Sleeper Seven

by Mark Howard

  "Guess she had a fright," she remarked casually, taking a long swig. "She'll be back for us."

  "What do you mean, a fright?" Jess asked nervously. "How long are we going to be stuck out here?"

  Sag, perched on a mound a few yards away, pointed off into the distance. Following his finger, they noticed a single dust trail rising amidst the heat shimmer of the desert.

  "Prolly an ATV rider or something. Looks pretty recent, so she should be back within an hour or so," Sag offered.

  Having nothing better to do than to wait patiently, Jess let her mind wander across all she had taken in over the last few days, until she came upon something that stuck in her craw.

  "Hey, Sag. So, about this remote kill signal you mentioned yesterday. You say they still keep repeating it, hoping Big Mama will come back online someday, right?"

  "Yeah, every couple days they blast it out. Why?"

  "Have you figured out how it works?"

  "Well, sort of. At least the first part. There's a preamble, sorta like attention, attention, and then there is a ship identifier, meaning which ship the command is meant for, then there are two following sections which I don't know what they do. But obviously some form of disablement command. It's all in binary strings of hex characters, like the unlock codes."

  "Do you know if it's encrypted at all?"

  "No, and that's the funny thing about it: I don't think it is. But then, there are so many layers of security to even get to the transmitting apparatus, and such a limited bandwidth on the ELF channel, that I think they figured it probably wasn't worth it. Just like how the Gen II's didn't even need a code to operate, as you discovered. Ignorance, meet arrogance."

  Star broke in. "I know where you're goin' with this, you wanna disable their ships. We've talked about that before. Problem is, A, we don't know what the ships codes are. Two, we haven't deciphered what the commands actually do. We assume it disables the ship, but what if there's a self-destruct in there too? We're not about to go killin' folks — not our style. We're more Peace and Love orientated — less chaos and death and all that."

  "And finally," Sag added, "the big one is, we don't have the massive antenna arrays to relay an ELF signal around the world. Ain't gonna happen."

  Jess sat for a bit, squinted up at the sun, and thought to herself.

  "Can't we change the numbers lady?"

  "Huh?" Sag responded quizzically.

  "The numbers lady. Can't we redirect the ships to listen to another non-ELF frequency that we can transmit on?"

  Now it was Sag's turn to sit and think. Star got up off her bag and paced a bit, a frown on her face.

  "I don't know...we could possibly override the signal, for a short time at least," she said, "if we take out the main shortwave transmitter — do you even know where that is, Sag?"

  "Yeah, believe it or not, other Hams have triangulated it already, it's down in Cuba — Guantanamo Bay. That's probably why the Feds haven't shut that place down yet. Anyway, I could broadcast a recording with a modified subcarrier frequency on the same wavelength, that tells the ships to listen for commands on another frequency we control, but I don't know how we could take out the main signal. They have more transmitter power than we do by a long shot."

  Sag rubbed his forehead as he pondered the idea further.

  "Maybe we don't have to take it out...maybe we just need to degrade the signal enough so ours is primary. Only thing I can think of is to park a ship right on top of the transmitter. The ring's field would disrupt it for sure, but that's risky for obvious reasons, and hell, it's not very elegant to boot."

  "Hey, whatever works, Rambo," Star said, her mind spinning now, "when you get back, can you check Big Mama's kill receiver to see if she's even able to tune into the shortwave band for the redirect?"

  "Even if it is possible, Star," Sag replied, "we agreed before not to mess with the kill signal. We made a pact that we're not gonna harm nobody."

  They all sat quietly for a few more minutes, until Jess broke the silence.

  "You won't harm any body," Jess remarked to herself, before turning to them: "I'm number seven."

  They both looked at her, the realization hitting them as well, as Scout silently descended directly behind them.

  "Ride's here!" Jess shouted.

  ~ 63 ~

  They boarded the ship and stowed their gear as Star began the startup sequence.

  "OK, here's what we do," Jess proposed once they were under way. "You all drop me at the edge of the base, and I squirrel myself in there and find the target ship. Now Star, you need to park yourself over Radio Free Guantanamo while Sag broadcasts the recording with the redirected command and control frequency. This all has to happen just as I snag the ship, so they can't kill it before I even get it out of the mountain. I take it out over the sea, and then Sag sends the kill signal, so just in case it self-detonates or whatever, at least it'll be away from any population centers. If we determine that it's a nondestructive disable, then we know we can take out all their ships safely. So once you hear from me that it's all good, you can send the kill signal to all of them. No harm no foul. Just the most powerful government, sans any Gen III surveillance hardware, is all."

  "Assuming this is how it all pans out," Sag offered skeptically, "the ship ID hex codes are sixteen characters long, and we don't know what any of them are except for the one Noly gave us. It would take weeks to send out the millions of possible hex codes for all the ships out there."

  "Just use all F's," Jess replied casually. "I had a problem with my WiFi router once — the network address was set to all F's, turns out that was the broadcast address."

  Sag stared at her, and after a moment turned a shade of crimson; he had not thought of that before. "Yeah...um, that might work, actually. It's worth a try anyway," he said sheepishly.

  "There you go, think positive!" she maintained, putting her arm around his shoulder.

  "I...have an issue with this," countered Star distractedly as she continued to pilot the ship. "The moment I leave the vicinity of that radio tower, they regain control, and could possibly undo any damage we did within minutes with a couple of counter-commands. I'll go along, but only if this plan includes compromising the entire ELF array for good, not just temporarily. And I don't like the idea of going down over the ocean either. Ocean's not a dumping ground."

  "Well, OK, so...first, what do we know about this ELF array?" Jess asked Sag.

  "The broadcast messages are generated in Virginia, but that's a small piece of the puzzle, and very secure. The final relay point and main broadcast antenna are in northern Wisconsin, called the Clam Lake array. All this infrastructure was supposedly decommissioned in 2004, at least officially, but they still use it for the ships, that I know."

  "OK, so do we know any weak points in the system we can mess with?"

  "Well, yeah: the antenna itself. It's just a half-inch diameter copper wire; problem is, it's thirty-two miles long. There might be redundancies, too, I don't know. You'd have to take it all out, to be sure. The plus side is, it's all strung out in the middle of the forest, so it's pretty isolated."

  "So it's buried or what?" Jess asked.

  "No, it's just on wooden poles like any old telephone line."

  "Poles? Well hells-bells, this is gonna be a cakewalk, I thought this was going to be some Death Star shit. So I knock out thirty-two miles of poles. Ship'll take it, right?"

  "Oh sure, that shouldn't be an issue, they'll snap like popsicle sticks," Sag replied, then turned to Star. "Hey...Roper would love to see that in person, wouldn't he."

  "Oh yeah," Star recalled. "Jess, honey, you don't know, but he chainsawed down a couple of poles himself back in the early nineties — part of a protest against their use of ELF as a nuclear first-strike tool in the cold war. Took the whole thing out for a couple days; did ninety in County for it too," she recalled wistfully. "Good times, those were."

  "Wow, Rope's a real enviro rock-star, huh?" Jess said. "OK, so instead o
f going out over the ocean, I fly the ship to Wisconsin and take out the array. Roper's at the scene and confirms it, and then you can send the kill signal to shut me down over the forest."

  "You're forgetting one thing," Star said, "there's no comms on the ship, plus you won't have no body. How are you supposed to let us know how things are goin' through all this? Twitter ain't gonna work up there."

  "Crap on a cupcake. Yeah. Well..I can jump back into my body in California and call you on my cell phone, I guess?"

  "That sounds like a total hack right there," Sag commented.

  "Yeah, it kinda sucks, doesn't it," Jess agreed. "Well...it's all I can do. So I jump back to give you a status update when I'm about to grab the ship, and at any other point in the plan where I need assistance. I mean, it's not like the ship is going to drop out of the sky if I scoot out of there for a few seconds."

  Star slowed as they approached the homestead, and after a quick radio check with Roper, maneuvered Scout downward and slipped into the hangar to park behind Big Mama. They continued their planning discussions over an early dinner, and decided they had to work fast, while they still knew where the target ship was. The second largest heist of U.S. government property would take place the next night.

  ~ 64 ~

  Buckled into a jump seat on Big Mama, Jess went over the plan in her head while Star piloted the ship somewhere over Oklahoma. Sag already knew the general location of the facility Noly mentioned, and provided the coordinates to Star. After dropping Jess near the base — how Jess would find it and get in would be up to her — Star would fly Big Mama to the Florida Keys and lie in wait for the go-ahead to disrupt the Guantanamo transmission.

  Sag would remain at the homestead, monitoring for the signal drop, which was his cue to play his hacked recording, announcing to the ships that they needed to tune into a new shortwave band that he controlled at 1.8MHz, instead of the ELF channel at 76Hz. He was pretty confident this would work, as he had confirmed the previous night that Big Mama was indeed able to tune into the new, higher frequency.

  Finally, Roper was going to drive up to Wisconsin and wait for Jess to take out the ELF array, at which point he would call Sag and let him know he could send her ship the kill command. Assuming Jess' ship was disabled safely and non-destructively, Sag would then send out the broadcast kill command, hopefully rendering the government's advanced fleet a collection of super-sized nuclear paperweights.

  "Hey, sleepyhead, grab your gear — time for some camping."

  Jess had been dozing through the last leg of the journey, and rousing herself, she unbuckled, grabbed her pack, and opened her lower hatch, filling the cabin with the high-pitched whine of the thrusters.

  "OK," Star yelled over the din, "you gotta move at least thirty feet away, so's you don't get caught in the bubble when I leave. Good luck, we'll be rooting for 'ya, but whatever happens, it's gonna be a good night!"

  Using her foot, Jess shoved her gear into the manhole-sized opening, where it plummeted to the dew-covered grass ten feet below. Lowering herself into the hatch, she reached the last rung and let go, dropping herself on top of it. While dragging the heavy canvas bag a safe distance away through the brush, the cacophony from the thrusters morphed into a heavy, low hum as she passed through the noise-canceling boundary. The solitary circle of white light on the ground behind her winked out as the hatch noiselessly slid shut.

  Jess was pulling tent poles from her gear bag when the trio of dark crimson thrusters turned bright blue-white, and suddenly the ship was gone. She felt a few strands of hair drop back onto her head as the heavy silence lifted, and holding a mag-lite in her teeth, she finished assembling the one-person tent as the chirping of crickets surrounded her. Before crawling into the tent, she shut off her flashlight and admired her surroundings. She was utterly alone, on a random mountainside in the middle of California, and it was beautiful.

  Her phone alarm woke her at two in the morning. After groggily touching the screen to mute it, she searched blindly through the gear bag for her granola bar breakfast and wolfed it down. She headed outside for a quick bio break, just in case, before returning to work. Lying down, she began the exit process.

  Once out, Jess maneuvered herself downslope, using the large dam as a geographical reference — just as she had practiced on Google Earth the night before. The entrance was likely behind the oddly out-of-place twelve-foot cyclone fence she had discovered during her virtual run-throughs, and this she found easily enough in real life. Before passing through it, she noticed a section of the fence further down had already been pulled away. She wondered if she was not the first to breach this facility.

  Beyond the fence, she followed an old two-track for another quarter-mile, which ultimately led to an overgrown cave entrance in the mountainside. After passing through the brambles, the thirty-foot diameter corrugated metal walls made it clear this was actually a man-made tunnel, and she followed it three hundred feet further in, until it dead-ended into a large concrete wall. In front of the wall stood a rusty metal staircase that led up to a heavy security door set in the middle of the concrete plug. The door had no window or exterior knob, and a metal plate protected it from being jimmied — a suspiciously high level of security for such an out-of-the-way location.

  Passing up the stairs and easily through the door, she found herself in a darkened entry room, containing a small desk, some white hardhats on wall pegs, a pair of dusty work boots, and little else. A second interior door with a taped-up four-pane window was the only item of interest here; beyond it she could hear the whooshing sounds of water and mechanical pumps. Jess wondered if this was the right place after all.

  Moving through the interior door, she emerged into a long, dark, cavernous area, containing a row of seven enormous circular structures, large enough to have stairways leading up to them and catwalks on top. Based on the hum they emitted, she guessed they were giant turbines, generating electricity from the release of the dam water. Finding nothing else in the large space, Jess was losing her confidence in Sag, even though he had seemed confident this was the place.

  Noticing waves of cooler air at the far end of the space, she made her way past the turbines and discovered several heavy gauge electrical cables diverting away from the main lines at each station. They all eventually joined into one large bundle, only to disappear into the far wall.

  Her curiosity piqued, she followed the bundle to the end of the space and through the wall. Bingo, she thought to herself, as she entered into another enormous space — this one brightly lit, and easily the size of a Costco — which contained six Gen III ships, lined up neatly in the same herringbone pattern as she had seen in Ohio. Four of the ships, apparently out of service, were supported by tremendous cement footings, but the remaining two hovered freely, emitting the familiar low hum.

  Two workers, a man and a woman both dressed in blue coveralls, emerged from a set of swinging double doors along the far wall, and pushed a wheeled cart which held a four-foot high and two-foot diameter black cylinder. Jess sped closer to examine the device. Appearing similar to a giant-size version of the Mac Pro computer, it had no controls, labels, or other markings, and Jess assumed it was a solid mass of material until the workers rotated the cart, revealing a tiny, one-inch square aperture which emitted a bright blue glow.

  As one worker maneuvered a second, empty cart underneath the ship, the other gently guided another black cylinder, this one emitting a much fainter blue glow from its aperture, as it descended from within the belly of the ship to rest on the empty cart. Swapping in the cart with the fresh cylinder, they attached an assistive mount and lifted the cylinder until some hidden mechanism within the ship took hold, ingesting it fully.

  Curiosity satisfied, she went about her business of finding the right ship. Sag had told her that the last three hex digits of the ship's ID code would be etched into the surface under each corner. The first ship she checked was the disabled one closest to her. It didn't match, but what she did f
ind interesting was an insignia on the bottom of that ship which had been covered over. Through the black paint, she could make out the shape of a triangle encompassing a globe with two lightning bolts striking it, identical to the military pilot's shoulder patches.

  Moving onward, she checked two more disabled ships without success, and then realized the one transferred from Texas was most likely one of the active ships. Indeed, she confirmed it was the one next to the ship that had just had the cylindrical object replaced. Before entering the ship, however, she surveyed the surrounding area. Following a dotted yellow line on the concrete floor, she discovered it led to a massively wide, though shallow, tunnel. Clearly a passageway for the ships, she found it opened to the outside night air a quarter-mile further down.

  Jess rushed back to the ship, and after slipping aboard began to dial in the unlock code. Although the problem of how to get out of the mountain seemed eminently solvable, she ran into another issue — the newer capacitive touch screens on these Gen III ships were more difficult to operate in her body-less state. Each time she tried to adjust the controls, it either didn't register, or registered a touch outside of the area she was aiming for. She could only get the proper touch target to register after four or five tries — and dialing in all sixteen hex digits was taking several minutes longer than she expected. As the seconds ticked by, her paranoia increased: Had they changed the system to deter operation by Sleepers like herself? Were they slowing down the code input as a delaying tactic while they were silently notified of the subterfuge?

  As she hovered over the screen, about to enter the final digit, another problem manifested: two headlights appeared at the end of the tunnel. It was yet another Gen III ship, which silently glided to a stop in an open slot next to the disabled ships. She waited a minute for further activity, and seeing none, she entered the final digit of the unlock code, whereupon the ship emitted three happy sounding chimes.