Fear the Survivors (16 page)

Turning to walk away, she tried to think of options. An exit strategy. Her Russian was excellent, naturally, so maybe she should try to flee to one of the countless satellite towns and cities around Moscow. Mozhaysk, where she had been living up until two hours ago, was out of the question, but there were more than ten million people living in and around the Russian capital, and surely she could lose herself amongst them. Walking north so as not to retrace her steps, Emilia came upon the banks of the Moskva.

A momentary glance across the river to the Kremlin revealed tanks and troop carriers in Red Square, and the pieces started to come together. It was clear that this was much larger than her. Red Army in the city, foreign operatives being rounded up, maybe even killed, if that had indeed been one of her colleagues leaking life into the cement in front of the embassy. These things could only mean a coup.

She set aside thoughts of who might have attempted such a thing, focusing instead on how she might avoid joining her colleagues in the grave, or worse, in the dark basements of Lubyanka.

She did not sense the eyes looking down on her from a high rooftop behind her, nor did she see the figure leap silently from that lofty height to the smaller block to her right. A minute later some part of her mind registered a dull thud around the corner ahead of her, and her eyes flashed in that direction. Her pace remaining steady even as adrenalin pumped into her veins.

As she rounded the corner, she saw a lone man walking toward her. Behind him she could see a set of concentric cracks in the pavement circling from what looked a very shallow crater. The man was looking at her as they approached each other. She resisted the urge to run. That would be futile. If she did, he would only alert his colleagues who were no doubt nearby, and they would seal the bridges. If she ran she was as good as dead. Slipping her left hand into her pocket she grasped her keys in her fist. The loose chain that bound them allowed her to arrange the three keys so they were pointing out from the gaps between the fingers of her bunched fist, turning her hand into a makeshift maul.

As they came abreast of each other, he stepped into her path and she slipped her hand from her pocket, her training kicking in. Without hesitation, she thrust her hand in an upward curl to connect with the soft tissue of his throat, hoping the keys would make it a short fight. Her eyes were locked on his, looking for the telltale signs of his repost, but she saw only blackness as he walked calmly into her blow. Sensing the coming impact, she pushed upward from her waist, hoping to drive her fist home, but instead felt her hand impact solidity. The man did not flinch. Her hand drove into his chin and she felt the keys twist in her fingers as they met the immovability of his synthetic skin. Instead of driving her metal keys into his throat, she felt as they stopped dead and her fist’s momentum drove the metal back down into her palm.

A moment later she was kneeling on the floor, clutching her left wrist as she stared at the impossible pain of the keys driven backward into her flesh. Blood spilled out from where the three shards of bronze had cut deep gashes back along the inside of her hand and stuck out of her palm, as burning agony screamed up her arm. She was dizzy with the pain, as though hot, noxious fumes of hurt were coming off of her wound to cloud her vision.

She did not see the fist coming down on the back of her neck, nor did she have time to sense the rush of air before it crashed down upon her. Her head snapped downward, snapping the life from her body as it did so, and she slumped to the ground. Without opening his lips, the strange man used a handheld radio to tell FSB personnel nearby that another of the foreign agents had been spotted. He gave them the location of Emilia’s body and, after flexing his powerful legs, catapulted himself up onto the tower block’s roof once more, and from there back out into the Moscow night.

It had been a long day, and it would probably be a long night. After he had helped decapitate the elected Russian government, he had spent the evening covertly coordinating the FSB’s movements. The FSB operatives, many of whom still remembered when they were known as the KGB, had been sent on a string of missions to track down ‘dissenters’ and ‘terrorists,’ guided by an unseen voice to the bulk of the West’s agents in the city. They had all but finished cutting out the Alliance’s eyes and ears in Russia. Now it was just a case of tracking down the few who, like Emilia, had escaped the net thrown out by the FSB forces loyal to Svidrigaïlov.

With an ally like Mikhail in their midst, it would not be a fair fight. Tonight would be a manhunt, pockmarked with quick slaughters across the city’s dark streets.

Chapter 17: Fine Tuning

The gentle notes of a grand p
iano swam in the air of the laboratory. It was long before dawn, and Birgit reveled in the serenity of having the huge space to herself. Behind her was the original resonance manipulator, long since superseded by its ever more powerful successors, but still useful for the smaller experiments the teams were working on.

Birgit’s head swayed gently back and forth ever so slightly with the pianissimo tap of the music, as an unknown virtuoso in a long-forgotten studio slid seamlessly through Beethoven’s twelfth piano sonata. The lonesome notes echoed through the darkened laboratory as Birgit worked, sometimes solemn, sometimes forte, but always pensive, focusing Birgit’s thoughts as she, in turn, tapped away on one of the powerful PCs that dotted the room. The only light in the vaulting space was the desk lamp illuminating Birgit’s dashing fingers, the big overhead fluorescent bulbs dimmed for the night.

Every now and then she would break from her annotations to grasp a plastic stylus and brush deftly across the pad to her right, spinning and delving into complex diagrams in front of her as she worked on her latest schematic.

Over the two months since her recruitment, she had become an artist. No longer slaving over theoretical sciences, no more straining within the suffocating confines of penny-pinching university budgets. Freed from the limitations of humanity’s embryonic mechanical expertise, she had taken the resonance manipulator and surged outward to the very bounds of her imagination.

She had long ago left behind even the most ambitious dreams of her forbears. The facility she now worked in, buried deep in the secret stone fortress that had become her home, was powered by a reactor the size of a football. It took in air and a tiny amount of distilled water, parsing them for the ingredients it needed, and exhausting only helium and an isotopic charge similar to that of an air ionizer. That and more power than a conventional coal power plant consuming more than five hundred tons of coal per day.

Unlike its coal equivalent, though, it was not particularly flexible, and once initiated, it could only vary its yield 15% through the recycling of fuel into an energy-loosing fission reaction and the dripping of power into some tritium breeding in its tiny core.

So its prodigious output needed to be used, and used it was. In another part of the facility, three huge domes rose out of the concrete floor of a vast cavern. Representing the single largest investment of the operation to date, matching even the phenomenal investment in Sao Tome, the three domes were the top halves of three golden resonance manipulators, each thirty feet across, each capable of taking several tons of raw materials and twisting them into anything up to the size of a Mack Truck in only a few hours.

Their capacity was incredible, limited only by the need to pull raw materials to the site. In a rolling line they had two of the domes working at any given moment, while the other one was open, either to be loaded with raw materials for the next cycle or having the results of their efforts lifted by gantry cranes out onto the rolling stock that ran alongside the domes.

For their first month of operation, they had focused on producing the vast cables of carbon nanotubing for shipment to Florida. Now they were making the components of the complex system that would help guide that cable to its anchorage in Sao Tome, and the elevators that would clamp to that great cable. Next they would begin on the components for the massive facility they had planned in space, components that would append to the two conjoined shuttles that now made up Terminus One, and the fledgling space station they were going to build along the elevator’s path in Low-Earth Orbit, creating Earth’s first true space station.

But all those operations were the realm of General Milton and his team, and were but the echoes of the work of Birgit and the various other teams of the Research Group. While the three gold domes digested and formed the ingredients of the Research Group’s many creations, Birgit sat at the other end of their work, the cutting edge of the effort’s arrowhead, as she conceived the machines and weapons that humanity would send out against the coming Armada.

And now, in the early hours of the morning, as the majority of the minds that made up the Research Group slept, Birgit worked away, enjoying the abandon of playing her music in the huge laboratory, filling its void with the muses that fed her vivid imagination.

But she was not the only scientist awake at this lonely hour. Down the hall, a curious Amadeu Esposinho slaved away in the smaller laboratory that had become his team’s home, or the Lair, as his two English colleagues liked to call it. They were both brilliant computer scientists from Oxford, products of one of the greatest universities on earth, and highly intelligent even by its standards. But they were socially awkward at best, and he was frustrated with their inability to accept the fact that the fundamental roadblocks that they were encountering were not due to inadequacies on the side of the programming, but inadequacies on the part of their subjects.

Of all the complex Mobiliei technologies the Research Group had been tasked with, emulating the neural interface was by far the hardest. For the majority of the tasks they faced, from the spiderweb strong nanotubing that made the space elevator possible, to the fusion reactors that now powered their many ambitious experiments, the group had been able to take the designs supplied by John Hunt and Quavoce Mantil and simply extrapolate them to their own need.

But the technology their alien counterparts had developed to
interface
with their machines was based on a wholly different physiology and psychology than humanity’s. And with the expansion of war into space came an equally great expansion in the speed and lethality of the machines that waged that war. At the quickness these machines needed to work, no hand-eye interface could possibly keep up with events, let alone control them.

So the young Amadeu, pulled from his seemingly hypothetical musings in Coimbra University in Portugal, faced what was possibly the hardest task of all of the teams that made up Madeline’s Research Group. He had to tap into the very wellspring of human thought, and bridge the gap between mind and machine. Amadeu was working on linking the brain directly to the tools it was going to need to control, exchanging arms and legs for flight and throttle control, eyes for visual sensors and radar arrays, ears for gravitic wave sensors and mass accelerometers.

There had been discussion at first of not even attempting to perfect the link, of focusing instead on building the kind of Artificial Intelligence that could operate independent of the limitations of biologic communication. But Amadeu and his team had received word from whatever source of information was mysteriously driving all their research that this was akin to saying you would try to avoid debates on issues by instead having a bunch of children and teaching them over the course of a lifetime, to think exactly the same way you did.

For the programming of artificial intelligences was as complex as the lengthy programming our own intellects required through the years of childhood and adolescence. Then they were told that while it could be condensed to something far faster than the decades we took to reach intellectual maturity, such acceleration also depended on the kind of cerebral links that Amadeu was struggling with, and thus they were back to square one.

Once they had exhausted such shortcuts, Amadeu had redoubled his efforts into making the technology of the spinal interface work with the unique biology of the human mind.

He worked with every hour he had. Alone, now, he enjoyed his solitude, allowing himself an occasional whistle, a frequent grunt, and many a soliloquy to the air about whatever challenge he was considering at that point.

“Cale a boca!” he shouted suddenly at his screen, telling it to shut up, to stop telling him it couldn’t be done.

He whistled as another model begun, then waited, waited, his eyes hopeful, his hands wringing, his lips contorted as he waited, waited, waited …

“No! No se fala!” A small stream of obscenities escaped his lips as the model finished inconclusively. His words at first out loud, and then vanishing into a whisper as if they were walking out of the room in disgust.

Despite his frustration, working at night was so much better than during the day. For in the day he felt just the same frustration, only he had to keep it bottled up inside him. Plus he felt a freedom once the computer whizzes left the room. A freedom to explore avenues of inquiry that they tended to mock.

He might not have solved any of the plethora of problems they still faced, but he felt like he was closer. Like when he worked on one of his pet puzzles, crosswords, or brain teasers, he felt like he was in that moment before the solution dawned on him, when he could see the holes in the walls before him, the path through the maze, when the world seemed to flatten into a perceivable map, readable, understandable, and decipherable. It was resolving, he could feel it.

He suddenly realized, as he often did, that his
back was a ball of tension. Stretching, groaning, he pushed his hands out and up, pulling at his knotted muscles like separating dough.

Finding himself at a momentary impasse, his mind wandered, and, as his world expanded from the screen in front of him, he heard the music for the first time. It was beautiful. Familiar but foreign, a taste he remembered, but from where he could not recall.

He decided to investigate its source. Stepping into the rock corridor that joined his lab with the larger Fusion Team’s laboratory, and the even larger Subspace Mechanics Team’s space, he traced the source of the gentle music to a dimly lit doorway and gently pushed it open. Entering the bedrock chamber that held the font, it suddenly resolved itself into something magnificent. Amadeu felt as it touched him deep inside.

His eyes came to rest on the single woman working in the room, the head of both the Fusion and Subspace Teams, and perhaps one of the most brilliant women he had ever had the privilege to meet. Stepping quietly into the room, he stood watching her. While her eyes seemed transfixed by her computer screen, her hands danced on the keyboard, and waved the stylus on the computer-aided design board with an artist’s flare. But though she was clearly utterly absorbed by her work, he could see the way the music was reaching into her in the way her head bobbed almost imperceptibly to the music.

A crescendo in the piece passed, and her whole body seemed to reverberate with the emotion from the music. But her fingers never missed a beat in their own sonata as her eyes remained on the screen, feeding her brain the information it sought as her hands fed her responses back to the machine.

“Did you ever play the piano as a child?” he asked, suddenly.

She leapt out of her chair, a scream bursting out of her as she sent her chair sprawling backward, its little wheels trying to stay under it like tiny legs scrambling for balance. He took two steps backward as well, as stunned by her response as she had been by his sudden statement.

“Oh. Oh, Dr. Hauptman, I am
so
sorry,” he said, mortified, his accent strong. “I was … I was down the hall. Oh no, I am so very sorry for …”

Birgit held up her hand, silencing him, and took several deep breaths, trying to tame her racing pulse. It was like being awoken from a sleepwalk, and she struggled to orient herself. But the music still played, and after a few moments she was able to reconcile the intruder at her door with the mild-mannered boy that worked down the hall from her. She had met him once, maybe twice, but only in passing after one of the lunchtime talks they had started giving to increase inter-team information sharing and camaraderie. He looked distraught, and clearly panicked, and she realized he was about as little of a threat to her as he no doubt had been to the girls at his high school and university.

“Relax, relax,” she said taking a breath. “You just startled me, that’s all.”

“I know. I’m so sorry, please, oh my … I …”

He stammered onwards, and she smiled, “It’s Amadeu, isn’t it?”

“Si … yes.”

She waited, but he was at a loss, so she prompted him with a pleasant but expectant expression, her eyes saying ‘go on’.

“Yes,” he said, “like I said, I was just working down the hall and … well … I heard the music, and I recognized it. Well, I didn’t really recognize it, but I remembered it from years ago and …” He realized he was babbling, and that it was only made worse by his broken English. But looking through the haze of his embarrassment, he saw that she was smiling conciliatorily, and he went silent and meek. It was a maternal smile, a supportive smile, and it set him at ease.

“Beethoven,” she said.

He looked puzzled a moment, then smiled back, the music breaking through to him once more as the level of adrenalin dropped from in front of his eyes, and his sense of his surroundings returned.

“It’s wonderful,” he said.

A moment of silence passed as they both listened to the thrum of unknown fingers on ebony and ivory keys. After a long but pleasant lull in the conversation, Birgit felt the tug of an unanswered question.

“I am Birgit Hauptman, by the way. And you are the Portuguese wünderkind that has been working on the ‘spinal tap,’ is that right?” She smiled at her little joke, and he was about respond when she then said, “I’m sorry, what did you say when you came in?”