As he decapitated the poor soldier, Shahim’s right foot came up and braced against the reinforced wall just inside the still opening vault door. Firing his right leg’s phenomenal string of muscles, he launched himself headlong at the ten men formed in front of him.
Even as they reacted, even as their training kicked in and their fingers began to close on their assault rifles’ triggers, the flying warrior collided with the still formed line of guards, and they washed from his onslaught like paper before a hurricane.
Shahim landed straight in their midst. His left foot flashing forward to ram into the head of one kneeling soldier, snapping his neck back, as his right foot brought all the rest of his momentum to bear on another’s stomach, flattening him backward and driving his right boot through the man’s torso to the ground beneath.
His arms were already flashing up as his feet connected, the two blades in his hands lashing out in wide diagonal arcs, slicing like scythes through the soft abdominal flesh of the four remaining men in the center of the formation.
It was a blur of death. As six of the soldiers’ hearts completed their last beats, their blood spilling from their opened bodies, Shahim brought his terrible eye to bear on the two men still standing to his left. Their rifles were still turning to follow the path of the intruder, only a second having passed since hell had breached their haven.
The needle-thin antennae of his deadly stare focused an arc of super-low frequency sound into an oval, one meter across and a foot high, and laid it across the torsos of the two men.
To the petrified prime minister, it looked as if the two men had been struck at their waists by a spinning helicopter blade. They flew backwards, folding completely in two as they did so, then smashed into the bunker’s walls with brute pain and crushing force.
He saw, with the last of his hope, the final two guards finally start to fire at the beast, but the bullets thudded into its back without effect. Whatever power it had used to break the two other men seemed now to push the beast back into the only two men left, the blades in its hands rising behind it as it went. It did not even look at the last of its prey before slaughtering them. The ineffectual gunfire stopped. It was over.
With the final two guards dripping down the bunker walls behind him, Shahim turned. He was drenched in gore. His team member’s skull fragments still dripped down the back of his head. His right foot was soaked to the knee in the blood and guts of the soldier it had crushed. Both his arms ran wet with coarse, red blood, from his shoulders to the tips of his blades.
The prime minister was about to say something, he knew he had to, but what? What do you say to such a thing?
Shahim saw the man’s mouth open and, without ceremony, hurled one of his slick blades right at the man, felling the target of the wild attack through the chest.
Shahim paused. Then walked slowly up to the man and retrieved his knife.
It was done.
With obvious effort, he turned to the cowering family on the cots arranged against the wall.
Despite it all, despite the way he had dispatched so many tonight, the Agent who called himself Shahim Al Khazar had never thought of himself as an evil man.
Until now.
The man whose personality had been chosen to overlay this particular machine’s mind had been a lord of the Hamprect Empire. He had thought he was a noble, not only in name, but in deed. For though he had been a decorated warrior on his home world, war had never been his passion, let alone this massacre of the defenseless. These were, he was forced to admit, sentient, if primitive, people.
But as he looked down at the shaking, weeping family, he knew his duty. He had been too fast, his attack too wild, the killing too easy. He could not leave any witnesses.
* * *
He made his way carefully through the waking city cloaked in a stolen shawl. The attack had awakened the population like a hornet’s nest and over the next few weeks the entire place would be combed, house by house, by a furious and hateful national army.
After two hours skulking from back alley to doorway, he arrived back at the warehouse where his few useless old warriors still remained, too stupid or too afraid to run. As he recounted the story of their victory, they whispered hoarse cheers, some of them crying with an orgiastic, fanatical joy. He removed the clean smock he had thrown around himself to cover his gory clothes and they cheered again at the sight of his victims’ blood drenching him.
As he walked toward a waiting van to leave, one of them asked after the fate of the prime minister’s family. As Shahim told them, they leered and cheered once more, whispering vulgar epithets about the dead woman and children.
Shahim’s huge frame froze for a moment, then he carefully placed his clean smock in the van, closed the door, and turned to the once proud warriors.
The sight of his left eye sliding back into his head, and the aberration that replaced it, shocked the levity out of them.
If they loved death so much, Shahim thought, he would give it to them, and his weapons flashed out once more before he finally left the warehouse, alone, his shame masked only by a murderous fury.
Neal sat looking at the large corkboard on the basement wall. It seemed like every time he did it was more formidable. Over the last six months they had managed to confirm the identity and location of nearly all seven of John Hunt’s fellow Agents. They had slowly and discreetly acquired varying amounts of information on each of them, and Neal had arranged this information on a large corkboard in his basement headquarters.
In that time, their small team had also grown and split into three somewhat liquid groups. Madeline was now living almost full-time in North Dakota. Their cover company Matsuoka Industries had a large facility there and she had become a regular in their research department, helping them develop the new micro-manufacturing technology that was set to make them all very rich, for what that was worth. While the rest of the team there was unaware of it, they were actually also now a vital part of something far more profound. Even now they were close to completing the first step in the long process required to develop and deploy an antigen to the virus that hung, quite literally, over their heads, waiting to fall like a guillotine once they initiated their attacks on the satellites.
Once this stage of their work was complete, Matsuoka Industries would be able to manufacture microchips that were smaller, more reliable, and most of all cheaper than anyone else, and all in a fraction of the time per chip it took more conventional facilities. That was how they had sold the idea to the company’s overjoyed CEO. But as the technology mogul licked his lips over his new toy, he had no idea that the manufacturing device they were going to make at his facilities was capable of far more than even he imagined. So much, in fact, that in time the microchip would be made defunct by the incredible abilities that the new resonance technology would give humanity. But for now that was all moot. They needed the new tool in order to build the tiny and impossibly complex bio-devices that the group needed to bolster humanity’s defenses against the almost inevitable biological attack they were going to invite.
While Madeline had been playing corporate spy, Colonel Milton had moved to his new posting at Hanscom Base in New England. Unbeknownst to General Pickler, he had also started to recruit a small but highly capable team from among the many officers stationed there, giving him access to some of the skills and resources he would need to coordinate an international attack on the network of satellites above.
Ayala, meanwhile, had taken on the role of intermediary, for which her training made her uniquely qualified. She travelled almost constantly between North Dakota, Massachusetts, and DC, updating each arm of the team on progress, and sharing crucial information, while helping each maintain their all-important cover stories.
Neal remained, for now, the lone member of the team’s third branch. His role was more esoteric. Firstly, he had looked for ways to find and track the satellites above them, relying solely on passive sensor data gleaned without ever referencing what he was really doing. It was an intricate ballet, to be sure, forever dancing around his real goal, taking almost comically convoluted routes to track down four devices that were already, by design, pretty damn hard to find.
He had made a brief return to his old job at the Array in Arizona timed to overlap with a similar trip by Colonel Milton. They had tested some of his theories using its phenomenal network of antennae, but while they had been able to detect one of the satellites on a couple of sweeps, it had soon become clear that to track them accurately they would have focus far too much of the array’s attention on them, and risk alerting the constantly vigilant devices to the Array’s newfound affection for them.
So Neal had started to pursue another avenue. Using his new role as part of the White House Science Advisory Team, he had parlayed access to several super-telescopes in Hawaii, the Philippines, Chile, and Australia. Using the combined imagery from all of them he began to set up a triangulated image of anything that was nothing. Armed with the knowledge that the satellites were cloaked beyond any capability we had to actively track them, he had instead used that fact against them and tracked pieces of near space that were blank, seeking moving patches where stars momentarily vanished, or, disconcertingly, seemed to shimmer, even if only for a fraction of a second. Taken in isolation these instances would provide little or no solid information, but taken as a whole they began to show paths in the sky. They were certainly very slippery, but once consecutive hits on each satellite started to come, he was able to plot an initial track using this passive method.
Eventually he had mapped the exact orbits of each of the four craft, and all without using any active radar. But the complexity of the process had only improved his respect for the advanced team’s abilities. They had not made it easy.
As Earth’s rotation gives the equator a relative speed of about one thousand miles per hour west to east, it is far easier for us when launching a satellite to use that latent speed as a catapult, so that we only have to gain roughly five to ten thousand miles per hour more to reach the relative speeds needed to enter low to mid-earth orbit. To go the other way would be like paddling upstream: you would have to work that much harder just to lose the momentum you already had from launching from Earth’s moving surface.
But an object arriving from somewhere other than Earth did not have to worry about accelerating into orbit, only decelerating. Unaffected by the earth’s natural spin, they had used this freedom and designed their satellites’ approach vectors to make the orbits retrograde: going against the earth’s spin.
It meant that no spot was ever far from their view, Earth revolving beneath them as they circled it in the other direction. Orbiting just above the Hubble telescope and Iridium satellites in low-earth orbit, the AI satellites moved at just over fifteen thousand miles per hour, using the additional rotational speed of Earth below them to allow a rapid, virtually constant vigil over the bulk of humanity. Each satellite passed the same point on the planet below every three hours, and that same point was also passed over three other times by the three other satellites during that time.
And so the increased relative speed of the satellites made it both harder to track them and harder to escape them. No matter where you were on Earth, every forty minutes a satellite soared overhead, unseen, its eyes upon you, its weapons ready. Only at the poles were you relatively safe, but still the satellites’ orbital distance allowed them a constant, if oblique view of all but the most remote parts of each pole, and they could, Hunt had warned, adjust their orbits to some degree, should they need to follow some unfortunate soul into colder reaches.
After reconciling this and compiling some semblance of a tracking algorithm, Neal had set up one of the online computers in his office to continuously gather a sea of seemingly inconsequential data from each of the facilities he now had access to. The online computer did nothing with the data, remaining impartial should it be scanned by the probing virtual eyes of the satellites many viral systems. But it did store the data on a drive that was also accessible, via a hard-wired, passive link, to one of his bank of offline computers. This secure PC then culled the information it actually needed from the sea of decoy data and parsed it through the algorithm Neal had designed. It was a long and convoluted process, and one that would no doubt need many tweaks and adjustments before it was capable of providing tracking data of targeting quality, but already it had given them a real insight into the movements of their quarry.
Colonel Milton and his small but elite team at Hanscom had then been able to use this information to extrapolate various options for destroying the orbiting threat. Given the information provided so far by John Hunt, a brute force attack using ICBM nuclear missiles would no doubt work, but it would be very difficult to gain access to nuclear weapons, and there was always the huge risk that launching them may facilitate World War Three, thus replacing one extinction scenario with another. Clearly nuclear weapons were, at best, a last resort. But they had some other options; quite a few, in fact. The large selection of long-range ballistic missiles in NATO’s arsenal included many that were non-nuclear, but which were designed to traverse the globe like their radioactive cousins, their chemical engines carrying them to some predetermined point in low orbit then cutting out and relying on gravity to bring the warheads crashing back down to earth. It was this ability to travel long distances outside the atmosphere that made them a strong potential option for attacking a target in space.
The information that Neal had supplied to the team at Hanscom had also given them a totally new set of options outside of extra-orbital ballistics. While the satellites’ retrograde orbits made them very hard to track, and harder still to run away from, this same fact could be used to the group’s advantage when trying to destroy them. If they could get something big enough, and explosive enough, into their paths, the satellites might do the work for them, rushing headlong into whatever trap the group was able to set.