by Randy Moffat
Bear thought about that.
“Apparently?”
Murray grinned.
“That is the operative word . . . . he he he.” He had the annoying habit of laughing at his own puns.
“So he wasn’t?” Bear moved on for him.
Murray sobered up.
“Oh, he submitted their reports, but frankly they do not jive with the authorship. I had a guy I know, a specialist in Chinese, read them and she tells me that the guy who wrote the bulk of the reports was highly educated. Po certainly does not fit that profile, but they were submitted by Po and a lot of people read the signature block back in China and figured he was the man who made them. My guess is he was getting them from someone else . . . then dumbing parts of them down to his fifth grade level, and sending them in like his own work.”
“But you do not think that Po organized the attacks on us?”
“Oh yes. I think Po did that alright. Hiring thugs and mercenaries with big guns has him written all over it. Besides he appears to have been killed legitimately during the Kansas raid.”
“I’m confused.”
“You and everyone else on the planet—which is why nobody knows what the hell is really going on . . .” Murray shrugged. “I mentioned I have a fourth source who verifies that Po led the physical attack and confirms he was killed. His body was identified . . . she says there was no mistaking him. The corpse had an aged revolver Po always carried everywhere in one hand and bottle of whiskey in the other hand. Apparently that combination is as good as a fingerprint. Speaking of fingerprints . . . the corpses matched Po’s too. The pieces of missing face aside it seems likely to be him unless they found a 200 year old pickled corpse to substitute for him somehow. More important though is that source also thinks that Po had absolutely nothing to do with the bomber Smith who blew himself up on the Gaia.”
Bear looked askance at Murray.
“You live in a very twisted world, Murray.” Bear said appreciatively. “But I will bite . . . what connection could there possibly be between the Chinese and Smith. Smith was a . . . well . . . Islamist ideologue for want of a less genteel phrase.”
“True. But there were indications of a connection between the Chinese and the suicide by Smith that most agencies missed. Smith was under the influence of a middle-eastern terrorist organization that activated Smith. Superficially they pulled the switch. My source had information that the dude who led that organization, in other words Smith’s handler, contacted Smith and gave him his instruction set before Smith applied for and joined TESS. Most agencies agree up to that point. What they don’t know is that my source confirms that about a month after Smith entered TESS training a man named Kassim Mahmud met with a Chinese guy in a park in down in Alabama. That alone means nothing except I got some information from elsewhere that Kassim left his meeting with the Chinese guy and went almost straight to the head of this bunch of whackos who owned Smith. This was just prior to Smith the human missile being launched straight at us. I am thinking Smith’s original role was as a mole with a long term mission of infiltration and information gathering. Suddenly, that mission changed to suicide after his boss meets with Kassim! That smelled to me so I got a money guy I know to check and guess what? Smith’s terror boss got a sizable ‘donation’ to the cause’s funds just after that meet—bought a nice car with it and then put a down payment on a villa in Trieste. There’s more too. I put some feelers into the Chinese board of trade and I’m told some pressure was put on them to shift certain oil sales around the same time. I laid it out on a time line. Those changes were ordered just after the head of the trade board met with an official high up in Chinese intelligence. Funnily enough, those changes in trade supported the terror group’s bigger objectives too by undermining the economic health of Saudi Arabia . . . who they hate. Me? I see all of this as a kind of tit for Smith’s TNT tat.”
“Sounds flimsy;” Bear said slowly. “Who was this Chinese guy that met with Smith’s control if it was not Po?” Bear demanded.
Murray smiled slightly lopsidedly and held out a limp hand palm up.
“Working on that, boss . . . . I am working on that. Detailed information was not flushed out at the time of the meeting in the park between Kassim and the Chinese man. It was a passing meet between the two. There was no time or ability to get proper information or follow-up since the meeting between the two was totally unexpected. My source’s mission was to follow Kassim, not some track down random Chinese dudes feeding pigeons in a park. After the meeting the tail stayed hard on Kassim and lost the Chinese guy. When I put Po’s picture in front of my contact she told me that it definitely wasn’t Po that met with Kassim, but they had no audio or full video so. Their confidence is high though that it was not Po—their Chinese was a lot younger. Confidence is low as to who it actually was . . . Still . . .”
“Still . . .” Bear looked at him hard.
Murray cocked his head.
“My contact managed to take a couple pictures of the two of them together. I am hopeful we can trace out who it was . . . in time.”
Bear cleaned a finger nail absently with a pocket knife.
“So if I hear you correctly—Po, a Chinese wildcard, launches an attack on us and is killed. Then another Chinese guy somehow activates Smith who was supposed to be a mole in TESS for a terror cell. His bosses suddenly change his mission and use him to blow himself up in an attempt to take the ship to the bottom of the ocean with him? That big boom failed, but the guy who started that chain of events is still operating out there somewhere. The guy organizing grandiose gunfights is dead as a door nail, but this guy working hidden agendas behind a curtain is still at large. Have I got all that right?”
Murray nodded.
“What do the Chinese have against us?”
“Nothing and everything . . .”
“Conversations with you Murray are geometric . . .” Bear said sounding a little pissed. “ . . . . a perfect circle. Clarify!”
Murray fondled his chin.
“I have read the Chinese government’s policy statement to its agencies. They are ALL . . . and I mean ALL . . . taking a wait and see attitude towards TESS. In fact, China has ponied up the cash to joining the list of official users of the organization . . . officially they are 11th in line for missions so officially China as a nation is dealing with us peacefully just like most people.”
“Yeah. So?”
Murray shrugged.
“So officially they have nothing against us. But that ‘nothing’ is like saying all Americans believe in anything the Federal government tells it. It just is not true. The ‘everything’ part is what everyone has against TESS. We have the MacMoran drive and they don’t. So there is strong sentiment in the Chinese government, as I have been trying to make clear, is also there in most governments that they should have the drive for national security reasons as much as anything. They see the drive as dangerous. Just like anything is dangerous to them as long as they don’t control it. China is a big country, Bear. I have visibility on several of the official organs of state, but not all of them. There are more than a billion of them, Bear. For all I know there is a secret Chinese John Birch society of paranoid reactionary commies who are operating without official sanction. Our mystery guy could easily be from some splinter group like that.”
“If they want the drive so bad why blow it up by hitting the Gaia?”
Murray shrugged again.
“I would really be guessing.”
“So guess . . . I’m too tired to do it myself.” Bear rubbed his neck.
Murray shrugged his pastry shoulders again.
“They figure the drive on the ship is the working model only. The actual design and manufacturing plant is actually here at Anglewood—so if they kill the ship, we will just build another one in time. In short, any attack on the ship was not meant to
be fatal . . . just to delay us for some reason. Someone wants to slow us down until they can get their hands on the plans or something. If I was a really devious bastard I might throw in another angle and would figure that with the Gaia gone it would be a good moment to slip some more guys like Smith into TESS since a lot of key folks would have been killed in losing the ship and lots more vacancies would open up and have to be filled—at least some of them with spies. If you look at it that way blowing the ship therefore increases the chances of getting a glimpse of the plans for the drive or the drive system itself because they will lying around on tables during construction.”
Bear thought about that for a while and then rubbed his neck again.
“That sounds just sick enough to be true. Find him, Murray. Find our Chinese guy in the park! Maybe he will lead us back to who we are looking for. We owe them for Baxter.”
Murray nodded.
Bear slurped his coffee thinking about the kind of people who thought like Murray had described, shivered and went to bed.
Early the next morning Bear met and talked to the comedy team of Murray and Craig about the strategy for expanding TESS’ foreign policy monitoring activities in a greater hurry. They were in three car convoy on the way to meetings elsewhere. They needed a plan for the future and Bear had very little time for planning. He was too busy acting . . . and reacting. Bear had his driver pull into a bagel place in southern Kansas city where the coffee was good and the cream cheeses excellent; Bear knew that Murray liked his knosh with chive schmear and he had to use a rest room.
An hour later they exited the deli and stood in the spring sunshine. Murray wandered off while Bear talked to Craig for a couple minutes until Bear threw his head back and breathed in the beautiful morning wind; smelling the mother world in its caress. Knowing he would be trapped in buildings for the rest of the day.
“Admiral MacMoran?” He heard a voice ask tentatively.
He looked down remembering he was wearing his uniform for a meeting later. He was instantly recognizable from a distance. The Fan club was on hand again.
This time it was a balding paunchy middle aged man who looked as if his middle name was obscure. ‘Ordinary Joe’ was written on him clearer than an Izod logo on his golf shirt.
Bear smiled his meet and greet smile absently and readied his handshake.
The man lifted his hand from his pants pocket and shoved a pistol towards Bear’s chest. Bear heard a distant shout and went limp, the best defense against a gun at close range. It moved his sternum away from the man’s gun and passed his heart over the muzzle instead.
The man shot him and then again. Bear had collapsed backwards quickly. He fired again towards Bear on the ground, but missed so that a pair of bullet flattened on the asphalt while Bear rolled over weakly. He aimed more carefully to finish his work.
There were two more shouts and then a flurry of shots from Bear’s personal security team just before one of Craig’s men hit the assassin in a flying tackle from behind. The dead man pitched forward and bled on Bear as the head of TESS mingled his blood with it on the tarmac.
Excited shouts and exclamations left little impression on Bear other than general excitement. Murray’s very troubled face loomed over Bear’s while someone tugged on the assassin to roll him off Bear’s supine form. Eventually they did.
“Admiral! Are you . . . are you OK?”
Bear tried to smirk, but it felt distantly odd and far away.
“Not really . . .” He gasped. “I’ve been shot . . .” He gripped Murray’s sleeve. “Protect TESS and Admiral O’Hara . . .” He said earnestly trying to hold Murray’s eyes but his own closed as he whispered the last vowel of her name.
He said no more as their world faded from him.
Somewhere in space swam a whale. She was evolving. It was a profound evolution—Nothing simple like an animal changing her fodder or range. It was wide process of unnatural selection driven organically by the organisms inside her. The change continuously enhanced her ability to be functional where she now lived most of the time; a shift in the very environment to which she belonged. Where once she was buoyed by and pressed down by tons of water, now she was pressed by nothing at all. Her feed was the same as her waterborne days. She consumed energy from the barely controlled interaction of atoms, but now what she did with it was a leap of proportional capabilities—as if an ant was suddenly an elephant. She was not the same whale that began the journey and would never be a true aquatic animal again, made ungainly by the changes to her outer form by the repeated welding of objects to her hide. She paid no price for her outward chunkiness now though; her new element was one without friction or drag. If you looked closely you could make out the whale’s old form under all the additions of crude surgery; but she was new and unique—like a lungfish that belonged in two worlds instead of one. She had adapted to become a whale with one foot still dabbling in the waters of Earth’s fountain of life and another in the vast dimensions of emptiness that dominate the larger environment of space. Because of the changes in her she sat like a signpost in an evolutionary ladder that pointed to a future dimly seen. There would be a time when whales to come would no longer be animals built for the tiny seas of Earth but solely for the incalculably vast oceans of space. She herself might never be wholly one or the other, but the fates would ensure any offspring were better and better at what she now did imperfectly.
Inside the whale’s belly was a host of Jonah’s. Seen from a distance they were tiny balls of energy who did their small busy things to take care of the whale. They were symbiotic parasites in her great gut. These human bacteria were poor imitators of the sun. They turned ingested matter into heat and expended it into the surrounding atmosphere—poor chemical relations to the fusion of stars. In the blink of time that was the parasites whole life, the outside observer had to look quickly and closely to see them at all. Two were interacting . . .
Aboard SS Gaia the female of the pair was doing ordinary things; tasks people do as the nuts and bolts in the erector set of life.
The male took his ease strapped lightly to a chair. Bulky bandages wrapped his torso. A bullet had pinged around inside his shoulder, breaking a collar bone on the way in and chipping a sternum as it left. Another piece of lead had just missed killing him and required five hours of surgery near the aorta to patch various areas of internal blood loss. The surgeon thought they had saved the heart. They were wrong. Bear had lost the heart somewhere around the time he had awoken to see Maureen bending over his bed and holding his hand fiercely to her cheek which was soaking wet.
It was days ago and long gone in the chain of events called a busy life, and yet it was very fresh in his mind. Especially the moment he went to brush the tears from her cheek and she punched him in the shoulder for scaring her to death which made him wince in pain. Contrite then she had kissed him, a formal welcome back into the land of the living both would likely remember the rest of their lives.
Bear regarded her now with suddenly eagle-like eyes that mirrored Maureen with a muddied male mixture of liking, lust, and complacency. The neat arches of her form were a study in fluid symmetry that the XY chromosome envied and could never achieve—the blocky lines of boyhood clumsy beside the Bezier curves of the feminine. She was feminine too. As she went about her business she was subtly precise in her movements in a way that men were not and she synchronized her mind and her body’s actions in a ballet that was achingly, touching womanly. It was erotic and endearing and its impact would have been readable to and observer as new alien lines in the map of Bear’s face. Husbandliness was an unnatural state there on the visage of so repetitive a bachelor—anyone who knew him and looked would see an image of striking contrast to vacuous mundane singleness. While singular, they were not single anymore; through the subtle chemistry of human science they had become a plural.
In time he reached out and laid his hand on o
ne of hers. The unsolicited simple gesture stopped her as thoroughly as being struck by a Mack eighteen wheeler doing ninety. She looked at him and his face communicated as much through the semaphore of his eyes as any other single component of the MacMoran synergy. The look in his eyes froze her like a Popsicle in dry ice. Motionlessness drew the eye to the eyes more and more. Her own eyes responded to Bear’s and widened into pools of endless depth, moist and reflective as the space between stars as if waiting for something. It was a look of women throughout time; almost as if tears fought with a smile. Nothing she could have contrived to do with her body could have penetrated as deeply, nor aroused his emotions more than the look she returned to him. He felt his heart spin out of control . . .
“Maureen . . .” He said suddenly hesitant, uncertain of his uncertainty. “We need to . . .”A claxon sounded somewhere in the heart of the SS Gaia before she could find out precisely what they needed to do. Something was wrong somewhere . . . and Admiral O’Hara of the Terran Exploratory Space Service put a hand on his face, cupping a dear cheek while Admiral Bear MacKinnon, commander of the Terran Exploratory Space Service pressed his face into the tiny warmth of her human hand and jerked his head to one side, sending her off with the gesture to deal with the latest in an apparently never ending series of crises that was their new life . . .
The new kind of whale swam on in the cold and the black oblivious to the tiny sparks of heat in her digestive tract who were the first humans now truly free of their native land . . . . adrift from their gravitic fetters to wander . . . perhaps forever in their hard won endless sea . . .
FIN