The Petrovski Effect: A Tess Novel

by Randy Moffat

  Everyone looked very serious indeed now. The secondary and tertiary effects of their actions had not been suspected some minutes before.

  Bear nodded; satisfied he had conveyed the problems and responsibilities clearly.

  “One hour, folks! A decision as hard as this one deserves at least an hour.” He laughed hollowly and walked our purposefully and a buzz of conversation rose up behind him.

  Ten minutes later he was sitting in his office trimming a nail with his teeth and O’Hara beat Wong in the door by half a step and an elbow. Farce comedy was his favorite. .

  “I’m in.” She said softly, firmly and a bit breathlessly.

  “Me too . . . boss. I was gonna tell you first, but she tripped me up in the hallway.” Wong added glowering at her.

  Bear rocked back in his chair and smiled while O’Hara stuck her tongue out at Wong.

  “Thanks, folks. This means a lot.” Bear said sincerely.

  Wong grinned sincerely back and put his arm around O’Hara. O’Hara looked uncharacteristically doe-eyed for being in business mode. It was sexy.

  Bear sighed—the kind of sound that people make when dragging friends and family into big gambles that increase the ante to life and death.

  He wasted no time.

  “Rear Admiral Wong . . . you are designated the deputy commander of maneuver.” Bear said. “You are in charge of the TESS fleet. Talk to Craig about protecting the plane. Proceed tonight to the submarine at . . . Where the hell is the damn thing again?”

  He cocked an eyebrow at Wong.

  “Groton . . . eh . . . Admiral . . .” Wong finished weakly not yet used to casually bandying around ranks he had spent a lifetime saluting. “Just down river from Groton in a small out yard where no one will be expecting it.”

  Bear nodded.

  “I give it a day or two before everyone knows precisely where it is and who owns it. Get to Groton and secure the damn thing. Possession is 9/10ths of the law. I want it under cover in any structure we can secure ASAP and away from prying eyes. Surround it with our own security guys. No more US forces on the inner perimeter . . . they can still be on the outer ring if they agree but not close in. Admiral O’Hara, you are Deputy Commander for support, I need you in Washington by tomorrow and I want to get the promised congressional money under our control very soon. I do not trust the bastards so hire a legal team to represent TESS and walk in there with plenty of lawyers, they are a dime a dozen in D. C. We will be breaking new legal ground across the board, but essentially our charter is to spread man across space and that is going to get complicated. Anyone, and I mean by that any country, who underwrites us with more money needs to sign on legally to support us with regular easy payments. Technically the US has led the way and TESS will need to make nice-nice with the US first. They paid the bills upfront and get first crack at us . . . that’s only justice. After them there are likely a hundred other countries who may want to talk about a stake in TESS and lead with their checkbooks. Be firm. To have a stake they need to cough up dough fast. Make it a flat rate for the first year—something like what the US gave us . . . we will go from there into raising rates . . . in return we agree to run as many missions as possible based on a first-paid—first-in schedule after the testing is complete. Make sure that’s in the contract and stays vague. Anyone who signs on to support us gets mission support in the order that they signed the dated papers. That ought to light a fire under them and motivate them to edge out their competition. In addition, I have a rough agreement to continue to use the bat-cave facility, whatever Wong uses at Groton, and the hanger in Wichita as extra territorial enclaves for all time. Essentially they are now TESS embassies. A country that signs on with TESS will provide one or more facilities that are similar too. Barter with them. Also the plane and sub are part of the final US deal.” He sighed. “You figure out the mechanics of all that schtick. Not sure what we will use all those facilities for over time, but something is bugging me and my political gut tells me they may be useful some day. Carve them in stone when you come up with the boilerplate agreements. Roger?”

  She nodded.

  “In addition, I want all of you to have body guards and personal security teams in the next two days . . . things are going to get serious fast. John . . . work with Craig if he stays. You tracking . . . ?”

  Wong was in mid-nod when there was a knock at the door, Johnson poked her head in.

  “Uhhh . . . am I interrupting?” She asked.

  Bear smiled.

  “No. How can I help you?”

  “Well, I just wanted you to know that I have decided to be part of TESS.” She looked shy.

  Bear laughed, stood and held his hand out which she promptly shook and then impulsively kissed his cheek and hugged him. Bear hugged back and then held her at arm’s length which wasn’t easy in the now cramped office space.

  “Good to have you on board Captain.”

  She smiled then stopped suddenly.

  “What did you call me?” She asked sounding a little alarmed.

  Bear laughed.

  “Captain Johnson. I am kind of going with naval ranks for now but let me know if you prefer Colonel instead. You are the new Chief of Engineering for the Terran Exploratory Space Service. A rare honor—Congratulations! I need you go to Groton Connecticut with Admiral Wong here. He will be leaving tonight to hide our future spacecraft from our future opponents for as long as humanly possible . . . which I figure is about 60 hours or so.” They all gaped at him and he suddenly found the whole thing hysterically funny and laughed uproariously collapsing into his seat and heaving.

  “Bear . . . You are a bastard . . . screwing with Ms. Johnson’s . . . Excuse me . . . Captain Johnson’s head!” Wong said protectively putting an arm around her shoulders.

  “Probably . . .” Bear sobered slightly. “. . . but I would prefer it if you called me ‘First Admiral Bastard’” He said with just the right note of pomposity.

  Johnson smiled sweetly.

  “If I am a Captain . . . what rank are the others?” She asked curiously.

  “What others? Bear asked.

  “Why . . . all the others . . .” Johnson said.

  “All the others? How many have voted to remain in TESS?”

  “All of them . . . Bear . . . all of them voted to stay in—even Jeeter who I had to grab by the earlobe and . . . well . . . have a sharp word with him. Some bullshit about not wanting to give up the U. S. of A and some promise you made . . . .”

  “Even Feathersgait?” Bear gaped.

  Johnson nodded though with some sourness in her expression.

  “Damn!” In his heart he had been hoping Feathersgait would quit.

  Bear thought a moment his mouth still open a bit . . . feeling overwhelmed. The rest caught the look and took the opportunity to laugh at him for a change.

  No Pants Po was half way to sober. It put him in a nasty frame of mind. Not that the frame of his mind was in any way elegant. It was the crudest of frames by any standard, plain unvarnished splintered wood held together by rusty nails and dripping glue and at the best of times a horribly ugly piece of craftsmanship. It had one virtue however in that it was much more beautiful that the blurred canvas of his mind itself that was badly shimmed and hung crookedly within the frame. Ugly modernistic existential utilitarian artless assault on the senses would be the opening line of any art critic trying to write a critical piece analyzing that sad set of dabs. It would have gone on in a kindly manner to define Po’s mind as a new invention really, artless art—or perhaps the art of artlessness.

  Po had never been to Li’s current house before, Li had lived elsewhere when they first met, but Po knew where it was and had Li known that he would probably have moved. Po stood before the door and scratched his belly absently. He was scratching a spot where he had been shot back in th
e thirties. They had repaired it in a fine waste of government medical supplies. Then he had been shot in roughly the same spot in the fifties too. He had a minor triumph and escaped the decade of the sixties without being shot . . . shot at certainly, but they had all missed. Then in the seventies he had been shot again in roughly the same e place yet again. He had so many repairs there that a series of ugly scars crisscrossed each other like puckered black and pink band-aids. It was that spot that itched most. It was an odd kind of itch because it was below the epidermis where old stitches still held scar tissue together at various strata and for no good reason sporadically tried to repair the cells of his epidermis and its surrounding environs. Even though it felt like it itched and he went to scratch it, he could never get his fingers on the actual spot that itched since it lay deep below the surface. He banged on Li’s door, scratching that ancient itch that could never be relieved.

  Li answered, instantly putting on the expression which the dead first assume when they open their door to find a pale horseman come to cash in their chips from the eternal poker game. He was furious and considered slamming the door, thought better of it and practically block snatched Po’s arm from its socket and flung him into the house and slammed the door of his fine suburban home afraid people in surrounding houses might see the derelict. Po, pure in his perfidy was utterly uncaring of the contrast between his unwashed self against the backdrop of a super-clean suburban American home. He belched and wandered into the first room at hand and collapsed in an Eames chair, rocked back and thrust a leg arrogantly over one arm. Li, now visibly angry started to speak but Po interrupted him to demand all the information he had on the thing called TESS. Li gathered his wind and blasted him in scathing Mandarin until Po’s patience ended with a snap 12 seconds in. Po pulled his pistol and pointed it at Li’s head.

  “I . . .” Li started to say, not truly frightened of the ancient despite the hardware, but made at least cautious.

  Po shot a random lamp into random pieces and stared at the pieces absently as if some sage had just thrown the runes. Li radiated hatred at him. It was water off a duck’s back. Hatred was a pond he had been swimming in all his life. Direct action in his own living room was outside Li’s experience. He felt violated.

  “Tell me . . .” Po demanded without emotion.

  “Look . . . : Li began.

  Po shot a picture of Li’s girlfriend on the mantel into pieces.

  “Tell me now!”

  It was instantly clear that a continued contest of wills would only result in the local police wandering up and inquiring about hunting practice being held in quiet suburban homes in quiet suburban neighborhoods. The Chinese character in Li feared Po’s pistol less than a loss of face from a shooting scandal in front of the neighbors.

  Li cooled himself down and realizing little was to be gained in indulging his current emotions told Po everything he knew. He held nothing back. He did not care. He would sort it all out later, once Po was gone. Po would pay. Li had time on his side. Po eventually had what he wanted and simply left by walking back out the front door and abandoning the purple Li. If he had not had the sound of enraged blood pounding in his ears, he might have heard Po’s last words more clearly and wondered what the ancient meant.

  “I’ll handle this.”

  Q-Kink as a team was now the eye of a hurricane called TESS.

  Bear hated it. He was working harder than he had ever worked before. For a skiver like him to keep long hours was a contradiction in terms yet every day he rose well before the birds and sank into sleep with gritty eyes and aching muscles well after the hour of witches.

  People, people, and more people wanted to see him. Reporters, entrepreneurs, politicians, egotists and idiots all wanted ‘a few minutes of your time.’ After five days he reinvented the simple solution all executives use—he gave them to someone else. In his case he gave them to Baxter. It was a shrewd choice. Baxter had a much shorter fuse and was light years less polite than Bear. On a politeness scale Bear would have been a 7 and Baxter was a minus 36. It meant Baxter handled things more quickly and efficiently than Bear who had become something of a diplomat during his short course in Admiralhood.

  Bear stepped out of his office to cut off hearing Baxter’s latest shouted reply into the telephone. “No! You crazy bastard! I told you before . . . N . . . O . . . . NO! No endorsements, no endorsements, no endorsements! You fucking cracked pile of fucking . . .” His cursing was getting redundant—too much practice.

  Bear went out of the cave, climbed up the steps and stood on the sun deck above the entrance to the bat cave breathing deeply. He gazed out. At least two guards were visible walking the fence line with shotguns slung over their shoulders. New layers of concertina razor wire glinted merrily as they entwined along the top and bottom of the line. I had just finished being added the night before in an orgy of portable lighting systems and frenzied contractor activity. Chainsaws still roared somewhere clearing antique buckthorn and brush away from the fence line leaving a clear field of fire and three electricians were up on a cherry picker putting lighting along the barrier fence posts. Craig had acted fast for an old man and the guards were from the most prestigious private security firm available.

  Like most firms, they were only too anxious to serve the new entity called TESS, smelling future business and the green milk of a cash cow. Promises of bonus for their maintaining utter secrecy were incentives for excellence, but in the end Bear did not really trust them. The two guards at the door below him and another at the interior doors only meant the intelligence headhunters would have to work harder to get in through these rented layers; it did not mean they couldn’t. Loyalty only to money was not the moral equivalent to love of a cause, and it could be corrupted simply by upping the bottom line for anyone in financial straits. Betrayal would not be a matter of corporate policy, but the corruption would ultimately come from individuals whose paychecks were not high enough to keep them happy. The arrangement would do for the short term, but would have to evolve rapidly to stay ahead of the competition.

  Bear shook his head to clear it. He was foggy from a thirty five hour day and general long term fatigue over the last 21 days.

  He thought of Maureen and speed dialed her almost without thinking.

  She answered in a convulsive nanosecond that told him as much as about her days as anything she could say. She was as wired as he was tired.

  “Admiral!” He said when he heard her answer.—

  She giggled then lowered her voice into the male range, or as close as she could muster.

  “Admiral?”

  He smiled despite himself.

  “I miss you Admiral . . . which is something I never thought I would say to a senior military officer.”

  She got quiet.

  So did he.

  “What are you telling me?” She finally asked to break the strangely long pause.

  “Well . . . I guess I am telling you I miss you . . . but it is my brain talking and not well . . . any other part of my anatomy. Though come to think of it . . .”

  He left it hanging there.

  She laughed again.

  “Wow! You sure do sweet talk a girl. I like your brain. It is almost as nice as the rest. I can almost hear your hard body from here.” She ended in a suggestive whisper.

  “Gosh . . .” He said tritely. “Golly! Do you really think so . . . you’re not just saying it?”

  “Yeah! Like totally!” She added in her best idiot valley accent.

  “Man. I have such an Admiral fetish going on right now.”

  She giggled again—a girlish sound for one of the top three senior officers in the Terran Exploratory Space Service. She and Wong were rubbing off on each other . . . they had almost the same laugh.

  “Where are you?” He asked.

  “. . . enroute to Groton to check in with
Wongsie and the Eggheads. You?”

  He hesitated a fraction of a moment and decided.

  “En route to you.”

  She got quiet again.

  He hung up while he still had the advantage.

  No Pants Po was the lowest common denominator in the human equation, but he had not earned that title without internalizing at least a few things. For example he did know the phone numbers for lots of unsavory elements. They were elements that were helium to his hydrogen; slightly more complex than Po, but so close to the bottom of the periodic table of human usefulness as to be indistinguishable to any observer higher up. Their self images were as small as their atoms and most of them toted guns as props. The guns were always categorized as for self protection but were primarily for hire.

  Li had underestimated him. If he had thought about it harder, it could have occurred to him that Po had known where Li lived which was a closely guarded secret. Li should have wondered what other secrets the old man knew. Another thing Po also knew was how to access three separate accounts belonging to Chinese Intelligence as discretionary funds he had garnered from eavesdropping some phone conversations. He could transfer money. It was not an enormous pile of cash, but it was a moderate heap. He had enough to wave under the noses of the hired guns he knew.

  A man does not live 80 plus years in the depths of the human jungle and not learn something about its game trails despite his natural immunity to the high road. Nor was Po strictly a coward either. His one real talent was blundering into a poorly planned situation with guns blazing and emerging alive despite the rules of logic or chance. He proceeded to make that talent his game plan. It saved complex planning which only made his head hurt.

  Of course, underestimating your team mates works both ways.