She shuddered and Neal fell silent for a moment. But then Madeline suddenly took up his line of thought, her expression one of childlike fear, “They … they were attacked from space.” she said, reticently.
Neal had concluded the same thing, but he desperately needed to check his thinking, and so, despite how much it might hurt her to think of it, he prompted her to go on, saying, “Why do you say that?”
“Two things,” Madeline continued, “firstly, the wreckage. A missile would have left some damage, pieces. But the ship must have been downed whole, taking everything that was bolted down with it.”
An image filled her mind but she went on, driven now by a new emotion growing inside her: anger. “But there is more than that. Years ago, the Institute helped test a laser platform for the air force. It was going to be part of what Reagan stupidly used to call Star Wars. It was designed to be fired from space, but for testing purposes we fired it from an air force gunship. It ended up being scrapped because even minimal cloud cover cut the laser’s effectiveness markedly.
“With more power we could have made it more capable, but we couldn’t generate enough juice within the predefined weight limits. Anyway, I was part of the team that laid the targets for the laser, and picked them up afterward.”
She turned to face him, clasping his forearm with her hand, “Neal, the burns on the bag, the soot, our targets from back then had the same pattern. It radiated from laser hits as the targets burned. The coast guard said it looked like there had been a fire,” Neal could hear the venom growing in her voice, “they must have been burned alive as they tried to get away.”
She looked into his eyes, her growing fury burning now as well, as fierce as he had ever seen, and he almost recoiled from her.
“We have to fight these fuckers, Neal.” Madeline said in a low grumble, her lips and eyes set now in determination. “We have to fight them and we have to win. James was a good man, and I know you and Laurie were close. This was a terrible end for them.”
She fixed his gaze and said, finally, “We need to avenge them.”
He nodded, her resolve filling him, allowing his anger at Laurie’s death to finally hit him. The emotion focused his mind into cold calculation, his uncommonly good instincts starting to guide his thinking once more. He thought about their next move.
“We will, Madeline, we will, but first we must survive this first storm. If they were cut down from above, that means we are always going to be vulnerable whenever we are in plain sight, possibly even when we are inside too, depending on who or what is watching. Either way, for now, at least, sunbathing is probably not a good idea.”
She smiled, coldly, then added to his thought, “And e-mail is going to be out, as well. If they can hack comms from a navy boat in the middle of the ocean, they can certainly read our e-mails. In fact, to be safe, we are going to have to stop using any PC that is connected to the net, altogether.”
They looked at each other. They had found salvation from their grief in seeking revenge. They would find a way to fight this.
“So I guess we’re not going to hand this off to ‘people more powerful than ourselves’?” Neal quoted her, a small, humorless smile edging at his lips.
“Those morons? Never.”
They chuckled for the first time since it had all happened, and then Neal went on, “OK, so what
are
we going to tell the admiral and his friends? They are going to want an explanation.”
Since their arrival in orbit, the four satellite-based supercomputers had been constantly updating all eight operatives on the progress of the mission, while also monitoring their work down on the planet’s surface.
After using devices like the crocodile clip to provide temporary connections to get the Agents in place, each operative had hidden their main subspace relays and proceeded to start integrating with their various target nations.
Leaving their relays behind had meant that they were unable to send significant amounts of information to the hub satellites in return until they were able to collect their relays and, like Lana Wilson, move them to more permanent locations.
In case of emergency, they were able to use small lasers aimed upward at the passing satellites to communicate covertly. But this method was cumbersome and limited, especially when compared to the instantaneously connected subspace tweeter that all their systems were designed around.
In the interim, most of them had buried the black boxes in fields near the military bases they needed to be billeted at for the first stage of their naturalization.
This was the case for Agents Lana Wilson in America, Preeti Parikh in India and Pei Leong-Lam in China, the same being true for the Agents in Russia, England, and Israel.
In France, Jean-Paul Merard had buried his relay in a vineyard, leading to the unfortunate if unavoidable death of the vintner, and forcing the Agent to wait several additional weeks for the police to clear the area before collecting it once more.
Shahim Al Khazar, on the other hand, was unique in that his orders were not to infiltrate a military or government organization at all. The political instability in Pakistan had led to the decision that it would be easier to nullify their military’s threat by joining and helping the extremist forces in the mountains than from within the rigidly structured military itself.
Earning an Al Qaeda commander’s trust had not been difficult; it had simply required that Shahim do something so atrocious that no one could doubt his resolve in the jihad they had all committed their lives to. After the explosion at the US Air Force base in Afghanistan had killed so many infidels, and claimed no fallen martyrs from the fighters’ ranks, he had been able to carry his blanket-wrapped black box into the camp he was sent to unhindered, no one daring to stop him.
It turned out to be Pei Leong-Lam who was the last to be able to return to his relay, the closed doors of the Chinese Training Camp keeping him penned up for the entire officer training class.
After three months, however, Leong-Lam was also to be the first among them to be assigned to a base. Based on Drill Sergeant Shih’s firm recommendation, he was to be sent to the prestigious Hong Kong Garrison. The day before deployment, he requested and was granted twelve hours leave by Shih out of respect for the way Leong-Lam had handled the drill sergeant’s abuse, and as Pei came into range of his buried relay, the connection was reestablished, and the eight were united once more.
Since its inception, the plan to infiltrate the earth’s superpowers had been founded on a very flexible set of parameters. No one could have predicted how earth’s major societies would change over the years that would pass from when the attack was launched to when the advance party actually arrived, so into the various parts of the team had been built a series of checks and balances.
Like all civilized societies, the one that was descending upon us was as complex and multi-faceted as our own. Factions and political alliances were as much a part of its systems of government as any of ours. However, an unparalleled unity of purpose had come from the discovery of a weaker, conquerable planet within their grasp. This could be a fresh start for the planet’s fiscal elite, a chance to expand out of the confines of their crowded, financially and politically saturated planet.
But as the plan to invade was formed, none of the prominent parties or dynastic families had been willing to give up control of the expedition to any of the others. So it had been decided that they would bake the same political diversity into the advanced team, and the invading army, which they ‘enjoyed’ in their own colorful governments.
The concession to politics had been further facilitated by the military decision to use a programming method known as personality-overlay to program the eight operatives, aiding their ability to appear less … robotic. Years of practice had led AI programmers, AIParents, or AIPs as they were called, to the conclusion that the fundamentally illogical nature of all animals was extremely difficult to fully duplicate in a fundamentally logical AI.
So this need to make the Agents more natural, combined with pressure from the halls of power to bake political influence into the invading force, had led them to decide to program the eight operatives of the advanced team with the personalities of actual members of their race, the minds to be nominated and voted upon by the very political entities that were vying for control of the whole enterprise.
The political battle that had followed had rivaled the greatest in any government’s history, only just stopping short of open war. But, after six months of heated debate, short-lived alliances, betrayals, assassination, and unashamed commercialism, eight nominees had finally been agreed upon.
The satellite-based hub supercomputers would remain pure AI, their logic unquestionable, and would be placed in orbit around the prize, in charge of the day-to-day running of the operation, supervising the work of each Agent as they infiltrated the most powerful human militaries.
The supercomputers, however, would ultimately bow to the combined will of the Agents, whenever a virtual meeting of the Agents could be convened, the eight Agents’ personalities, picked with great care and even greater expense, representing to varying degrees all of the main parties politic. They would vote on any decision that either they or the supercomputer chose to put in front of them, and this would allow the advanced team the strategic flexibility it would need to respond to any unforeseen developments once they arrived at Earth.
If a consensus could not be reached on how to react to whatever political or martial situations they found themselves facing, the AI would form the ninth, tie-breaking vote.
Now that Pei Leong-Lam had managed to return to his relay, the first full Council was convened since only a few days after their arrival. From now on, they would meet at least once a week, more often if the need arose.
The conference took place in a virtual meeting space, the personalities of the eight Agents represented by avatars created in their images, seemingly floating in a circle in empty space.
The AI that was creating the image and projecting it into the heads of the eight Agents was also the host of the meeting. It remained invisible, however, represented not by an avatar, but by virtual screens in front of each Agent, where it could place any image or dataset relevant to the conversation.
While this system might be primitive considering the machines’ advanced abilities, the entire meeting would be conducted at phenomenal speed. The esoteric constructs inside each Agent that housed their personality copies were, after all, still computers, just with an animal consciousness overlaid on top of them; and they were still capable of operating at machine speeds.
None of them would ever struggle to recall an event or piece of information, or to calculate an equation; the answers would appear to them with the speed of any computer calculation.
So these meetings of the Council, while no doubt doomed to be steeped in argument, demagoguery and bile, would nonetheless only take a few seconds in real-time. While the meeting occurred, the Agent’s on the ground, as long as they were within reach of their subspace relays, would only have to briefly excuse themselves from whatever they were doing, their eyes would briefly glaze over for a second or two while they participated, and then they would be back to the business of assimilating themselves in to their respective organizations.
So, as this first meeting of the Council was convened by the AI, around the world the eight Agents became momentarily distracted. Most had found ways to be alone, having been notified in advance by the AI that the last of their ranks was almost within range of his relay.
Agent Mikhail Kovalenko, in Russia, was unfortunately in one of many long meetings with his superior, both in terms of time and wind. The strict Captain Gorovchev would think the junior officer was about to sneeze, and would be thankful when, a moment later, Mikhail’s eyes would focus again, allowing the captain to continue yet another of his frequent diatribes on the importance of discipline.
The word sounded from all around them, as their images resolved in the virtual meeting space. Because of the subspace tweeter, the signal travelled not through what we considered ‘normal’ space, but under its surface, so it was actually not burdened by the constraints of having to travel at all. It arrived instantaneously, and because of this a meeting would be conducted between eight people spread across the planet, without any of the delays such a meeting would suffer over our more primitive communications.
The AI had orders on how to chair the meetings, and it was not flexible. A list blinked into existence in front of each of them, its contents immediately a part of their memory, sent as it was, and as all data was being, directly into their computer minds.
Lana Wilson’s avatar’s virtual mouth opened to speak, the AI sensing this the moment she began. In the millisecond between her deciding to speak and the word forming in her avatar’s mouth, the AI stopped talking and diverted her speech to the group. “Imagery of the action was conveyed to us,” said Lana, “but not of the surrounding area. Was the destruction witnessed?”