“That’s not making things clearer.”
“It’s a form of gibberish.”
“No kidding.”
“Seriously. There’s a whole class of language modification called gibberish. It’s simple encryption. I’m trying to get him interested in the kind of stuff I do. Math. Encryption. That sort of thing.”
“Still clear as mud.”
“You never used pig latin when you were a kid?”
I had heard of that. “So that’s what it is?”
“Pig latin is a form of gibberish too, but the one Luke and I use is Egglish.”
“English?”
“Egg-lish.”
“What are the rules?”
“Simple. You add ‘eg’ after the first letter of each syllable, unless it starts with a vowel, in which case you stick the ‘eg’ first. Simple encryption.”
I thought about it for a second. “Leguke. That’s Luke in Egglish.”
“Exactly.”
We went through a few more examples, until we heard my son coming down the path. He waved as he approached.
I switched topics. “Can’t the government do anything about it? The satellites, I mean?”
Luke sat back down on the bench next to me.
“They must be trying,” Damon replied. “Satellites contain propellants so they can change orbit and maneuver. Most of them use things called Hall thrusters, which use xenon and krypton gas and electricity. So I’d guess that now they know this isn’t passive—not only random debris, but an active attack—NASA and everyone else must be moving whatever they’ve got left up there.”
“Can’t they regain control of the SatCom satellites? I mean, wouldn’t they have sent a SEAL team to the HQ? Like the instant they heard that announcement? Maybe even before? Our military can’t be that degraded.”
“Yeah, they would’ve. Maybe the attackers only announced it when they lost control of the satellites. Maybe the gig is already up.”
That sounded more hopeful than anything else.
Damon added, “There’s still a huge expanding debris field up there.”
I mulled that over. “Any idea how the attackers might have gotten into the SatCom network to begin with?”
“They must have broken the encryption on the TTC—the telemetry, track, and command—of the communications system. Ground stations. I don’t know.”
“So, they mounted a cyberattack to take over the satellites?”
“Space systems are an indistinguishable part of cyberspace. Doesn’t make any difference if you’re attacking a desktop computer or a hunk of electronics flying at six miles a second a hundred miles up. Space is in cyberspace from a computer’s point of view.”
“Fat chance they’re going to get their prisoners released. They’re incurring God’s holy wrath, not just from us, but the Russians as well. From everybody. Won’t be an inch of this planet they can hide on afterward.”
“They’ve certainly made a statement. Exposed a soft underbelly.”
On some levels, it made sense, but on others, it didn’t. Then again, how much sense did it make to blow yourself up wearing an explosive vest? I needed to focus on the here and now.
“You really think you can rewire one of these?” I slapped the metal sheathing of the hulking machine.
“I don’t need to ‘rewire’ it, but more reprogram how it accepts commands. If I had a transmitter, I might be able to locally spoof some GPS.”
“This thing is like a tank.”
Even the tires were ten feet high.
“More like a big self-driving car,” Damon said. “It’s got sensors for avoiding poles and people. A better analogy would be a robotic vacuum. Except this one sucks up corn instead of dirt.”
Luke said, “It could suck up people.”
I laughed. “I bet it could.” I certainly wouldn’t want to get in the way of one on a rampage.
“Why did those men push us into the barn?” Luke asked. “They made Ellarose cry. She was scared.”
“Those men were scared, too,” I replied. “They’re doing what they thought was right. We’re the outsiders here.”
“When people get cut off, they tend to go back to their roots,” Damon said. “The old Kentucky militias are famous. In the secession crisis of 1861, there were pro-Union, pro-Southern, heck, even pro-neutral militias. This was ground zero of militia country.”
Damon was something of a Civil War buff, a passion he shared with Chuck.
“What’s a secession?” Luke asked.
“When parts of a country want to separate from the other parts.”
He nodded seriously. “Right. Got it.”
“Which is the reason for all this mess,” Damon said.
“The Civil War?”
“Wanting autonomy. These Chechen terrorists—from their point of view, they’re freedom fighters.” He turned to Luke. “But what they are doing is very, very wrong. You understand?”
My son nodded.
The wind was hot and dry and dusty. I coughed. The smoke thicker. A gust brought a flurry of black snow through the floodlights.
“Dad, what’s that?”
A spinning mote settled in my hand. I squinted into darkness. Flickering lights played in the distance.
“Ash, I think.” To Damon I said, “Whatever you’re doing, hurry. Are you going to have time to rewire all eight?”
“Just one. An hour of straight running, it can cut a swath all the way across the east side of the farm, I think.”
“You think that will be enough?”
“These don’t even slice away the corn stalks. They strip and flatten it down. We would need a silage harvester to cut.” Damon spliced together two more wires. “Firewalls in a network I understand, but fire breaks in the physical world? The wider the area of dirt the better, is my understanding. Don’t worry, Mike. It’s a good plan.”
A good plan. My plan.
Back at the barn earlier, I’d asked Damon if he could rewire the GPS tractors, operate them like he did his drones. He’d said he could. Then I explained how we could have Ken’s militia go door to door tonight, before everyone left the town, and take Terek to help install the mesh-networking app on everyone’s phones. That way we could coordinate.
And ask everyone who had something that could move dirt to come.
So tonight, Terek and Irena went out with Ken and Oscar and their guys to canvas the town and tell them the plan. See if we could get enough people on board.
Damon flew one of the drones up five hundred feet to act as a base station for the mesh-network. Joe, Chuck, and Susie were in the farmhouse fielding calls. Before sunset, we flew a drone to its limits, about a mile out and a thousand feet up. No fires were that close.
So we had time.
The next morning, we would use the drones to provide an aerial view, keep in communication with everyone, and use the corn-head-drones to plow a path through the fields—harvesting it at the same time—and hopefully save the town and the farm.
That was the plan. My plan.
It had seemed clever at the time—and maybe I’d been trying to get us out of that stable pen—but it was my idea, and we were about to risk a lot of people’s lives, put them in harm’s way, when they were all about to leave for safety.
My mouth was so dry it felt full of corn dust.
Damon fiddled the last wires together. He twisted tape around them and plugged the end of the newly constructed USB cable into the laptop on his knees.
He paused.
“What?” I asked.
“The Range Rover is right there,” he said. “The keys are in it. I checked.”
“Why did you check?”
“Why do you think? We could just leave,” Damon said. “Get right back on the road. We’re ahead of those fires, I think. Those militia guys are gone. Chuck and Susie are in the farmhouse. Joe wouldn’t stop us.”
It wasn’t like I hadn’t thought of it.
Past two oak trees, the Range Rover
was visible in the light spilling out of the farmhouse windows and onto the lawn.
“I’ll leave a drone here. It’s easy to operate from a cell phone with the app installed. Ken’s a smart guy. I’ll leave instructions. I’ll even leave them this laptop with instructions on how to drive this corn head. We don’t owe them anything. In fact, we owe them less than nothing.”
“We can’t leave Terek and Irena,” I said.
“I can call Terek right now.” He held up his cell.
If Ken and his militia hadn’t stopped us, we might be in Washington by now. Or at least Chuck’s cabin. Of course, we might have been stopped by the fires. Even trapped by them. It was impossible to tell their extent without flying above the mountains to see what was happening.
Could we have made it?
“Mike,” Damon said. “Maybe we should go. I’m serious.”
“I...uh…”
Before I could answer, Terek appeared from the darkness beyond the floodlights. “Guys, I can maybe stop them.”
“Why are you back already?”
“I got a message. Maybe we can stop them.”
I said, “Who? Ken? The Kentucky guys? Because we don’t—”
“The Islamic Brigade. We might be able to stop what they’re doing.”
Damon was still staring at me.
“Mike, what do you want to do?” he asked again.
CHAPTER 27
AT FIRST LIGHT, we drove in a two-pickup convoy ten miles east and south, and then launched the drones up into the sky, into the amber haze. The machines followed us as we drove back, hovering at a thousand feet and as far to the east as reception allowed. The fires were heading our way, but we still had time to save the town.
I almost wished the flames were closer, wished that someone said it was too late.
But it wasn’t.
Not yet.
Black leaves whipped in a dust devil. A gust sucked a suffocating wave of smoke behind it, which roiled across the field. Through the mud-streaked window, an orange-gray sky shimmered with flecks of black.
“Mike, you guys okay?” Damon’s voice barely audible over the roar of the old tractor’s engine. My cell phone was taped to the dashboard of the tractor. I had it set to speakerphone.
“We’re good,” I yelled back.
A buzzing mechanical insect hovered in the orange haze. One of the drones doing overwatch, coordinating the operation, and keeping an eye on the fires.
“Nothing near you,” came Damon’s voice over the phone.
“Ten-four.” Wasn’t quite sure what that meant, but it seemed like the right thing to say.
Three hundred feet ahead, the hulking corn head cut a swath through the swaying field, spitting a stream of kernels into an open trailer. It left a mess of husks and stalks in its wake.
It was unnerving to see the huge machine navigating unmanned, but it wasn’t self-driving. Damon controlled it remotely from the central command he’d assembled in the dining room of the farmhouse.
“You say something?” came another crackling voice.
It was Oscar, the shaved-head guy who’d cracked me in the face. His voice came from a walkie-talkie I had on the dash, next to the phone. He’d apologized profusely, and was now acting like he wanted to be best friends. I think he feared whatever he thought my big brother Terry might do, whenever he got back to Pittsburgh.
He should be.
Even I was scared of my big brother.
I thumbed the transmit button. “All good. Talking to Damon on the phone.”
Oscar’s tractor was a hundred feet in front of me. His big green John Deere had a factory-made snowplow on its front. He drove right behind the corn head and swept aside the husks and leaves, while I followed in an older rig and did cleanup.
Luke coughed.
My son rode shotgun beside me.
He’d refused to stay with the other kids. He hadn’t screamed like a baby but had steadfastly made the point that I might need him. I sensed a desperation beneath his stoicism. We still hadn’t found a way to contact the Seymour residence from here. Still didn’t know where Lauren was. He wasn’t about to let the only parent he had left out of his sight.
And Luke was the reason we remained.
When Damon had asked me what I wanted to do, Luke had answered for me. We needed to stay and help these people, he said. I was proud and worried at the same time, but then, what else could I say?
I ruffled Luke’s hair. Like father, like son.
Riding shotgun wasn’t exactly dangerous. We could jump off and walk faster than the corn head was grinding forward. Maybe five miles per hour?
Oscar’s tractor edged further away from me.
I jammed my foot down on the tractor’s clutch. The gearbox squealed. I attempted to switch into a higher gear. It took me two tries to force it into place. The corn head and Oscar’s vehicle slipped another fifty feet ahead and turned.
To my left, the field stretched a few hundred yards to the road. The farmhouse was about a mile away. A green forest of oaks and firs to my immediate right. We had already made a first cut, maybe twenty feet wide. This was a second pass.
Luke coughed again.
“Keep the rag wet,” I said.
We both had bandanas tied around our faces. Mine was blue and red, but he’d gotten one from Oscar that had the lower half of a skull imprinted on it. Luke tried to splash water from a plastic bottle onto his hand and then onto his face, but it was empty. With one hand on the tractor wheel, I reached into a cardboard box with water containers.
“Take this.” I handed one to my son.
We might have enough time for one more pass down the eastern flank of the farm. Would a forty- or sixty-foot fire break be enough?
I’d never seen a fire up close like this. With the wind gusting, the burning embers could jump hundreds of feet, Farmer Joe had told us. While we were cutting the break, two dozen people from the town assembled fire teams to put out any patches that might catch.
The tractor’s engine coughed and sputtered.
The thing was almost as old as I was. I didn’t even know Ford made tractors. This was an ’85, and looked more like what I thought farm equipment should look like than the spaceship-looking lines of the self-driving corn head. The tractor’s cracked and knobby back tires were taller than me, their rims hand-painted red. Rust showed through the paint.
Joe had welded steel I-beams onto the chassis, then rigged up a contraption to strap a snowplow a neighbor had brought over onto the front. There was no way to raise it, except by hand. We used a chain attached to a welded crossbeam to lift it up, which took three people and a steel bar.
The whole thing rattled and shook on the loose edge of coming apart as we rolled over the field rows.
The plow slammed into something.
Luke flew forward into the dash. I grabbed the back of his T-shirt, but he had his hands out to catch himself. He righted and clambered back to perch on the seat next to me.
We jolted up and down.
“Dad, be careful.”
“I’m trying.” I wiped away sweat streaming down my face, stinging my eyes. It was hard to keep focus.
The field was dry and dusty.
It hadn’t rained in two weeks, Joe had said. What we would give for a thunderstorm or two from down south. My back slick with sweat, my shirt and shorts soaked like I’d been swimming.
Swimming.
I was so hot, even the memory of being thrown headfirst into the Mississippi seemed delicious. Even drowning seemed secondary to the idea of cool depths of water.
Light flickered through smoke cascading down the rolling Kentucky hills that climbed to meet West Virginia. The sun rose blood-red over the Appalachians as a hot wind blew in from the southeast. The air sweltering and acrid. Burned my nostrils even through the soaked bandana across my face.
Not more than a mile away, flames licked the treetops.
The sky was literally falling. Spacecraft burning up in the at
mosphere.
A slow-motion disaster was grinding mercilessly across America. Across the entire planet. All at the same time. Soon people would be going hungry. Natural disasters going unchecked, power failing, food supplies running out. The world’s militaries on the trigger edge of disaster.
We had one long shot to maybe stop it all, to save everyone, and here I was driving a broken old tractor across a dusty corn field through the eye of a firestorm.
With the weight of it all on my beaten-down shoulders.
Damon’s talk about the morality of the self-driving car the other day was more than academic. Who do you save in a disaster?
No matter which way you turn, someone will be hurt.
The immediate gut-punch reaction was to save the people close to you. Friends. Family. Loved ones.
My gut screamed for me to run, to find my wife. But my mind rationalized that she was safe. She landed in Virginia. She might already be sitting back on their country estate, sipping a gin and tonic.
And if I could have asked her, I knew what she would say.
Stay. Help these people. Same thing Luke had said.
“Dad!” Luke yelled. “Look out!”
He pointed.
I barely swerved around a stump at the edge of the field. Wiped more stinging dust and sweat from my eyes with the back of one hand. “Good work, Luke. You keep that eye out.”
The plow bounced and ground its way over the dusty hard pack. My teeth rattled in their sockets.
And what about Terek?
The young Ukrainian had burst into the shed last night and babbled about how he could maybe stop the Chechen terrorists.
As Terek had spread the meshnet through the town, explaining to people how to install it and asking them to go and spread the word, the area had slowly become reconnected. By the early morning, some of those connection points had tapped into an outside mesh node.
A few messages made it through to the wider network.
Damon got a text from Grandma Babet.
And Terek received from an out-of-the-blue message from a Russian hacker collective he had contact with. Sometimes he worked with them, he said. Just friends.
And I thought he didn’t like Russians.
CyberSpace: A CyberStorm Novel (Cyber Series Book 1) Page 18