‘Do not e-mail anyone about this letter, do not talk about this letter to anyone on the phone, anyone at all. You are being watched. Talking about this will mean your death. Not at my hands, I assure you, but I will be unable to stop it.
Stay low, stay quiet, and tell your friend Madeline to do the same.
Soon I will be able to tell you more. Until then contact no one about this letter or about what happened in India.’
All thought that Neal had had that this might be a prank vanished when Madeline’s name was mentioned. At the word India his heart simply froze.
‘I have sent you another letter under identical cover but I know now that you did not receive it in time. Find it, and make sure no one else has seen it in the interim.
I give you these two final pieces of advice: do not talk about this to anyone when you are in the open, even Madeline. Never talk while looking upward. I think you may know why. And do not trust anyone with black eyes.
I will come find you soon. Until then, do nothing about this. Complete your thesis and do all you can to secure the job at the White House, it will be more useful than you can imagine in the coming months.
Yours sincerely,
A Friend’
Neal reread the sheet three times. Then opened the other letter, which was much the same as the first, only it contained a line imploring Neal not to go to India in the first place.
Dear God. Someone had known. Neal struggled to wrap his head around it. Someone was trying to warn him. Someone had known that the
King’s Transom
would find something, and they had known what would happen when they did.
Suddenly there was a firm knock at the door and Neal literally almost soiled himself. The sensation was most unpleasant.
“Neal, are you there? I heard you were in town. Are you there?”
Who was that? Shit, Who The Fuck Was That?!
Neal scrambled to hide the letters, then recognition dawned on him, he had heard that voice on the phone too many times.
It was Colonel Milton. But what the hell was he doing here? Did he know? Was it him? Wait, he would not have sent the letters here, he would have told Neal directly. Let’s not get paranoid, Neal, get it together.
“Colonel?” shouted Neal through the door.
“Yes, Neal, I thought I’d drop by and see how you are doing.”
Neal opened the door the width of his body, standing in the gap to hide the mess behind him.
“Hi.” said Neal.
“Neal. How are you? Listen, I heard about what happened in India. I’m sorry.” said the colonel, his hat clasped under his arm as he noted the clearly distraught Danielson.
“Yeah, it got pretty crazy out there.” said Neal, his mind still racing about the letters.
“Dr. West was a good person, I had known her for several years.” said the colonel.
They both knew that Neal had only met Laurie a few months beforehand, but somehow they also both knew that Neal had grown closer to her in that time than the colonel ever had in much longer.
“Yes.” said Neal, seemingly struggling to stay focused on the conversation.
“Well, Neal,” said the colonel into the awkward silence, “I just wanted to come by and offer my condolences, and to pass on a message from General Pickler.”
“Yes?”
“He says that you should try for that job in Washington, that he has put his name behind yours as well, and that I should help you with completing your PhD in any way I can.”
Neal nodded, obviously brought to attention by this turn, but still mute. After a sigh Colonel Milton staunchly forged ahead once more into the resilient awkwardness, “Of course, as the air force liaison to your university, an institute which relies heavily on the Array’s support, I imagine I will be able to be of very significant help, should you wish it.”
“Wow, yes, err, that would be great.” Neal said finally, realizing he was being offered help, help he sorely needed with getting his extremely rusty thesis past the university board.
Then he looked distracted for a moment, clearly thinking of something else, “Yeah,” he said to the floor, “I’ve been hearing that I should take that job quite a lot recently.”
“Well, that is because it is a very important job, and because the general, and Admiral Hamilton, I believe, have put their considerable weight behind you.”
Neal looked at the colonel, he looked into his eyes. They were brown, dark brown to be sure, but not black by any measure.
“Yes, Colonel,” he said, “it would seem to be a great opportunity. And it would certainly be very … useful.” He looked askance at the colonel to see if the word got a reaction, but was met with a blank, if slightly confused expression. One which soon changed to mild frustration.
“Yes, well, Neal. Like I said, the general wanted me to pass along that message. And I also wanted to give you this, as well.” He handed Neal a slip of paper with an address, date, and time on it just under a week from today.
Neal looked a question at the rigid officer.
“It is the details of the memorial service for Dr. West. The president will be there, as well as the senior White House staff, General Pickler, Admiral Hamilton, and myself, amongst others. In light of your recent work together, I am sure she would have wanted you there, too.”
“Thank you, Colonel. Thank you very much.” Neal said looking at the paper, genuinely touched. Then looking back up, he continued, “I can’t say whether she would have wanted me anywhere near there, but I’m certainly going to turn up anyway.” he said with a rueful smile spreading across his lips.
“Yes,” said the colonel, “something tells me it was just that attitude that made you so endearing to her.” They both smiled sadly at each other, past conflicts momentarily forgotten, then the colonel nodded.
“Well, I am sure you are busy. Good-bye, Mr. Danielson. I’ll see you in Washington, yes?”
Neal nodded, momentarily bewildered by it all. And with that, the colonel replaced his hat, gave a small salute, something he had never done to Neal before, and walked away.
The powerful, matte grey ship beat hard into the Channel swell as it invaded the deep harbor’s entrance, brushing it aside as though a pest to be silenced. Standing in formation on her decks, any member of the crew of the HMS
Dauntless
not actively involved in crewing the ship ‘lined the yards.’ Back in the day, this would have meant three hundred men or more climbing her rigging and lining up along the sail yards and booms pitching high above the deck, an impressive sight designed as a show of skill and strength whenever a powerful sailing craft left or entered port.
The passing of the age of sail had left crews more deck bound, but improvements in their standards of both dress and discipline meant that the
Dauntless
’ sailing from Portsmouth was no less stunning than in days of old.
Lieutenant 2
nd
Class Hunt was not part of the dress crew standing in formation along the decks but was, instead, more actively involved in the ship’s current progress. Deep in the core of the ship, the vast diesel engines needed to power the frigate roared around him. His hair and face were thick with grease and dirt, its black coarseness ground into every wrinkle on his forehead and cheeks.
Standing on the bridge, the captain of the
Dauntless
was one of a few senior officers of Indian descent in the Royal Navy, and had worked hard against well-ensconced preconceptions of what a naval officer should look like. His relatively diminutive frame had forced its way bodily up the ranks, powered by a keen intellect and fearsome ambition. He had managed to do so against a tide of lighthearted racial slurs and offhand remarks, and against far more insidious prejudices, hidden, perhaps, but far from dead.
The prestige of the Royal Navy in an island nation still drove a certain kind of snob into its officer ranks. So when Captain Prashant Bhade met new officers like John Hunt, he instinctively balked at how clearly he fit the profile of what a naval officer ‘should’ look like that had so plagued a younger, more junior Prashant.
John Hunt had known about, and had been prepared for the captain’s disdain for his carefully cultivated officer look. Courtesy of the AI listening from above, John had heard the details of the captain’s call to his superior at Britannia Royal Navy Officer School, and the ensuing discussion of the then trainee’s list of prolific skills.
Based on his reading of the captain’s closed personnel file, John was far from surprised when he was initially assigned to one of the few parts of the ship that he had not demonstrated excellence at. Standing in front of the captain the day he had presented himself for duty, John had seen the glint in his eye when he said, “I see you are moderately proficient in a lot of the … easier parts of the duty roster. No doubt you will end up on the bridge in due course, but before that I think it would do you some good to take a more proactive role in the ship’s operation.”
Captain Bhade had smiled as he handed the fresh-faced new lieutenant over to his head of engineering, and watched him be led below to the engine room. That should wipe the smirk off his clean-cut face.
In truth, John Hunt never smirked. He never squinted or wept or wheezed or coughed or sweated even a drop unless it suited his purposes to do so. He had taken the assignment without complaint, and set to downloading the necessary data he would need for this job from the AI’s data banks.
In truth, the role had been advantageous in many ways. The first of which being that it gave him ample opportunity to smuggle his relay on board the advanced destroyer before they left port. In the three days they had left to provision the ship for sea, John had been the first to volunteer for every task under the sun, including the arduous loading and fitting of several new and reconditioned parts for the engines.
Taking the usually unwanted role of supervising these jobs, John had been able to simply add his relay, coated in a wooden crate, to a pallet of equipment being lifted from the dock and then lowered down into the waiting mouth of one of the ship’s holds.
Finding a place on board to hide it had been another matter, and if there were to be an emergency, the occupants of lifeboat eleven in starboard locker five would no doubt wonder what the black object in their life jacket locker was in the milliseconds before John, or one of the hub satellites above, was forced to deal with them. But, that highly unlikely event aside, it would hopefully remain hidden there for as long as it needed to be.
* * *
“So, how is he doing?” asked Captain Bhade of his chief engineering officer, as they motored steadily southwest, two days out from port.
The Welshman shook his head, “Well, sir, I cannot deny the lad has a head on his shoulders. You’d warned me of that, sir, and truer words were never said. But he is a worker as well, that one. First one in, last one out, that’s him. I’ve had to remind him of the engine room time limits more than once.”
Captain Bhade raised an eyebrow. The time limits in the engine room were due to the often dangerous combination of fumes and heat that had to be endured in there. All sailors had to take a turn on deck once an hour. In the first powered warships, it had been every twenty minutes, but then the fires of the old coal engines that they had used back then had made the engine room a giant oven. Longer than twenty minutes and the sailors started, quite literally, to cook.
Now the more efficient and cleaner diesel engines were safer, more efficient, more reliable, vastly more powerful, but the engine room remained a hellhole of fantastic noise, smell, heat and physical vibration. Your whole body shook for ten minutes after leaving it, your ears buzzing as the grease and carbon monoxide ebbed from your pores.
“A worker indeed? Well, we’ll give him a few more months of working down there and see how he likes it then. Thank you, Shadley.” The engineering officer, dismissed with a wave of the captain’s hand, left the room.
The hardy Welsh career navy man had called various ships’ engine rooms home for twenty-two years now, he thought, as he made his way back below the waterline, and was still pleasantly surprised by young Hunt. One thing about Lieutenant Hunt, he never copped the high and mighty with Engineering Officer Shadley, even though, as a warrant officer, he was technically junior to the young lieutenant.
No, John never patronized Bill Shadley, and that made him all right in Bill’s book. Though the engineer would never dream of saying it, that smug prick of a captain could learn a thing or two from young Mr. Hunt.
* * *
A week later, John Hunt sat in his cabin amongst the four empty bunks of his fellow junior officers. He had just come off duty. His eyes were blank, and he was perfectly still, he had locked the door.
Inside his machine mind, the personality copy that was, to him, the closest thing he had to a soul, sat in its esoteric construct. It was, virtually at least, separate from the machine mind and body that allowed it to function. It controlled them in much the same way the conscious part of a human brain controls a human body, via a thick run of optic cable not dissimilar to a spinal cord.
The comparison could be further strung out by comparing the machine mind that underplayed his personality overlay to a human subconscious, though his link to his machine subconscious was far clearer, and his control over it much more absolute.
Also different from our subconscious, his machine mind could perform a myriad of tasks at astonishing speed. It could move his arms and legs with perfect coordination through the most complex of maneuvers while simultaneously using the host of tools and weaponry that was built into the Agents’ bodies.
It could react faster and bring more brute strength to bear than any human could possibly imagine. It was, in fact, much faster and more capable than the personality overlay that controlled it. But it did not have opinions, or creativity, or allegiances, and so the machine had been made the willing slave of the personality that was programmed into it.
The machine mind also maintained constant contact with the hub satellites overhead, receiving information from them no matter where the Agent was, and transmitting regularly in return whenever it was within range of the relay, or in case of emergency, by one of several blunter means available to it.