by Taiyo Fujii
“They went off to war,” said Chris. “Looks like rain tomorrow, so they want to get as far as they can today.”
“War? Rain?” Bruce repeated, puzzled.
Akari put her hands on her hips and puffed out her cheeks in pouty indignation. “Chris, tell it to him properly!” she said. “I have told you many times, it is ‘wardriving’!”
“Oh, wardriving.” Bruce nodded.
An old civilian hacker technique that amounted to driving around town looking for open Wi-Fi networks. The CIA had no need for such tactics anymore. These days they had preassembled databases of all the information you could hope for, just waiting to be searched.
“Sounds good,” Bruce said, and gave Akari the thumbs-up.
Tue, 15 Dec 2020 09:01 -0800 (2020-12-15T17:01 GMT)
80 Pike Place, Seattle
Noting the red light ahead at the foot of the hill, Kazumi reached down with his left hand to lightly engage the rear brake. As he approached the intersection, the surface of the road changed from asphalt to cobblestones that muttered under the block-patterned tires of his mountain bike. Although powdery snow covered the street, he didn’t feel the slightest danger of slipping with these tires.
After engaging the brake, he made a fist and held it behind him at waist level. This signaled to the cars behind him that he was stopped. Many cycling hand signals were common to the US and Japan, and Tokyo also required cyclists to ride on the road, so the only modification Kazumi had to make when riding in Seattle was to keep to the right instead of the left.
As he brought the bike to a halt at what looked like the correct line, the blue hood of a car with a white star printed on it slid up along his left. Daryl’s Chevy.
The window on the passenger’s side opened. “Kazumi,” Daryl called. “Can you go down Pike Street? The marketplace is straight ahead.”
“Got it.” Kazumi exhaled, releasing a pure-white cloud that thinned out through the falling snow and then dissipated. To steady his breathing, he inhaled deeply, feeling his mucus membranes dry out as the cold air streamed through his nose.
The marketplace began directly in front of him and stretched off to the right for maybe two blocks.
“You okay, Kazumi? Not getting tired?”
“I am fine. I will rest when I walk through the market.”
The two of them had been roaming Seattle’s bayside district since early morning. Akari had analyzed some cell phone call records provided by Chris and realized that the locations where the China Mobility SIM cards first came into service were concentrated near the bay. If North Korean spies were throwing away roaming cards when they were finished with them, then the area the cards were first used had to be their home ground.
“Make a leisurely stroll of it,” Daryl said. “Wardriving’s an interesting way to spend a day, isn’t it? I didn’t expect to find three hundred open Wi-Fi hotspots in two blocks.”
Warcycling in my case, thought Kazumi, as his breathing came under control. He hadn’t expected to play hacker on his trip overseas.
The Raspberry Pi FPGAs in Kazumi’s backpack and on Daryl’s passenger-side seat were using reprogrammable chips carrying a real-time password-cracking program of Akari’s own design. The three hundred hotspots Daryl had just mentioned were only those with security settings weak enough for the program to break into as they cruised past.
“I was not expecting it either,” Kazumi said. “Maybe because there are so many cafés. Only four of them are the Fu Wen spots we’re looking for, though.”
Kazumi looked down at the smartphone taped to his handlebars. A wardriving/cycling app whipped up by Akari counted and mapped the networks that had been detected, those that had been cracked, and Fu Wen wireless hotspots used by the North Korean spies.
“Anyway, it is all thanks to the antenna booster you made,” he said. “We can even reach into buildings with this.”
Daryl waved his hand modestly, then pointed at Kazumi’s backpack. “Do you have enough honeypots?”
“Seven left.”
The honeypots were Wi-Fi routers on Raspberry Pi hardware, able to impersonate free Wi-Fi hotspots accessed by the China Mobility roaming SIM cards. Daryl and Kazumi were placing them under trash cans and benches as they went.
“Okay. Put all seven somewhere on Pike Street, then. Once you’re done, hop into the car and take a break.” Daryl pointed behind Kazumi. “Could you also get me a latte? Wouldn’t be right to come to Seattle and pass up the coffee.”
Kazumi looked behind him to see a familiar white mermaid logo. He had never seen a brown-and-white Starbucks before. Could this be their original location?
“I wonder if the spies get their lattes here too,” he said.
Daryl slapped the steering wheel and laughed.
“No doubt about it,” he said. “And we have to know our enemy, right? Okay, I’m going to try that block of warehouses by the wharf. Meet you when I get back.”
The Chevy turned off to the left in a cloud of white exhaust.
Tue, 15 Dec 2020, 10:02 -0800 (2020-12-15T18:02 GMT)
Pier 37 Warehouse, Seattle
In the warehouse, Shiraishi was working in his usual position. He sat on a bed with a sleeping bag on it and typed on the tablet in his lap.
“Coffee and breakfast is here,” Chance said. “Are you packed?”
Without taking his eyes off the television, Shiraishi turned his head back over his shoulder.
“All on the bed,” he said. “Listen, I’m sure I can smell gasoline. Can’t you do something about it?”
“It’s just your imagination.”
Shiraishi snorted.
Chance placed her Boston bag on an open space on the bed. Shiraishi’s luggage was apparently nothing but a neatly folded change of clothes, a laptop, some power cables, and a large black blueprint case. The cluster of computers that controlled the swarm of orbiting space tethers ran on virtual servers in a data center somewhere. From the way North Korea had talked about Shiraishi, Chance had expected a gadget fetishist. His minimalist approach to possessions was a pleasant surprise.
“I’m glad you’re traveling light,” she said. “What are we doing today?”
“Preparing to hand this project off,” Shiraishi said. “I’m creating an interface that will allow even nontechies like you to control the Cloud freely.” He pointed at the screen. Chance saw what looked like an online data-entry form.
“A web app?”
“Yep. Looks easy, right?”
The app was very simple, Shiraishi explained. The Formation Settings menu let you choose the shape of the Cloud, from a sphere to a long line. The Impact Settings menu offered five levels of force to apply when the Cloud collided with something, from Contact to Annihilate. Then there was a text field for entering the TLE of your target in orbit. That was all. The intricate orbital maneuvers actually carried out by the individual space tethers were all calculated by virtual servers scattered around the globe, including the worldwide Sleeping Gun network built by the Cyber Front for intelligence operations.
“You enter the TLE, and then, when the estimated time for the operation to commence is displayed, just select either ‘Go’ or ‘No go.’ The order is sent from six hundred thousand base stations at once—the entire global network.”
Chance nodded. Shiraishi’s ideas had been invaluable in setting up the network of base stations needed to control what was, after all, a cloud of space tethers spread out in low Earth orbit.
Perhaps because his work was going well, Shiraishi was in a talkative mood. “Let’s say you want to take a Japanese Information Gathering Satellite offline. Choose ‘Sphere: High-density’ from the Formation Settings menu and set the impact to ‘Contact.’ Then you just enter the target TLE, and you’re done. The Japanese government thinks the IGS orbits are a secret, but TLEs for them prepared by amateurs are easy enough to
find.”
Shiraishi was right about one thing: his app couldn’t be easier. It was amazing how simple he’d made controlling forty thousand spacecraft.
“I ran a simple test where I left twenty thousand space tethers around SAFIR 3 and split the rest into two subclouds of ten thousand each. All eight of Japan’s Information Gathering Satellites, along with the Wyvern’s reentry craft, will become inoperable as early as today.”
The edge of Shiraishi’s lip curled upwards. North Korean headquarters had suggested this program for the initial use of force. As targets for accidents of unknown cause, the IGSs were perfect.
“There are low-level controllers, too. A technician who can use them could reach targets forty or even fifty times farther away.” Shiraishi tapped at his tablet and a complex table appeared on the television screen. This, he said, was the spreadsheet containing what amounted to an orchestral score for the entire Cloud, calculating the correct timing for the application of Lorentz force by each of the forty thousand individual space tethers. Shiraishi opened the Help menu to show Chance how macros and formulas could be used as well, though the details were indecipherable to her.
“Will engineers in the North be able to use this?” she asked.
“Who cares? I’m not their babysitter. Anyway, this interface is for me. You think I want just anyone to be able to use it? The web app will be plenty for them.”
“Good. I’m relieved to see this in action at last.”
Shiraishi looked at Chance as she finally rose to her feet beside him. “Relieved?”
“There were concerns that you’d try to monopolize the Cloud.”
Shiraishi snorted, his breath coming out in a puff of white. “Morons,” he said. “Where would the fun be in monopolizing an obstruction? My focus is the Great Leap.”
“You’ve done good.” Chance gave him a short round of applause totaling three claps. The latex covers on her fingers made a hard sound.
“Watch yourself. It was my idea.”
The Cloud of space tethers would cause a gradually increasing number of accidents made to look like collisions with space debris, whittling away at the enthusiasm for space development in the nations currently operating satellites. The world’s satellites had been launched into orbit at great expense; when they broke down, budget cuts were bound to follow.
If North Korea then announced that it was actually expanding its investment in space development, it would be able to attract the best scientists and engineers from around the world. The great powers that had lost their appetite for orbital engineering for fear of accidents would be left behind as North Korea and its allies, including Iran, Pakistan, a few small African countries, and some movements not even recognized as nations yet, took the lead in space development. This was the Great Leap.
The first time Chance had heard this plan, she’d laughed at the idea that engineers would betray their home countries so easily. But learning that China had been able to poach dozens of Japanese engineers every year to work on the Tiangong-2 space station had changed her mind.
Chance packed Shiraishi’s luggage into her Boston bag. It all fit except for the blueprint case.
“Will you be carrying this?” she asked, holding the case out to him. On it she saw white lettering that read great leap for the rest of the world.
Shiraishi’s arm shot out and seized the case from her hands. He then cradled it against his chest with arms folded.
“There’s nothing in here you’d be able to understand,” he said. “You’d have to be Dr. Jahanshah himself. When are you going to bring him to meet me?”
“Not until the Great Leap is under way.”
“All right, all right. I’ll get back to my work on the app.”
Chance noticed Shiraishi’s left hand, the arm that held the case, tightly gripping the tattoo of the Tsiolkovsky equation on his right arm.
Seshambe, 25 Azar 1399, 23:56 +0330 (2020-12-15T20:26 GMT)
Tehran Institute of Technology, Tehran
This one? No, this isn’t it … That’s the one. That one hanging over there.
Jamshed pushed a creaking chair out of the way and pulled a yellow sheet of paper illuminated by a naked lightbulb closer. The sheet of paper was clipped to a piece of string, which hung in turn from the ladder wiring that wound across the ceiling. Diagrams and equations were scrawled across the sheet of paper in marker. On his desk sat the scientific calculator with the printing on its buttons worn away.
Paper, pen, and calculator: the only computer he had. He was fortunate to have plenty of paper, at least. Alef had given Jamshed the posters from the Azadi Interanet campaign he was planning.
At night the lab felt deserted. Perhaps because the Internet had been completely blocked for two days now, he didn’t even see any of the students who usually came in to use the computers at night. No doubt they would all be attending Alef’s demonstration tomorrow.
Jamshed yanked the paper out of its clip, placed it on the table, and drew a coordinate system on it.
“Unbelievable … It really is my exact design.”
The connected coordinates that made up the observational data for the unknown objects reported by Meteor News were a perfect match with the principles of propulsion at work in Jamshed’s space tether design. The randomly moving ballast implemented to fight tidal forces had been Jamshed’s own idea. The wobbles in the observational data followed the equations in Jamshed’s paper precisely.
While making his calculations, Jamshed had discovered a few elementary mistakes in his paper. Presumably whoever had stolen the paper had noticed these and was using an amended model.
“So Hamed didn’t even read it …” Jamshed sighed, recalling the sight of Professor Hamed, his advisor at the time, glancing at his paper with an obvious lack of interest. That jerk. He’d written in his name as lead author without even reading the thing properly. How stupid did you have to be to read about a spacecraft that could generate electricity and maintain its orbit without fuel and just dismiss it with a shrug?
Jamshed clipped the paper back onto the string and placed a new sheet of paper on his desk. He pulled the cap off his marker and tried to draw a line of moment, but the pen was dry.
“Already?” Jamshed threw the pen onto the floor. It wasn’t pens that he needed. It was someone to talk to.
Kazumi from Meteor News. He’d reacted to the tether-propulsion system, even to the words “space tether.” He’d be hundreds of times more useful than Hamed had been. Jamshed wondered what Kazumi had thought of the half of the paper that he had managed to send. He longed to talk to him about it.
Whoever it was who’d actually engineered the space tethers would do, too. Sure, they might have stolen his paper, but there was so much Jamshed wanted to ask them. How had they approached the problems of bringing his ideas to life? What had they used to get the devices into orbit? How were they stabilizing their rotation?
And then there was the problem of base stations, which Jamshed had ultimately been unable to overcome. Three hundred fifty kilometers sounded pretty high up, but compared to the size of the Earth, it was barely off the ground. A space tether in LEO was only visible from the surface within a circular area of about a two thousand–kilometer radius. To communicate with an orbiting space tether, you would need multiple bases all over the Earth. If a tether was passing over Tehran, only a few other nearby countries would have the necessary line of sight to communicate with it. To bases on the other side of the world in North Korea or the US, it would be invisible.
He had mentioned this in his paper as a future challenge. If you were going to build bases around the world to receive telemetry from the space tethers and send back new target orbits, ideally you would need at least a few dozen locations—and if you wanted real-time control, more like a few hundred … no, a few thousand. How had the mystery space tether engineer gotten around this problem?
“Maybe you don’t really need that many bases.”
Deciding to recalculate the necessary number of antennas, Jamshed stood up to borrow a pen from a student’s desk. Then there was a noise in the corridor outside.
“What’s that?”
He heard several voices in conversation and the sound of something heavy and metallic being dragged across the floor. Had the students come to collect some materials for their barricades?
“Don’t you know what time it is?” Jamshed pulled open the door to see three people passing by, illuminated by the light that spilled from his laboratory. They looked at him, clearly surprised. All three had green scarves wrapped around the lower halves of their faces and Kalashnikovs slung casually from their shoulders.
“Sorry,” the man at the head of the three apologized in thickly accented Persian. “We didn’t think anyone was here.”
They were dragging a metal case painted olive. The other two men apologized in turn, and then the three of them hoisted the heavy-looking case off the ground and disappeared into the darkness.
Members of your demonstration, Alef? With Kalashnikovs . . . ? No. Something was wrong here. That rectangular case, Jamshed realized, contained a surface-to-air missile launcher that had been provided to the institute to shoot down drones. But wasn’t tomorrow supposed to be a nonviolent protest?
“Alef … What are you planning?”
Tue, 15 Dec 2020, 14:03 -700 (2020-12-15T21:03 GMT)
Peterson Air Force Base
After finishing his ground-run test, Captain Ricky McGillis waited for Second Lieutenant Madu Abbot to disembark from her F-22 Raptor before returning with her to the briefing room.
“This pressure suit feels pretty good,” said Ricky.
“Make up your mind, would you?” said Madu. “I thought you were complaining that it smelled like rubber or something.”
“It’s the power of Gore-Tex, you know? Keeps you from getting all hot and sweaty. Wish we could have it in our regular pilot suits too.” Ricky opened the door and let Madu into the locker room ahead of him. “That clear helmet is great too,” he continued. “Nice to be able to move your head freely—whoops!”