any of them before the plague made the issue moot.
“After going over email communications from Mr. Osborne, I found this.” She changed the display to a slideshow of an excavation revealing one of the alien escape pods, as well as a dead Vulpes. “He took the escape pod back to his facilities in San Diego. He sent several more requests to Director Bennitti for guidance, which were never answered, because everything was falling apart by then.
“In the end, the conclusion is pretty obvious. Jeremiah Osborne, with a well-skilled team of aerospace engineers and scientists, figured out how to open the pod and remove its redundant drives. He appears to have shared the information with the military and might well have constructed more than one working drive adaptation.”
“Son of a bitch,” Michael snarled. “Why didn’t you see this?”
“Do you remember my initial report after the Russians started this dance?” she asked. “I said there was a 10-12% chance someone on the planet would figure out the alien drives.” She shrugged. “You roll the dice enough times, you lose.”
“Just down the road from our fallback base?” Michael asked. “That’s bad luck.”
“Pretty bad,” Chamuel agreed.
“What’s the chance they’ve figured out the escape pod’s communications?” Gabriel asked, her eyes sharp and inquisitive.
She might be the only one in the group Chamuel considered a friend, though she was now reconsidering her position with Azrael. “We know there are six pods less than 500 miles from the Flotilla. If you recall, I considered the possibility that this was the reason the coast guard ship was in the Columbia River.”
“We’d already recovered the local pod,” Michael reminded her.
“I am aware; however, the ship was already heading north before we recovered it. In answer to your question, I’d say the odds are even, or maybe a bit in their favor.”
Everyone was silent for a moment as they let Michael think. Chamuel was the Heptagon’s tactical genius. She analyzed everything she saw and provided it to the team. It had been Michael’s decision to let Gabriel unleash her virus on the world’s data networks. Since the Strain Delta plague was already wreaking havoc, shutting down the data networks merely decreased the chances of anyone getting ahold of the alien tech, which Chamuel calculated would have made matters worse. Sure, it was a cold-blooded decision which ultimately cost more lives. However, it increased the species’ chances of survival by allowing Project Genesis and the Heptagon time to work on the problem. She wondered if Michael was working on the problem or the situation.
Oh, what a tangled web we weave, Chamuel thought. Ultimately, who was worse? Chamuel for saying more people needed to die for the human race to survive, or Michael for actually pulling the trigger. Whatever helps you sleep at night, I guess.
“Okay,” Michael said eventually, “I’ve made up my mind about this Flotilla. I’m contacting San Nicolas and telling them to neutralize it.”
“All of it?” Chamuel asked. “Or a surgical strike on OOE?”
“What are the odds on each?”
Chamuel closed her eyes and let the factors roll through her mind. “Looks like a 40% chance of getting all the alien tech and those who understand if we target just the OOE ship. There’s a 77% chance if we target OOE and the military, and an 82% chance if we target them all.”
“All it is, then,” Michael said. “Are we done?”
“What about Grange?” Jophiel asked. The elderly linguist had been unhappy about being asked to interrogate their prisoner, and she was obviously hoping this would get her out of the job.
“Run at least one more session,” Michael said. Jophiel frowned. “Gear the inquiry toward seeing if our guest knew about their discovery of the alien tech. If she doesn’t know anything, euthanize her.”
“Very well,” Jophiel said.
In Michael’s standard, no-pleasantries fashion, the meeting was over. Chamuel looked away from the blank conference screen and back at her satellite image collection. She’d renewed her interest in the NASA fleet, which was still in the Gulf of Nicoya near Costa Rica. It was just sitting there, and she couldn’t get any good views. What is happening there? Her complex mind estimated a 14% chance the military, with their NASA cargo, had surrendered control to the Russians and a 23% chance it was the other way around. However, she also calculated a 5% chance some sort of agreement had been reached. The probability grew every hour, so she kept a careful watch. An old US spy satellite would pass over later in the afternoon, then she’d know more.
A picture drew her attention. It was an image she hadn’t shared because it had her mystified. Chamuel didn’t like being mystified. A roughly round shadow obscured part of Amarillo, Texas, like a massive translucent cloud. It just hung there and hadn’t moved for hours. As she did with Costa Rica, she only had weather satellite images, and nothing would be in view for more than a day.
She leaned closer to examine it. The best image processing software only managed to reveal a weird series of geometric lines, somehow reminding her of an integrated circuit. She chewed her lower lip and stared. What the hell is that thing? The computer had no answer.
* * *
Shangri-La
Amarillo, TX
“You definitely have a concussion,” Dr. Clay said as she examined the x-ray on the back-lit box. Modern X-rays were computer images. Shangri-La’s salvage team had found a FEMA lot shortly after getting the beast into the air. Among the dozens of residential trailers and truckloads of MREs, they found the old medical trailer, complete with a film X-ray machine and a stash of film. “I never thought I’d use an old model like this again,” the doctor said, shaking her head.
“I’ve had worse injuries,” Cobb replied. The doctor looked at him skeptically. “IEDs in the Stan. You’d be supri—OUCH!”
“Sorry,” the teenager said. He was stitching the three-inch-long gouge on Cobb’s head, put there by former Private Groves’ pistol. He was the doctor’s son, or at least Cobb thought he was.
“Yo
u got some painkillers?” Cobb asked. He looked at his really worn camo fatigues. He could add a nice splash of blood down one collar to the list of various stains.
“You should lie down for a day.”
“Not right now,” he said. She gave him the same skeptical look.
The door opened, and a Marine stuck his head in. “You okay, sir?”
“Fine, son,” Cobb assured him. The young Marine nodded and disappeared. In the hours since the attempted coup, Cobb hadn’t been more than a dozen feet from at least two soldiers. The Marines and army seemed to have taken Groves’ attempt personally.
Inside the rear of the medical trailer were a dozen beds, each with a screen which could be pulled closed for privacy. Master Sergeant Schardt was behind one of the screens, sedated, hooked up to a life-sign monitor that was beeping away. Cobb had waited in the exam area for three hours while the doctor operated on Schardt. He’d been shot three times and was one tough son of a bitch. He complained the whole time he was carried to the medical trailer and didn’t stop until she put him under.
“Anything new on the master sergeant?” he asked.
She didn’t look away from the x-ray. “He’s fine,” she said. “I already told you, the bullet missed his bowel. There’s no risk of septic shock.” She walked over to a big, stainless-steel, floor-to-ceiling cabinet. It had been secured by several big locks which had all been drilled out. From the cabinet, she took out a handful of paper, single-use pill pouches. When she brought them to him, she leaned in and looked at the stitches with a critical eye. “Good job,” she told the boy who was trimming the extra line. He grinned. “Only one package of two pills every four hours.”
“Sure thing, Doc,” he said, ripping open a package and dry swallowing the two pills inside. The paper was embossed with the FEMA logo and said Oxycodone—50 mg. Yeah, the good stuff! “I’ll take it easy.”
Turning Point (Book 3): A Time To Live Page 24