by Mayer, Bob
The East Coast of England, 999 AD. 29 October
They hit the beach in a thick fog.
An unnatural one as Corpse-Loddin had warned them.
Literally hit the beach. Ragnarok knew when they were getting close to shore. They all did. They heard the sound of the surf pounding on the shore, but it came up fast, appearing less than fifty feet in front of them, and then they were scraping up onto the pebbly beach.
Roland was impressed as the Vikings embarked tactically. Five bowmen stood in the prow of the ship, arrows notched. A dozen swordsmen slid over the side and ran in three groups of four into the fog, covering front and both flanks, similar to the way a danger area was crossed in Ranger School.
Ragnarok waited, Roland at his side.
Finally, one man from each of the three groups appeared, waving an all clear.
“Which way is the target?” Roland asked.
Ragnarok pointed to the right. “I would have preferred to go along the shore, but in this fog we could get hung up on a sand bar offshore. Then we would simply be a pile of shit for the English pigs to descend upon like flies. It has happened.”
“And the Standing Stones?” Tam Nok asked.
“I know of no Standing Stones.” Ragnarok was obviously irritated. “Loddin said they were over the dunes.”
“The berserkers?” Roland was more interested in the warriors.
“Their ship will be on the beach wherever they landed,” Ragnarok said. “Unless they put it back out to the sea for security.” He’d gone from irritation to frustration. “If either of you would tell me what we must do, I can make a plan.”
Tam Nok held up a hand while she closed her eyes. As the rest of Ragnarok’s crew deployed, other than a handful to guard the ship, she turned slowly in a complete circle. She took a deep breath, and then opened her eyes. “The stones are there.” She pointed inland, to the right.
“The monastery is there,” Ragnarok countered, pointing inland but farther to the right. “That’s where you told me we were to go. The men expect to plunder it.”
“The stones first,” Tam Nok said.
Ragnarok turned to Hrolf the Slayer. He signaled in the direction Tam Nok had indicated. Without hesitation, Hrolf issued orders and the party moved out.
Roland walked next to Ragnarok. Tam Nok at first walked behind them, but then she came up and walked at Roland’s side.
“Do you have a weapon?” Roland asked, always the practical one.
Tam Nok tapped the side of her head. “Yes.” She leaned closer. “And I have a dagger inside my robe.”
Roland grunted, a response he’d learned a long time ago to give when he had no clue what to say.
He missed Neeley.
He missed Nada.
He missed his team.
Because even Roland sensed something wonky about Ragnarok. He glanced at Tam Nok and she looked back, inscrutable.
The fog was troublesome because it indicated trouble was nearby.
The Vikings and company clambered up through the dunes.
Right into the ambush set up by a contingent of berserkers.
Roland caught a glimpse of someone charging in from the right. He wheeled, sword at the ready, and caught a naked man wielding an axe on the point of his blade. Roland twisted the blade hard and instead of taking the impact of the charging berserker, he ripped through the man’s spine and cut him in half, letting both parts fall to the ground and stepping over him to take on the wave of attackers that followed.
“Behind me,” he yelled at Tam Nok as he clashed swords with a berserker wearing just a wolf-skin tunic. As the two were in stalemate for a moment, sword to sword, Roland took advantage of his opponent’s obvious weak spot and kicked him in the scrotum.
Even a berserker could feel that.
As the man doubled over in pain, Roland decapitated him with one powerful stroke.
It was a good sword.
The ambush was over as quickly as it had started. The dozen berserkers were dead except for one who ran away into the mist. Two of Ragnarok’s men were dead, one wounded.
Tam Nok went to the injured man to tend to the wound, but Ragnarok beat her to him and voided her mission by slitting the man’s throat.
“We don’t have time for wounded,” Ragnarok said. “And they don’t survive the journey back.”
Tam Nok stared at him without expression. “Why would they attack like that?”
“I told you,” Ragnarok said. “Berserkers make no sense. Under a standard, when they are paid, they follow some order. But on their own, when rogue, they are unpredictable.”
But Roland knew there was a very valid military reason for such an attack if one was willing to take the losses: the lone survivor who’d run now knew the strength and capabilities of the Viking war party.
They moved through the dunes, wrapped in the unearthly mist.
Suddenly a tall stone, about two meters high, appeared out of the fog. And then others, each stone roughly shaped, placed in a circle. In the center was a three-meter-high stone, but it was angled almost forty-five degrees, pointing.
Ragnarok halted. “I sense something.”
“I do too,” Roland said. Not the feeling of unease that the mist was giving off, but something ancient and powerful.
Tam Nok was almost in a trance. “These are from the original people. Our ancestors. Who sailed the oceans in vessels we can only imagine. When there was a great land in the middle of the great sea to the south and west of here.”
“I have heard of such a land,” Ragnarok said. “Green Land. It is said—”
Tam Nok cut him off. “This land no longer exists. It was destroyed. But the survivors spread out across the Earth.” She pointed. “These stones were placed here by those survivors.” She walked forward, into the circle, until she was standing underneath the angled stone. She closed her eyes and remained perfectly still.
There was grumbling among the Vikings, who had not made this journey to stare at stones set in the ground.
“My men want to attack the monastery,” Ragnarok said.
Roland shook his head. “We have a mission.”
“And you need my men to do it,” Ragnarok reminded him. “And the rest of the berserkers are around here somewhere. They did not come here for stones either. They are probably pillaging the monastery while she does . . . whatever it is she is doing.”
“This is more important than that,” Roland said. “You’ve been paid.”
Ragnarok spit. “Not enough. I am taking my men. You can meet us at the monastery.”
With that he signaled and the Vikings disappeared into the mist, heading north, leaving Roland alone with Tam Nok.
Los Angeles, California, 1969. 29 October
“What we’re working on,” the young man at the lectern said to the sparse crowd in the hall, “is a way to transmit data over a computer network. In basic terms, to enable different computers in different locations to speak to each other electronically.”
Behind him, via overhead projector, was a very complex transparency with a bunch of boxes, lines drawn, and words too small for anyone to read.
A typical presentation by a scientist, Scout thought.
She was dressed in an amazing soft suede leather halter top (courtesy of a purchase from Reefer Madness dude, who’d invited her to bong and bang, in that order, which she’d politely declined). She had low-riding jeans, held up by the Luke belt. She even had a Snoopy patch stitched on the bottom of the bells on her jeans. It would be considered a Halloween outfit in her time, but it was high fashion for 1969 for California. The shoes were platforms, which wouldn’t seem so out of date in Scout’s time, but she’d had a hard time walking across campus wearing them, since high heels had never made it into her hair-dying, rebellious attire growing up. Seems shoes didn’t change that much. High and hard to walk in seemed to be a torture women inflicted on themselves no matter what the year. They’d be hard to run in, and she wondered if that was the purp
ose?
The lecturer plowed on, handling objections before they were raised. “While it is funded by the Department of Defense’s ARPANET, which stands for Advanced Research Projects Agency Network, its application goes far beyond the military.”
“Working for the man,” someone called out two seats to the right of Scout, but was ignored.
Luke was still in the flat thong sandals but he’d changed into a billowy peasant shirt with intricate embroidered flowers. Not anything any guy would be caught in now or then she thought, but he pulled it off. She was thinking Jerry Seinfeld and puffy shirt, but that was a ways off in the future. She could smell that he’d washed his hair. Long flowing locks a bit frizzed from the lack of product or blow dryer. Scout decided most of her modern economy was comprised of grooming products. He was cleanly shaven because there was no razor that did half a shave, so it was either grizzly or smooth. Yep, men had few options in this time. He’d doused himself with something full of musk and it turned her stomach a bit. Musk and a feminine shirt—strange times indeed.
The lecturer, who’d introduced himself as Chuck Keane, shrugged. “The man has the funds for science to advance.”
“And to build bombs,” the same heckler called out, “that kill babies.”
“This isn’t a political debate,” Keane said. “This is science. And the future. And the rumor that we’re designing a network to survive a nuclear attack is flat-out wrong. The goal is to get people at distant sites to be able to work together on their research via their computers. And the reality is that ARPANET has been funding almost fifty percent of all computer science in the world.
“The problem right now is that different computers are incompatible and can’t talk to each other. What we’re building, have built, is a switch that goes between the computers. So each computer only has to be able to talk to the switch, not every other different computer.”
They should have sent Ivar here, Scout thought. Or Doc. Why me?
“This all actually started about four years ago.” Keane glanced at the heckler, before continuing. “A man named Bob Taylor, who worked for the Advanced Research Projects Agency, was in his office and he had three computer terminals. Three because he had to be able to communicate with three other remote computers. So to send the same message, he had to go to each machine and type in the same message. Which is certainly not efficient. He envisioned a network that would allow him to do that only once. That would connect all different computers.”
Keane was getting into it now, even though his scant audience seemed rather bored. Scout supposed the students in the audience were here because their professor had ordered them to be. None were taking notes and most were barely paying attention.
“Taylor reached out to us here at UCLA. Interestingly, he also put out a contract to major corporations, such as IBM and ATT, inviting them to bid on it. None of them did.”
“Why not?” Scout asked.
Keane seemed surprised anyone was interested, much less a woman. For the first time Scout realized she was the only female in the room. “Uh, well, they think the way to go is to build bigger and better mainframes. Where each computer can do all the work needed by itself with no need to communicate with another machine. Plus,” he added, “I’ve seen memorandums from them back to Taylor, where they told him he was wasting his time. That this network couldn’t be done.” He paused to see if she had another question. When she didn’t, he went on.
“We call the switch an IMP, or Information Message Processor. We built the first switch here at UCLA and the second one is at SRI—Stanford Research Institute. This all sounds simple, but inventing the IMP was just a start. We then had to build our own hardware to connect the IMP to the computer system. Just as they had to do at Stanford. I predict that’s something that will get standardized in the future, where you can just plug a computer into it, but right now, well, we’re doing what we can.”
Scout thought of her laptop, iPad, and cell phone and realized she had no clue how they worked. Or how the technology that ran them had been developed. And then it hit her. She truly was at the genesis of a communication and technology revolution that was going to change the world. And no one other than this guy at the lectern seemed to have any clue about what was to come.
“How big is this IMP?” Scout asked.
“Uh, well, about the size of two big gym lockers.”
Scout glanced to her right at Luke. He caught the glance, smiled, and put his hand on her thigh. Scout resisted the temptation to pull out the stiletto she’d also purchased and stab him in the arm with it.
“You understand what this geek is saying?” Scout whispered to him.
“Not a clue.”
She looked back at Keane. “Why tonight? Why are you testing it tonight?”
Keane shrugged. “It’s ready.” He looked down at his notes. “And it’s not just hardware. We also had to develop software that was compatible with our operating system in order to be able to transmit data. So far, all I’ve been able to do is transmit information back and forth to myself but—”
“Brilliant!” the heckler called out.
Done with the interruptions, Scout leaned across the empty seat separating her from the loud mouth. She hissed: “Shut up or I will rip your throat out.”
The heckler was startled. He stared at her, started to say something, and then saw the look in her eyes and slumped down a little lower in his seat.
“—but now, with Stanford coming online, we can test it.” Keane stumbled to a halt. “Uh . . . any questions?”
“Okay,” one of the other dozen people in the room spoke up. “So you got a computer here. And a computer at Stanford. If it works, how many other computers can your system talk to?”
“Uh. Well. Just those two.”
“Seriously?” the guy rolled his eyes. “How big is your computer?”
“You mean size-size or memory?” Keane asked.
“Both.”
“The mainframe takes up an entire room downstairs and we need air conditioners running full-time when it’s on. It’s got a huge memory, almost four megabytes.”
Scout tried to process that. Her iPhone had 64 gigabytes. She tried to do the math, once more thinking this was much more up Doc’s alley. That meant her iPhone had sixteen thousand times the memory capacity of their room-sized computer. She guessed they had to start somewhere.
The heckler rallied some courage and asked a question, not looking at Scout. “How much does this computer cost?”
“Four million dollars,” Keane replied.
A bit more than her iPhone had set her back.
“What a waste,” the heckler said over his shoulder as he scurried out of the room and away from the Nightstalker.
No one else had a question and the sparse crowd drifted out. Keane disappeared through a door next to the lectern, leaving Scout sitting with Luke.
“So what’s the plan?” Luke asked. “Think the bad guys are going to whack him?”
“How long have you been in the Patrol?” Scout asked.
“They recruited me a couple of years ago,” Luke said.
“This your first mission?”
“Yeah.”
“This is your time,” Scout said. “Any suggestions? Have you picked up anything strange happening around here?”
“Other than your pretty face showing up?” Luke saw that his attempt at charm fell flat and that Scout was shifting into another mode, one he hadn’t seen yet. He shifted accordingly. “I’ve run sweeps through this building daily. Making sure it hasn’t been rigged with a bomb or poison gas; mainly checking for anything out of the ordinary. I think if someone wants to block this guy Keane from doing this thing tonight, they either need to destroy the computer room or him, but I don’t think the latter is the strongest possibility.”
“Why not?”
“Because he’s just a grad student. The professor who runs the lab will still be around as well as other grad students. Keane’s a cog that ca
n easily be replaced. The hardware, not so easily.”
“So we need to hang around here and make sure no one messes with the hardware,” Scout said.
“Bummer,” Luke said. “There’s a great party I wanted to take you to. We can still make it if this guy does his thing. Do you know what time he sends his message or whatever it is he’s going to do?”
Scout stared at him. She wondered if this was how she’d appeared to the Nightstalkers when they first met her. Scattered and all over the place.
“They try for the first time at twenty-one thirty.”
“Huh?”
“Nine thirty. They get two letters out and the computer at Stanford crashes. They reboot up there, then the first complete message is sent at twenty”—she paused—“ten thirty tonight.”
“Do you think the problem might occur up at Stanford rather than here?” Luke asked, indicating he wasn’t totally clueless. “Maybe we’re in the wrong place?”
“We’re in the right place,” Scout said.
“How do you know?”
“Because I’m here.”
Luke laughed and suddenly he was attractive to Scout again. “Then I guess we just hang around and make sure nothing bad happens here until that message is sent. If it’s so important, I really don’t see it. Although if this came out of the Pentagon, I don’t care what that guy says, the military is going to weaponize it.”
“Let’s check the building,” Scout said. “Thoroughly.” She wished Mac were here. He’d know how to really look for a bomb. “Where’s the lab?”
“I’ll take us there.” Luke led the way.
The building was a labyrinth, but as he had done in the library, Luke led her without hesitation. He stopped outside a door. “In there.”
“There’s no security in this building at all?” Scout asked.
“Nope.”
Think like Mac. And remember your explosives training, Scout thought. “Does this have an outside wall?”
“Sure.”
“Okay let’s check above and below, just in case someone wants to use a shaped charge, then outside to make sure no one is targeting the outside.”
“‘Shaped charge’?” Luke asked as he led her to the staircase.