by David Poyer
“But the main problem is, a lot of our guys are missing family. They’re immigrants, single, and a lot of those that aren’t, they’ve moved their families back to wherever home was. But Honolulu scared everybody. They listen to Shanghai Sue, about what Zhang’s threatening to do to LA next. And there’s not enough calories in the individual ration to keep working for ten hours. They get here hungry, they work hungry, they get back to the barracks late and miss chow.”
“I agree, that’s not right.” She felt guilty. The first thing they taught you at OCS: Take care of your people. Okay, maybe these weren’t hers. They were Cadden’s, if anyone’s. But they were building her ship, and she hadn’t even realized that the workers lived isolated in barracks. Much less that they were malnourished. She said tentatively, “Would it help if we provided some messing?”
“Could you do that?”
“I have a discretionary budget. For incidentals, and commissioning. But we don’t need an expensive ceremony. How much would it be? How many guys, I mean people, are we talking about?”
“I’d have to get back to you on that. Around three hundred? Ballpark.”
She did a quick calculation on her phone. “We’ll do breakfast and lunch. Starting Friday. Nothing fancy. Oatmeal. Pancakes. Wraps and tacos, for lunch. With an apple for roughage, or salad.”
“Roughage, huh.” He smirked. “Rabbit chow.”
“Don’t give me that look. Everybody needs it. Um, would that be enough? To keep everybody fed and working?”
“It’d sure help. It’s not that we’re not patriotic, but … shit, you know what I’m sayin’. That would be appreciated. If it happens. We get a crapload of promises, you know?”
“I keep mine,” she told him firmly.
“Uh-huh. Okay.”
“Are there stoppages planned for Itbayat?”
He bent a sharp glance on her then. Oh, no, she thought, I’ve made him suspicious again.
“I don’t know,” he said coldly. “I told you that. Look, we didn’t have this conversation, okay? And I don’t want my name mentioned.”
“Of course. Sorry I asked.”
“No problem. I just might trust you.” He hopped down again, stretched like a cat, and thrust out his hand. “Till later, Captain.”
She couldn’t help eyeing his blue-jeaned behind as he loped away. The guy had to be ten years younger than she was. Well … maybe eight. Or even just six? He’d seemed interested, too. She hadn’t seen a ring. Though they might take them off during work hours, to avoid accidents.
She scratched absently between her fingers, although there was no rash there now. It had become a habit. Noticing only then that she wasn’t wearing her own gold band either. She hadn’t for several days.
“Yeah,” she muttered. “I keep my promises.”
She couldn’t help imagining what Eddie would have come back with, though.
Sure you do, babe.
Sure you do.
17
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology
THE huge open bay was dazzlingly lit, but in a curious rum-butterscotchy hue. Blair’s Louboutin heels grated and slid on grit the color of dried blood as she neared a patch of rocks and heaped dirt under a high-arching dome.
The center administrator said, “It’s what the sky on Mars would look like. Varying from a deep brown to a sand-tinged blue, especially at dawn and dusk. We tested the Curiosity rovers here.”
The JPL at Caltech had been lead for robotic exploration of the planets, asteroids, and outer solar system, including Voyager, Cassini, Juno, Rover, Dawn, and others. But NASA had been redirected to war projects for two years. Now a dozen congressmen, staffers, and military officers were getting a classified introduction to the results, not just from JPL, but from Glenn, Goddard, Langley, Johnson, Ames, Kennedy, and other federal research facilities.
As their footsteps crunched onward, the director said, “As you may imagine, our work with orbiters, rovers, and landers has given us the ability to build near-autonomous probes capable of withstanding the cold of space and the heat of the sun. They can operate for years, if not decades, without repair or recharging.
“This project began with a Venus flier we started five years ago. Trugon—the Greek name of the turtledove, Aphrodite’s sacred bird—had to withstand both the vacuum and cold of space and the enormous heat and pressure of the planetary surface. It had to self-charge and self-deploy, since it takes several minutes for external commands to reach Venus. We kept the name for the mission, but redirected our efforts. As you’ll see.
“Ladies and gentlemen, meet Trugon Beta.”
Something buzzed softly. For a moment, she couldn’t tell from where. Then part of the red soil shrugged aside. A machine, perhaps the size of an adult hawk, or a rather oversized Frisbee, slowly rose, propelled by some invisible-to-her means of levitation. It hovered at head level, eyeing the group with turreted lenses from atop a curved carapace. They clicked from one to the next, as if memorizing their faces. Then it glided to one side. As it crossed a patch of shadow, it changed color and shade to mimic the new background. Shadows chased themselves across its surface. Even from fifteen feet away, it was hard to focus on the machine. Its outline seemed to waver as it blended chameleonlike with the backdrop.
She slowly realized it wasn’t alone. From under the soil, under the rocks—indeed, from the tiled floor around them—other shapes were lifting, surrounding them with a whirring, insectlike chitter. A chill harrowed her spine; she couldn’t help shivering at an unnerving impression of malevolent observation, of cold, evaluating intelligence.
“Are they armed?” one of the congresswomen asked, arms crossed over her chest. She sounded as uneasy as Blair felt.
“We’re working on weapons mounts, but the primary mission is observation. As you know, we have few humint assets inside China, Iran, Korea, Tajikistan, Pakistan, and the other zones of conflict. Our observation satellites were shot down or blinded at the opening of hostilities. We have Mice up now, but the Chinese are using smoke obscuration and camouflage to screen their sensitive areas from above.”
Responding to some collective decision, the individual units drifted together, interlocked with echoing clicks, and ascended as a single mass toward the far-above ceiling. “DARPA tasked us with changing that.”
Blair lifted a hand. “How will you deploy these … machines?”
“Trugon is self-deploying. We can release it from outside the borders, or air-drop it as close to sites of interest as possible. The upper carapace is not only active camouflage and impact protection, it’s also a highly efficient solar panel. Recharging by day, flying at low altitude by night, these units can cover four hundred kilometers in a diurnal cycle. Reaching their assigned overwatch points, they select discreet positions with good fields of view. Then land, dig in, and hide.”
Another lifted hand. “How do they transmit their—pictures?—back?”
“Scrambled burst transmissions, at very low power. Undetectable, unless you’re right on top of them. And it’s not just images they’ll send.”
A general cleared his throat. “I’m assuming these will go in near airfields, major roads, missile bases.”
“Correct, but also within industrial installations and near command points—their sensors can pick up computer data transmissions. In tests, we’ve decoded keystrokes from three hundred and fifty meters, and Bluetooth-frequency transmissions from much farther.
“As to follow-on development … You’ve seen an example of early cooperative behavior.” He waved at the hovering, humming swarm above them. “Trugon Gamma will be capable of true intelligent thought: selecting patrol routes, identifying targets, plotting approaches, and autonomous mass attack. A self-directing weapon, cheap, easy to deploy, and capable of hiding until conditions are ripe for assault.
“We’ll have the first two hundred production units operational within weeks. The first run’s being built by 3D Robotics. Mattel will del
iver a thousand more a month later. General Atomics and AeroVironment, the legacy drone makers, are fully tasked. We needed mass production and wanted it cheap. That’s why we went with the toymakers.”
“What happens if they’re discovered?” a staffer asked. “Couldn’t the enemy turn them, transmit back misleading information?”
“Excellent question. Which leads us into a demonstration. Those of you off to the right, there, you might want to move back a few yards.”
A unit detached from the swarm still hovering ominously overhead. It dropped to the soil, burrowed under a wheelbarrow-sized rock, and vanished, except for a glint of lens and a stub antenna, which repainted itself rust-red. “This is one of our prototypes. Outmoded, but useful as a demonstrator. Let’s see what happens if it’s noticed.”
Across the dome, a tracked robot, some kind of rover, whirred into life. As it ground forward the turret focused on its approach. Almost fearfully, Blair thought. The turret retracted, as did the antenna, leaving only a curved surface the same color and granularity as the soil around it. It seemed to stir once, shifting slightly under the friable red sand around it.
But the rover kept boring in. It oriented clumsily, whining, then telescoped a steel grasper arm.
With an earsplitting crack, a smoke of fragments and gray blast gas enveloped the rover, which staggered back, rocking on its tracks. When the smoke cleared, dozens of silvery gashes gleamed on its paint.
The director said, “An antipersonnel charge, focused toward the disturbing agent. The blast not only destroys our probe, but acts to discourage further attempts to find or investigate others.”
And what if a curious child finds one? she wanted to ask. But merely questioning the war effort in public was treason. She compressed her lips.
The director announced their next demonstration, in an adjoining lab. No one spoke as they left the whirring swarm behind, dozens of lenses still tracking them as they somewhat nervously strolled away.
Instinctively, Blair tried not to limp.
* * *
THE tour had begun with the Naval Research Laboratory, then moved on to the Lockheed plants in Alabama, the revitalized land-based strategic deterrent forces in Wyoming, Montana, and North Dakota, the huge Archipelago campus just outside Seattle, and the Defense Innovation Unit in San Francisco. Finally, they headed back to Pasadena.
There were a few bright spots in the generally dark overall picture of the war. Zhang had made the mistake of thinking this would be a short conflict. Of course so had the U.S., but the Chinese response had been to halt research that wouldn’t produce short-term results. Their leading facilities had been closed or cut back, the personnel drafted. And some, such as the research campuses in Shenzhen, had been targeted in Allied raids and cyberattacks, though it was difficult to gauge if significant damage had been inflicted.
The NRL had showcased autonomous submarines and mine-torpedoes that penetrated harbors on their own. Lockheed, the new F-40 and AAF-X fighters, and soft-kill antimissile systems. Other companies had demonstrated armored battle robots, to make up for Allied shortfalls in fighting manpower, and a line-of-sight weapon that combined fusion and X-ray lasers to generate a lethal beam.
The only area where the enemy seemed clearly to be ahead was in cyberwar. But that might, in the end, be enough to decide the battle.
Jade Emperor, wherever and whatever it was, had outmaneuvered its American digital adversary, Battle Eagle, again and again. It had taken down power grids, crippled financial markets, melted routers, ATMs, and air traffic control computers with malware, deleted medical and payment records, ransacked databases and corrupted their contents, and siphoned billions of digital dollars from Vanguard, Schwab, and Fidelity into shadowland accounts. A DEA report said half the Chinese weapons purchases from Russia had been paid for in stolen U.S. dollars. Of late it had sucker punched American cyberteams, fabricating dummy sites that consumed enormous effort to penetrate … to reveal even more cunningly designed viruses lurking within.
The shell game left the U.S. players staggering away, computers riddled with code so virulent they had to junk the useless, hopelessly compromised machines.
Worst of all, evidence showed, over and over, that the repositories of advanced Allied weapons technology had been Trojan-horsed, and cyberdrained of the most advanced specs, tests, and production data.
Jade Emperor, which seemed to be growing more cunning and stealthier by the week, was turning the whole U.S. research effort into a free resource for China.
She wondered if Zhang had been right, after all, to dismantle his own scientific infrastructure. Clever … and thrifty.
Why feed the cow, when you can steal all the milk you want?
* * *
THAT evening she flopped into a chair at an executive inn on Colorado Boulevard. The room smelled musty and the carpets felt matted and sticky underfoot. The clerk had seemed absurdly grateful to accept her government housing voucher. Without air travel except for government flights, and few trustworthy means of buying goods or services other than cash, a lot of businesses had gone under. Defense hiring had taken up some of that slack, but not all.
So many were hurting … and now the combatants were about to field a whole new generation of weapons. Driven by the inevitable spur of war … The bed creaked as she sat on it. She rubbed her face with both hands, wishing Dan were there. Sometimes you could have fun even on a lumpy mattress, in a creaky bed.
But even more than that, she missed having someone she could trust to be on her side. No matter what.
She sighed. Glanced toward the bathroom. Maybe a shower … Instead she got up to check the minibar, conscious of a sudden overwhelming anxiety. A gin and tonic … but the bar was nearly bare. No gin, but an off-brand vodka that might do the trick.
She built a stiff drink and flipped through tomorrow’s schedule. Up early, 0400, to head back to Washington. She opened her notebook and started typing notes for her trip report.
The hotel landline rang. She almost didn’t answer, but picked up unwillingly on the sixth ring. “Hello?”
“Ms. Blair Titus?” An unfamiliar female voice, the accent Indian? Bangladeshi?
“Mmm … Who’s this?”
“Can you hold for the honorable Liz McManus?”
The chairperson of the UN conference she’d attended in Dublin. But why was McManus calling her? And how had she even gotten the number? “Yes, I can hold.”
McManus was on the line almost at once. “Blair? Your office said you were in California. This isn’t a bad time?”
“No, no, I was just putting my feet up … it’s ten at night. What time is it there? Where are you, anyway?”
“In Bruges. It’s early morning here.”
“What can I do for you, Ms. McManus?”
“Liz, please. I was asked to relay a message. From … the young gentleman you met in Dublin.”
For a moment she stared at the dusty drapes, groping. Did Liz mean some illicit rendezvous? She almost laughed. With her schedule these days, how could she fit one in, even if she wanted to. “Um, I’m not following. Young gentleman?”
“He says you met at Queen of Tarts. And had quite a fascinating conversation.”
She nodded, suddenly grasping what was going on. McManus, no doubt assuming this phone conversation might be bugged, was casting it as a personal call, a heads-up between girls. “Uh, oh. Oh, yes. The one with dark hair, right? Yeah, he’s a serious, um, hunk.” Good grief; she sounded so dated. What did twenty-somethings say now?
“I wish I were in your shoes. He sounds eager to see you again.”
“Um, that may be difficult. But he’s … What else did he say? Anything about me?”
“Just that he wanted to get in touch again. He left a Gmail address.”
She pulled a hotel notepad over, biting her lip as she scribbled. Fucking hotel pens … Gmail was totally unsecure, but maybe Xie Yunlong thought that out in the open was the best way to conduct a sub-rosa negot
iation. But their exchange at the pastry shop hadn’t left her with the impression there was any air between whomever he represented and the Zhang regime.
On the other hand, she shouldn’t have expected anything major to be revealed or discussed at a first contact. Maybe Yun had needed time to assemble a peace offer. Or to consult with whoever in the Chinese state, party, or army had asked him to set up a back channel.
A third possibility was that this was a trap. Laid either by the enemy, to draw in and then destroy her, or by someone on her own side, to see if she could be tempted to divulge confidential information. A sting operation. She slowly drew a honeybee on the corner of the pad, then added a smiling face. Her second bee, fatter, wore a truculent scowl and dark-framed glasses. “Any idea what he has in mind?”
A chuckle. “What do all the lads always have in mind?”
“Good point. But I’m a little older than guys his age usually go for.”
“You’re a good-looking woman, Blair. I still get offers myself. You might be astonished. But let’s not go into that!”
She chuckled, though it felt forced. “I take it he wants to meet up?”
“I’m not sure he’s able to. He said his … wife is jealous. So don’t tell anyone else. The woman keeps close tabs on him. And she may have a friend, someone you know as well. Which is why he’s getting in touch via me. A go-between, you might say.”
Blair licked her lips. An extremely unsettling piece of information, that about the “wife” knowing someone she knew. “Um, understandable. I’ll think about getting back to him. If he calls you again, um, for the record, I really liked his—I liked his cologne. Okay? You can say that. And see if there’s another way to talk. Other than email. And thank you for passing on the, uh, the pass, I guess.” She tried for a breathless giggle, but it didn’t sound convincing.
McManus said that was what friends were for, that she hoped they would meet again someday, and after a few more neutral words they hung up.
She topped off her drink with a shaking hand, and propped bare feet up again. The ice in her glass was actually clattering.