Under Vanishing Skies

by G. S. Fields

  “What do you think I’m doing here? You wouldn’t answer my messages. I came to see if you were alright.” She traced her fingers down my arm and stopped at my wrist. I shook her off and sat up. William mumbled something in his sleep and rolled over.

  “Come on,” I whispered. I got out of bed and motioned for her to follow. We went out onto the front porch, and I quietly closed the door behind me.

  Turning to face her, I said, “I’m serious, Shannon. What the hell do you want?”

  “Most men I sleep with wait a few months before they avoid me.” She smiled, but I didn’t.

  I didn’t need this and I didn’t need her. My heart knew I was lying, but I ignored it like I ignored the little voice in my head. First she popped into my life after three years without a word. Then she suckered me into joining the Council, convincing me that I could make a difference. And just when we had chance to make that difference, she fucked me over in front of the entire Council. What does she want? Does she think I’m going to forget all about that so we could play kissy face again?

  She shrugged and went on, “I wanted to make sure you were okay, that’s all. You took off so fast after the Council meeting that I didn’t have time to talk to you about your crazy stunt.”

   “My crazy stunt? Jesus H. Christ! Are you shitting me? I told you what I was trying to do. I needed time...time to figure out what was going on, but you couldn’t wait, so what is there to talk about?”

  “Come on, Aron. You weren’t making any sense. You sounded like some kind of lunatic conspiracy theorist. What did you expect me to do? Block the vote so you could go off on a snipe hunt while we risk having an outsider decide the list for us?” She took a step toward me and said in a soft voice, “Listen, I know that you’re dealing with a lot right now.” She nodded toward the door. “I get it. It’s a big change for you.”

  “You don’t know anything about what I’m dealing with. Did you have three close friends die over the past month? Huh? Did one of your friends disappear in the middle of the night? Did you wake up one morning to find yourself the parent of a ten-year-old boy? No! So don’t tell me that you know what I’m going through.” I turned to walk away, but she grabbed my sleeve and stopped me.

  “Rick and Jin were my friends too, you know. But you’re wrong.” She let go of my sleeve and turned to face the ocean. “I know what it’s like to be a parent. Saravan and I had a baby. I never told you that, but we did. That’s why I didn’t come to see you after I got back from that walkabout.”

  “You have a child?”

  “Had,” she said turning her back on me. “We lost her.” Her shoulders slumped and she began to cry.

  “I didn’t know,” I said walking to her and put my hands around.

  She stopped crying, pulled herself up straight, and turned to face me. Her face was a mix of embarrassment and anger. “Well screw you, Aron Atherton!” She pushed me away. “You’re not the only one who goes to bed every night and wakes up every morning with a broken heart,. Every person who survived the goddammed storm lives with the same pain you have. Your problem is that you’d rather feel sorry for yourself than enjoy what little time you have left.”

  “Listen, Shannon...I’m sorry about what I said. It’s just—”

  “Save your apology for someone who wants it. I offered you the most precious thing I have left on this planet, my time. Time I wanted to spend with you. But you would rather spend your time trying to prove that Ahmed is a crook. Well here’s a news flash for you...he is a crook. Everyone knows it, but nobody cares. Don’t you get it? The list is final and nothing you dig up now is going to change that. Why can’t you just let it go?”

  “Because,” I said softly, pointing to the hut. “There’s a boy in there that deserves a chance to grow up and become the man that I know he will be. But he’s not going to get that chance unless I find out what’s going on.”

  I placed my hands on her shoulders again. “And you’re right. I did spend too much time feeling sorry for myself, but you’re wrong if you think that’s what I’m doing now. For the first time in a really long time, I care about what’s going to happen to someone besides me. And I’m not just talking about William. I mean everyone. I don’t think I actually understood how big a deal the list was until it was finalized. It’s not about who gets to go and who stays behind. It’s about whether or not the human race survives. I know how grandiose this sounds. But it’s how I feel. Do you understand?”

  Her face softened. “Yes. I get it.” She looked down. “But we'll never get a perfect list of candidates together. The only thing we can do now is hope that whoever goes up there can make it work.” Then she took my hand and said, “And all we can do down here is enjoy the time we have left. Do you understand that, Aron? It’s time to let this go and start living again.”

  I wanted to let it go. But I couldn't give up. Not yet.

  I shook my head. “I can’t. I gotta try.”

  Rage flashed across her face and she threw my hand back at me. “You’re a fucking idiot, Aron! A goddammed fucking idiot! You have no idea what you just gave up.” She turned and stormed off towards the dock. I just stood there and watched her go.

  After a few minutes, I heard, “Aron?”

  I turned and saw William looking through the half-opened door.

  “Yeah?” I said.

  “Are you okay?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “She was pretty mad, wasn’t she?”

  I nodded.

  “Why?”

  I rubbed the back of my neck and shrugged. “It’s complicated.”

  He tilted his head and said, “Is it boyfriend-girlfriend stuff?”

  I grinned and said, “Sort of, but we don’t have time to worry about boyfriend-girlfriend stuff, do we?”

  He shook his head.

  “We have work to do. Right?”

  He opened the door the rest of the way and said, “Right.”

  “Then let’s get to it.”

  ***

  It was painstaking work, but little by little, we pieced together the information we had found. By the time we had finished the food that Helen brought us for dinner, William and I probably knew more about the Chinese military communication infrastructure than anyone else left on the planet.

  I found a map of Asia and had William plot the location of the equipment we found on one of the lists. It didn’t take him long to figure out how to do it. He drew lines between the symbols he placed on the map using the information from the spreadsheet. With him doing that, I had time to focus on the big question. What did it all mean? So far, all we had was a pretty map and we were already through most of the files.

  I scratched my head and ran my hand through my hair. I felt like we were going down another rabbit hole. It was just a bunch of communications equipment: hubs, routers, laser uplink stations, and radio towers. Maybe Jin thought he could build something out of all this stuff, but there was no way in hell that I could. He had been a Cyber Ace in the Chinese Cyber Force. I had managed communications contracts. Even if he did plan to build something, how did he plan to get the stuff from China to the Maldives? Perhaps he had some other secret up his sleeve, like an SF296 fighter jet hidden in a mango grove somewhere.

  “I’m done.”

  I looked over and saw William sitting cross-legged on the bed, leaning back on his elbows. If I sat like that, I’d crack in half like a dry crab shell.

  “Did you plot everything?” I looked over his shoulder and pretended to understand the intricate web of communication pathways laid out on the map.

  “Yup.” He nodded. “So, what does it mean?”

  I stood up straight, interlaced my fingers behind my head and said, “I don’t have a clue. Are you sure that’s everything?”

  He nodded again. “Everything that you told me to plot. The only thing I didn’t use were the numbers in the hidden column.”

  My hands dropped to my side and I grabbed his data mat. “What hidden colu
mn?”

  “Right there, between the seventh and eighth column. There's a column of numbers that was minimized. I thought you hid it so I wouldn’t mess up.”

  He was right. There was another column. Each cell contained a one or a zero. I selected the column title, hit the translate button and then watched as the Chinese symbols turned into four letters: EMPH.

  “What’s an emph?”

  “It’s not an emph, it’s an acronym. EMPH stands for Electro Magnetic Pulse Hardened. Do you know what that means?”

  He shook his head.

  I began to get that same excited feeling that I used to get back in school when my brain managed to finally wrap itself around a really tough math problem. “It means that some of this equipment might have survived the storm. These ones.” I pointed at column. “The cells with a number one in them.”

  “I don’t get it.”

   “Do you remember what your dad told you about the storm?”

  “A little.” He shrugged. “He said a big solar flare hit the earth and burned up most of the atmosphere.”

  I nodded, “Right. A solar flare burned up most of the atmosphere, but solar flares also do something else.” I began to pace the room. “See, solar flares are huge clouds of charged solar plasma…energy like electricity. Anyway, when the sun shoots out a flare. The flare flies through space really, really fast.”

  William looked at me, his head tilted to the side.

  “Have you ever shocked yourself? You know, touch something and get zapped?”

  He nodded.

  “Well, a solar flare has a lot of stored energy and when that energy touches the earth…Pow! It zaps it just like when you get shocked. That energy comes in through the planet’s magnetic poles.”

  William said, “That’s what I said. A solar flare burned up the atmosphere.”

  “Yeah, but it did something else. That energy spawned massive geomagnetic storms and those storms fried most of the electronics in the world.”

  His brow furrowed. “Is that why you and dad had to build all the stuff for the IICN from all that spare junk?”

  I smiled. “Exactly. Some bits and pieces of equipment didn’t get fried, but that was just luck. EMPH equipment wouldn’t have been damaged at all.”

  “So some of this stuff,” he said, pointing to the map, “might still work?”

  I sat down on the edge of the bed and said, “It’s possible. But the only way to know for sure would be to go there and check it out or—”

  William stared at me for a half second before saying, “Or what?”

  “William, I need you to go through that list again.”

  “Again?” he whined.

  “Yup. All of it. For every piece of equipment that has a one in the EMPH column, I want you to color the equipment icon blue. Got it? How long do you think that will take?”

  “About thirty seconds,” he said, smiling. “I linked each icon to the spreadsheet, so all I have to do is write a script to change the color based on the value in the column. Come on...I did harder stuff when I was five.”

  I ruffled his hair. He ducked out of my reach and flashed me an annoyed look. It was the kind of look my girls had given Kelly when she would dress them up in the same outfits.

  It actually took him closer to three minutes to finish the script, but I wasn't complaining. All real coders underestimated schedules. He handed me the data mat and I overlaid the position of the Indian reconnaissance satellite on it.

  “There,” I said, pointing at an icon located in the southwestern part of China. “See that?”

  He nodded.

  “If that laser uplink station is still operational, we might be able to communicate with it through the Indian satellite that Jin hacked.”

  “I don’t get it. How is that uplink station going to decrypt the messages?”

  I folded my arms across my chest, leaned back, and smiled. “Jin really was a genius.”

  William shook my shoulders and said, “How is that going to help?”

  I looked at him and smiled. “Do you know how those laser uplink systems work?”

  He shook his head.

  “They shoot a laser through a liquid lens that automatically morphs itself to adjust for the scintillation of the upper atmosphere.” I could tell from the puzzled expression on his face that I had lost him. “You know how on a really hot, sunny day when you look out over the dock and everything looks all wavy?”

  He nodded.

  “That’s scintillation. Same thing happens in the upper atmosphere. If you shoot a laser through the distortion without adjusting for the scintillation then the information the laser sends gets all messed up.”

  Looking even more puzzled, he asked, “But how does the uplink know what the scin-till-ation will be like up in the sky?”

  “It uses a quantum computer to figure that out.”

  He still didn’t get it, but I did. I finally understood Jin’s plan. He planned to use the quantum computer at the laser uplink station to decrypt the messages. All we had to do now was—

  The door flew open and Mohamed charged into the room. He was out of breath. “Aron, you must come quickly.”

  I stood up. “Take it easy. What’s going on?” I knew from the sound of his voice and the fear in his eyes that it wasn’t good.

  “The pirates just attacked the Tari island chain.”

  That was only three islands to the south of us.

  “Is it still under attack?” I asked.

  Mohamed shook his head and tried to catch his breath. “No, but we just got a call for assistance. They have several hundred wounded and a few—” He paused and looked at William as if deciding whether he wanted to finish the sentence. “And there are some dead too.”

  “Well come on,” I said. “Let’s go.”

  I snatched my backpack from the floor and hurried past him, but he grabbed my arm and stopped me.

  “There’s more.”

  “Well...what is it?”

  Mohamed didn’t speak.

  “Come on...if there are people hurt, we’ve got to move.”

  “The pirates attacked three boats near the island, and there are reports that they killed the men on board and kidnapped the women.” His gaze fell to the floor before he said, “Your friend Shannon was on one of those boats.”

  Chapter 14

  Our boat approached Tari from the east and I looked out at the plumes of black smoke rising into the early evening sky. Swarming around the smoldering island, a ragtag armada from nearby islands rushed in to help. I grabbed the binoculars from Mohamed and scanned the boats. There wasn’t a single MDF patrol boat in the mix. I searched the sky and didn’t see any helojumpers either. It didn’t really surprise me, but it pissed me off.

  The main pier was overflowing with boats, so Kamish pulled around to the south side of the island. He docked next to a hut that sat on stilts over the shallow water. I didn’t wait for Kamish to tie the boat to the moorings. Grabbing my bag from the deck, I slung it over my shoulder and sprinted down the narrow boardwalk and out on to the beach.

  I had only made it twenty feet before I came across a young girl lying face up in a grotesque heap over a small boulder. Her eyes were open, but they already clouding over. I knew from her blood-stained, naked legs how she met her fate, but I pushed the thought away. Seared on her forehead was the seal of Jamal. I didn’t bother to stop. There wasn’t any point. Her throat was cut so deep that I could make out the ridges of her trachea.

  I passed a dozen more victims. My hatred for Jamal and his pirates grew with each crescent moon and star that I saw branded on their bodies.

  I could make out the roofline of the community center up ahead. I stopped and took a few deep breaths before going on. I decided that throwing up in front of the wounded wouldn’t instill a sense of confidence. Best to let my stomach do what it wanted out here.

  When my stomach was empty, I straightened up and headed for the community center. As I approached the buildin
g, I tried to make sense of what was going on outside. The scene that unfolded was pure chaos.

  Laid alongside the open-air hut were rows of bodies covered in blood-soaked sheets. A boy, maybe four, sat next to one of the corpses. He wailed as he shook an uncovered foot. A two-man team carrying a body almost tripped on the boy. They dumped their load a few feet from the kid and hurried off. I stood there and watched as body after body was brought in and dropped to the ground, I had to get out of here, so I walked inside the community center. What I found in there was worse.

  Screams filled the air. Those unlucky enough to have survived the attack were sprawled out on every inch of open ground. I passed by a woman in her thirties. She sat cross-legged on a thatched mat holding a makeshift tourniquet on the stump of her right arm. I tried not to make eye contact. I failed. Her eyes locked on to mine. I saw her mouth open and close as if she was trying to speak, but nothing came out. I closed my eyes to break her hold on me and kept going.

  As I moved through the hut, I scanned the faces looking for Shannon. But all I saw were the faces of people on the verge of death. A woman carrying towels rushed past me. There were others like her, people moving from patient to patient trying to prevent the inevitable. Their clothes were covered in as much blood as their patients.

  I felt a hand on my shoulder. I jumped and turned to find Mohamed standing behind me. His warm smile and laughing eyes were replaced by a somber, resolute expression. He had seen this before, the insanity and horror of an emergency medical ward. But I hadn’t. After other raids, I had helped carry the bodies to the makeshift morgues. Dealing with the dead was far easier than dealing with the dying.

  “Follow me, Aron. I need your help.”

  “Me? I can’t help here. I’ll go out there and see if they need help bringing people in.”

  “These people need us. Just do what I say and stay calm.”

  I nodded, but I had lost my calm back on the beach next to that girl on the boulder.

  I followed him through the ward. We stopped next to a large group of tables that were pushed together. Linens, buckets of water, and bottles of various medicines were spread out across the table. Next to the tables I watched as an elderly woman sang gospel songs, cried, and washed bloody utensils.