Fear the Future (The Fear Saga Book 3)

by Stephen Moss

  Madeline’s voice came back to him now as a whisper in the darkness.

  “Are we clear?”

  “We are, Madeline. Sorry, but I needed to hear it properly. I know we said we should talk as much as possible in the open, but …”

  “No need to explain, Amadeu. I know what you mean. Trust me, I know what you mean.”

  She did. It was not the first time she had felt spied upon in her life, and she did not relish living through it again. That she now had the help of friends as capable in this new world as Amadeu made it infinitely easier, no doubt about that. But that she was now hiding from her own, from the one who had been with her from the start, in India, all those years ago, that also made it so much harder, as well.

  For now it was not the Mobiliei satellites, but Neal himself that they feared. Neal and Ayala. Always listening. Always watching. In their very heads, or so it felt.

  “So,” said Amadeu, whispering in the blackness, “is it really a lost cause?”

  “No,” replied Madeline. “Moira definitely didn’t say that. She just doesn’t see how it can be done. She still has the highest possible faith in Birgit, but, well, that is what worries me.”

  “It does?”

  “Yes, it does. Because if even Moira, with all her knowledge, with all her ability, and the breadth of her experience in the field, and more than that, with the amount she respects, even idolizes, Birgit, if even she doesn’t see how it can be done …”

  Madeline let it hang out there for a second.

  “Did you tell Neal this yet?” said Amadeu.

  “Do I even have to tell him?”

  They both laughed now, but without humor. They had seen too many examples of Neal knowing too much about their work, more than they’d had the chance to share with him yet. And besides that, Amadeu’s other contacts had given him more conclusive evidence of surveillance. They were being watched, Amadeu knew that. Maybe everyone was being watched, who knew, but he did know for certain that he and his direct contacts were.

  Most notably the nexus of the group. The man who had started it all. The man whose tirades on the subject had become so vitriolic it had prompted Amadeu to create this very communications program, if only so he could have a place to tell the man to stop ranting, to save him from himself and stop drawing attention to something he was not alone in suspecting.

  Madeline spoke again after a brief pause. “No, I haven’t told Neal yet. Though, interestingly, he does not seem nearly as married to this line of research as we all are.”

  “You know, I sensed that too,” replied Amadeu. “You’d think, given the wall I have hit, that he would be more worried, that he would be pushing harder, both on Birgit and on me.”

  “Still no more progress on your end either, then,” said Madeline, as conciliatorily as she could.

  Amadeu did not flinch at the comment, so much as brace for the flinch he felt should come. It was a failure on his part, he knew that, but whether it was a failure to achieve his goal, or to accept the truth behind that failure, to accept the real cause of their inability to meaningfully exceed the Mobiliei pilot’s capabilities, that was something else.

  “I am afraid we continue to see diminishing returns, yes. We broke though one wall only to find a taller one beyond, one that I cannot seem to find a way over. We will, I feel confident, be faster than the Mobiliei. But unless something changes, it will be by such a minuscule margin as to make it almost imperceptible.”

  “And Neal knows this?”

  “He does,” said Amadeu.

  “And how did he take that?”

  Amadeu thought about it.

  “You know, it’s weird,” he said. “At the last Meeting of Representatives which I presented at, I am telling them my numbers, I am telling them the facts. I am trying to be positive, to be sure, but I am not sugarcoating it. Not by a long shot. We know the numbers of Skalms coming for us. We know the probabilities of damage from the coming missile-mine strike. We know what we will likely be facing once the real fighting begins. Given that, and the speed difference between our fleet and theirs at the point of closing, we knew what needed to be done on reaction times to give us a fighting chance.”

  “Of course, Amadeu. To say that message has gotten through would be an understatement. So how did Neal react to news of your … ongoing struggles?”

  Amadeu snorted. Ongoing struggles. But his discomfort with the greater topic at hand sobered him once more, and he replied, “Well, Neal nodded. He looked somber and he let the group throw some questions my way, I think it was that Uncovsky from Russia, and the Qatar representative, about me getting enough resources. Then … he just left it.”

  Now that Madeline thought about it, she had seen the feed. All Representative Meetings were broadcast internationally, and even got a shockingly large viewership, for political meetings, anyway. But then they typically moved with an impressive speed and purpose compared to the lolling indecisiveness of ordinary governing body debates.

  It was an unnatural speed, Madeline feared. A fear that had been the root of a brief conversation with Amadeu a year beforehand. A conversation that had seen her being brought to this black meeting place for the first time.

  “So why isn’t Neal reacting more strongly?” said Madeline.

  Amadeu did not know. Neal was not known for coyness. Neal was a reasonable enough man, sure, well, he had been back when they had started out, at least, but no one had ever accused him of being restrained, and certainly never gun-shy.

  “I’ll reach out to him,” Madeline said. “He asked me to update him on this anyway. For now, stay focused on the school. No matter what happens with Birgit or Neal, your work is still at the center of everything. Your progress, as hard as I know it is, is the fulcrum on which this turns. Anything you need …”

  He had heard it many times before. But he feared what he needed was a better raw material to work with. What he needed, he knew, was a cleaner subject.

  Madeline knew there were others in the little conspiracy of theirs. She knew that Jim Hacker had recruited more once Amadeu had showed him how to communicate without Neal or Ayala being able to track it, once Amadeu had given Neal’s chief of staff the means he needed to start a candid discussion on safe terms.

  But who they were and what they were doing, that Madeline was not fully privy to. She could not be. That was the nature of their conspiracy. A limited string of people, layer on layer of security.

  Amadeu was, for the most part, just an enabler. And Madeline was right, he did have another, vital role to play, a day-job to return to.

  “You’ll pass on to Jim what I’ve found out, and what I am going to do next?” said Madeline before leaving.

  “I will,” Amadeu replied, and she was gone.

  Chapter 35: Tidal Unity

  The nods came as Neal had hoped, acquiescence filling the room’s collective minds. There was a healthy amount of dissent as well. Germany, Poland, and Ukraine leading the way this time. Some strongly voiced opposition. And, for effect, some from himself as well. This, then, was a victory for the Chinese and Russians, and the ever-thorny bed they still shared.

  Though his opposition to the bill to make the new Representative Mind the permanent head of worldwide communications had been a falsehood, Neal did not have to fake the very real frustration that showed on his face as the voting was validated and the decision announced at last. Oh well, he thought. So he still had to placate two of the largest countries on earth. That was hardly unreasonable, given what had preceded it.

  And in the end, it all helped with the public image of the Representatives of Earth. The meeting hall was filled with a voting party from every recognized sovereign nation on the planet, each with a voting power based on their total population, Gross Domestic Product, and, most importantly, the relative scale of their contributions to TASC in the previous governing period.

  The governing periods lasted thirty days. The Representatives met three times in each period, with the last
meeting of each month concluding with a pledge to continue support, and the first meeting of the next month including an agreement on voting rights accrued from the previous month’s relative contributions.

  There was no chairperson, not even Neal. The only concession to TASC’s unique place in the group was that its vote was fixed. Regardless of population or income, TASC itself got a one percent share in the voting pool. That meant Neal had the tenth largest voting power in the room, matched with several members of the former European Union, but everyone knew, of course, that Neal’s real power did not stem from that vote anyway.

  He had allies, many of them, and in the end he held the steering wheel. They could tell him where they wanted him to drive the seven-billion-person party-bus they were all now on, but few in the know were under any real doubt as to whether he would actually veer too far from the path he really wanted to be on.

  This, then, was a tool. They knew it, and Neal knew it. But to say the representatives that filled it still wielded very real and far-reaching influence would be a gross understatement. In this room the world got to see what was being done to save humanity. In this room the world watched as a united war machine of unparalleled scale churned and rolled forward. And every member of this group knew they would be remembered by historians as the people who saved humanity, because the alternative was that there would be no more history at all.

  “A good session, in the end,” said Neal, as he stepped out of the room, and out of view of the countless cameras dotted throughout the hall. “How long until the Indonesian cutover review?”

  Jim was silent a moment as he checked on the Chinese delegation’s status. Though the review was of the extensive production facilities across a swathe of the Indonesian archipelago, those islands were all now leased to the People’s Republic of China, and the meeting would be with representatives of the Chinese government, with only a sparse Indonesian contingent present.

  “They say they should be ready in about ten minutes,” said Jim, his eyes refocusing.

  “Good, good,” replied Neal, as they walked along a back corridor and boarded a small, unmanned cart. It whirred off without word, instructed to do so, no doubt, by one of Jim’s many minions.

  “And you, Jim, how are you?” said Neal, glancing across at the man seated opposite him, in the cart’s small cabin.

  “Good. I am still concerned with the Macapá SpacePort dredging operation. They simply did not spec that work correctly. We have lost …”

  Jim went to call up a number of days the SpacePort’s sea-lane had been effectively closed to large-scale shipping from his mind, but Neal interrupted him. “Do you need me to have a word with the Brazilian delegate?”

  Jim shuddered ever so slightly, not that he feared Neal meant anything more than just having a word with the woman. He was overly sensitive, Jim knew that, to what he knew Neal was really capable of. But that was not this Neal. Not the politician. And anyway, Jim had pushed the Brazilian issue as far as he needed to. He had even sent a friend down there, a most capable one.

  “No, I don’t think that will be necessary,” said Jim with a genuine smile. “I’ve asked Quavoce, or rather Major Garrincha, to go down there and help supervise work directly.”

  Neal smiled as well. He knew this already, not through any asset of Ayala’s, but through a shared acquaintance. “Yes, Jim, and you have gotten me in some trouble because of it.”

  Jim looked askew at Neal, maybe even with a hint of fear, and Neal was caught off guard by the reaction. Had things really gotten so bad that Jim would be afraid of him?

  “Banu told me,” said Neal, and saw that Jim, though he tried to hide it, relaxed a little. “She was none to happy that her father had to go away on business.”

  Jim tried to move past his faux pas, raising his eyebrows as he said, “Well, to be honest, you could always let her go with him.”

  Neal balked instinctively at the thought. Banu. His little warrior. Sent off into the Amazon rainforest. No, he thought. But as he considered it more, he started to see Jim’s point.

  “Yes, I suppose she isn’t the lone little warrior-princess she once was, is she?” he smiled. It was a smile laden with simple and very genuine fondness, and Jim was reminded of why he had followed Neal in the first place. Why he had trusted him. He was a good man, at heart.

  But that did not forgive his actions, Jim then reminded himself, steeling himself against a potential wave of regret at what he had started with Madeline and Amadeu and others.

  Still smiling, Jim agreed with Neal, saying, “We have other pilots that can take the reins of the Skalm should it be needed. Others that have been training for just such an opportunity. And in a matter of days, when we finish retooling the Dome facilities at District Two, we will start production on the next Skalm, the first of many to join Banu’s lone destroyer.”

  Neal nodded. His little Banu. Nearly ten years old now. She called him Uncle Neal. He probably took more pride from that simple gesture of respect and affection than he did from any of the titles and power his life was now saddled with.

  “Shall I let Quavoce know she can … go along?” said Jim, hesitantly. “That she can leave District One?”

  Neal looked at the man, a little vacantly at first, and then with more clarity. “Yes, Jim, you can send her with him. She will like that. Though she should probably go under a pseudonym, and …”

  “Don’t worry, Neal. I’ll have my team see to it she remains safe. And then there is always the matter of Quavoce.”

  They shared a moment of genuine shared amusement. Woe betide anyone who threatened Banu on Quavoce’s watch. No, thought Neal, she will be fine. It will do her good to get out and see the world, to try to forget all of the fighting and killing for a while.

  “We’re here,” said Jim, suddenly, as they came to a halt by another door, in another part of the growing representative’s complex on Sao Tome.

  Neal was confused a moment, then nodded. “Good. Let’s get on with it then.”

  - - -

  Ayala: ‘¿how did it go with the indonesian transition discussion? ¿do they still insist on partial commercial capacity?’

  Neal: ‘they do. but i think we can allow a small percentage, if only because not all of the facilities there are at standard for fleet production anyway.’

  Ayala: ‘¿no, they aren’t all up to standard, are they? ¿a coincidence?’

  Neal shook his head and snorted derisively, both in the ether and in real life, seated now in his office. Jennifer looked a question at him and he shook his head again now, though this time to say ‘not to worry.’

  Neal: ‘you give our chinese allies too much credit. or maybe i give them too little. either way, we have gotten from them as much as we could reasonably have expected. more even. better that we give them this small victory, so they can fulfill their larger contracts. it helps them, and it helps the public get their hands on more little goodies from our laboratories. austerity makes no one happy, no matter how patriotic. this will help us overall.’

  On this topic, Neal knew, Ayala and he most certainly did not agree. She was not one for compromise, and she did not see the argument for appeasement, either of the Chinese, or the world’s populace at large. So they all wanted access to the virtual world, to spinal interfaces, to hypersonic and exo-atmospheric travel, to AI driven robots that could bring home the bacon and cook it up in a pan, and, she had heard, even help with the last part of that saying, too, for the right price.

  But Ayala saw no need for any of this. Not given the greater threat they faced. People needed to knuckle down and get it done, no matter what they were forced to endure.

  They needed to endure, as she had, and, if necessary, they needed to suffer, as she had.

  But seven billion people did not rally to a banner easily, not even one as powerful as the threat of extinction. The Armada was still a long way away, farther than most people could comprehend. Such abstruse concepts suffered in the space between the mind and
the heart.

  History was filled with such mass delusions, from a cowed Europe refusing to see the true threat of a rising Third Reich, even as it steamrolled Poland’s borders, to the ensuing struggle to bring a distant United States into the fray years after the fighting had already started.

  But while Ayala may be uncannily capable of forcing people into line, Neal needed to influence humanity on a far vaster scale than Ayala and her methods could.

  You couldn’t manage everyone in the way Ayala now wrangled some of the world’s more troublesome leaders. And Neal wouldn’t want to even if they could. It pained him whenever he thought about it, what they had done to their dissenters in Iran, and Russia, and Egypt, and others, Neal knew, more than Ayala had told him about, more than he wanted to know, no doubt.

  No. Wherever possible, Neal tried to win people’s hearts as well as their minds. And, Neal thought, not just the hearts of the masses, but of the few, the ones he would have to trust as he worked toward final victory.

  And as he thought about that, he considered who he did trust. And he came back to an old topic with the woman whose voice was even now in his head.

  Neal: ‘i spoke to jim today about banu.’

  Ayala: ‘¿really? ¿what did he say?’

  He wondered if Ayala really didn’t know. If she wasn’t watching him just as much as he knew she was watching so many others. But that was the price. And Neal knew she was trustworthy for a very specific reason: she could be trusted to do what it would take to survive. Whatever it would take.

  Neal: ‘Jim pointed out that she is not, really, such a person of interest anymore, not now that we have the first of the pilot cadets trained and ready.’

  Ayala: ‘¿he did, did he? interesting. ¿and what did he recommend you do with this information?’

  Neal: ‘he recommended i let her accompany quavoce on his trip to brazil to supervise the reopening of the silted channel there.’

  Ayala did not reply for a second. Neal assumed she was checking facts, maybe calling up the conversation in question for review, maybe asking Saul or one if his team of analysts for a dossier.