But Neal nodded and smiled at John, explaining it to the group as he ushered them all farther into the hangar, “If John here doesn’t know who you are it means you have not been flagged as being associated with Madeline and me. Trust me when I say that is definitely a
very good thing
.” They all nodded appreciatively and Neal continued, “John, let me introduce our three new friends.
“Ayala here has been with us since soon after you first approached Madeline and me. I hope she will not mind me saying she is uniquely qualified in the art of both discovering and keeping secrets. I think it is safe to say she is a very big part of why Madeline and I are still alive.”
Ayala was not bashful and nor did she feign modesty. She smiled and shook John’s hand, her eyes clearly assessing the man even as she gripped his hand with somewhat excessive firmness. He smiled in return, unfazed by her scrutiny or her applying her considerable strength to his hand.
“To her left is Dr. Martin Sobleski, a projectile engineer who has spent the last two months working with Colonel Milton on long-range missile options to take out your friends above us.”
Several of the group inadvertently glanced skyward at the rusted roof while Martin and John nodded at each other and the scientist gingerly shook the Agent’s proffered hand.
“And, last but not least, we have Captain Jack Toranssen, of the US Air Force. The captain served under Colonel Milton for several years at the beginning of his career, but now he is a B-2 Mission Commander. He is normally based out of the Whiteman Air Force Base in Missouri, but he is on loan to the Hanscom right now, at the request of Colonel Milton, of course.” John Hunt nodded, and the captain stepped up to face the Agent, displaying the same lack of reticence as Ayala had moments before.
He stared straight into the eyes of the young-looking Agent and said firmly, “Good evening, Mr. Hunt.” the lack of rank was notable, if only to John and the Colonel, “I think I’ll go ahead and say something I assume the others are all thinking. The colonel has shown me a lot of frankly circumstantial evidence of this conspiracy. Persuasive evidence, certainly, especially considering the man it was coming from, but now that I’m here … I think it’s reasonable to say I want to see something more … concrete.”
The captain spoke without spite, but with enough force and bluntness to make the words a form of threat, and Neal and Madeline flinched a little. Knowing some small measure of the Agent’s abilities, they knew that facing off against the machine was nothing short of suicide. Of course, neither of them thought for a moment that John would actually hurt the captain, it was just disconcerting to see a proverbial Jack Russell barking at a Rottweiler, no matter how well restrained that Rottweiler might be.
The British officer stood firm, meeting Jack’s inquisitive gaze head on, and Neal half expected the Agent’s vicious left eye to metamorphose again. Because of that, Neal found he couldn’t help but stare at that orb, his morbid fascination taking over.
But instead, John smiled, then shrugged, apparently deciding that the captain would respond to something rather different than the display he had given Neal and Madeline.
“If you’ll excuse me a moment. Maybe this will help.” said the Agent.
He walked over to one of the old planes in the hangar, crouched under it, positioning his feet under the fuselage as best he could. He then grasped one of the reinforced arms that went from the bottom of the plane to about halfway along the wing, and placed his other hand under the plane’s fuselage. Without strain or much in the way of obvious effort, he then lifted the plane from underneath, raising it entirely over his head in one smooth movement.
They all stared. He smiled, and a moment passed while he looked at each of them in turn to see if there were any other takers.
“In fairness, that was a very reasonable question, Captain Toranssen,” said the Agent, gently placing the plane back on the floor of the hangar, “and I am glad you asked it. It gets any doubts you might have out of the way.”
He walked back to the group, seemed to reconsider something, and then with a sidelong glance at Neal, he said to Martin Sobleski, “I know Neal wants to see this again, and maybe this will interest you too, Doctor.” and without further ceremony, his left eye slid down, exposing his weapons system. The doctor’s head jerked away instinctively, then the scientist in him reacted and he peered closer.
Neal came to stand next to Martin and they both stared at John’s transformed eye socket for a moment, “Awesome, isn’t it?” said Neal and Martin nodded, equally agog. John smiled at the two, then Neal gathered himself, remembered that there were other people present and said, “Yes. Thank you, John. Someday we’ll have to have another demo of what it can do. But for now, if everyone is … comfortable with John’s credentials, we have a lot to cover and not much time.”
Neal looked around the room getting nods from everyone, most of them still astonished by the nonchalant hefting of a plane into the air like so many sacks of potatoes. Neal merely smiled as he looked at each of them in turn, until his eyes returned to rest on John, who also nodded.
“Yes,” said the Agent, “If I may, I would like to get an update from each of you on how things are moving along, and maybe I can go over any plans, schematics, or theories you are ready to discuss as well. Then I have some important updates I need to give you while we have time.” He looked around the group, “Well, who would like to start?”
The colonel spoke up. “I have been watching you, you know.” They all turned to Barrett. “Not overtly, I’ve never run a search on your name, or anything obvious like that, but I had my office start to monitor your ship, under the very reasonable auspices of it being one of the new Type 47 Destroyers which we are also looking to develop here in the US as well. I must say your name does seem to come up a lot in the ship’s bulletins, Lieutenant First Class Hunt.”
Barrett emphasized the new title John had acquired in his short but storied time on the ship, and carried on, “But that is not the point of my speaking up. If my information is correct, the HMS
Dauntless
is currently docked in Hawaii, so I have to ask: how the hell did you get here?”
John nodded, “The Cessna is a surprisingly capable little plane, but no, it would not get me from Hawaii me to the mainland, let alone all the way here. No, Colonel, I was selected by my captain to attend a seminar in San Diego at your Naval Academy there. I then convinced my fellow Agents during one of our Councils that I needed to have a … liaison with a female to stop some rumors that have been spreading that I am either celibate or gay. And rumors of the like have indeed begun to spread aboard the
Dauntless
.”
Some of the group flinched a little at the mental image of this, well, machine, sleeping with some unsuspecting lady. Ayala was not among the more squeamish in the group. It would be hard for a covert agent to describe the offhanded way with which one approaches such things as sex after a long time in the field. Because of this, Ayala was notably not one of the people in the group who had a problem with the fact the alien Agents were apparently fully functional in that department. In fact, it spoke of an alarming level of preparedness on their part.
Moving past any such conjecture on the part of his audience, John continued, “At this moment, there is a female officer who was also attending the conference in San Diego unconscious in the hotel room the navy provided me. When I return, I will report the same thing to my fellow Agents that I will tell my fellow officers aboard the HMS
Dauntless
: that I spent the weekend locked in my room with her, in flagrante, as it were.”
Madeline was clearly dismayed at the thought of the unconscious woman waiting in the Agent’s hotel room and glanced at Ayala, who feigned equal disdain of the Agent’s tactics. But inside she was still noting the efficiency with which this man … this machine … had used his surroundings to his advantage. She noted this all with a mix of professional respect and equally professional detachment, her mind reflexively gathering information on the abilities of this ally, and what this told her about what she should expect from the other seven Agents that they were going to have to face.
But Madeline only saw that this man had done something her morals said was, at best, distasteful. To drug the poor girl was admittedly very effective though, and if she pressed the issue in her mind she knew she would have to acquiesce that this unknown woman’s reputation was an unfortunate but more than acceptable price for getting John Hunt here to help them.
John quickly finished his explanation, mentioning the borrowing of an unaware fellow officer’s Cessna from an airfield in southern California, an officer John knew was still in Hawaii, the brief fuel stop in Kansas, and then the flight here.
Formalities aside, they got down to business, ignoring the tensions that clearly pervaded the group. They did indeed have a lot to cover.
* * *
An hour later they were in the thick of their conversation. Enthusiasm, fascination, and the vital importance of their work kept them all focused. They had started at the beginning, discussing how to handle their single biggest threat: the satellites. First on the agenda was a review of the satellites’ defenses in detail so they could decide how best to circumvent them. It would be difficult, expensive, and very unsubtle, but hypothetically the orbiting platforms could be brought down.
They had analyzed the various options in the US arsenal for hitting an extra-atmospheric object. They had discussed the country’s large stockpile of Inter-Continental Ballistic Missiles (ICBMs) and Submarine Launched Ballistic Missiles (SLBMs). Armed with nuclear warheads of various lethality, ranging from devastating to earth-shattering, these devices all wrought appalling destructive power.
If they could penetrate the satellites’ laser defenses to within the blast radii of one of these leviathan missiles, then John told them that there would be nothing that the satellites could do to stop them. A nuclear blast would destroy them; there was no question of that, the Mobiliei could no more build a machine capable of resisting a close proximity thermo-nuclear explosion than humanity could. Unfortunately, as they had already surmised, detonating multiple warheads in low-earth orbit would have devastating effects on the planet below too.
So Neal and Martin Sobleski had concluded that launching a volley of Ballistic Missiles at them was ‘less than ideal.’ This was where Martin’s more advanced missile work came into play. Taking the floor, he started to work through their other options, such as they were.
He presented on the various satellite killer missiles, both experimental and in place, in the US, its allies, and even its enemies.
There were not many. It was not an easy task to shoot a fast moving target hundreds of miles away in space. So he turned to the GBMD system, or Ground Based Mid-course Defense system, the US’s primary defense against a nuclear attack. It was a system designed to track incoming missiles’ paths and intercept them using a battery of kinetic collision and high-power explosive devices.
Normally this system, which covers the whole contiguous US, wouldn’t have the range needed to chase down a satellite, but the information Neal had managed to get on the satellites’ orbits provided one small advantage: the AIs were moving so fast in their retrograde orbits that a missile did not need to chase them down. Hypothetically, the missiles just needed to get into their path and the satellites would come at them at the equivalent of about Mach 15.
Hypothetically.
Martin’s theory had one huge flaw, though. Well, actually, it had many flaws, but the main one was that is was based on an assumption. An assumption only John could confirm or deny. Could the satellites maneuver quickly enough to avoid the missiles?
John Hunt did not let them wonder long. He smiled and said: “No, now they are in position they do not have the capacity to alter their orbits that quickly. It was a one-way trip for us all, they are all but stuck where they are.”
Martin, Captain Toranssen, and Neal all sighed and shared smiles bordering on the triumphant. They might have something.
But the Colonel was far from ready to celebrate. There was much left to confirm and the discussion veered to how much of the defensive net’s capability would need to be co-opted.
The answer was daunting. Even firing the majority of the system’s munitions they would still only be able to take out two of the satellites, at best. With shielding they could boost their chances of success, but not the number of the AIs they could destroy using that tool alone.
So they moved on to … other options. Discussion veered to Russia’s Gorgon interceptors and Gazelle missiles. But there was no way of shielding them in advance, and anyway, there was the small issue of gaining access to a launch system built specifically to defend Moscow from the US.
As moods darkened once again John decided to offer them one more measure of hope, “Gentlemen, I have a partial solution: the
Dauntless
. Missile defense is, after all, what the Type 47 was designed for, both at long and short ranges. I’m sure the British government will object pretty strongly, but …” he smiled sarcastically and the room smiled with him, briefly.
“The
Dauntless
carries over a hundred and fifty defensive missiles,” John went on, “but specifically it has forty-six with exo-atmospheric range.”
“The
Dauntless
has
that
many exo-atmospheric missiles?” said the colonel, whistling at the scale of the armament. Jesus, the British took the navy seriously. That ship was a veritable missile barge. But if what John had said about the amount of missiles they would need in order to take out the satellites was true, then even the massive arsenal aboard the
Dauntless
would not be enough. He went to speak but John was one step ahead of him.
“It is classified, but yes, the
Dauntless
has that many exo-atmospheric Ship Launched Anti-ballistic Missiles, or SLAMs” he smiled at the acronym, “Now, that is still not enough to get through the satellites’ laser defenses unless all forty-six are shielded, a process that will be even harder aboard a ship than it will be at the GBMD sites, and one which I will need help with from outside.”