Threat vector

by Michael Dimercurio

  He smiled at her. "Just one objection." Her guard went up. "It's just that SG-1 has the same specific gravity as water, and water weighs a ton for every cubic meter. I'm guessing you'd put about fifty cubic meters of SG-1 under a cruise ship hull. And a dolphin can't haul one ton, much less fifty. He'd die before he pulled a bag of SG-1 liquid from the bottom to a ship. It's too much."

  "Maybe it's easier to show you than to tell you," Suhkhula said. "But I'm tired, and the virtual-reality-display rig is at my apartment. I worked this out after-hours, because there's something a little strange about me. I can work around the clock, but when I finally get tired, I have to go to bed immediately. I literally collapse. So I've taken to leaving the office when the sun goes down and continuing my work at home." She checked her watch. "It's eight now. If I order out, by the time we get to my place the food will be there. We'll eat dinner and have a glass of wine, and I'll show you the VR demonstration."

  "You have put a lot of thought into this," he said, his voice intentionally soft. "I am sorry I seemed skeptical back there. I am amazed and gratified. I think you are a genius." He dropped his eyes for a second, looking up to find her staring at him, a vulnerable look on her face.

  "We knew we'd have to do something like this after the last product stopped selling," she said, ignoring the compliment, but seeming embarrassed. "But the acoustic daylight sensors have put us at a standstill. And biologists and surgeons and animal behaviorists are not only expensive, but generally

  principled. They get annoyed at using animals for weapons research."

  "So do you." By that time Suhkhula had shut the door to the office and walked with Novskoyy down the hallway. She was so close her shoulder rubbed his arm as they walked to the elevator. As they entered the elevator, he stole a glance at her profile. Her hair framed her face, her cheekbones magnificent, her exotic Chinese bone structure making her face somewhat flat, but the effect was sexually enticing. Her arms were slim, her shoulders muscular, her breasts small but upturned, the swell of her hips smooth, the shape of her backside so achingly perfect that all he could think about was cupping her buttock in his hand. He realized he was almost panting in desire when he noticed her looking at him.

  "—egg rolls?"

  "Excuse me, Suhkhula?"

  "You seem distracted suddenly, Al."

  "I must admit to you, I've never really worked with a woman before. Never anyone as brilliant or articulate or beautiful as you. It is ... a difficult adjustment."

  She smiled, her face lighting up. "And you've been in prison for a dozen years. That's always been a sexual fantasy of mine, getting a man fresh out of a prison cell. Don't worry, Al. I'll take very good care of you."

  Alexi Novskoyy very nearly choked.

  bottom half, with a low overhead, forcing him to crouch down. Once inside, he was in darkness, compounded when the opening hatch rolled down. A voice came from above, amplified and deep, Suhk-hula's voice, but the circuitry making her sound like a god. "Put the headset on, Al. Then you'll be able to see."

  He reached out in the darkness and found a bar wrapped in padded leather. A headset hung on it, attached to a coiled cord. He strapped it on. Immediately he found himself suspended a thousand meters over a body of water, with sandy beaches on either side. He gasped in shock at the three-dimensional reality of it. A giggle from the sound system.

  "Realistic, isn't it?" she asked. "This is the choke point at the Gulf of Hormuz." The view lowered, the water coming closer until he was perhaps fifty meters over the strait. Below him was a detailed view of a gigantic ship, the wake looking as real as if captured on videodisk, the ship likewise, the detail depicted down to the rust spots on the handrails. "To your right is a VLCC, for very large crude carrier, a supertanker. This will be our target. Below you to your left is a cargo/utility ship at anchor, the one colored red. This belongs to da Vinci." The view continued to change as his point of view plunged under the water and moved toward the bottom of the red cargo vessel. As he looked up at it from underwater, he noticed that the hull had a square opening in it, and that there were waves within the opening illuminated by bright interior floodlights. A disturbance was going on in

  the interior of the cargo ship, a dark shape blocking the light.

  "Our guided dolphin is in the water here at our cargo vessel. Can you see him?"

  "I see him. He's got a line or a cable in his teeth."

  "There's a cable reel inside the hold of our cargo ship. The end of it is a polymer anchor with a plastic shock absorber."

  Novskoyy watched in fascination as the dolphin swam with the cable underwater to the underside of the heavily loaded deep-draft supertanker, the VLCC. His view seemed to follow the dolphin, as if he were swimming after it. The dolphin reached the supertanker, the simulation real all the way to the sight of the supertanker's huge brass screws rotating far aft, even the deep bass noise of them thrashing in the water. The dolphin came under the midsection of the tanker carrying the plastic anchor in its mouth, then maneuvered to the hull of the giant ship, attaching the cable. Once it checked that the cable was secure, the dolphin returned to the cargo ship, following the cable that had paid out from a reel in the square opening. The view followed the dolphin up to the cargo ship, where it took another cable and repeated the routine, swimming rapidly from the cargo ship to the VLCC, anchoring the cable, and returning.

  The dolphin then disappeared from view, and the hold of the cargo ship disgorged a large spherical bag that splashed into the water, then sank slowly.

  "That's a bag of SG-1 liquid explosive," Suhkhu-

  la's supernatural-sounding voice narrated. "The bag is propelled along the cable by a cable trolley."

  Novskoyy watched as one bag after another was moved to the supertanker.

  "And as you can see, the bags are all anchored to the underside of the tanker. Let's light it off. The catalyst is in a small canister attached to the cable trolley. It also contains the detonator. The unit is on a timer."

  The dolphin swam away, as if alarmed, while Novskoyy's three-dimensional view remained under the broad hull of the supertanker.

  "Let's shift to slow motion and key in the mode to color chemical indication."

  Novskoyy watched as the canister of catalyst was released, a brown dyelike liquid flowing like a stain in the bag, and the brown cloud caused the liquid around it to turn red. Novskoyy realized the red was not solid, but small particles of red dust. The brown faded, while the liquid in contact with what remained of the brown dye turned blue, until the bag was completely blue liquid suspending red dust particles.

  "Freeze frame. Here the red particles are elemental sodium metal grains. The blue represents hydrogen peroxide. Slow motion."

  The walls of the bag began to dissolve before Novskoyy's eyes, and as they did, a brilliant flash grew from the bag, exploding into a ten-meter-wide fireball, which expanded in slow motion, the sound around him mimicking an explosion in slow motion. His view was obscured by the explosion for a time, but when the whitish-orange fireball dissipated, the

  hull of the tanker was ripped open in a jagged hole reaching far up into the oil hold.

  "The simulation has made the oil invisible, or else the black leakage would prevent you from seeing the gash in the ship. Stop simulation. In real circumstances it is possible that the oil could catch on fire as well, if there is a partially filled hold with air inside. Or if the explosion ruptures the hull to the upper decks and admits air, the oil and air in the region of the fireball will definitely add to the power of the explosion."

  "Beautiful," was all Novskoyy could say, awe inflecting his voice.

  "We worked very hard on this," Suhkhula said.

  "You did a superb job. I am overwhelmed. By your work. And by you." Novskoyy held his breath. There was only silence. He felt a pain in his stomach as if he'd been punched, her silence a rejection. But when the images in the eggshell went dark and the door rolled up, Novskoyy blinked, first from the light from the flat, the
n from disbelief. Standing in front of him was Suhkhula.

  She was naked, looking up at him with eyes that seemed almost liquid, a slow smile coming to her lips, an instant passing before one came to his. He stepped close to her, picked her up, and carried her to the bed.

  the car gliding off to whisk me away to the da Vinci Maritime skyscraper, or so I guessed. When I sat back, a panel in the interior rolled open to reveal a fresh cup of espresso. I took it, mumbling, "Spas-iba," then remembering it was a computer I was talking to. As I finished, the car's door rolled open to reveal the elegant front entranceway to da Vinci Maritime.

  A young man waited by the door, greeting me with the same graciousness I'd experienced from the employees the day before, except today he seemed grim. I was reminded of the time I was arrested, the faces of the First Chief Directorate guards wearing the same dark expressions. The clerk led me to the elevator and asked me to follow him to a conference room.

  As the door to the conference room opened, several shouts reverberated off the marble walls of the corridor, some in English, some in Italian. I could hear Suhkhula's voice, but I could not make out her words. I walked in and saw the engineers and directors of da Vinci Maritime screaming at each other. Instinctively I ducked as a coffee cup sailed by my face, flying across the room and shattering on the cherry wood of the wall panels. At that, Suhkhula's voice rang out through the room, fury at top volume, her tone penetrating to the very marrow of my bones, and the noise stopped. I looked at her, but her expression held little more than recognition. There was no tenderness there, no acknowledgment of our time together the previous evening.

  "Good morning, Al," she said, her voice as impersonal as a hotel room. "You should be in on the

  headline for the day. Toricelli is dead." She looked at me as if the name would have some meaning.

  "Toricelli," I said, prompting her.

  "The program manager who was directing the chimp in the mammalian control lab yesterday."

  "What happened?"

  "The surgery was performed yesterday late afternoon to remove the control port from his brain. After surgery his brain swelled. Apparently it was catastrophic — his brain functions went flat. He was brain-dead. They disconnected him from the respirator. He breathed on his own for a while but then crashed. A few minutes later he was gone." At the last words her eyes filled up, but she didn't look away or hold her hands to her eyes or do any of a hundred gestures that most women would do while weeping, at least the women that I know about.

  I stood there and looked at her. I didn't want to give away my thoughts to the others in the conference room, or even to Suhkhula. Had it been a one-night stand for her? Did I mean nothing to her? I had to work with her for the next months as the undersea mammal systems project developed.

  "I am sorry to hear that, and I offer my condolences to you, to all of you here. This should not have happened, and we will investigate immediately. Suhkhula, does Rafael know?"

  "I informed him this morning. He's on his way. He said he wanted an immediate meeting with you. Meanwhile, I will show you to your office."

  Without another word, Suhkhula led me down the corridor to the elevator. She did not say a word as the cab climbed from the fortieth floor to the sev-

  enty-eighth. She led me to the end of the hallway approaching the corner of the building opposite her office in the "prow." A double door of mahogany came open as we approached it Inside was a plush outer office, a male secretary at a wide polished cherry table working at a pad computer. A second set of doors opened, leading to a room with plate-glass windows on two sides framing the building's corner. The view below was as spectacular as it was from Suhkhula's office. The furniture was stark and functional: a large conference table, a desk the size of a limousine, a row of television widescreens. The only gesture toward comfort was two deep chairs with a cherry table between them facing the windows.

  Still silent, Suhkhula went to a recessed sideboard and opened a panel that displayed several decanters and a row of glasses. She chose a bottle with a tan liquid in it and poured ten or fifteen cc's into one of the glasses, then drained it in a gulp. She repeated the action, draining a second, then motioned to me. I waved off the offer, amazed that someone could drink before eight in the morning. I looked over at her, and now she was crying openly, wiping tears from her eyes, her shoulders shaking. I went over to her and pulled her to me, and she seemed to surrender into my chest, becoming suddenly small, a crying child. I tried to soothe her with words, but she said nothing. Finally she sniffed, wiping her face with a tissue she'd produced from her purse.

  "I'm okay," she said. "But the program is obviously canceled."

  "So it would seem," was all I could think of to say. "Were you close to him?"

  She nodded. "I hired him, I trained him, I spent years with him. He was like a little brother to me. I can't believe he's dead."

  I held her for a long time, until the secretary walked in. "Mr. Rafael is here, sir. He wants to see you in the conference room."

  I broke away from Suhkhula, then returned to kiss her on the cheek, a new tear wetting my lower lip. "I am so sorry," I said, then turned and left.

  Rafael smiled in genuine pleasure as Alexi Nov-skoyy entered the room, his hand swooping in to meet Novskoyy's hand—a salesman's handshake— but the hand then pulling Novskoyy in close, the other hand wrapping around Novskoyy's back, Rafael pulling him into a bear hug.

  "Come, sit," Rafael said warmly. A large platter of pastries lay on the table, a gleaming coffee service next to it, two steaming cups of espresso at adjacent chairs.

  Novskoyy looked at Rafael, who had begun eating a pastry. Novskoyy took the opportunity to speak. "You heard about Toricelli."

  Rafael shrugged. "I heard."

  "From what I understand from Suhkhula, this is extremely bad news. Toricelli was a key designer of the systems for mammalian control. And if this disaster happens every time we unplug from mammal control, we will not have many volunteers to direct the dolphins."

  Rafael waved as he stuffed the last bite of the

  pastry into his mouth. "I know," he said. He wiped his hands and mouth on a napkin, then grabbed another pastry. "You should try these," he said, his mouth full. "They're the city's best. Maybe Europe's best, at least outside Paris. Mmmm."

  "So," Novskoyy said. "What do you think? The program would seem to have crashed."

  Something was up, Novskoyy realized. Rafael did not display the slightest sense of grief or shock, at either Toricelli's death or the end of the program.

  "Let me give you some pieces of information that up to now you have not had," Rafael said calmly. "Number one, Toricelli was a problem. We found out that he had spoken to a potential competitor of ours. Although nothing became of it, we later found out he was setting up his own consulting firm, exporting electronic information through an Internet connection. We had to get rid of him. It seemed most logical to do that when he was undergoing a delicate procedure like disconnection of the communication port. It is major surgery, after all. Brain surgery. Nothing to take lightly. Now, that's not to say it's unsafe. It's as safe as a ride in a baby carriage. But you know what the doctors say. Anything can happen during surgery. And last night, what happened was our way of firing an employee without integrity."

  The idea that Rafael would have a wayward employee killed did not shock Novskoyy. It was perhaps odd that this had happened in the West, but at home such thinking was routine. On more than one occasion he himself had been forced to worry about the integrity of the organization first and the

  life of an individual second. In a way, that Rafael had done this gave Novskoyy a strange sense of confidence. Rafael cared enough about the company to take care of a bad apple. It showed Rafael's commitment and sense of responsibility.

  Novskoyy sat back in his chair. "I understand. But Suhkhula—did she know about this?"

  "No, not at all. She and Toricelli were close. She was a mentor to him, grooming him to replace her
someday so that she could rise in the organization. And I don't fault her for this, but Suhkhula would not take the reality behind this news well. It is necessary to shield her from the more gritty aspects of running an organization such as this." Rafael paused to take a sip of the expresso. "Now it is your task to continue your test with the mammalian control technology. Do you think it can work?"

  Novskoyy stood, starting to talk as he paced the room near the windows. "Suhkhula has me convinced. I believe it will work against the oil tankers. Against warships at their high speeds, I have my doubts. And there's a problem I haven't brought before Suhkhula, and that is that submarines with anechoic tiles—stealth antisonar coatings—will not accept a cable suction device. And a dolphin would not be able to cut through the coating and return to attach the cable to the exact spot working against a submarine's high speed of advance."

  "So what are your thoughts?"

  "The original plan before Toricelli died was to test this on our test tramp steamer, which is pulling into Port Lauderdale, Florida. In the early morning of Sunday, July 1, the dolphin under test was going

  to attach SG-1 explosives to the test vessel, blow it up, and then try to do a test on the underhull of a visiting Royal Navy Astute-class submarine. We were going to see how this coating reacts to a cable suction device."