Orbital Cloud

  “Perfume,” she said. “Probably essential oils in microcapsules designed to melt slowly from the heat. Our sense of hearing is surprisingly malleable. If a gullible audiophile comes home bursting with expectation after spending $300 on one of these, they aren’t going to hear the same thing as the day before. A little perfume helps make an impression. I’m not surprised these things were popular.”

  Chris tossed the cable aside and reached for her coffee cup again.

  Presumably the perfume idea had been Shiraishi’s, just like the strategy of making a hit product to spread the Trojan. Neither would occur to the average thinker. But by weaving together scraps of information, this team would uncover all of his schemes. This was intelligence work in its ideal form.

  Perhaps taking a cue from the report Bruce had sent in, headquarters had dubbed them “Team Seattle” and recognized them as an official CIA base of operations. They had even arranged to have all of the communications between the space tethers and the base stations bounced to Akari’s cluster of Raspberry Pis. The movement of the space tethers would now be communicated to Team Seattle in real time. And they knew where the base stations were, too.

  They could win this. Chris was full of confidence. All they had to do now was find that man whose twisted ideas had given the CIA the runaround.

  “Just you wait, Ageha Shiraishi …”

  “Uncle Ageha?” Akari stared at Chris, returning the espresso cup she was holding to the table. She frowned, and her lips quivered.

  Chris realized her mistake. She had revealed too much.

  Akari gritted her teeth and glared at Chris. “Hey,” she said. “Do you think Uncle Ageha did all this?”

  Bruce was glaring at Chris too. Just then, a notification appeared on a monitor.

  China Mobility Wi-Fi activation.

  Washington - Seattle - Pier 37

  A smartphone using a China Mobility SIM card had connected to one of the honeypots Kazumi and Daryl had planted the previous day. The location matched D-Fi’s warehouse.

  “You’re wrong!” Akari shouted. “There’s no way that’s true!” She dashed out of the room.

  After a moment of surprise, Kazumi ran after her. “Akari!” he cried.

  He was closely followed by Daryl, who said, “Meet you at the car!”

  Once they were out in the hall, Chris heard Kazumi shout “The stairs!” over the heavy sound of the fire doors opening.

  “I blew it,” Chris said, left alone in the room with Bruce.

  “Save it for later, would you?” Bruce said. “I’m going after her too. She’ll be on a bike at best—I can cut her off.” He pulled his Walther PPS from his ankle holster and checked the loaded chamber indicator on the slide before wedging the weapon into his belt at the small of his back. “I’ll need more than this peashooter. Better make a stop along the way.”

  “Where?”

  “The coast guard just beyond Pier 37. We need M4s and ammunition. I’ll also be borrowing someone with on-the-ground army experience, so please make the necessary preparations.”

  Wed, 16 Dec 2020, 11:02 -0800 (2020-12-11T19:02 GMT)

  Pier 37 Warehouse, Seattle

  Chance snapped the SIM card free of its credit card–sized plastic frame and handed it to Shiraishi.

  “Change yours, too,” she said.

  “It’s only Wednesday,” Shiraishi replied.

  “Lot of network access last week. Today’s the move, too—perfect timing. We’ll burn the old one here.”

  Chance pointed at the zinc box in the corner of the room, a so-called incineration box. It contained a powdered mixture of iron oxide and aluminum along with some thermite, designed to burn at a high temperature. They would use gasoline on the warehouse itself, but anything they wanted to eliminate completely would go into the box.

  Shiraishi changed his SIM card and entered the numbers Chance read out. As the SIM activated, the “No service” message was replaced by a 4G signal indicator and a Wi-Fi connection was established.

  “Huh?” he said.

  Wi-Fi? Shiraishi checked the log in the notifications center. The device was connected to a hotspot run by “China Mobilility Services.”

  “Hey, show me your phone,” he said.

  Chance’s smartphone was connected to the same hotspot as his. Shiraishi pulled the torn-up card out of the incineration box and turned it over. “China Mobility Services” was on the list of free Wi-Fi spots that the card would connect to automatically. But why would China Mobility offer Wi-Fi service in Seattle?

  Shiraishi brought up a UNIX terminal and checked the network they were connected to. It was running from a Raspberry Pi device, a seventy-dollar kit computer. No one would offer commercial service through something like that.

  They’d been set up.

  “Turn off Wi-Fi,” he said.

  “What’s wrong?” Chance said

  “Someone set a trap for us. They know we’re here now.”

  Chance looked up from her smartphone, frowning.

  Shiraishi explained that one of the services their roaming cards were designed to connect to upon activation was being spoofed.

  “NORAD … ? No, they couldn’t pull off something like this. The CIA?”

  “I don’t know. Although I wouldn’t expect the CIA to use a cheap gadget like a Raspberry Pi.”

  Chance opened her right hand and gazed down at it. “Can the mission still be salvaged, I wonder?”

  She took hold of her little finger and wrenched the resin cover off. Then she repeated the operation for her ring finger. In the places where her flesh had been ground away, the bones of her fingers showed palely through the thin layer of skin that clung to them.

  “Let me just say this,” she said, producing an oddly shaped pistol from her handbag. Her bone-thin fingers fit snugly into the custom-molded resin grip. A quick motion of her other hand saw the magazine slide partway out. Chance checked it, pushed it back into place, and then pulled the slide. The first round was in the chamber. A bright-red beam of light stretched from underneath the barrel into the room. Chance shone the laser sight onto Shiraishi’s chest.

  “I will protect you right down to the wire,” she said. “But if you are about to fall into the hands of the US government, I will not hesitate.”

  Chance crammed the smooth pistol, now merged with her right hand, into her coat pocket. “You follow my orders.”

  Shiraishi nodded.

  Chance reached into her bag again and pulled out a few passports, then tossed the bag into the incineration box. She turned as if remembering something. “Did you finish preparing for the Cloud handover?”

  “Not yet. I need until tomorrow.”

  Give up control of the Cloud in a situation like this? If he did that, this woman would kill him without blinking, long before he was “about to fall into the hands of the US government.” Right now, his only choice was to do exactly what she told him to.

  Wed, 16 Dec 2020, 13:03 -0700 (2020-12-16T20:03 GMT)

  Rocky Mountain Airspace

  The roar that rattled Ricky’s transparent helmet came in through the headset that was supposed to be soundproofed and hit his ears like thunder. Orders from Control came thick and fast.

  “Shooting Star, go to maximum thrust.”

  “Roger,” Ricky said.

  Carefully but promptly, Ricky pushed the throttle forward. Through the thick gloves of his pressure suit, he felt the faint click that told him where to stop. Pushing the throttle farther than this would engage the afterburner and leave him short of fuel before the mission was over. The trembling F-15 didn’t move an inch. It was still bound to the runway by its own brakes and wires.

  “Maximum thrust confirmed,” Ricky said.

  “Go!”

  A slight jolt. The wires had been cut with incendiary charges. The thrust of the F-15 sl
ammed Ricky’s back against the ejector seat. In anticipation of recoil throwing him forward, Ricky tried to push back with his feet planted firmly on the floor, but the seat just kept on pressing into his back.

  The view from the canopy flew past with terrifying speed. Passing the four hundred–foot marker, Ricky pulled lightly at the control stick. The vibration transmitted up from the ground vanished. He was airborne. But he could not raise the fighter’s nose. He had to pass Mach 0.6 horizontally first. That was the liftoff protocol for challenging the altitude record.

  The headrest pressed against his head. His eyeballs wouldn’t stay in place. Ricky let out an internal whoop of joy. The power of the F-15!

  The custom airspeed indicator recorded Mach 0.65. A green LED lit up.

  Ricky slowly pulled the control stick toward him. The plan was for him to perform half an inside loop at 2.5 G and then go straight up to thirty thousand feet. The mountain range at the edge of his vision shrank suddenly, and he saw the sky ahead of him. “Above” and “below” swapped places in an instant.

  He saw the ground above his head. Returning the control stick to the center, he slowly pushed it to the left to roll once, completing an irregular Immelmann turn. He was gradually getting used to the feel of the pressure suit’s gloves.

  “Altitude thirty thousand feet, heading west,” Ricky said, using pedal and control stick to turn the fighter’s nose westward. He saw a pitch-black shadow to the right of the fighter. It was Madu’s F-22. She was maintaining her relative position precisely, the underside of her plane with its observation pod visible.

  “Mission leader, do you copy?” came her voice over the radio. “Looked pretty good there, Ricky.”

  “This is Control,” crackled the radio next. “Thanks to Madu, we’ll be putting our feet up and watching the show from here on out. Go for it.”

  Ricky turned his head from side to side, taking in the white-capped Rockies at the foot of the blue sky. The transparent helmet offered a fantastic panorama. But he wasn’t entirely happy with his high-altitude pressure suit.

  “Control, I’m freezing up here!” he yelled into the mic. “My fingers are going numb.” The suit’s heater wasn’t switching on. The AC unit had been removed from the cockpit, too. He didn’t want to think what the temperature must be.

  “This is Gehner. The heater is active. Go ahead and adjust its output. Over.”

  “I can do that? Where?”

  “Behind your head. Oh, you can’t reach?”

  Ricky groaned. What idiot had designed this suit? Now that the pressure in the cockpit had dropped, the suit was so overinflated he could hardly bend his arms.

  “AC malfunction? Sounds rough.” Madu’s cool tones came through clearly.

  “Can it. Hey, what am I supposed to do?”

  “We value your feedback,” Control said drily. “Expect improvements in future.”

  Sure—they weren’t the ones getting flash frozen. Confirming that the autopilot was on, Ricky pulled his digits in from the fingers of his inflated glove. He made a fist to let the blood flow through them. Okay. That should do it.

  “Mission Leader, do you see the ISS straight ahead?” asked Control.

  “The space station? Hold on. I see something like a dot …” Ricky squinted. There, in the dark-blue sky, was a sharp point of shining light. “That’s it! Visible to the naked eye, huh?”

  According to what he’d picked up at the briefing, the ISS’s orbital altitude was 1.3 million feet. That made it the farthest man-made object Ricky had ever seen unaided. Even at the F-15’s operational altitude, the horizon was only 150 miles—a million feet—away, and you couldn’t see an aircraft at that distance with the naked eye anyway. The atmosphere was too thick; it misted up the view.

  “You didn’t know?” Control said. “In the evening you can even see it from the ground. There’s six people on that thing. As we get higher, the orbital hotel will enter our field of view. Judy and Ronnie Smark are on board that one.”

  Ricky squinted at the ISS. He knew that it should have two great solar panels spread wide, but it was so far away that all he could see was a dot. He was finally getting an intuitive grasp of their mission.

  “Ten seconds left till seventy-degree climb,” came the voice from Control. “Ready afterburner.”

  “Good luck,” came Madu’s cool voice again. She needed no such words of encouragement herself. She was flying the latest fighter model, with supercruise capabilities that let it break the sound barrier without any afterburner at all.

  “Readying afterburner,” Ricky said. With his left hand, he pulled the throttle back half an inch, then carefully began to push it forward again. He was waiting to feel the click through the pressure suit’s thick glove that signaled military power, maximum thrust without afterburner. This would be his second ignition, the first one coming when he had broken the sound barrier. From here they would climb straight up to an altitude of seventy thousand feet.

  “How much colder is it gonna get?” Ricky felt the faint click from the throttle. His hand stopped.

  “You’re a mammal,” said Control. “Generate your own heat. And—go!”

  “Engaging afterburner,” Ricky said. He pushed the throttle forward as far as it would go. An instant later, the fighter shook violently. Jet fuel was injected into the nozzles burning at high temperature.

  “Acceleration as expected,” said Control. “Don’t black out now. Begin climb.”

  Ricky put his warmed-up fingers back into the fingers of his glove, switched autopilot off, and pulled the control stick toward him. In a more contemporary aircraft like the F-22 flying alongside him, the tail assembly vibrating like a bee’s wings would cancel out the shaking of his hand, but this model from the nineties was sensitivity itself.

  Pitch-black sky spread out before his eyes. There was hardly any atmosphere above him. This was space.

  “Target coming from below, twelve o’clock. Mission Leader, you see the stars?”

  “Nope. The target’s below?”

  Ricky carefully moved his head to the side and peered down through the gap in the instrument panel. Right about where pitch-black became tinged with blue, he saw two white dots that looked the same as the ISS. The objective.

  “I see them. The hotel and the Rod from God. Both moving pretty fast, aren’t they?” The two dots rose higher as he watched.

  And then Ricky saw something impossible. He put his finger under a corner of the ultraviolet visor and peeled off the film. There in the pitch-black sky, which had been clear just a moment ago, was a faint strand of cloud.

  “Hey,” he said. “What’s that? Control, do you copy?”

  “What is it?

  “The Rod from God’s wrapped up in a cloud.”

  “Clouds don’t drift out of the atmosphere, Mission Leader.”

  “I see it too,” came Madu’s voice. “Really does look like a cloud.”

  “Observation craft, can you get it on camera?”

  Were they crazy? The two of them were climbing at Mach 2. The observation pod on the belly of the F-22 could only film what was under the fighter.

  “I’ll give it a try.”

  What was she doing? This was the stratosphere. She’d lose velocity. But before Ricky could object, the black shadow beside him began to move. Madu’s F-22 had pulled up farther and was losing airspeed rapidly. Twisting his head to see behind him, Ricky caught a glimpse of the F-22 with its belly pointed in the direction they were traveling. The woman was executing a Cobra, on a real mission, at this incredible altitude.

  Ricky focused his nerves on his control stick and maintained his course straight ahead. At some point the altimeter had reached 75,000 feet. This was the highest altitude a standard F-15 had ever reached. But the number didn’t even register for Ricky. The faint cloud of light around the Rod from God was connected all
the way to the Wyvern Orbital Hotel in a tattered string of glittering fragments. What the heck was it?

  “This is Control. Madu, we see it. A cloud. An orbital cloud!”

  “Watch this!” Ricky shouted into the mic. “Launching!”

  There was a faint jolt as something kicked into Ricky’s back. Unburdening itself of the ASM-140’s weight had allowed the F-15 to accelerate farther. A moment later, the F-15 was illuminated from straight below by a brilliant flash of light.

  Ignition.

  The newly independent ASM-140 flew off through the pitch-black sky in a straight line, trailing smoke behind it.

  Ricky watched the smoke stretch out like a living thing. At the edge of his field of vision, the altimeter showed eighty thousand feet.

  Wed, 16 Dec 2020, 12:08 -0800 (2020-12-16T20:08 GMT)

  Western Days Hotel

  Alone in the room, Chris watched the video projected on the whiteboard, sent direct from the Operation Seed Pod control center at NORAD’s Oregon site. The ASM-140’s first stage had just disengaged, and the second stage was beginning its acceleration.

  In geographical terms, the two pilots had flown over the Rockies and were now directly above the West Coast region and its swirling blizzard. Chris craned her neck and cast a glance at the display on the table, which showed two dots moving on a map of Seattle. One was Daryl and Kazumi, while the other was Bruce, who was trying to cut Akari off. Would they catch her? Alaskan Way, the road that ran along the waterfront directly to the piers, was closed due to the blizzard, but that was the route Akari would probably take on her mountain bike.

  Who had activated the new China Mobility SIM card in Pier 37—Shiraishi himself, or another operative based in Seattle? If Shiraishi was there in person, he had to have some kind of observer or guard with him. They would be armed. And there was no guarantee that their weapons would be limited to what the law permitted.

  “Talk about bad timing.” Chris moved her chair so that she could see the map and the Oregon operations center together. There was movement in the image on the whiteboard.