The Black Ships (24 page)

Sixty
Meter Observatory

Mauna
Kea, Hawaii

July 3
^rd
, 2027

M
cCutcheon stood up and looked around the boardroom table. The large
central atrium of the telescope facility had changed drastically over the last
year and a half.  Most of the changes had been gradual but the last four
weeks had seen a frenzy of activity as the crowded central area had become too
congested. What had served as their conference area was now completely
overgrown with desks and office equipment.

The octagonal central atrium was roughly
seventy feet in diameter and sixty feet in height. A military engineering unit
had spent the last month assembling two extra levels in the space. Using a
modular, extruded aluminum framework, they constructed a second floor with a
twenty-foot octagonal hole in the middle. The new twenty-five-foot wide ring of
added space played host to two new conference areas on opposite sides of the opening.
The second floor also housed workspaces for visiting staff, a secure discussion
room and a small lunch area complete with a staffed barista machine.

A third level had been built on four sides
to allow workspaces for the senior staff. It was a ten-foot-wide section of
aluminum flooring with eight cubicles built against the outer wall of the main
structure. A four-foot-wide walkway overlooked the second floor, where the
current briefing was taking place.

“It looks like Mickey is ready to start,”
McCutcheon announced, bringing the low-level chatter to a gradual halt. He
grinned and waved at the young woman as he sat, indicating that the show was
hers.

If Uncle Harold could see you now,
thought Mike as he watched his cousin stand up and walk to the
railing that surrounded the central opening. Even before Mike became associated
with the discovery of the aliens, Mickey’s father had always compared her to
his nephew the
scientist, the doctor.
She always seemed to be second
banana in Harold’s eyes.

Her work at SoCal had freed up so much
bandwidth for them that they had easily generated enough capital to justify her
salary for the next century. An ambitious VP had added their group to his
portfolio shortly after work was implemented and he’d laid her and most of her
team off, trying to show his superiors that they would achieve labor savings by
promoting him. Her father assumed she had been laid off for performance
reasons.

Of the original staff who remained, none
had any idea of how to maintain the system that now crammed over ninety
terabits of data through their optic network. Mickey had been contacted by
Fred, her old boss, who had managed to hang on in a diminished capacity and she
had politely declined his offer of assistance. Despite her respect for her old
boss, she had no interest in providing backdoor assistance to the new VP. The
lucrative new optical service would fall on its own, very soon in fact, due to
a
maintenance subroutine,
as she liked to call it.

Though it was borderline sabotage, Mickey
was reasonably sure that no jury would side with a company claiming that the
staff they had laid off should have done a better job of anticipating that they
would not be around to maintain the system. Any day now, subroutines would
start running system diagnostics and requesting acknowledgement from password
protected accounts. Without those manual confirmations, the system would start
to shut down.

Even though there had been a slim chance of
successful legal action, Mickey was completely unconcerned. The staff of the UN
effort enjoyed diplomatic immunity from prosecution. Having proven her ability
to contribute to the team, she had insisted on making that immunity permanent
for any existing legal entanglements. After a quick back-and-forth with New
York and the US Justice Dept., the paperwork had been amended and she signed
on.

SoCal was about to lose millions and they
would have no legal recourse.

She smiled at the assembled team, then
touched the tablet in her left hand, bringing the eight-foot screen hanging
behind her to life. The massive display, centered over the twenty-foot hole in
the middle of the second floor, showed a graphic user interface with
pictographic characters. “This is the first workable interface that we came up
with last week using a base 10 operating system.” The emulator had taken more
than a month to program and required a bank of quantum processors.

She touched the screen and a sea of
pictographs began to scroll across the middle window of the screen. “This is the
translated data in its original text and, thanks to our friends from the
mainland,” she gestured to four tribal elders who were among the newest
permanent members of the increasingly unusual team, “we have been able to
provide real time translation of the interface into English.”

She touched a few buttons on the pad’s
screen before continuing. “Folks, this may well be remembered as the greatest
hack in human history,” she intoned in a calm but forceful voice as she stabbed
her finger at the tablet. The screen behind her flickered for an instant and
the interface was now in English.

The scrolling text contained orders. Page
after page of information rolled across the screen. “The translation seems a
bit odd,” Hal Tudor observed. “The sentences seem very jumbled. Are you sure
it’s accurate?”

Kaya, one of the Hopi translators, spoke
up. “This is a literal translation, word for word,” the elderly woman asserted.
“English is such a mix of different languages that it’s filled with extra words
and grammatical tangents. The alien language was ancient long before they first
landed here on Earth. Their way of speaking has undergone thousands of years of
evolution, independent of any human tongue. We can’t expect them to sound like
us.”

That seemed to satisfy Dr. Tudor and Mickey
spent a few more seconds with the controls on her tablet, turning the screen
behind her to static. “The fifth data burst caused this to happen to our
interface.” She turned to look at the screen before continuing. “At first, we
thought it was some sort of security mechanism, but it was hard to believe.”
She strolled over to her place at the middle of the table and set her tablet
down, picking up her coffee mug and cradling it in her hands.

“These guys had shown only the most
elementary interest in securing their network,” she mused, “or even in
considering that their transmissions might be intercepted by us. As the colonel
likes to remind us, they don’t consider us to be a threat. As far as they are
concerned, we’re barely a step up from pointy sticks. What we see as state of
the art technology is far behind what they use.

“And yet, somehow, we manage to get by…”

She held the mug in her right hand,
touching the screen with her left forefinger. A screen of text came up. It
showed a list of systems - processing, helm, fire control, life support, data
retention, and hundreds of barely recognizable items. “We backed up to the last
working state and began feeding the data from burst five, bit by bit –
literally,” she said with a chuckle. The group sat quietly, riveted to the
screen.

“Forget it, Micks,” Mike said quietly from
across the table. “It’s a tough room.”

She grinned. “We got this list at the start
of the burst and then everything went belly-up a second time.” She killed the
current display, bringing up the translated interface before taking a drink.
“It was Corporal Farquhar who got us moving again,” she said, waving her mug
across the table at Rob, spilling coffee on her tablet in the process. A low
chuckle broke out. “So that’s how it is,” she asked with a look of mock
indignation. “I give you comedy gold with
bit by bit
and get nothing,
but a little slapstick gets you laughing?” 

With a sigh, she leaned over to the middle
of the table to grab some napkins. “The trick to this,” she remarked with the
casual air of one who regularly spills coffee on electronic devices, “is to
wipe the screen without letting your skin touch it.” She dropped the napkins
beside the tablet, looking up at the main screen to ensure that she hadn’t lost
the view of the interface.

“OK, as I was saying, Rob here suggested
that the list I just showed you indicated a firmware update. Basically, that
would be an update of the little bits of software that do various things
throughout the ship. We went back and figured out how to apply the updates to
our emulator, giving us the latest and greatest version of the enemy’s
systems.”

“So we can access all of the data from
their transmission?” Mike was seriously impressed. He had originally suggested
calling his cousin simply to embarrass the team from Echelon into cooperation.
He was glad they called him on what he had thought to be a bluff. Mickey may
not be big on rules but she was the most results-oriented person he knew.

“Better than that.” Her voice took on a
conspiratorial aspect. “Now that we understand the architecture of their
firmware update, we can put together one of our own and send it to them before
the fight starts.”

“We can gum up their engines,” McCutcheon
slapped a hand on the table in glee. “We can shut down their weapons, blind
them and board the little bastards before they even get a chance to fight.” He
smiled up at Mickey. “What do you need to make this happen?”

“I need a ship equipped with a bank of
lasers and fitted with a transmission unit that we can put directly in the path
of the mother ship,” she stated, holding out her index finger. “It needs to be
fast enough to get there and transmit before the rest of the fleet goes into
battle,” she added as a second finger extended. “And it needs to survive long
enough to send the signal.” Three fingers.

“Three or four ships should do the trick,”
McCutcheon mused as he looked absently at the main monitor. “Just big enough to
convince the enemy that we’re trying to split their forces; they’ll probably
stay together to fight against the main assault force. As long as our little
software expedition looks like they overshot and ended up too far away to be a
threat, they’ll probably be left alone long enough to send the signal.”

He stood up. “That’s a good day’s work
folks,” he boomed. “Mickey, give some thought to the broad strokes of the plan
so we can get it moving. I want to see the lasers ordered right away, and we
need to get our hands on some ships and start modifying them to send this
signal. I don’t care if it’s a sketch on the back of a napkin but I need to
start giving the shipyard some idea of what they need to do to make room for
the systems involved.”

He looked over at Farquhar, then back to
Mickey. “Ed’s been helpful?”

She nodded. “His idea about firmware
updates is the reason we managed to keep the door open on the alien system, but
he has incredible practical knowledge as well. He would be a big help now that
we need to put together some laser transmission systems.”

“He’s all yours,” the colonel waved a hand
negligently at his subordinate. “He’s been driving me nuts with all his tech
talk lately so good riddance,” he grinned good naturedly at Rob who shook his
head and sighed, the very model of an abused employee.

As the group broke up, Mike caught McCutcheon’s
attention and walked over to the lunch area. He took two bottles of water from
the fridge and threw one to the colonel as he walked up. The sub-zero climate
on the mountain top was very dehydrating. “Would you say my cousin has made a
hell of a big contribution today?” he inquired in a low voice.

“I’d say that and more,” he responded
enthusiastically.

Strike while the iron is hot,
thought Mike. “I have a thought on how we could show some
appreciation for all the lives she’s going to save with this idea.” He looked
quickly over the officer’s shoulder. Mickey was still at the table, deep in
discussion with Rob. Her hands were waving excitedly as she described technical
details. “I know this is going to sound presumptuous at first, but I think you’ll
agree that it’s justified when you consider the contribution she’s making.”

It took less time than Mike expected to
sell the boss on his plan. Now he had to wonder whether the colonel could sell
it all the way up to where the decision would really be made.

Calgary, Alberta

August 25
^th
, 2027

C
allum sat in the waiting area of the large atrium, watching a
newscaster from the local twenty-four-hour news channel as she rehashed the
surprise announcement that Humanity’s response to the aliens would launch early
with only one augmented fleet rather than two. The revelation regarding the
enemy timetable had left no room for a defensive plan. A quick offense was now
considered the species’ only hope.
How does this make sense?
 he
wondered.
It puts a kink in the UN’s main excuse for dominating the planet.
Maybe it has something to do with the doubt that I sowed when I made the New
York broadcast. Could be they’re trying to counter the growing belief that
there are no aliens.

His thoughts ground to a complete halt as
he stared up at an image of himself.
Goddamn Jeff,
he raged silently.
The picture on the screen was from his work ID photo and it showed him with his
new beard. He’d been working as a form carpenter on a high rise construction crew
and he’d made a start on recruiting new followers from among his coworkers. His
superintendent had been out drinking with them at a downtown pub last night
when the TV over the bar had displayed the standard ‘Callum McKinnon most
wanted’ screen.

Even four months after the blast, every
station in North America ran that screen twice an hour for five minutes. The
FBI had been on to him from his first arrival in New York but they had left him
his freedom and assigned him a controller. It hadn’t taken Cal long to realize
that Kevin’s cousin wasn’t his cousin at all, but a trained agent. The man’s
eyes were always on the move and he carried himself like someone who was ready
for action. Driving a cab in New York may not be the safest job on Earth, but
it didn’t justify what Cal was seeing.

He assumed he was only free until they
could figure out whether he had any other associates in the city and so he had
played that up. He cut Mark out of the plan to abduct a UN diplomat and gave
him the impression that he had one of his
teams
carry out the grab.
Using his extended freedom, he had boarded a bulk freighter carrying fertilizer
down the East River, killed the crew and set the nav computer to ground the
ship next to the Secretariat building.

He saturated the cargo by diverting fuel
oil into the hold, creating a volatile product known as ANFO or Ammonia Nitrate
and Fuel Oil. It was exactly this kind of mixture that invariably resulted in
the deaths of several farmers every year, leaving only a smoking hole where their
truck had been sitting. A simple timer attached to seven sticks of dynamite
would be enough to start the violent reaction and bring down his riverside
target.

He climbed back into his Zodiac and raced
across to the riverbank, heading for the roadblock that had been thrown up from
a prearranged force based on the warning from whoever was pretending to be
Mark. He approached one of the cruisers. “We’ve been directed to pickup the
Secretary General,” he said to the patrolman standing by the car.

The man, seeing a captain’s badge hanging
on his belt, shrugged. “Keys are in the ignition.”

Cal had planned to use his next captive in
conjunction with a new attack but her escape had forced him to go on the run.
He had hoped that leaving the country would leave the chase behind, but the
Canadians were almost as angry about the attack as their neighbors to the
south. He had been keenly aware of every glance that turned his way, certain
that he was about to be denounced at any moment. After several months in Calgary,
he had grown a beard and shaved his head, looking like half the construction
crew. Exposed to the elements at high elevations for twelve months of the year,
they preferred beards for their winter warmth as well as protection against the
summer sun.

Then Jeff had made his offhand comment last
night.

“Y’know, Tim,” he roared across the table
to be heard over the noise of the crew. “Y’look a bit like that Callum bastard,
if I squint just right.” He held up his hands in a frame and rotated them,
along with his head until he fell off his stool to the enthusiastic enjoyment
of the crew. Callum had laughed it off and left twenty minutes later.

This morning Cal called in sick.

Someone must have remembered the reason why
Jeff had fallen off the stool last night.
Rolando was pretty sober,
he
thought. The six-foot-tall Philipino welder rarely drank more than one beer and
would have remembered the whole story. They were probably retelling stories
from last night and ended up putting two and two together.
I should have
gone to work today and then left tomorrow,
he thought, now keenly aware of
the police who walked about the station. Two soldiers in body armor also stood
by the exit to the bus ramps equipped with the shortened Canadian version of
the M-16 designed for armor crews.

The heavy, armed presence was common now in
the city. The whole country was a tinderbox. After more than a generation of
state-funded universal health care, everyone was now at the mercy of the health
insurance companies. Cal had nearly been caught up in a riot himself last week
when Darryl, one of the riggers responsible for attaching loads to the crane,
had lost his little finger while guiding a three-cubic-meter drop bucket filled
with concrete.  The insurance wouldn’t cover the re-attachment and he
couldn’t afford the eight grand that the procedure would cost. The angry crew
shut the site down and went looking for trouble, brandishing the severed finger
on a piece of rebar like some kind of holy relic. Cal had slipped away and gone
home before the camera crews could show up.

Cameras were the least of Callum’s problems
now as he looked around the departure area. A drug store was perhaps thirty
feet away from the men’s room. He would buy a razor, some shaving cream and
turn his beard into mutton chop whiskers.
OK, breathe easy, you just need
five minutes to change your appearance.
He reached down and grabbed the
small backpack at his feet and stood up. It was a slow day for bus travel and
the seats between him and the drugstore had only one little old lady who smiled
at him as he walked past.

Cal heard a tiny gasp as he continued to
the front door of the store. “That’s him,” the lady said in surprise. Cal kept
walking, hoping she meant something else but the lady suddenly screeched at the
top of her lungs. “That’s him. That’s the murderer.” Cal turned to see her
standing in the middle of the aisle, her bony index finger pointed at him like
the beckoning hand of death.

He looked past her to where a police
officer was looking sideways at him, talking into his microphone while he drew
his sidearm with his right hand. To his left, both soldiers were moving his way
across the clear space in front of the exit doors, their assault weapons tight
to their shoulders, ready to aim and fire. He cursed to himself as he realized
that he’d lost track of the other two policemen before he stood up. They could
be anywhere.

His quick assessment left him with only one
viable option.

He raised his hands.