by Randy Moffat
The prerogative of a TESS Head of Department to override a ship’s operations plan on the spot was a rarely invoked codicil in the TESS rule book and Dixon had to look it up while the still apparently unexcited but implacable Woo stood watching him relentlessly with her arms crossed. Eventually he found the paragraph and had to acquiesce. But Dixon was only being careful. Once he embraced the notion as his duty he treated Woo graciously and had driven his crew with relentless efficiency to develop a plan to quickly load and shift the five loads to orbit that Woo had brought out behind her on a hired ocean freighter.
Woo rode up with the first load. On L5 she found Captain Johnson in the Thorium Generator power control room—coaching a pair of academy graduates fresh from a civilian nuclear power course on Earth through the oddities of a high temperature Thorium system made to operate with or without gravity. Trailing behind Woo were four academy communications graduates of her who own who hovered in the doorway respectfully, trying and failing not to look delighted at their limited weight up here on the Rock. The trip from Earth to L5 had taken only twelve minutes to make and for the newbies it was a universe away from any prior experience. Something they had all longed for since they joined TESS and they had giddy as school children.
Woo ignored their tittering and pulled out an actual paper diagram of the huge antennae rig she was lugging about with her. She laid the paper out flat on the floor, pinning it with her feet and her tech pad.
Captain Johnson’s eyes got big at the sheer size of the thing, but shrugged when Woo explained how she wanted to erect it on the outer surface of L5—parallel to any rotational motion used to simulate gravity. There was no parasite drag in space so its orientation meant nothing to the Captain. Johnson agreed to lend her own graduates to Woo to make up a slightly more experienced space walk work party that could train Woo’s grad students as they got busy. She and Johnson shook hands on the precise locale on the surface of the Rock where it would go. The monster would be mounted over an unused chamber that was positioned close to the Rock’s outer skin, making it ideal because cables could quickly be strung between it and the antennae.
Woo was close to being in business.
She radioed Gaia and gave instructions to her communications Sergeant. She fed SFC Rivera the information she needed as to where to pick up the sister equipment for the ship and what precisely to do with the second rig she had gotten from Sausalito with Admiral O’Hara. Rivera started to bat ideas around, but it turned out to be very awkward with a several minute delay between transmission and response. Eventually Woo lost patience and told her just to improvise until she got there. She had every confidence the NCO would do it creditably.
She headed for the surface of the Rock to observe her eager team’s first work of re-erecting the antennae from the dusty mountain in Utah on the surface of an asteroid in the heartland of nowhere.
We were in the Q-Kink Bat Cave’s secure briefing room. It had been built as a TEMPEST cage from the beginning so I figured we were fairly safe from monitoring there. Monitoring was the last thing on my mind though. Murray thought he had found Jeeter.
Murray was pointing to a spot in a big map of Shanghai, China as he addressed Wong and I about as respectfully was his nature allowed. His cousin, Captain Craig was sitting in too and peering intently at his extended fingertip. The fingerprint rested just inside the G1501 ring road on the south side of the Laungpo river in an area called Songjiang, a down scale city district.
“We have made a pretty educated guess that Jeeter is being held here.” He said and a slide danced off screen in a shower of pixels to be replaced with one showing a run down and dirty looking building. “The building itself was originally an older warehouse being used as a communications retransfer station by the local cops; but the guy Hú that I just briefed you about infiltrated it and took it over. As I already told you he probably controls the boss who currently holds the office whose ministry position oversees the police. Our source tells me they transformed this place into their local operational headquarters on the Q.T. The joint is decidedly not centered on policing the public these days. They are there to spy on everyone they don’t like. My information is that they use it to monitor sister Chinese government agency activities all around town. They have communications taps laid throughout the city. All illegal, but characteristic of Hú’s draconian tactics. He is gathering dirt for leverage over people where ever he can.”
“How much do you really know about the place?” I asked.
Murray pressed a button and a partial map of the place’s interior came up. It showed about 40% of the facilities likely corridors and rooms.
“My source has only been there once. I am working on filling in more information from our local assets; that is priority one, Admiral. This map shows all I have for now.” Murray finished.
Neither Admiral cared much which Admiral he was talking to.
“40% isn’t enough to plan fully.” I observed dryly.
“No.” Murray conceded, but I think it includes most of the key areas and may be enough to get us started. “Watch.” He said and played a video image that was clearly taken from about chest level and the record wandered through the place including a trip into a latrine. At one point it lingered on the faces of people arrayed around a conference table and froze on the face of Bo Hú chairing a meeting at the end.
I held onto my anger and tried not to grind my teeth.
“So what do you think is a good plan here?” I asked.
“Fairly straight forward. I suggest we send in our Brutus team as soon as possible. We remove him from the place with extreme prejudice.” Murray said bluntly.
“No negotiations?” I said wistfully. I hate violence. I am good at it, but I dislike it as a general principle as inefficient. “. . . and why ‘as soon as possible?’”
“Three problems.” Murray cut off further peaceful suggestions. “One. Hú hates us. The way I read him he started out just cynically hating us. A matter of practical politics. Somewhere along the line he bought into his own propaganda though. Now he genuinely hates our guts. It is his stated policy that everything we are and own belongs to him. Forfeit to China. This means he will not negotiate with us—or if he does he’ll do it as a totally callous political ploy that will drag any talks out for so long that Jeeter will be dead of old age. Two. TESS is only a secondary objective for him anyway. We are a mere tool. A vehicle. A sidebar. His real overall objective is to seize control of the entire Chinese government and ultimately the country itself. Having the McMoran drive is intended to make him into a national hero and catapult him ahead of any opposition in the affection of the people. The popularity gained by making China a drive using competitor with TESS at a stroke would allow him to springboard off the event to the full control of the country he craves. Unfortunately his plans for that control are already moving forward and are not actually dependant on Jeeter. Sure, he wanted Jeeter to gather information on our secret systems, but Colonel Jeeter and even TESS for that matter are only pawns on this bigger chess board of getting his hands on China as a country. I have strong indications that out there in that bigger game Hú is planning to attack hard soon to push Premier Lau off the board. In his turn, Lau appears ramping up to do something like the same. If we fail to act now we may end up dead center in the middle of all these power plays coming to fruition. That spells civil conflict on a large scale. Jeeter may end up dead in the middle of all that and any protection given to him by potential knowledge he may have of the space drive game may well vaporize in the midst that kind of struggle. I can foresee several scenarios where the Hú faction sees him as being better off dead. Third, of course is that Jeeter is no spring chicken. Delay by us while we wait for some perfect later moment may mean more interrogation for him. More intense interrogation as they feel more pressure to get what he has out of him. Interrogation that he will not survive. We need to hurry.”
I thought ha
rd for almost a whole minute. My mind’s eye filled in what was happening to him. I decided.
“OK. The Brutus team is very well and good, but can we count on any other help?”
“Murray nodded. I will be taking three very experienced guys with me from here and another ten from various worldwide TESS locations to bolster Brutus. Most have some kind of wet boy or pertinent military operational experience and can keep their heads screwed on in a crisis. I also have three reliable Chinese operatives actually in the city now who can provide intelligence, clear our way over there and act as emergency backstops to get us out if it comes to that. They are already preparing the ground over in the city of Shanghai on my say so. In addition, I have hired a dozen mercenaries, mostly Taiwanese who can presumably blend in to some extent with the locals. I plan to use them for an outer ring while we use the Brutus and our TESS guys as a core inner ring for any operation such as entering the building. Altogether that should give us forty seven men and women to work with.”
“Forty eight with me.” Craig grunted.
Everyone looked at him but made no comment. Craig was not a comment kind of guy.
“Forty nine… with me” I said.
“Like hell!” both Wong and Murray chorused and grinned evilly at each other. They were ganging up on me.
“I’m going.” I said stubbornly.
“No freaking way!” Wong reiterated. “Total bull shit.”
I started to poke my lip out. It was a move I had practiced in front of a mirror. Pouting is an admiral-like manipulation technique. I was getting good at it.
I started to point out tartly that as the only non-Vietnam era army guy among us I had the best and most recent experience in building clearing operations, but Wong headed my cogent arguments off with an upheld hand.
“Bear!” He met my eye. “Don’t you poke your lip out at me! Item one. We need to be as low profile as possible going in. Everyone on this planet knows who you are by now. Item two. They know me too, but of the two of us which of us is likely to blend in better wearing jeans and flip flops and mooching around the slums of Shanghai in dark glasses… a six foot three Anglo-Saxon Viking like you? Or me—Mr. Chinese?”
“Mr. Chinese!” I hooted. “You’re not Chinese, you’re American. From Sacramento for crying out loud. You’re so Yankee you eat pie for breakfast.” I argued.
“I may be ABC, but I speak Mandarin like a native… learned it on my Granddaddy’s knee. And my epicanthic folds are just to die for. I think my great-great grandma had an affair with Genghis Khan’s illegitimate nephew… on his 23rd wife’s side.”
We both knew his halting version of ‘native’ was a rough form of ChinEnglish learned third hand from relatives with Georgia accents which would mark him in any Chinese city like an illiterate Mississippi clan member addressing the dons of Harvard, but we had much more important things to talk about. Besides, I knew he was right, the dirty bastard. As my trip to the rock had shown my face was just too well known now for what had to be an at least a half way undercover operation thrown together in a hurry.
“Alright. Alright!” I pushed my raised palm forward a few times. “Let’s move on. Jeeter is one of us. I want him out of there! No bullshit. We go in. We get him alive. We get out and disappear. No TESS trace if possible. No trouble.”
There was a lot to do, but we did it fast. Agile as only small groups can be. I was in a bit of a hurry as I had a painful phone-con to make.
SFC Rivera was out space walking. She was finishing attaching the last set of clamps securing the phased array panels from an old US destroyer to all four sides of the sail on the SS Gaia. Warrant Officer’s Pinta and Gaston were helping her so the job was cantering ahead briskly on the pony of their experience. Rivera appreciated their finesse and the ease with which they both moved fluidly about in space with little effort. They were like fish in the ocean now she thought. In their native element.
They had needed to reposition three antennae on the sail’s superstructure and the panel on the bow and stern sides were tricky since they had to leave the view ports for 11 Forward clear for viewing and also not interfere with the rotary cannon’s sweep on the already somewhat cluttered bow.
“That should do it, Sergeant Rivera.” Pinta’s tinny radio voice said.
“Agreed.” She replied. “Thanks to both of you for your help. I would have been out here two more days getting this job done without you. All I have to do now is get the cables connected into the new control rig down on the bridge and run some tests to make sure the basic functionality is there and then wait.”
“I meant to ask… .” Gaston came on radio, out of sight around the curve of the sail. “What’s all this for?”
“No idea.” SFC Rivera said, though she had a suspicion. “These antennas are phased array. All they do is gather in a lot of low level transmission material and reassemble it into a holistic bigger picture. Funny thing is that the rig they lead to in the bridge is actually kinda simplistic. Guess I will ask Lieutenant Woo when she gets here.”
“WOO!” Pinta whooped explosively. “Coming HERE?”
“Oh, here we go!” Gaston gave an unheard background mutter.
“I had no idea Tia was coming aboard! Woo Woo! When?” Pinta could not get the joy out of his voice. They could hear his face muscles creak from lack of practice.
Rivera grinned.
“She told me she’d be here in about fourteen hours. You two should communicate more!” She observed to the empty space he had just occupied—he was already swarming for the nearest airlock.
“They’ll be communicating all right.” Gaston said sourly. “They’ll be communicating 24x7. We won’t see them for days.” He raised his voice. “Don’t forget the poker game is at 2100 sharp tonight!” He yelled the last bit too late.
Pinta could not answer, his radio was blocked by the thick steel airlock hatch slamming shut over him.
“Don’t sweat it, Chief. I’ll take his chair if he is busy.” Rivera said smugly—her mission done.
The screen energized and I was looking at the Secretary of State for the United States… again.
His cold and wary expression spoke volumes. So did his terse greeting. He was leery of me now. I had done him brown. I had dropped a rock as a warning shot across the bows of his country, creating something just shy of a nuclear explosion off the coast of the United States. There had been pushback on capitol hill and the Pennsylvania Avenue residence. I wasn’t the flavor of the month right now.
I hit send on an e-mail and then met his eyes across the distances between us.
“Admiral.” He said woodenly. An ugly contrast to the easy bonhomie of our last calls.
“Mr. Secretary.” I replied. “On behalf of the Terran Exploratory Space Service, the service owes you something of an apology. In fact, I feel I owe you a personal apology as well… which is why I am calling.”
He looked weary. Diplomats never trust contrition. There is always another shoe out there somewhere waiting to dop.
“And the… nature… of your apology?”
“I want to apologize for our carelessness in crashing that bit of space debris into the ocean near your waters. We are taking measures to make sure it never happens again.”
The words ‘Unless I have to’ went unsaid, but we both pretended not to notice.
The secretary risked a hint of a conciliatory smile on behalf of his nation if not himself.
“Well… We have had the Devil’s own time explaining it to Liberia. Two of the oil tankers that we had to move aside from the impact zone were registered there.”
Liberian flagged oceanic ships were ubiquitous on the oceans of earth.
“Then I hope you will extend our apology to the leaders of Liberia too… Indeed! Feel free to extend our deep concerns and the same apology to the entire government of Liberia if you think it will help.” They
were undoubtedly shooting at each other in the Liberian Presidential palace right now that Ebola had been crushed. Cleaning political house was a past time Liberians indulged in about every decade whether they needed it or not. “Though come to think of it wasn’t the original Liberian registry for ships founded by one of your predecessors in office? Couldn’t you put in a word there for us?” I couldn’t resist the dig.
He moved on. I suspected it was to mask the fact that he had not known the fact.
“Other than your apology how can I help you?”
I smiled.
“I only have a minute Mr. Secretary… but felt I owed you this apology immediately. In return for any inconvenience TESS may have caused you I have just sent you something of a tit for that tat. I hope it will add spice to my apology. Something to allay any resentment you may harbor against us and as thanks for your assistance with your reports from the US intelligence agencies concerning Colonel Jeeter. The e-mail’s attachment is a TESS secret intelligence report that you may find… interesting. It concerns events unfolding in China just now. I know the CIA probably has most of it on their own, but I like to flatter myself that there may be a few things in it that will be original to you… . and to the United States of course.”
The Secretary of State to the United States looked decidedly confused.