Fulcrums of the Universe: A TESS NOVEL #2

by Randy Moffat

  In practical terms he was continuously gathering around himself a growing number of tools for political violence outside his paramilitary forces. Control of the proper military represented a major addition. The majority of the military’s officer corps were still clearly loyal to the existing party—born and raised as solid CCP members. On taking control of the ministry Hú had begun his usual low level actions to repair this though. He hurried the retirement of four general officers. Their replacements were his choices and they knew it. After three months holding the office he had begun a spectacular and popular campaign to stamp out graft and corruption in the armed forces. Remarkably swiftly the investigations had borne fruit and Hú had arrested seven more quite senior Army commanders for a variety of crimes. Their innocence was quite beside the point. Their replacements too were Hú men. Down in the lower ranks his para-military personnel had been in the process for several years of permeating the Army and Navy enlisted personnel. The Militia’s inherent jingoism and nationalist fervor for China appeared to make Hú’s militia personnel a natural fit for military service. All branches had been absorbing his people in increasing numbers simply through enlistment. In addition, once he gained even temporary control of the ministry he was in a position raise his sights on the rank structure and implement an officer training program that fast tracked Militia members into the regular army. The first graduating class had entered military service two months before and now his former Para-military personnel were entering the army as junior officers at a rate of about a hundred a month. In time he would ‘sew up’ the military services at all levels.

  He wasn’t waiting even for that. Politics was his game.

  Across the nation he was increasingly able to disrupt the operations tempo of his opponents and enhance his own. On the purely political front he was even more successful. This last month had set a personal record. He had eliminated three mayors and a Minister who opposed him. Those eliminations had entailed his tinkering directly in the political process through coercion, blackmail or threats. He was really beginning to love the results of using direct action. Action was seductive to Hú.

  The sudden notion of seizing a TESS ship in orbit instantly appealed to him on that basis. More direct action. When it was successfully accomplished China would ring with his name. The thought arose that it might be just the tool he needed to springboard himself into the Premiership. If he could make it work, he would shortcut the acquisition of the TESS drive, gain huge support in China and make his opponents look foolish all a the same time. All he would have to do was select the right man and then plan carefully to strike quickly. It called for boldness, but boldness was something Hú had in plenty.

  “Well done, Zeng.” He said honestly pleased. It was a rare and pleasant moment of affirmation between them. Zeng smiled in relief. To spend time in the company of Hú, a man who was the king of the narcissists, you had to be something of a narcissist too. By definition narcissists never attribute success to others. In this pleasant fog of self delusion it never occurred to Zeng that the idea had come from Li’s ‘suggestion’ originally. By that point it was all Zeng. Now it was all his master’s.

  Murray spent two nights furiously compiling data and information while comparing the widely disparate reports from his widespread contacts worldwide. He had up-shifted the number of his agents and contacts in China especially. He cross referenced, collated and charted his conclusions.

  His final analysis made him very unhappy.

  He’d begun by checking up on the Chinese top dog… Premier Wěi Lau. He followed the scent of leadership thru several turns and twists along the rarified corridors of power in China looking for reasons Lau might want to risk the equivalent of declaring war on a foreign power and take it into his head to kidnap Colonel Jeeter suddenly. The real question that arose was how such an abduction might benefit the Chinese state. As Murray’s information matured however it turned out there was another player in China other than Lau he had not anticipated finding. Murray had the money to purchase the best intelligence analysis software on the planet. As he fed in a more and more information the AI logarithms built into it threw up this other name several times like a bloodhound following a scent in an unexpected direction. Murray’s experience and neo-cortex had made him focus his attention initially on the declared power structure… the Council being the logical locus point that lay at the center of the government of China. After all, the communist council had been in charge for fifty years or more and was the formal seat of power. So much for logic. Murray’s gut started churning about the fifth time his computer sent up the other guy’s name. His gut was smarter than his brain and he went off on the tangent following the echolocation of his gastric gurgles. It turned out that this new player had managed to swing himself into positions of considerable formal governmental clout within that council in the last year and a half. It was in that context that Murray first ran across his name and he had seen him at first as just another Vice chairman to be overlooked in the shadow of Lau. Hard digging though showed him he was very wrong. Murray had to move mountains of dirt, but it turned out that his real power derived from a huge informal support structure piled on top of a power base of the disenfranchised and unhappy within China herself. In a country of a billion citizens there are always ten percent of them who are displeased with life in general, let alone hating the powers that be who have failed to raise them up to where they think they should be. If you can leverage that unhappiness among the people into voting for you as a block, mere arithmetic empowers you to becoming the mouthpiece for 100 million people. Convince a hundred million people you are their absolute leader. Get them to embrace the notion that you are the only one with their best interests at heart. Let them empower you to the point that what you say goes and you suddenly have some real power. Worse, Murray put this guy’s percentage much higher than a measly ten percent. Lau had a serious contender squatting in the shadows along the sidelines.

  All politics is salesmanship. In sales terms this guy had market penetration. Scrambling about, Murray got his hand on examples of the guy’s heretofore overlooked and ignored marketing materials. His writings, his speeches, his blogs, his websites and even to Murray’s astonishment, his comic books. Each new item was bad news that got piled on top of more bad news. A solid cross section of his routine propaganda materials was wacky hate speech. It got really ugly then. The bulk of that hate speech was aimed straight at TESS. At the end of his process Murray sat still and starred thoughtfully at a picture of a Militia for Work member taken at one of their work camps a year before. He gazed for almost an hour thinking fast. His mind was working hard to build up the full picture. He realized the mess that was building up over in China scared him. By the end of his search Murray feared that he was seeing things. Hoping he had got it wrong. His gut knew he hadn’t though. Murray was honest enough to realize he was spotting real connections. A pattern that even the formal governmental agencies of China might have missed. This guy Hú was up to something much bigger than his current governmental faces even suggested. Events were being put into motion over there that Murray could only dimly sense even after two days of research, but something smelled of rotten fish. Very rotten fish. Fish that had been left in the sun among the sea wrack to rot for three days. It stunk to high heavens. When Murray’s gut finally put the name Hú together with the stated Hú agenda and then added in Jeeter’s name he did not like the feeling at all.

  He needed some still missing pieces of hard information and he needed them fast. His tweets, phone calls and e-mails would have swamped a less robust communications system over the next hours.

  Zeng’s people had penetrated the Chinese space program early and thoroughly. They did it with some ease because there was so much nationalist pride wrapped up in the China National Space Administration and the Hú message was all about Chinese pride. After the mad initial penetration of key personnel inside the CNSA it was almost easy to reorient the agenc
y to reflect new priorities that called for increased activities. Activities that happened to benefit Hú.

  Now those calls went into high gear.

  The space program began to shift time tables rapidly based on orders from Zeng. Despite the brighter members doubtful allegiance to much of the pseudo-science that Zeng represented, there was a core of ideological loyalist program personnel who were not only efficient workers, they were solid engineers as well. They may not be given to rational self examination about politics, but they could shove their shoulders against a grindstone and get work done. They did.

  In an ironic stroke TESS was contacted almost immediately. Officially the CNSA requested that several TESS delivery schedules be reoriented and moved forward in time. Special equipment was designed in a hurry and either improvised or built rapidly for transport to orbit. More than that China’s entire conventional spacecraft program whose launches were carefully laid out for ten years ahead was changed dramatically overnight. Conventional launches were also rushed into marginal and dangerous readiness, reducing the next five years of plan into a four month launch window overnight. Corners were cut everywhere. Rockets were fired off while everyone held their breath, expecting one of them to explode. They were not disappointed. One machine failed to lift off and sat on its pad merrily venting gas and teetering dangerously until the fuel was cut off. That was the lucky one. A second made it to 5000 feet before blowing itself into pieces in a spectacular fireball. Blessings are often disguised. Its loss in the air meant that the launch towers and platform were still intact and could be used again a week later. Better still, the rocket had been unmanned and since no deaths occurred the clampdown on media went efficiently. The loss of an “experimental unmanned rocket” barely made the news and most of the now hurried launches went forward flawlessly allowing them to move men and materiel to orbit rapidly.

  Leveraging even those moves, Hú used his people, spread like fingers through the diplomatic corps to enhance his organizations schemes further by making promises and treaties to gain space support from other countries. The deals they cut were ironically to trade for more and even more TESS sorties that could fill in holes in their plans while masking the aggressive space movements intended for China under the cloak of being done in the service of other nationalities. TESS was busy. TESS did not notice.

  In the meantime Hú was filtering through lists of those ultra-nationalists he could absolutely trust in the military. He found what he was looking for in an officer named Colonel Sho.

  Colonel Sho was a fierce nationalist. A passionate Hú supporter. A marine. Recruited because he loved China, had been taught to hate TESS and was a tough warrior.

  Seen in a certain way he was the worst of the best of the best.

  Rear Admiral Maureen O’Hara was getting ready to return to orbit but still had one task left. She called the TESS head of intelligence and gave him one of the missing pieces he was looking for.

  Glancing at the caller ID he picked up quickly.

  “Ma’am?”

  “The line is secure… Yes?”

  “512 K encryption… pretty unbreakable; With that proviso… Yes, Ma’am.”

  “China.” Maureen said baldly—tired of all these qualifiers. She was an open person and hated secrecy even more than Bear. To her a spade was a spade.

  “Ma’am?” Murray asked.

  “I have found at least five different purchases and three international applications for license that show similar components to the TESS drive systems and possible usage materials being shipped as a result. They were all shipped to a single country. China! Frankly, they were not really very secretive. Their operations security is either very good or very bad. The shipments and the goods have been sent to only two quite specific locations inside China. I have done a casual check and the two locations appear to be warehousing and delivery vehicles that primarily deal with the Chinese government there. I sniffed about and rather easily found out that the bulk of them were specifically signed for by something called the Central Leading Group for Protection of Party Secrets Committee… apparently it is a little known branch of the CCP that has been around a long time by their standards. They have something of a sordid past, but nothing very terrible recently. I have several people’s names associated with the group, but the head of the outfit seems to be some kind of scientific team. The scientific team boss is a guy named Zeng. I looked at their web page and they frankly sound like a bunch of kooks who espouse some kind of fringe science. Still, if they are ordering our stuff and I think anyone who is being totally honest could have said the same about Q-Kink when they built the drive… .”

  Murray chuckled and then cleared his throat.

  “Thank you, Admiral. This is very helpful. Now the big question. Does it appear to you that they have the entire drive and all the components they might need to build it… assuming they know what to do with it all?”

  The Rear Admiral went quiet a moment.

  “No… with reservations! I would characterize that what they have shipped so far is potentially a 50% solution. Perhaps a bit more. And I have to add that what I cannot see is what they already have put in place themselves—or for that matter obtained through less legal channels than I have been looking at. Obviously they may have much more than 50% if they stole it or manufactured it in house or imported it in illegal ways.”

  “Fair enough, Admiral.” Murray said thoughtfully.

  “I take it you know the name, Zeng then?” She asked.

  She was a sharp tack and missed very little.

  “Yes, Admiral. I do.” Murray admitted. “The name Zeng is associated with a particular faction within the party led by a man who goes by the name Bo Hú. According to my current homework Bo Hú is a very bad man.”

  “Bad how?”

  “Bad like Milosevic. Bad like Pol Pot. Bad like Hitler. My overall reading of him is just shy of plain crazy with a mile wide streak of xenophobia. The hate he spews is targeted at TESS. That kinda bad, Ma’am. Oh… and it looks like they really want a McMoran drive.”

  Maureen was silent a minute.

  “That’s bad.” She said.

  “Yes Ma’am. And it gets worse.”

  “Uh-oh.” She hesitated. “Give it to me.”

  “Night of the long knives kind of bad, Ma’am. I smell much badness in the future around China. Maybe the around the near future. This guy and his goons are dead center in the middle of all that wrongness.”

  Rear Admiral O’Hara absorbed that a moment.

  “I think we should tell this to the Admiral… . don’t you?”

  “We? Ma’am?”

  She chuckled.

  “Why not? Things haven’t been this bad in a while, Murray. They have been creeping downward on our special TESS bad meter from “Insane crazy…” towards the “Kinda OK most days that we are still alive…” setting. I think the Admiral is actually getting complacent. What he needs is a real emergency to wake him up again. Perhaps this particular bad news should come from me this time. You always seem to have to deliver it alone. You may need a friend there to help him… well… to keep him from objectifying the bad news as only coming from you and choking you senseless.”

  “Thanks, Ma’am. That is very thoughtful. You are a scholar and a gentlewoman.” Murray said; meaning it. “I’ll brief him very soon. I need to talk to a guy… a particular guy first. Gotta track him down and then I’ll spill the whole thing to the boss.”

  Rear Admiral Maureen O’Hara was once again on Earth. She had only been up in space again for two days, when Woo called her back. It was something Woo had never done before. It must be important. It was tiring being an admiral. She had vowed she would come down for this single day only because Woo asked it of her. Woo was an old and trusted comrade and she had played their relationship like a trump card. Maureen had landed on the Gaia, been whisked to shore in California by th
e TESS patrol boats and been flown out here by a leer jet. Total time about five hours.

  She was picked up at an obscure airport in a non-descript mid-size rental car by Woo. They were in upstate Utah and Lieutenant Woo drove the car over increasingly punishing roads to a small town. On its outskirts they had driven off the paved road altogether and followed a serpentine dirt track to the top of a small mountain where a small cement block building could be seen hanging on the edge at the top.

  Towering over the building was a huge square looking antennae sitting on four open iron girder posts that looked lot like they were of a piece with the Eifel tower. They got out by the rig and Maureen craned her neck back looking up at the huge thing. As she looked down she caught a glimpse of the car driving towards them down below and throwing a cloud of the dust behind it. It would be up with them in a few minutes.

  “That’ll be the station owner.” Woo said quietly following her eyes.

  “Well…” Maureen said laconically. “I’ll say this for you… you don’t think small. I’m sorry… I am tired. Remind me of what’s so special about this thing again. It’s AM radio isn’t it?”

  “You really don’t remember?” Woo asked solicitously.

  Maureen smiled encouragingly.

  “Well… . You were clearly excited about your idea when you told me you needed the thing. You probably told me, but I was sitting on the can at the time… a bit distracted. Bad coffee does that to me sometimes. Then there were the other forty thousand things that have happened since to help me forget.”