Ghost Fleet : A Novel of the Next World War (9780544145979) (28 page)

“Just don't do it again,” she said, and kissed him deeply.

Hangar One, Moffett Field, Mountain View, California

The thing that always jarred Daniel Aboye was the smell. The space was cavernous,
⁷²
1,140 feet by 308 feet, to be exact, the size of three Superdomes. But the smell filled even that void. To someone from outside the valley, it was the tangy funk of old pizza and people who'd gone too long without a shower. But to anyone local, it smelled like money. Fame. Power. Success. So much had changed in Silicon Valley's startup scene during the past few decades, but there was one constant. This smell.

And the fact that it now filled Hangar One
⁷³
made it all the more appropriate.

In 1931, the city fathers of Sunnyvale, California, had come up with a unique plan
⁷⁴
for economic development. They'd raised $480,000 to buy nearly a thousand acres of farmland and then sold off the land to the U.S. government for one dollar. What was to make it such a good investment was the topography of the farmland: it was the only part of San Francisco Bay not regularly shrouded in fog. The deal was that Sunnyvale would then become the home for a new planned Navy fleet of “flying aircraft carriers,” massive helium-filled airships that would serve as bases in the air for propeller biplanes.

The plan didn't work out as anticipated, not for Sunnyvale or the blimps. In 1933, the USS
Akron
, the Navy's test airborne aircraft carrier, crashed. The plan was shelved, its only legacy that the airfield was renamed after Admiral William Moffett, the head of the Navy's Aeronautics Bureau, who had been killed in the crash. But, fortunately for the town, World War II interceded a few years later, and Moffett Field became a base for patrol airplanes and then the home of the U.S. Air Force Satellite Test Center. By the 1950s, several big aerospace firms clustered around the base and the test center. The thousands of scientists and engineers who moved into the sunny valley built close ties with local universities, and the old farmland became the hub of a different industry. The city fathers' plan of economic growth through blimp basing instead spawned what became known as Silicon Valley.
⁷⁵

In the defense drawdown of the 1990s, most of Moffett was abandoned and the facility was handed over to NASA's Ames Research Center.
⁷⁶
Little remained of the military presence except for its signature building, the largest hangar in the world.

Bits and pieces of the base were sold off to private industry over the ensuing years, starting when Google acquired Hangar One
⁷⁷
and turned it into a site for executive jets. When he had first arrived in Silicon Valley and seen all that ambition and vision, let alone cash flow, Aboye felt outgunned. Now, he just had to make a phone call and the massive hangar was at his disposal. Larry and Sergey had not asked what would happen inside; they knew only that he needed a massive space away from prying eyes.

Now Hangar One was the team's new home, though they had taken to calling it Aboye's Ark. Taj Lamott, chief technology officer of Uni, had come up with that, a joke about either the size of the place or the crazy vision of the man who'd brought them all together. Daniel had been an early investor in Uni, which was now one of the leading video-game studios in Palo Alto, and in a few of the firms he had quietly reached out to. At other firms, though he wasn't an investor, his reputation had been enough. That, and the simple lure of the offer. It was the opportunity, he had said, to be part of Silicon Valley's most important startup ever.

The rule for selection had been simple. The CTO of each firm Aboye talked to would designate his or her three best programmers. The limited numbers were ostensibly to keep the project in stealth mode, as the investors called it. The goal was to hide their business not only from Directorate spies, but also from the National Security Agency. Even if the NSA's networks weren't pwned by the Directorate, which most people suspected they still were, anger over the sneak backdoors of the old Snowden-era scandals lingered. The NSA had cost Silicon Valley
⁷⁸
hundreds of billions of dollars, and its citizens weren't in a forgiving mood, even years later.

But the limited numbers were also about the value of an idea, its yield as well as its transformative power. Aboye and his group couldn't throw hundreds of thousands of programmers at the problem, as the Directorate had done before the war with its so-called human-flesh-search-machine
⁷⁹
censorship that had morphed into the massive hacker attack that opened the assault. Nor did they want to. They all knew that a great programmer was literally orders of magnitude better than a good one. And they also all knew from experience that the best way to accomplish something considered undoable was merely to bring the right minds together.

Some of the CTOs had sent their top executives, including a few billionaire founders who relished the chance to get their hands dirty again. Others sent the smelly, misanthropic coding beasts they usually hid away in the basement. The sum total, though, made Hangar One the greatest gathering of geniuses since the Manhattan Project.

The only other contribution each firm was asked to make was a single corporate jet. That was a key part of the cover. The volunteers would show up at Hangar One as if they were heading out of town, and then the jets would fly off to various business conferences and corporate offsite meetings. However, each jet would fly out just a few people short. It had been a perfect cover story, until the matter of pizza had come up. Daniel had solved that by creating another startup company located in an office complex just across the street. Although the business was supposedly an app maker for the health-care industry, its sole purpose was to serve as a destination for the pizza deliveries.

It had all worked so far. As Aboye waited for the test, he pinched the skin at the inside of his wrist, just as he had done as a boy when the hunger got so bad he would see double. How long had it been since he'd had to worry about his next meal? Thirty years? Forty? Now, the familiar pain soothed his anxiety.

He had a lot to worry about at this moment. The bank of monitors along the wall in the southwest corner of the control room flashed and winked with a rainbow's array of colors, each a hue hinting at failure.

“Here it goes,” he said to the engineers assembled in a circle at the center of the room. Together they stood, staring hard into the shifting light form in the middle of their grouping, moving their gloved hands in syncopated rhythms. They had depicted the Directorate data networks as a library. There were three levels to the holographic building, and a white-painted atrium let in an amber sunset that illuminated the central hall. The hologram rendered six of Aboye's team in the middle of the atrium, each as a featureless black form that looked to be made of turbid smoke. The wraithlike bodies had no identifying features.

Aboye watched Taj maestroing his part, his fingers in the gloves dancing away like a conductor's as he stood uneasily on a swiveling chair mounted on casters. It was something that he swore helped him focus, even if the risk of falling, and failure, was higher now than it ever had been. A few billion richer, he was still the same Taj that Aboye had met nine years ago during a job interview at which Aboye had told Taj he was so talented that he could not in good conscience hire him. They had been friends ever since, and Aboye now wondered if this was what he had actually wanted Taj to do all along.

“This is the jumping-off point,” said Arran Smythe, nominated by the group to be the program's chief engineer, largely because of her comparatively calm demeanor. Outside the hangar, she worked on network design for Amazon. She was a tall, thin woman who moved with precise, choppy gestures whether or not she was working in a sim. Like the rest of the engineers and programmers, she wore the same kind of formfitting one-piece gray utility coveralls used by astronauts. That had been the Tesla team's idea. At first it seemed to Aboye like they were playing dress-up, but over time he saw how they stood taller when they put on the suits.

“Wyc, you're first.” Smythe's voice almost bubbled with excitement. Aboye knew why she and the rest of them were happy. They were re-experiencing the joy of a startup, discovering what their unbound minds could accomplish.

In the holographic projection, one of the dark forms dashed from the library atrium into the shadows of the stacks. Then another.

“Taj, next,” said Smythe.

The casters on Taj's chair began to creak and he twisted slightly back and forth as he manipulated the control rings on his fingers. What he saw on his goggles was only for him, but the jerky gestures attested to a problem.

On the holographic screen, the black forms ran in and out of the atrium, dropping off books in what was now a burning pyre in the middle of the room.

“Fudge!” shouted Taj, still the innocent little boy at heart. “Gosh-darn mother-fudging network!”

The library's glass ceiling crashed in and water began to come through, the simulated network's automated defenses now reacting. First came a heavy rain, which the wraiths tried to shoot fire back at, the visualization of their counterprograms, but then came a vast, unending deluge, as if a river had been diverted and was pouring into the atrium.

Taj's chair toppled over and he tried to catch himself but landed hard on his tailbone. He rolled over onto his side, clutching his wrist.

The hologram's library pyre was now extinguished and the black forms found themselves underwater. They flickered out one by one as the water rose quickly from floor to floor. Smythe turned off the hologram and looked at Aboye with something like shame. The automated defenses had detected and defeated them. The cone of light around them brightened slightly, indicating the test was over.

Aboye moved to help Taj up but then checked himself. Angrily, he thought that perhaps Taj needed to learn a lesson from the pain, and maybe grow up a bit. He turned his back on the group and made for the darkness across the hangar, walking past row after row of murmuring servers, the waves of warmth washing over him.

He reached the exit. He faintly heard Smythe issuing commands to the room, but the rushing of blood in his ears prevented him from understanding them.

As soon as he was outside, he sat down, closed his eyes, and covered his head with his arms. He sighed. What else could he do? This was not working out like it was supposed to.

He felt a hand on his shoulder. He sprang up and saw Taj, a white cryo-pack on his wrist.

“Is it all right?” asked Aboye.

“My wrist or the project?” said Taj. “Thanks for making sure I was okay.”

“My apologies. I didn't handle that well,” said Aboye. “You know how I can be, and, well, this didn't go as planned.”

“Look, there's no sugarcoating it. We're in trouble. Running out of time and money too,” said Taj.

“I will spend every last dollar I have,” Aboye said. “I started with nothing, so that is not my fear. I fear failure, and what it would mean for this country. We need to succeed because of the importance of our mission, yes. That is crucial. But there is something bigger on the line. Do you know what it is?”

“I've been going full tilt for three days. Stop with the riddles,” said Taj.

“We need to become again the country that breaks the hard problems, that sees the virtue in innovation and the reward in risk,” he said. “If we do not succeed, then I worry that all truly is lost.”

“Daniel, stop trying to put the weight of the world on our shoulders. We'll never crack it if we think that way. We all joined for that stuff, but also for the challenge. That's the fun part.”

Aboye could muster no reply. Instead he turned from Taj and walked slowly down the runway, gazing up at the starry sky.

As he walked along the deserted tarmac, the massive hangar building slowly shrank behind him and clouds gradually hid the stars above him. A gust of wet wind left a fine mist on his face, and he stopped in the middle of the runway. He felt truly lost, and he did the only thing he knew to do when he felt that way. He sank to his knees and began to pray.

USS
Zumwalt
, Mare Island Naval Shipyard

“Smells like victory!” somebody said. Laughter followed.

Vern Li peeked out between the fist-size gap in the curtain on her bunk. Flashes of flesh. Gray underwear. She wrinkled her nose as the stink of digested rations worked its way into her bunk. It mixed with the smell of her coveralls: her sweat and the remnants of epoxy from some of the structural reinforcements she had been trying to work around a few hours before. She smiled and stifled a laugh. It was so awful, all of it, that you just had to give in to it. It had been three days since she'd showered.

Closing her eyes, she tried to wedge herself into the corner. But what had started out as laughter flipped over to tears as quickly as powering on a pair of glasses.

She felt silly, knowing the mix of laughter and tears was just from being so tired and loopy. Before the war, she had planned to redefine how to power machines. Energy, the magic of the battery, was the essence of their utility. It was what gave machines life and gave humans their life force: an electrical spirit. Or so she'd thought when she was smoking weed in high school. Now she was just a machine herself. No different than any other device on the ship. She felt drained, empty.

Vern wiped her tears away and slipped on her glasses to check the time: 0443.

She batted the curtain aside, trying to ignore the yellow pulsing
14.3
in the corner of her vision that indicated the number of hours of REM sleep she needed in order to return to average performance. She hoped the rainbow glow of the code she reviewed as she made her way to the galley would help obscure her red eyes. Somehow, she would get through another day.