The Petrovski Effect: A Tess Novel

by Randy Moffat

  Bear cleared his throat and scratched his head.

  “I’ve been thinking . . .”

  Craig grunted—his usual.

  “First, thanks again for taking the heat down there dirt-side while the rest of us ran for orbit with our tails between our legs. That took guts and I appreciate it.”

  Craig did not even answer. What can you say when people stroke you? Bear knew he still felt like he had failed. They had lost the B-52. Explosives had shattered her and she had burned along with much of the hanger in Kansas. It had not really mattered. Her MacMoran paperclips and controls had been removed and what they had had gotten was a gutted hulk incapable of Petrovski movement only after they were replaced. Bear felt certain that pictures of her taken by the attackers had made it to some intelligence organization somewhere and always smiled in secret pleasure knowing that they had missed all the important bits.

  “Second, I want to know everyone who was wounded or killed defending our installations. I will make sure we send them my personal letter of thanks for their efforts, and maybe a fruit basket or something nice. I will try to do the right thing for the families of the dead of course. Third, we are going to need a counter intelligence organization to do what we can to head off this kind of thing . . . or worse . . . later.”

  Craig thought about that for two minutes of thoughtfully ragged breathing.

  “Got any ideas?” He finally asked.

  “Yes.” Bear said. “I am thinking of an inner ring and an outer ring of information . . . treat the drive particulars like the Druze and Scientologists treat arcane knowledge. At the heart will be small group of initiates . . . an ecclesia of . . . .”

  Five hours later they used the drive initially to make sure they were not likely to stop dead in space half way to another planet and have no power, water or latrines. Then they used it several more times to test its performance and reliability. The drive worked like a rock and the submarine overall performed with fewer and fewer signs of cantankerousness each time. The improvement was slow, but measurable—statistically percentage points were added during each jump measured in equipment, circuits, and machinery that failed to fail. Finally, they got to the point where the ship was reliable enough to try baseline testing of the drive in earnest. They had started small leaps, making short jumps around the Earth using the drive repetitively. Each time they fine tuned correlations between time of activation and distance traveled and then checked all the other systems like the reactor too. They did it so many times that even Petrovski and Aziz were satisfied they could travel a stated distance in a stated direction with fair precision instead of just winging it as they had when they began. By that time, everyone else had been thoroughly bored except for the great views. In an odd kind of foresight, Bear had turned the base of the sail of the former sub into a kind of lounge with soft chairs and tables where the crew could sit around and look out the windows. It was the spot where Bear had watched the pursuing boats. It had become the favored communal area with a running card game, computer gaming, as well as an internet café that they punched through a satellite system into the web dirt-side allowing communications with loved ones. Some smart ass dubbed it ‘10 forward’ and despite Bear’s efforts, could not get them to stop. He regretted Star Trek had broken the ground already if only because for historical reasons people would remember the pub on the first spacecraft was affiliated with a woman who wore really huge hats. He was afraid of what other names might stick and rushed through a ship-naming contest before they started calling the damn ship the “Enterprise” or some such shit. They left a bedpan from the infirmary in a public place to collect strips of paper with suggestions and it filled quickly.

  At the stated time Bear, Wong, and O’Hara retreated to the ship’s small conference room clutching the pan and began to go through the strips, tallying scores for a variety of names. After 10 minutes the leading contenders were Victory with five votes, Santa Maria with three, and Orgasm with seven.

  “Here is an original thinker.” Wong said. “Consensual Pleasure. I wonder what they mean?”

  O’Hara wiggled in her seat reading an old traffic ticket someone had scribbled on and waving a finger in the air to gain attention.

  “Even better . . . even better . . .” She held up her hand palm out. “Raggnarok! Imagine calling the ship the end of the world . . . I get the reference to mankind’s final struggle, man against the void and all—but it calls up so many images of Ice Giants and the Midgard Serpent wrestling with Thor and Balder . . .” She wrinkled her nose. “Balder’s hot! My favorite Norse mythological guy . . . tall, broad shouldered, muscles, long blond hair . . . did I mention tall . . . ?”

  Wong made a sour face.

  “Great . . . the World Wide Wrestling Federation and bestiality mixed up in one word. Crap! I’d rather go with Stargazer . . . at least it highlights the mission.”

  Bear was looking thoughtful, pulling on his lower lip and staring at his piece of paper.

  Maureen lay her hand on his arm.

  “What is it?”

  Bear looked at her and put his own hand on top of hers.

  “I like this one—The Gaia. An earth mother is evocative of strong magic for men and women far away from home. Gaia . . . she was the lover of time itself . . . hmmm.”

  In the end it was Gaia by a vote of two to one. Wong dissented that too many people would not understand it, but Bear was the tiebreaker. O’Hara cheated; it was her suggestion in the first place, though she never said so. Bear had recognized her writing. He thought it ironic that a woman stacked the deck in so many ways just to get to name the first deep Space Ship. He never acknowledged he knew. The SS Gaia got a bottle of champagne wrapped up inside a plastic bag broken on her welds up in the nose of the flagship by the same woman who had named her and they began to test their new calculations in and out of the atmosphere the next day while her crew was still getting used to the name. They needed to see how the flexing of the hull between space temperatures and those in the soup would discombobulate them. To do it, they had to take the spin off the ship before they tried it. The loss of gravity came with a collective sigh of regret on Rivera’s behalf. Rivera had been recovering nicely once spin came on for an extended period. She had taken solid food two days ago and again yesterday. She looked distressed within minutes of spin coming off and gave a Technicolor yawn into a handy airsick bag seconds later. It had to be done though. It was even more disorienting to everyone else to effectively materialize inside the atmosphere and start falling at the speed of gravity while still spinning in circles meant to generate gravity they no longer needed since the planet had started doing its job again. They learned this empirically. It took the entire crew tumbling around the hull like balls in a bingo cage and plunging towards the nose of the ship to figure out they should not enter the atmosphere with spin still on and especially not nose down. Eventually, they got good at that maneuver too—shutting off gravity by stopping spin moments before sliding in and out of their native air in trajectories that put them parallel to the ground when they appeared and then returning to space almost instantly. They tested it again and again without incident and at various heights above ground level. With a little practice they got so they could match Earth’s speed, stop spin, and then slide into the atmosphere inches above water and fairly motionless relative to it.

  In the end they were able to make the correct entry angles a mundane matter that they could do without really thinking too hard. They got so good it became a matter of competition between manning shifts to see who could make the smallest wave when hitting the ocean. Once settled into the water and floating instead of flying they would activate her electric screw and maneuver around if they needed to. Bear would not risk exposing the ship to another attack, and once he was sure they could make a painless water landing every time, he developed the technique of arranging a different landing site every time they went d
own to increase security. They would simply contact Craig, and he would send a boat loaded with guards with lots of guns to the agreed pickup point a few miles from a randomly selected nearby harbor. They used multiple boats and guards and even sent out different security teams simultaneously to mix it up still more. The arrangement was not completely foolproof, but certainly made it so that the opposition could not reliably predict which harbor to lurk around with any great accuracy or lead time. The SS Gaia would drop out of drive a couple miles away from a boat in the water behind a low wave of displaced water which the boat would breast and then toodle over and pick up passengers and transfer cargo a quickly as possible. Once finished the ship would depart back to orbit well beyond the reach of even the most determined attacker with standing orders to shift position periodically and make targeting basically impossible from anyone at the bottom of the gravity well of the planet.

  The SS Gaia was as safe as they could make her from overt physical attack.

  These things work for a while, but carry the seeds of their own weakness within them. You are always fighting the last war.

  The enemy, realizing they no longer had the option of attacking the ship in one location shifted tactics.

  Qing Li was examining his latest reports on TESS. No Pants Po had survived the attack, just. He had been wounded during the assault on the submarine shed. A bullet had hit him in the liver. Qing Li assumed it had bounced off. Li wasn’t sure whether he wanted the old man to live any more. He could go either way on the issue. If he lived Li would give him to Peking as a sacrificial lamb. If he died, he would do the same thing second hand by returning a corpse. He was leaning towards the latter because he was still angry that Po had invaded his home, shot it up and violated his sense of peace and tranquility. There was also a danger that a live Po might say something about Li to the folks back in China. He wanted none of that.

  Had he known the old man would do something so open, so dangerous, so un-Chinese as to hire mercenaries to attack TESS openly, he would have shot the bastard himself before he could try. Based on Po’s reputation for invulnerability the correct procedure would have been to empty at least a clip into his skull from a few inches away. He got angry thinking about it—getting his hands dirty after all these years of cleanliness was enough to set his blood pumping and make his vision grow dim.

  He calmed his breathing using the three arm movements of the Tai Chi Chuan.

  Best to turn a negative into a positive—if life gives you lemons make lemonade as the Yankees said. The attacks might serve a purpose after all. The old man’s lunatic scheme might have slowed TESS down a little, forced them to act hastily and perhaps would have benefits to mask what Li was actually trying to accomplish in the long run. After all, the ultimate aim was to get their hands on the technology. The success or failure of the attacks was difficult to judge, but Li did not think they had succeeded in delaying TESS operations as much as Po had assumed since the new ship had escaped out into space. The TESS leader, Admiral MacMoran was making a daily news interview from there, clearly thumbing his nose at whoever had perpetrated the attack. Still, such an attack would never have provided anything but a short term benefit anyway. In the mid-term Li was more optimistic that he would be able to turn someone critical, with money or other leverage. He already had two security guards and a custodial worker at their Kansas cave on his payroll. He was continuing to work those angles. In the meantime he was working the true way—the Chinese way. Time meant nothing, only success. That meant more long term thinking—everything else was just tactics. Hong Kong had been a lease of ninety-nine years. The British poured wealth and ingenuity for a century into the place and in the end the lease ran out and they had given it back and were forced to walk away. This was the kind of thinking he admired and it was worth applying now. His long range plans were more permanent and subtle. He would make sure those plans were worthy and succeeded. Right now he was considering his longer middle term plans. The great game was like chess—the pawns were now expended and he was moving to advancing the knights and bishops, he felt a hand on his arm.

  Not that he needed the touch to know that the stranger had joined him on the park bench. Li looked at the man who had sat down beside him. His name was Kassim Mahmud. Qing Li smiled ever so slightly. A knight had arrived on his chess board.

  Kassim was an Iranian with wide connections in what passed for middle-eastern intelligence organizations. Personally Quing Li thought he was a pig; his manners were atrocious and he stank . . . personal hygiene not being on the high school curriculum in whatever hellhole he had grown up in. Li could have handled unwashed armpits, but made sure not to breath when the Arab opened his mouth. A miasma poured from behind bad teeth that made Quing Li want to go drain a swamp to get some fresh air. Fastidious in his own person, Li had to grip the bench arm to keep from launching himself away from Kassim when he spoke. Luckily, these negotiations would be short. Kassim’s knowledge was for sale. Many of his buyers were not in major intelligence organizations at all, but among those deviants that they usually hunted. Terror cells and organizations used his information to avoid capture and death every day. They met his price because the Iranian’s information was generally good.

  Li and Kassim had met today to talk price.

  The currency was energy. Qing Li and Kassim both knew that there were almost as many cars using gasoline in China now than the United States. Each year China crept closer and closer to the United States in her consumption. Any oil produced anywhere was going to be bought by someone on planet. Still, the US was currently under an administration that was cold to the Saudis and had shifted a majority of its purchases elsewhere. The loss of revenue was a danger to the revenues of entire OPEC membership in the middle-east. The Chinese were a huge and constantly growing customer but had strong interests in Russian, Iranian and African oil rather than the previouslyAmerican dominated marketplace of the Saudi’s, Iraqis and the lesser Arabian producers. Qing Li was in a position to influence those who influenced the influencers who decided what market they bought their oil in. If they suddenly bought more South American and African oil and refused to buy from the Arabs, it would deal a serious economic blow to the middle-eastern governments which most terror cells now targeted in an attempt to destabilize them. On the other hand an increase in purchases by China would offset the loss of American money. Kassim could be the broker.

  Qing Li would do this he explained, if Kassim could get them to do him a favor.

  Kassim asked what the favor was.

  Qing Li thought about it for a while and then answered straightforwardly. He needed a man to work for him—one of the myriad of fanatics that Kassim rubbed shoulders with. It must be someone with no known connection to Chinese intelligence. The time would come that the man might be asked to do as he was told without question. Li explained carefully that it would have to be a man willing to do anything at all if it was asked of him because Li would certainly ask for it all.

  Kassim smiled at him. Life was cheap in the lands of Allah where one of their few talents in the 21st century appeared to be making more of themselves without social controls on their population. There were more and more mouths among them, little talent, little employment and most of them were young . . . and bored. It should be easy.

  Qing Li smiled back at Kassim who simply made an incomprehensible shorthand squiggle in a notebook. As if such requests were a daily part of business. It probably was a standard part of Kassim’s nasty business model.

  Kassim would get back with Qing Li.

  Business as usual . . .

  TESS was in business too, sort of. It was O’Hara that ended up being the logic behind the Space Service and doing several pieces of the annoying detail work. Bear blessed her every day because there were parts of business that he hated intensely. It bored him out of his mind.

  She saw right away that their mandate required them to make their v
enture pay. To do that, they needed TESS to at least appear to be professionals.

  Bear was at Anglewood at the time. He insisted that one of the Admiral’s always stay in space, in case an attack got some of them . . . it would not get them all. Most of the problems facing TESS right now were rapidly becoming administrative or a matter of resources, the task of permanently staying on planet fell fairly naturally to O’Hara since she had handled both those logistical functions previously. As operations officers he and Wong had taken to switching out and alternating tours Earth-side too. While on Earth, he hated to leave the caves since every time he did, Craig insisted he take a personal security detail with him. An important man, especially the head of TESS, could no longer wander into a Starbucks or a bookstore without a five vehicle convoy and a dozen overly earnest, fit looking guys and gals with guns, great communicator earpieces jammed in their ears and way too much energy intently scanning horizon lines and open windows for possible assassins. It was all a bit wearing. At least at Anglewood he could pee without someone checking every stall first and giving him an exaggerated thumbs up or annoying version of a verbal ‘all clear’ while a wet stain spread on the front of his pants from waiting for them to finish. It was tedious being suddenly so important.

  Luckily most stains were hard to see since the pants Bear wore now were increasingly colored black. O’Hara had remembered some side-ways comment he had made earlier about the ‘black, white and grey’ of the space service during a pep talk he had long since forgotten and she had designed uniforms using that as a baseline. She had pestered him for a week with various designs, drawings and repeated feminine suggestions until he got fed up. One evening he was exhausted and only wanted to sleep when she pulled up ‘just one more’ which nicely broke his dromedary’s back. He had told her to handle it impolitely and rolled over. He did not really give a damn at that moment and his only earlier guidance to her had been to ditch Sam Brown belts, “too Nazi”; high collars, “they chafe”; and ‘no fucking ties!’ His abrupt rejection of responsibility was what she had wanted to begin with; the right to decide the issue for herself. Once his annoyed permission was given, it was too late. His uniforms had shown up three days later in a flurry of boxes. While Maureen pointed he opened box after box suspiciously. As the head of TESS, every time he met anyone after that he did so as the equivalent of a head of state and he had to wear the damn dress uniform rather than the working one which was considerably more comfortable. She had even gotten the dress uniform tailored to his admittedly male form. The mirror confirmed that the black pants with gold stripe down the leg tucked into really soft and comfortable grey boots with black rubberized soles to grip decks looked pretty good. So did the grey tunic with a double row of shiny embossed buttons from waist to each nipple and a white lining that showed when a triangle hung down at the top with the top three buttons on one side undone so that nothing touched his neck other than the soft and non-abrasive material of the white t-neck or crew neck under armor shirt peaking out. The whole ensemble looked striking in the reflection that never lied and in his heart he knew she had done a good job from the showmanship angle. She had put some glittering starburst things on the shoulders and a pretty colorful emblem with planets, stars and for some reason a blazing comet streaking across it on the sleeve. He also had admiral’s stripes, ripped off directly from a blue water navy on each arm. The whole effect looked imposing, which was the point, but Bear always felt formality was overrated and a trace of resentment still lingered when he put the rig on. He was a more of a Zackary Taylor slouch hat kind of guy than a Patton ivory handled pistols popinjay. The rig made him look stern and austere which was an unnatural state for him. She smiled when she saw him in it the first time, a glorious display of enamel that meant she admired her work on him.