Fulcrums of the Universe: A TESS NOVEL #2

by Randy Moffat

  Her eyes met mine and got a bit moist around the edges as we gazed complacently at each other for a minute. I thought for a moment she might blubber… . instead she pulled my head down and kissed me firmly. Then she smiled softly and grabbed my ears, one in each hand and held my head still.

  “You are so sweet…” Her eyes seemed to twinkle in the half light. “I know what you mean… it’s the same for me, but with me it is usually just your great big old cock!”

  We both collapsed in a fit of giggles and I chewed on pieces of her to punish her for trivializing my intensity. Companionship moves in an out of focus. Warmth remains.

  In the end we embraced and held each other pleasantly for a long time until we snoozed. Frankly we both needed the sleep. Leading TESS is exhausting enough without throwing a bucket full of post-coital endorphins into the mix.

  Li looked over his shoulder guiltily and cursed under his breath. He was in China again after all these years—against his will and all his instincts. The first time in decades and only because he was being threatened openly. The threats were subtle but ever so real… a Chinese kind of threat. Someone somewhere had talked about him. They had leaned on a lever laid over an obscure fulcrum of intelligence to move him out of his disguise in the West. Worse… they had made it clear that the threat would not go away and he could not simply ignore it. These were the people who leased Hong Kong to Britain on a 99 year lease… let them improve a barren hunk of rock into a modern city to the tune of trillions of dollars and then just took it back with all the pangs of conscience than a slumlord feels evicting a crack addict who is in arrears. If China could bully the British Empire in terms of centuries they could certainly pry playboy Li out of his comfortable hide of a few decades deep cover in a western existence. They’d wanted him to come to this planning meeting—whether he wanted to or not. They got their way. They called, he came. He smelled of brimstone from his fuming, but he came.

  Disgusted he had flown into Shanghai this morning and had taken a taxi to a thoroughly nondescript building on the southern outskirts of the city. He curled his lip. In the US the building would have been torn down two decades ago but here it was what passed for a middle class strip mall. A garish collection of neon, a tangle of dangling power lines and alleys choked with deserted construction rubble. Over half the tiny shops appeared to be pushing mobile telephones with slightly desperate looking shop keepers eternally hovering behind tired looking counters where flyspecked goods were crammed in willy-nilly behind dirty panes made more and more dusty by cars passing on one of the largely unpaved streets in the area.

  It was China through and through. Unfinished, unhappy with itself and full of unlikely and astonishing multitudes scrambling like weeds for a place in the sun. Li Shook his head to himself and walked into a narrow alley between two buildings that his cell phone GPS ap told him was the only path to the meeting coordinates. He knew he had the right place the moment he arrived at the correct doorway. There was a big ugly round faced man standing with his arms hanging loosely and staring at him with a sour expression as he approached. Li greeted him in haughty Mandarin dredged up from the memories of his youth. The hulking brute grunted and patted him down un-gently and then jerked his head at the door his bulk had almost hidden behind him. Li pulled its steel covered weight open and entered the dim recesses beyond. A surprisingly clean corridor led him to another door where a second tiny guard stood. His dark Southern Chinese face was pulled up on one side by a puckered scar received in some dark fight among dark people in dark times in the dim dark past. Oddly Li felt this man was three times more dangerous than the hulking Lurch out in the alley. His dark eyes glittered up and down Li and Li shivered slightly as though the guy had grabbed his privates. The man rose without comment though and opened his own personal guard-post door and stepped to one side without comment… obviously recognizing him from a photo. That notion made Li squirm even more inside… very few photos existed of him inside the intelligence community though many existed in the commercial world of his deep cover. Very few people knew of his connection to intelligence. The fact that an obscure stooge in the smelly back end of beyond had memorized his visage began a sense of unease that settled between his shoulder blades and became an itch that expected a dagger to be plunged into it at any moment.

  Li mustered his great courage and chutzpah, squared his shoulders, rolled his neck and stepped through the doorway.

  It was a communications room with ranks of radios, computers and electronics covering most of the walls. The smell of ozone was in the air bringing with it the scent of a Chinese intelligence gathering unit. A young sycophant in uniform greeted him in an oily way and instantly guided off one side of the chamber and through a couple turns into a conference room. His obsequiousness as Li entered communicated clearly that Li was about to rub shoulders with the nobs on the scene here. Around an oval table sat an eclectic array of ten men in uniform and innocuously prim suits that were the uniforms of their services. No estrogen penetrated here. The glass ceiling of Chinese patriarchy was undisturbed. Li frowned. To a man they were all looking at him carefully. Some of the looks seemed far too knowing. Too expectant. Li had lived too long behind the curtain of a cover to appreciate having people actually know him for what he was—the heart of Chinese intelligence in the Eastern United States. Some corner of him wanted to run for the wainscoting like a hamster in open view of a circling hawk. Instead he inhaled, breathed out his mouth and walked arrogantly to an open chair at the head of the table and sat down without being asked. It was a nice touch to assume the place was for him. Li knew that in China the power position counted for a lot and Li also knew that by sitting there he placed himself opposite the core power broker without invitation—a most un-Chinese gesture. It would make most of the people here uneasy. They were even.

  Opposite him was a man known as Bo Hú. Boss Hú was a leader who had recently cobbled together an unlikely alliance of ultra-right business leaders, ultra-nationalists, hardliners and a lot of fringee head case fellow travelers. Hú had even managed to include a small shot group from the neo-Maoist left. The lot of them shared nothing whatsoever except a common perception that China was the only logical leader for the planet Earth in the long run and who resented any influences from outside the nation who presumed to threaten what they regarded as this China’s manifest destiny. He thought of them as the China Preeminence Committee though it was not their name. Nominally they were a sub-committee of a fairly defunct Communist Party committee which theoretically enforced anticorruption; historically by using torture. One of the reasons Li had agreed to show up today was to head off encouraging any clique from developing an idea that he was not playing ball. In the extended intelligence game the dumber players might decide that those who were not on the local playing field were automatically disloyal. If they ever decided that about Li they might grab him and start tweaking his testicles with something sharp. Li licked his lips and considered his homework about this weird leader. Hú’s current ideological whipping boy was the Terran Exploratory Space Service which inside the committee’s twisted viewpoint violated the fuzzy boundaries of Húian defined Chinese turf. The trouble was that Hú’s coalition was in a position to do something about it. The demonstration of that ability to Li was that they had used some obscure leverage near the information fulcrum to move the intelligence mountain and roll the Li boulder down and through the door of this meeting.

  Li hated being moved about the global chessboard against his will. As the chairman scootched his butt into the chair’s cushions and rolled it under the table Li changed his mind and upgraded his feelings from hate to loathing. Li was a pro though. Naturally he kept his face bland and interested instead. At the present time he did not dare run contrary to this group’s desires and must play along.

  Hú bent himself at the waist in a bow of acknowledgment at Li joining them. He tried flattery.

  “We are honored by your presence. The eyes
of China among the Americans.”

  Li nodded vaguely. He considered his possible situational approaches and opted for “supportive but neutral.” He would lead from strength on the theory it was never a wrong move to partially show that you know what-was-what.

  “I have a full schedule peering under stones in America, but it is always a pleasure to support fellow travelers in the search for Chinese greatness.” Li said neutrally, pandering to the conceit of the room. It paid off surprisingly quickly.

  “Chinese greatness indeed. A greatness that is paramount. As one who appreciates that greatness we wanted to update the mighty Li on what we have learned and find a way forward.” Li nodded neutrally and Hú continued with even more enthusiasm. “We have assembled a number of pictures we feel suggest the nature of the drive that the TESS personnel have succeeded in constructing… our physicists can expound on what it is we have discovered. “A slide show dramatically began on the back wall and a small number of blurry photos purported to catch glimpses of key parts of the McMoran drive. Added to them there were many more slides of computer generated images into what to Li seemed to be wild flights of fancy and even wilder projections about the nature of the drive from only the most distant evidence. It evolved quickly that one of the men at the table was a man named Liu Zeng who headed something called Scientific Advisor to the Central Leading Group for Protection of Party Secrets… . whatever that was, though every time Zeng spoke about the objectives of the group the whole thing smelled more like a right wing political statement than methodical science. After five minutes it occurred to Li that the man’s science was similar to what Mengele had preached as doctrine to the Nazi’s—fairly bald and callous political expediency rather than hard research. Li held himself in check. With a billion people China contained so many tiny distinctions of alignment and rank that no one man could understand them all. Li needed to hear what Zeng had to say. It took forty five minutes but essentially Zeng summed up the opinion of a hundred or so of his toadies that the drive somehow twisted space away from TESS ships allowing them to surf along space time itself which could just have easily been a distillation from about fifty TIME and Scientific American articles rather than anything original. It was all very airy-fairy. Gobbledy-gook extrapolated from tiny grains of truth into mountains of guess work that showed little or no original thinking. Li shuddered. He was in the hands of lunatics and idiots here.

  Li tried to cut to the chase.

  “This is very well, but what is it you hope to accomplish precisely?”

  Hú smiled slightly, entertained by this almost western demonstration of anxiousness.

  “You have been a long time it the west, Comrade. Very well then…” Hú remarked casually. “We want what information you have on the drive… . we must build one for China… we must counter TESS before they become too powerful.”

  “So we can build a Chinese TESS to compete at least?” Li asked.

  Hú nodded.

  “If you like.”

  With you at its head Li thought privately. He probed for more information instead. Not a Chinese direction of questioning.

  “I see. To what lengths are we willing to go to obtain it?”

  “Lengths?” Hú asked tartly. “Are there any lengths to which China should not go to be supreme in the world?”

  Li looked thoughtful. That covered a lot of ground right up to and including a planet full of smoking ruins.

  “TESS has shown a remarkable agility in surviving attempts to stop it… or even to gain any information to date.” Li said tangentially—continuing to sniff about.

  Hú smiled and the look shot a stab of adrenaline through Li. The smug satisfaction on the face of a deliberate whacko like Hú was suddenly terrifying. He clearly already had a plan to deal with TESS and was simply mustering forces to execute his plan. The man was serious. A steam roller. Best not to be the one who stood in his path or end up like the coyote after the road runner was through with him.

  “So you cannot help us?” Hú asked. There was danger there. Li was alarmed.

  “Let us walk rather than ride.” Li said reaching for a Chinese idiom he had not used in decades. “Slowly… slowly… let me learn… what do you desire from me exactly?”

  “Any information you can give us that would be useful.” Hú looked at him sharply.

  Li considered the sharpness. Hú was reconsidering his opinion about Li and that boded poorly for Li if he did not act wisely… and quickly.

  “I feel the picture that you have of the TESS drive is far from complete.” Li was an old hand at subterfuge and had a few gambits prepared just in case. “I think I can help with that somewhat.”

  Hú visibly subsided while Zeng brightened like a light bulb next to him… all attention. The meeting had clearly come down to these two alone. They were the movers and shakers here and the rest just window dressing.

  “Can you give me an example?” Zeng asked eagerly.

  Li chewed his inner cheek.

  “Yes. It occurred to me there would be value in finding out what materials the original Q-Kink team might have used to construct their devices.” That got both Hú and Zeng looking thoughtful. “Imagine for example if they ordered large quantities of Protactinium it might give your…” Li studiously did not gag. “. . . Scientific genius a chance to evaluate where in the puzzle of the drive the element could be used. Or if for example they ordered several sulfur purification chemicals then you could deduce what possible functions they might have fulfilled in using it to create or execute the drive.” He had them now. The pair’s minds were racing as they saw the sense of the notion. Li drove on to protect his flanks and enhance his credentials. “I began some preliminary investigations along these lines a month ago and I suspect my sources may have determined two or three curious items I can report quickly.” Li moved to protect his rear as well. “In addition, I have strong indications that many items that were used by Q-Kink were ordered within my region of intelligence gathering so I can be of some ongoing help.” Li lied smoothly. Li’s own chief rival was the head or West Coast intelligence in the United States. Li wanted to remain relevant until he could get full shufti of this particular conspiracy. Hú had hooded his eyes and only nodded slightly.

  For a Chinese political animal though Zeng was a poor dissimulator. If he had been a dog he would have been panting and wagging his tail right now. Hú looked at him out of the side of his eyes and Li detected a hint of annoyance there. A wedge between them might be all to his own future benefit. Li addressed his next remark then to Zeng.

  “Mr. Zeng… I will begin to place additional manpower and resources to gather more information immediately.” Volunteering what could easily be coerced would make Li look better—make him look like one of them—inside the tent pissing out instead of outside the tent pissing in. He settled back quietly… his seeds planted. Thanks to this annoying pocket of brown-shirts Li had a lot of work to do. The primary business was done though and the meeting spun slowly to its conclusion in a whimper rather than a wail. Zeng gripped his arm violently as Li attempted to make his exit; pleading with him to provide the lists as quickly as possible and Li knew in that moment that Zeng’s “team” was clearly pretty much talentless hacks since no one had ever thought of so obvious an approach before. Li shook him off politely, pleading important business and had just made it to the outer door when Hú appeared at his elbow. Alarm bells went off in his head and Li’s defenses went up.

  Hú smiled and Li suddenly felt like he was on the menu of a hungry tiger.

  “You have been long in the west…” He smiled at repeating the thought again. A chill ran down Li’s back. Unfinished statements like that left it to his imagination to fill in. The echo was that it was time to leave the west and come back east. That was Li’s worst nightmare and he already regretted coming. Hú was good. Li bowed slightly instead. He was working hard to appear impassive.
/>   Hú went on.

  “Your idea has great value. I will look with interest at your lists.” Li received the message. ‘I am in charge here… . the man who can stroke you… and by implication punish any misbehavior.’ The slight emphasis on the word “interest” equated to “I’ll be watching you” and Li checked himself as he realized that he had scored a medium sized tactical victory here, but had simultaneously made a small strategic error. Li had not meant to convey it, but Hú had been able to grasp that Li was actually intelligent and a potential source of new ideas. Someone who could be of true value to his plans. That had been a mistake. Li felt a faint shudder ripple his frame at the thought of what life would be like if he was recalled to China from the west and placed directly beneath Hú’s thumb. Li smiled broadly to cover his suddenly queasy stomach. He absolutely needed to stay in the west. He was already plotting a strategy that would continue to make him more valuable to this man in the west than here in the east.

  “You are too kind comrade Hú. As always, I shall endeavor to be of great service to the Motherland. Our motherland.” He kept his face neutral.

  Hú smiled slightly in return.

  “I am sure you shall.” He said and walked away.

  Li watched him go silently resolving never to return to this country—his motherland, again if he could help it.

  Rear Admiral Wong, TESS Chief of Operations stood on the hull of the SS Tellus with his fists on his hips and looking the ship over with satisfaction written on his face. She was rocking every now and then as depleted remnant of a wave turned the corner from the river outside, passed under the triple armored doors and lifted her here in the heavily shielded submarine pen at TESS’ now wholly owned facility at Groton, Connecticut. The former US naval officer rode the up and down of the motion to the manor born while looking over the hull for anything he might have missed seeing before. The Tellus’ hull was a fairly early model Victor III Class Russian submarine and Wong was certain that no strictly American team had never built one quite like her. For one thing the hull was built of titanium, something the United States had never done, using steel instead. Titanium was much stronger than steel, but could not be welded in the presence of oxygen and it had taken the massive five year plan thinking of the former Soviet Union to build a huge enough submarine construction facility that had been filled entirely with Argon Gas so that construction crews could take up torches to build her hull wearing space suits in the inert gas atmosphere. He shook his head at such a budgetary elephant though he has to admire the brazen sense of purpose. Much of the titanium was exposed now since he had put crews to stripping of the anechoic coating tiles that were somewhat like those that had covered the old space shuttles. The tiles and coating had interfered slightly with homing torpedoes and made the ship slightly more stealthy during its old aquatic life, but Wong had seen little use for them in space and ordered them removed since they tended to fall off anyway as their aging soviet fixatives gave way. He would rather they fall off when he wanted them to rather than when lady luck was in the mood.