by Wesley Cross
Hunt sat there for a few seconds, his fingers drumming a steady rhythm on the leather seat of the car.
“You’re right,” he finally said. “But I want you to stay where you are. At least for now. And if we are to escalate, I need a favor.”
“Shoot.”
“That cash that the Unit recovered. I’d like to have access to it. I will not touch it unless I’m completely out of options, but I need some kind of reserve in case we are in big trouble.”
“You got it. Connelly should know how to access it, but I’ll send the instructions just in case.”
“Thank you. I owe you—”
“You don’t owe me jack shit, kid. That’s just a pile of paper that your father and I took from some really bad people. It’s not like I had other ways to use it, anyway.”
“All right, then.” Jason put a hand on the man’s shoulder, making a decision. “Stay where you’re at for now. Keep me in the loop as much as you can without putting yourself at risk. And keep an eye on what’s happening with the DOD’s contracts. I’m not concerned they would pull them on merits, but who knows what levers Engel can pull.”
“I understand.”
“Something else I’d like to ask you, Jim.”
“Yeah?”
“You’ve been doing this for much longer than I have, and sometimes I need a reality check. I need someone to tell me that there’s actually a chance for us to succeed at this crazy venture. Tell me, Jim. Can we do that? Can we succeed?”
Rovinsky stayed quiet for a few moments, his eyes scanning Hunt’s face.
“We can,” he finally said. “But I think it’ll take more than you’re currently prepared to do to make it a reality. I think you’ll have to reevaluate your entire system of beliefs about how far you’re willing to go. Of what’s required.”
“And what do you think is required?”
Rovinsky took a deep breath and looked down at his hands as if looking for an answer. When he looked up again, there was an expression in the older man’s eyes Hunt had never seen.
“A war,” Rovinsky said. “Civil war.”
7
As the black SUV pulled up in front of the hotel, a group of four men wearing identical business suits spilled from its belly and crossed the short distance between the vehicle and the lobby. There they swept the area covering all entrances and stood guard, holding short-nosed submachine guns pointing down to the floor.
A few seconds later, another SUV drove up behind the first and climbed all the way onto the curb. Another three men came out from the back of the car and then flanked a fourth man as he emerged from the car as well. He wore a pair of distressed jeans and a leather jacket and had an appearance of a rock star, with a full beard and wild, long hair under a cowboy hat. A pair of oversized sunglasses completed the ensemble.
The team ushered the man through the lobby at a speed that almost required them to carry him and then disappeared into the elevator. A second later, the doors chimed and the party disappeared from the view of any potential onlookers.
Less than a minute later, Alexander Engel stepped inside of a private suite and impatiently ripped off the fake beard and removed the wig.
“It’s quite a costume,” Victor Ye said, getting up from a deep chair by the window and extending a hand for a handshake.
“You’ve got some balls, Victor,” Engel replied, ignoring the outstretched hand. He marched past the man and sat down on a couch, crossing his legs. “Whatever your proposition is, it better be worth this nonsense.”
“Fair enough.” Victor Ye sat back down and turned toward the window, watching the Potomac. “God, I love this town. So much power and history concentrated in a few square miles. Nothing comes close.”
“Please save the history lesson. I’m a busy man, Victor,” Engel interrupted him. “But I am here to listen to your proposal. I’d appreciate if you respected my time.”
“I come bearing gifts,” the man said, and reached inside of his jacket pocket.
The three security team members moved forward in unison in response to the gesture, but Engel stopped them with a wave of his hand. “Wait outside.”
After the suits left the room, Victor Ye got up and walked over to the couch, handing the piece of paper to Engel.
“Project Thor,” Engel read out loud. “What’s that? It’s just a name here.”
“Your presidential aspirations haven’t gone unnoticed, Alex.”
“I’ve lost the election.”
“So I’ve heard. But a little birdie told me that this might not be the end of the fight.”
“How come?”
“Don’t play coy with me, Alex. I didn’t come here to spar. Like I said,” he pointed to the piece of paper, “I come bearing gifts.”
“All right. I’ll bite.”
The man sat on the opposite side of the couch and ran his hand through his mane of jet-black hair. “What do you know about kinetic bombardment?”
“It sounds vaguely familiar,” Engel said, watching Victor’s face with caution, as if trying to decide if the man was playing him. “A type of weapon, I’m assuming. Wait, wasn’t there some type of bomb during the Vietnam War? The lazy dog bomb?”
“Very good. That was, at least as far as I know, the first use of the weapon. A proof of concept, if you will. They were inch-long steel projectiles that were dumped from an aircraft on the enemy positions. Steel rain.”
“Why would I be interested in something like that?”
“The lazy dog bombs?” Victor laughed. “I imagine that wouldn’t be of much interest to you. That was just scratching the surface. But I think you might find the idea of Project Thor fascinating. There was a researcher who used to work for Boeing after World War II who came up with it. The concept was simple—there would be a satellite in orbit that had a magazine of tungsten rods with fins.”
“I don’t understand the application,” Engel said. “It’s like shooting bullets from space? Wouldn’t they burn in the atmosphere? I thought dumping old satellites is a fairly standard procedure?”
“No.” Victor smiled. “Not bullets. We are talking about telegraph-pole-sized projectiles made of a material that is four times stronger than titanium.”
“You’re saying they wouldn’t burn during the flight.”
“They are twenty-foot-long, one-foot-diameter rods that would hit the ground at speeds of Mach 10. They would most definitely not burn.”
“Oh, I see.” Engel got up and started pacing the suite. “The kinetic energy would be enormous.”
“Yes. According to the calculations that I’ve seen, one rod impact would have the energy of somewhere between ten and fifteen tons of TNT, about the same yield as a tactical nuke. What’s more, you could hit a target anywhere in the world in less than fifteen minutes. Half the time you’d need for an ICBM. And with current guidance technology, it’ll be precise enough to hit a moving car.”
“All right.” Engel stopped pacing and looked at the other man. “It’s an interesting idea for a weapon, I’ll give you that, but I still fail to see what your proposition is. You want me to build it? Or, rather, hire you to build it?”
“No.” Victor smiled and opened his arms wide. “I’m telling you it has been built already.”
“It has?”
“Yes. The project itself has been mothballed, but there are currently three satellites up there carrying three telephone-pole-sized tungsten rods each.”
“Fully operational?”
“No, but they could be. As of right now, they are just three inert chunks of metal stuffed with microchips cruising around the world, but we could jump-start their systems within days. Satellites are completely autonomous. All we’ll need to do is to reactivate control systems here on Earth.”
“Can someone defend against them?”
“Not really.” Victor shrugged. “Their launch signatures are almost nonexistent and occur in orbit. Unless you know where to look and what to look for, no one will ever know.
They are also extremely fast, so there’s no real way to intercept them. The only weak spot they have is that during atmospheric reentry, their sensors would be blind because of the plasma sheath in front of them. I might have exaggerated about hitting a mobile target. But it’s hard to find a better weapon against anything stationary, whether it’s a building or a bunker.”
“Why are there only three rods?”
“Tungsten’s dense. That makes the rods heavy,” Victor said. “Each pole weighs almost ten tons. It was the primary reason the program didn’t get far. They were too difficult and expensive to get to space. They had to bring one rod at a time.”
“Why come to me?” Engel stuffed his hands into his pockets and looked the man up and down. “Why now? For years, you resisted that anyone in our group even knew your real identity. Now you come to me in the open and bring what seems like a good bribe.”
Victor stayed quiet for a few seconds as he contemplated the question.
“A good leader needs to recognize when there’s the time to step aside. I know we haven’t always seen eye to eye, and I tried to keep you, and a lot of others, in the dark. But I think, as we are trying to come out of the shadow, your public profile, especially if you secure the position of the president of the United States, gives you some unique advantages that I cannot match. A power struggle at this precarious moment wouldn’t help us. It’s better to be the second-in-command of the victorious army than the emperor of a fallen empire.”
“There’s no guarantee I’ll become the president. Or that we will be victorious.”
“Are there ever?” Victor shrugged. “As Hyman Roth said in The Godfather: this is the business we’ve chosen.”
“And what would you want in return?”
“Nothing that you wouldn’t want to give, anyway. You can help me bring some hardware and assets from Hong Kong, and you’ll get all the missing pieces you need to build that cyborg army. I also will give you some new prototype sentries. They are not as good as cyborgs—nothing really is—but they are cheap and they are completely autonomous.”
“You can do all that?”
“Yes. I will also need to bring some talent to help you reactivate Project Thor, but I don’t need any help with that part. I can smuggle them myself. All I ask in return for my fealty is the seat at your table as your first lieutenant.” Victor stood up to face Engel. “There’s something else.”
“Oh?”
“I know you’ve been trying, and failing, to recreate what is now Jason Hunt’s pet.”
“What do you mean?”
“Oh, don’t be coy.” Victor cocked his head and smiled. “You know exactly what I mean. The cyborg. The only real cyborg that you couldn’t duplicate, no matter how much you’ve tried. No amount of your snooping into GA’s tech, and even locating the welder who came up with the original alloy—bravo, by the way—gave you the result you saw in Jason Hunt’s toy soldier.”
“That is true.”
“Well,” Victor’s smile grew wider, “I’ll give you a hint. The alloy isn’t the key. The software is. Unfortunately, the man who created the original piece is no longer with us, and we could not recreate his work. Until now. My team might have the missing ingredient. Add it to your stew, and voila, you’ll have the perfect dish.”
“You’ll help me build them as good as Hunt’s borg?”
“No. I’ll help you build them even better than that. Much better. They take awhile to assemble, but I’ll have the first prototype soon. I called him Daimyo. And in a nice sunny place, hidden away from curious eyes, I’m building a factory that would produce so many of them, nobody will challenge us ever again.” Victor stretched out a hand. “Do we have a deal?”
Engel looked at the man for a few seconds, saying nothing, and then took Victor’s hand into his. “Welcome to Guardian Manufacturing.”
8
Helen Chen suppressed a shiver as she watched robotic hands hover above Rachel Hunt’s foot. Their slender, metallic wrists were fed through the flexible sleeves to allow them access into the transparent plastic casing without compromising its integrity. One eight-fingered hand held a small glistening device shaped like an upside-down U, which was now positioned above Rachel’s right big toe. Another had a two-inch-long rectangular box with an open lid pressed into the ball of her foot.
“Want to push the button?” Max Schlager asked as he looked up from the monitor.
“No, thank you very much,” she said. “When Jason asks who chopped off his wife’s toe, I don’t want to be the one raising my hand.”
“We aren’t chopping off the whole toe.” She heard Schlager chuckle. “Just a bit off the top.”
“You find it way too amusing,” she said. “And why isn’t Steven here?”
“I can see it fine from your video feeds,” Poznyak’s voice said in Chen’s helmet. “No need for me to freeze my behind there with you two. Not for the trial run, anyway.”
“Let’s go, Max.”
Schlager hit Enter.
The U-shaped instrument flashed a bright light, and a clean slice of skin the size of a penny slid off the toe into the plastic box.
“Is it supposed to look like that?” Chen asked, looking at the small cut. Instead of the bright pink she was expecting to see, the flesh looked gray.
“Yes,” Poznyak’s voice said in her speakers. “Gray is fine, actually. If it took on a shade of brown, we would have a reason to worry. There’s no reason to be concerned about this color. Let’s see if we can create a minor miracle.”
Chen watched as the shiny fingers controlled by Schlager closed the small container and pulled it out of the plastic sarcophagus. Then the arm swung around and deposited it into a rectangular hole in a workbench next to it.
“Now the fun part,” Chen heard Schlager whisper. She watched him type a series of commands. “Here comes my droid army.”
It was an apt metaphor, Chen thought. A swarm of bots, each one less than a micron in diameter, descended on the slice of the frozen tissue. Molecular rotary joints, designed to have minimal energy dissipation, guided tiny mechanical creatures as they burrowed their way into the tissue.
“This is less of an army,” Poznyak’s voice reverberated in Chen’s helmet, “and more of a special operations team. Sneaking in at night, trying to produce no heat signatures from their onboard computers, quietly scanning things as they go.”
“Signal’s good,” she said, watching a three-dimensional outline of the skin’s slice materialize on the large screen. As the bots started moving through capillaries, scanning the tissue as they went, the empty, transparent shape started to fill in with what looked like tiny dots of color. As minutes passed, the dots grew larger, joining each other until the colors filled the entire slice.
“So far, so good,” Poznyak’s voice said. “I don’t see any areas that sustained serious damage. Some micro fractures, but the bots should easily repair those.”
“That’s great.”
“I wouldn’t get too optimistic just yet,” Poznyak said. “We are dealing with a small area and, more importantly, the area right from the surface of the body. There’s a much greater chance that the cryoprotectant didn’t properly penetrate some of the inner parts of the body.”
“But I thought the full-body molecular scans showed nothing like that?” she said.
“They did not, but it only means there are no obviously damaged areas. The real data is going to come from the bots. Then we’ll know for sure. But as confident as I am in the technology, I’d be shocked if there were no damaged regions at all. That’s just not possible. A part of this is a gamble. But as long as they are small enough and not in the vital parts of the body, we should be able to warm and repair them when they are in a liquid state without too much trouble. You can initiate the next stage now.”
“Yes, boss,” she said, typing a command. The colors on the three-dimensional picture of the cut started to change. “It’s working.”
“Um, a problem,” Schlag
er said, pointing at the graph at the edge of his screen. “We are operating at ninety-two percent capacity.”
“What’s operating at ninety-two percent capacity?” Poznyak said.
“The servers. We are having a hard time processing so much information in real time.”
“I don’t understand. We didn’t have any issues in test runs.”
“We didn’t, but we only did those in a simulated environment. Here, each bot encounters a multitude of problems we couldn’t possibly anticipate in a sim. And with that number of bots, the amount of computing power needed goes up exponentially.”
“Are you saying—?
“We can’t do a full-body restore,” Chen said. “Our hardware won’t be able to keep up. We are almost maxed out on a tiny piece of tissue. There’s no way we can pull off the actual revival.”
“Can’t we upgrade our computers? Don’t we have, I don’t know, some spare parts?”
Chen and Schlager shared a chuckle.
“Not quite,” Chen said. “These computers are already state-of-the art. Upgrading them won’t be easy.”
“The upgrade itself isn’t even the main issue,” Schlager added. “Part of the problem is that we don’t even know how much capacity we will need.”
They watched in silence as the bots finished working on the tissue. Finally, the computer chimed and a green icon appeared on the screen.
“Full restore,” Poznyak said. “If not for the lack of processing power, I’d be jumping up and down right now.”
“Look,” Chen said. “It’s a temporary setback. We will figure out the hardware issue. Especially now that we have the real-life data from the bots. What’s important is that your science works. This is amazing.”
“Thank you, Helen. Put the sample in the storage. I’d like to try reattaching it when the time comes. Is there anything I can do to help for now?”
“I think we’ve got it from here. Max, can you wrap it up without me?” Chen put her gloved hand on Schlager’s shoulder.
“Sure.”