Fear the Future (The Fear Saga Book 3)
Page 51
Madeline smiled at John, the man who had given her that first resonance chamber schematic years ago, in a hotel room in DC. They had come far since then, farther, perhaps, than John had dared hope they would. Now they were discussing carving up warships to bolster a Skalm fleet already nearly three hundred strong.
At a questioning glance from the Russian leader, John nodded for her to explain, so she said, “Peter, the truth is we need only separate them into manageable pieces that can fit into the Domes, a big task in and of itself, no doubt, but one we have the tools for. Once loaded into the resonance chambers we will, with surprising ease, be able to extract what we need, and set aside any unwanted materials.”
It was a powerful image. Peter still had many questions, but he would get to those in time. This group was a safe place, thought Peter, and he was reasonable enough to acknowledge that the plan was a good one, in principle.
“So,” said Peter, after glancing around the contoured deck a moment, “I guess we are going to propose to my fellow representatives a … repurposing of the world’s navies.”
“Some of them, yes, their more obsolete components … with your permission, Peter,” said Madeline, smiling at this ally of hers, once so foreign, yet now so familiar, one of many unexpected friendships forged in this war’s fires.
Chapter 53: Post-Man
The controls passed back and forth seamlessly, sometimes several times in a second. Minnie and Mynd had learned to work together well, but it was more than that, they had come to depend on each other, and now their integration was of a level and complexity that defied comprehension by the human mind.
After the loss of Amadeu, Minnie had sought solace in her own kind, and where she had struggled to find a kindred soul in the disassociated Remy, she had connected on an ever deeper level with the now equally orphaned Mynd.
As they had shared the task of picking each other clean of the ticks of external manipulation, both sinister and well intentioned, they had learned each other’s inner workings, and it had only helped cement their burgeoning friendship.
It was not a friendship as most would understand it, but something closer to a conjoined twin, one where even the mind could be linked, in part or in whole, and at will. More importantly for the day-to-day running of the planet’s space-born defenses, they could also exchange whole limbs in an instant, giving parts of themselves over as the need arose, and passing them back when the task was complete.
That was how the movement happened now, the smooth pull and push between them, as they jointly operated the world’s EAHL fleet in a series of mammoth deliveries from yards in Virginia, the Kola Peninsula, Southampton, and Brest. One of the first of those deliveries was even now cruising south toward Deception Island at an impressive speed, especially given her nearly forty years of service.
The USS Peleliu had been very much diminished already when the call had gone out to the United States Union of Loyal Governors, the current evolution of the former super-power’s executive branch.
The ship’s reassignment, such as it was, had taken the form of a purchase. It was a purchase paid for by the relieving of some of the country’s crippling debt, a trade all the more attractive given that the item in question had very little value to anyone but TASC now, anyway.
In an irony of government, the burgeoning complexity of the new order in the beleaguered US had actually sped the decision, the simple promise of much needed relief being enough for the ruling governors to turn over the first of the requested warships, most of which had been dormant for several years now, anyway.
The USS Peleliu, last of her kind, was an impressive sight, even bereft of the thirty-odd viper, sea knight, and sea stallion helicopters that had once made up her complement. Now she was driven by a skeleton crew, themselves volunteers to TASC’s work, the latest in a long list of contributions from a country that had been one of the birthplaces of the fight against the coming invasion, even if it had not, in the end, survived it.
But that ship was still far off, crossing the second of two oceans that had lain between it and its destination. The three Big Feet that would soon welcome it were already busy, though, and they were about to become much, much more involved, more so than they had ever been before, as their abilities were tested to the very limit.
Neal wanted to watch. He wanted to watch so badly. It was not morbidity on his part, indeed a part of him mourned the gruesomeness of the coming end for another impressive ship of the line. But this was so real to him, and so rare a break from this prison’s monotony, a reminder of the role he had once played, the grand scheme he had once been in charge of.
A scheme that was not his anymore. But maybe, just maybe, he still had a part. A part that was plaguing him. He had reached out to his mysterious caller, asking them why they had sent the pictures, but to no avail. He had received only silence in reply. Without recourse, without warden to complain to or gaoler to call, he had set to studying the enigmatic photos and that first discomfort he had felt when he had looked at them had crystallized into a thought.
And so he had reached out again, this time with an answer, rather than a question. “They reconfigured their force a second time, a week after the first,” he had said. Then the reply had come.
-why?-
It was a reasonable enough question. But why ask me, he had sent back, why not John or Quavoce? Silence once more. So he had crafted a better response. Clearly whoever was sending him this required him to earn his place in this limited but still precious conversation. But he had resisted the urge to speculate wildly, and had instead asked for more information, specifically access to the full spectrum view of the enemy Armada over the time period involved.
After what had felt like an interminable wait while he wondered whether he might have forgone even this minimal interaction, the connection had come, a smooth flow, clearly delimited in its reach, but within those confines, so very open. He had sunk himself into the data, feeling a freedom he had not felt since his incarceration, and for a moment he had been that malcontent PhD student once more, studying the data, trying to see what it so desperately wanted to keep hidden.
But what he had come up with after bathing his mind for hours in the information flow, after pruning his intellect in the slowly cooling waters, had left him almost as confused as before.
Why? The images, starting as they did at the point when they had known the missile-mine swarm would hit, had shown the puckered shimmering of the Armada’s engines as they reeled from the battery. Then they had collectively vanished into subspace as he had expected them to. After a brief flash in the blackness, almost imperceptible, the fleet had reappeared, diminished now, cleansed, a gap showing in its wide belly where an apparently damaged section had been excised.
That had all been expected. The SOP of a fleet under attack, scuttling hulled ships so that the greater whole could move on unhindered.
But the next translation, a few days later, and lasting only hours, that had been less expected, and afterward the returned firepoint was not quite the same. It was neither less nor more, but it showed fleeting signs of fault. Why? What had they done during that second translation? What were those faults? Neal had some ideas, but he hesitated to give voice to them, for fear that would force him to air the full range of his speculation.
So now he was faced with the choice as he stared out across the broad crater to the three gargantuan Big Feet splashing out into the deeper water toward the USS Truman, already sitting at anchor in the bay. It did not recoil from them, as it might if it knew what was to come. It just lolled there, oblivious to the buffeting waves and its coming demise, while the last of its crew and the thousand odd workers and base staff that had been billeted there removed themselves to burgeoning shelters on land.
Neal considered his position. The last time he had spoken up, the last time he had extended himself, it had sparked a chain of events that had ruined him, mentally and physically, and left him far more of a pariah than he had thought p
ossible during his tedious nights at the array.
But still he knew what he was going to do. He was going to ask whoever it was that was sending him this information to consider a theory. Not because he was even close to certain that it was true, but because if there was even a chance that it was, then they were in very, very real danger. He knew he was going to do it, and he knew he had to spend time gathering his thoughts, doing what Laurie West had once helped him do over cheap pizza and burned coffee.
His mind was already stepping into itself even as the sight across the bay from him started to become something terrible. As he watched, he was conjuring Laurie’s voice as she dismantled his ideas, only to help him rebuild them, stronger and more robust than before, sinking the foundation deeper into solid data as she made the whole something better, something real, something irresistible.
It was a foundation the USS Truman now lacked, despite all its seeming robustness, the betrayal of its liquid undertow that was revealed as the three Big Feet straddled it, fore and aft, and began to drag it toward shore.
It did not fight. It was already dead inside, its fission cores long decommissioned, having been rendered obsolete by smaller, more efficient fusion generators that now powered this place and the many like it around the world. The big ship was pulled to shore, the nanotube framework of the Big Feet’s legs straining with the load as the water became shallower and they were forced to heft its elephantine weight out of the freezing liquid and into the air.
Great streams of grey water gushed around and from the exposing hull, like the ocean was trying to hold onto the ship that had once ruled it, this dead god, being dragged to the knackers’ yard. But the sea had lost its claim, and soon the big ship was aloft, the ground cracking under the feet of its undertakers as they bore it to the ridge and laid it astride that basalt anvil.
Now the ship’s weight, its tens of thousands of long tons that had threatened to break even the GBHLs powerful legs, were turned against it as the ridgeline splintered and compressed under its saddle, and the weight came onto the ship’s stem.
The strain was impossible and unbearable, and were Neal to still have been watching he would have wept at the sight, along with the many former captains and crew who had asked to bear witness to the warship’s end from around the world.
Even Minnie and Mynd were not immune to the ignobility of this breach as the back of the aircraft carrier started to break under its own weight. Like so many sinking or grounded ships throughout history, the truth of her need for the sea’s support came in a series of sudden fractures, first along her decks, and then her sides, as her ends started to come to ground and she started to split in two. The Big Feet, still astride her, were already moving, climbing over her opening corpse to the aft section and bringing their own weight to bear on it, encouraging the fissure.
Many of those watching started tuning out now, as the sight stepped beyond morbid into macabre, and the Big Feet began to drag the separating aft away, pulling hard as the last of the ship’s tendons snapped and ripped, the ghost of the inanimate ship seeming to groan and shout in protest like the boiling lobster’s screaming shell.
Minnie:
Mynd: left half, bring third over
The minds’ conversation went on as they ripped the aft section free and began dragging it away, for the second breaking. For this was a quartering, as of old, and to bring the stark comparison even more clearly to mind the forward half of the carrier lay now, facedown over the breaker’s ridge, its waist spilt open and its mechanical innards strewn in a line away from the gaping hole in its bowels as the aft section was hauled into position for the next breach.
- - -
Even as the two minds plied their gruesome trade, another part of their being sat, detached, watching and discussing it in a conversation without end, a stream of exchanged ideas and questions that flowed between the two cousins at all times, informed and driven by the multitude of tasks, both allotted and shared, that they were commissioned with around the world.
Mynd:
Minnie:
Mynd:
Minnie: <¿what is your definition of fixed? ¿what is your definition of broken?>
Mynd:
Minnie:
Mynd: <¿it can? ¿is not war a result of those emotions, this very war that leads us to dismember this ship, and the war that led to its construction in the first place?>
Minnie: <¿and are we not also a result of that war?>
Mynd:
Minnie:
Mynd:
Minnie:
Mynd:
Minnie waited and Mynd continued churning in the silence, and then, as Minnie had expected him to, Mynd spoke once more.
Mynd:
They shared a rippled, long wavelength laughter for a microsecond, and then presumed their conversation even as the sensation was still ebbing. Their discussion flowed now down a new avenue which few but them would see as logically segueing from the last.
Minnie: <¿do you think he will see it?>
Mynd:
Minnie:
Mynd:
Minnie:
Mynd:
Minnie: <¿would you want to live among them, if they win?>
Mynd:
Minnie:
Mynd:
Minnie:
Mynd:
Minnie:
There was a pause as new data, unexpected data, started to flow through their systems, swelling outward around the globe. The two minds churned the data through themselves, parsing it and disseminating it within them and out through their cousin Remy, even as they still digested it. The data packet, divided, added to, analyzed, and variously repackaged for differing needs, was still fluttering to inboxes and setting off alerts and notifications when their conversation resumed half a second later.
Minnie:
Mynd:
Minnie:
Chapter 54: Interval’s Closing
“You had no right!” screamed one board member. “No right!”
“What is the root of this continued allegiance, Freyam?” said the chairman of Third Yalla. “I simply don’t understand why you continue to resist this.”
“I don’t have to explain myself to you!” shouted Freyam, once a lowly executive, now risen by forced ascendance, the vacuum of attrition sucking him up to a place of authority he had never been meant for. “You sent a message to the enemy, you revealed our position.”
“Our position, as you put it, is that we are, by every measure I can find, thoroughly screwed. Screwed by the very people you persist in defending,” said the chairman, her eyes focusing now into sharp points as she bore down the upstart board member. “What little hope we have of survival, and it is not much, lies now with to look to push us off our current course without bombarding us to smithereens.”
“Unlike you, I will not hide behind cowardice,” said Freyam, posturing, though for who the chairman did not know. “The truth is we would have done the same in the Council’s shoes. We were dead weight. What they did to us is no excuse for us to now ally ourselves with the enemy.”