Shadow of War, page 12
I nodded. The shelters were crucial. If an attack came, people had to be able to escape to safety in a pressure-controlled environment within the bedrock, able to sustain them with air and supplies until rescue could come. We used explosives to carve out the rock.
“So no one else has been here?”
Her face screwed up. “Well, the mines are asking for explosives, all the time. We’re always shipping them out. I told Chief Sim this—”
“And have any shipments gone missing?”
“No. They’ve all arrived safely at their destinations.”
“And the supervisors at the mines can account for it all?”
“Yes, Mac.” Her tone was growing exasperated.
I waved at her as I marched away. “Thanks, Laura. Keep up the great work.”
—••—
Meg affectionately called Renée Frenchie. She’d been a French national when we’d first met, though calling it a conventional meeting was putting it kindly. It had been violent. As had our next. I’d fired on her warsub to damage it so I could continue on the chase to recover the SCAV drive from the Chinese spies who’d stolen it. Renée’s career had never recovered. She’d been a warsub Captain in the FSF. Her superiors had demoted her to a much smaller ship and punished her for the death of her crewman. She’d translated her anger into rage toward me, and had embarked on a mission to kill me. She’d nearly succeeded, but I had captured her, and she had eventually seen the logic behind our push for independence. Now she lived in Trieste, with me, and was in charge of our city defence network.
Outside, in the warm waters, she grinned behind her full facemask as we swam, holding hands, away from the city, then turned back to see it in the daylight. The light from above shimmered down. It was warm enough that our wetsuits didn’t cover our entire bodies; they ended at our knees and also left our arms exposed. Our bubbles soared up as we exhaled, and we stopped and lowered ourselves to the sandy bottom. We sat together like that, cross-legged, staring at the city.
“What are you planning?” she asked after a minute.
“With the weapon?”
“How are you going to steal it?”
“Sahar Noor will help. And Commodore Clarke.”
“If the BSF catches you, it’ll be prison. Or worse.” She sighed. “After what we just went though with Meg, are you sure you want to?”
“It’s what TCI does, Renée. I can’t stop. If I did, I’d have to leave TCI and abandon the city.”
“I guess that’s a fact. Do you really think an energy beam will work underwater?”
“It has advantages over torpedoes, though its range is likely short.”
We sat like that for several more minutes, just staring at each other and watching the city. Fish swam near us, investigating, wondering what we were doing. A few shellfish crawled by, also curious. We were sitting on a bare patch of sand; there were grasses nearby, and there were far more species living in them than were near us on the sand. There were dangers, I had no doubt, but as Triestrians we had come to just accept them, and not worry. She glanced at her PCD once, and her brow furrowed. Then she put it away.
My comm beeped. Renée stared at me for a moment, giving me a look I recognized instantly. She sometimes complained that I was always working, that I never took a break. I shrugged and offered her a smile.
“Go ahead,” I said.
“Mac, it’s Sahar Noor.”
I blinked. “Hi, I’m just outside right now. Sorry, there’s no video.”
“It’s quite all right. I’m sending you an information packet right now. It’s in your inbox. A schematic of the labs. It’ll help with your plans.”
“That’s great, thanks.” I glanced at Renée. Her eyes were closed as she waited for me.
“The Commodore will try to get us the guard stations. He’s working on it. I’ll send it when I have it.”
“Sounds great.” I stared at Renée. I nudged her, and her eyes opened. She smiled back. I mouthed to her, Are you okay? She didn’t acknowledge it. Her eyes closed again. “Thanks again, Sahar. I’ll be in touch.”
“I wanted to also say—” The comm cut out with a squawk, and I frowned.
Renée’s eyes were still closed.
“Hey,” I said. “Sorry about that.”
She opened her eyes. “No problem. Work never stops. I know.”
Renée’s eyes closed and then snapped open a moment later. It was like a long, sustained blink in slow motion.
I frowned.
Then they closed again, but took longer to open this time.
“Are you okay?” I asked.
“Fine. I’m fine. Just tired.” Her words were slurred though, it didn’t seem like simple exhaustion.
“You said you felt okay to swim.”
Several heartbeats passed. I was about to ask again, then, “I did. Something’s . . . wrong, Mac.” Her voice was quiet. “My headache is back. It’s like a . . . like a knife. I don’t think . . . ” She gasped and then her words trailed off.
Then she passed out.
—••—
I keyed City Control in an instant and roared, “I need help out here! It’s Renée!”
There was no reply.
“Grant! It’s Mac!”
Still nothing. Then there was a burst of static and a garbled voice, but then nothing.
I swore.
I scrabbled at my emergency regulator; it was easy to find. Divers used their right arm to reach back, next to their ribs, and then sweep their hand forward. The reserve would be there. I grabbed it and tore the tube from Renée’s mask. I thrust my reserve into it and hoped to hell it would work.
“Renée!” I yelled. I wondered if it was the concussion, but there was another possibility here . . .
I pressed the button on the side and watched as bubbles churned out from the mask edges. I’d exchanged the air in her mask with air from my tank. “Renée,” I said. “Come on. Wake up. Are you there?” I grabbed her shoulders and squeezed. I was on my knees, in front of her. Her head had fallen forward, completely limp. I pinched the skin at her hip. “Hey, wake up.”
I heard a cough. “Mac?”
“Are you okay?”
“Headache . . . ” She looked up and blinked her eyes. “Everything’s blurry.” Then her eyes closed again. They didn’t reopen.
“Shit,” I snapped. I stared at Trieste. There was no more time to waste. I grabbed her around the waist and pulled her up. I started to pump my legs, swimming with everything I had, dragging her back to the city. I had to make sure my backup didn’t get yanked from her mask, though I still wasn’t sure that was the problem.
I tried to contact STC again. “Grant! Where are you!”
Still no answer.
Chapter Ten
It was difficult pulling Renée while swimming, but luckily I was fit and the flippers were an enormous help. We were also relatively close to the Docking Module and Living Module B, and both had moonpools. Within ten minutes I was at the Living Module and frantically gesturing for help from other swimmers. We hauled her up to the deck around the pool, and I tore the equipment from her back and the mask from her face. I kept calling to her the whole time. She seemed to be breathing, but I turned her face to the side in case she threw up.
“What happened, Mac?” one of the swimmers asked.
“She passed out during the swim. Not sure.” I looked up at him. “Call for medical—now!”
—••—
“Where’s her tank, Mac?” Stacy Reynolds asked, only minutes later. We were in the clinic, and Renée was back on a procedures table. It seemed that we’d only just been there, following the explosion outside.
“Back by the moonpool.”
Stacy was studying the readout on the bulkhead next to the table. “Her CO level is extremely high. How long has she been on your emergency regulator?”
“Twelve minutes now maybe.”
She blew her breath out. “Wow. Her CO level must have been extreme.” She leveled her eyes on me. “We need her tank. I think someone has tampered with it.”
Cliff was there an instant later, with the tank in his hands. “Boss, I just ran a check on it.”
“And what—”
“The mix is off. Way off.”
I stared at him. “You mean, deliberately.”
He nodded.
I stared at the readout. I hadn’t given much thought to the first attempt on my life earlier, when the bomb had hurt Renée. I’d returned to Trieste from the trip and had simply gone about my business. Damn. Stupid of me.
“Where’d you get the tank?” he asked.
“From the moonpool in our Living Module. Same place they always are.”
“From your locker?”
I thought back. “One was from mine, yes.”
“And the other from Renée’s.”
“Yes.”
“Did you get them mixed up?”
I sighed. “I wasn’t paying attention. We put the gear next to the pool and got ready. Put the tanks on our backs.” I shrugged. It was just a normal part of life in Trieste, like putting shoes on in the morning. You didn’t really pay attention to it. And air tanks weren’t like wetsuits. They weren’t personalized. You could use any tank, and often they were just lying around, against the bulkheads, for anyone to grab and recharge. The regulators were personal, but they were easy to attach to different tanks.
“It’s another attempt on your life, Mac. You have to be more careful.” His face was hard; he clearly felt guilt at this happening again. “I’ll have my people pay more attention to you. We’ll check over your equipment more closely.” There was something in his expression, but I didn’t think more about it at that point. I was too concerned with Renée.
Her eyes opened a minute later. “Mac,” she whispered. “You got me back home.”
I clutched her hand. “I’m so, so sorry.” Tears welled up behind my eyes.
“You saved my life.”
“I risked your life,” I hissed.
“No.” She took a breath. “If it wasn’t for you, I’d have drowned out there.”
I didn’t want to argue with her right then and there, so I left it.
I put my head on her chest and listened to her breathing.
And cried, silently.
—••—
An hour later we were in my office in City Control. Richard, Alyssna Sonstraal, Meg, and Cliff Sim, my CSO. His people were investigating the second attack and reviewing video, but I’d wanted him at this meeting. He’d agreed, though I could tell it had bothered him. He wanted to solve this mystery because it kept growing.
Meg was as concerned about Renée, but the doctor assured us she was fine. Her blood was fully oxygenated, the excess carbon monoxide flushed from her system, and she was resting peacefully. I felt massive guilt for it, and knew I’d have to be careful. Cliff wanted to put a guard on me at all times, but I was against that notion. However, I couldn’t allow those around me to face the same risk I did.
Johnny Chang, my Deputy Mayor, was also there. We’d filled him in on the trip to Churchill, and he had an idea of what was going on.
After the introductions were done, I said, “So. We know the dangers facing us. This new weapon is something Trieste needs. We can’t let other nations get their hands on it.”
“The BSF already has it,” Meg said.
“Doctor Sonstraal invented it.” I gestured at Alyssna. “She knows where it is, for the most part. We have to plan. We have just over six weeks.”
“Why the hurry?” Cliff asked.
I filled him in on plan to infiltrate the Churchill labs and steal the first component on 17 March.
He nodded. “Most people will be busy celebrating. And what of the guards?”
“Commodore Clarke can distract his people. For the others, we have to come up with something. We also have Sahar Noor to help.”
“What was she like?” Johnny asked me.
I couldn’t help but smile. “Incredible. More than I could have hoped for.”
“Do you trust her?”
I thought about that, but only for a second. “Implicitly. She’s honorable. She’s with us.”
Meg interjected, “But she doesn’t want people to die. She’ll object to that and likely won’t help if it involves war.”
“Seems slightly ironic,” he muttered.
I shrugged. “She has her reasons, and they make sense. But it doesn’t matter. We need her and Churchill. They’ll join with Oceania. They’ll be the fifteenth city.”
There were smiles all around. “That’s incredible,” Johnny said.
We had started with just Trieste, only two years earlier. Against all odds, we had defeated the superpowers and had grown steadily.
“How are we going to steal this?” Richard asked. He had lowered himself to a metal chair and had his elbows on his knees.
“I think we need to know more about it first.” I looked at Alyssna. “It’s time to fill us in.” We had given her a lab, a place to live, and a new home. I’d hoped my intentions were clear, and she could finally end the evasiveness.
Her smile was genuine. “Absolutely.” She took a breath and gathered her thoughts. “I first had the idea while at Cambridge. I was doing a research study on a US program called an electrolaser.”
I practically growled. “You told me this was not a laser.”
There were a few hooded looks in the office; they were impossible to miss. The concept of an underwater laser—even though underwater engineers had used them for over a century—as a weapon seemed unlikely.
“It’s not.” A shrug. “Well, not really.”
I frowned. There was that statement again. I wanted her to finally explain.
She continued: “The electrolaser is fascinating. It uses a powerful laser to deliver an eventual electric pulse or shock. It’s a two-stage weapon. First, a laser would fire at the target and create a type of channel leading right to the target.”
“Channel?” Johnny asked. “Like, a pathway?”
“Exactly, Mr. Chang. It heats the path and vaporizes the air, rapidly heating it to a plasma, or a gas. The part that matters is that it’s electrically conductive! And it’s basically straight as an arrow, leading directly to your target.”
I raised an eyebrow at that. Her weapon had four components, and only the first was at Churchill Sands. I wondered if her weapon was in fact this electrolaser device with multiple parts.
“Then what happens?” I asked.
“The electric charge is massive. It’s like a non-lethal taser weapon. It’s used on the surface though, mostly against human targets. There are rumors that it’s been tested against aircraft and missiles—the Phoenix Project.”
“But you said non-lethal,” Johnny said.
“Yes, for crowd control at large distances. But it can be fatal at higher energy levels against vehicles and planes and so on.” She raised a finger. “But this is just where my idea came from, remember. My weapon is not an electrolaser.”
Complete silence met her comment. Some of us were on the edges of our seats. She glanced around, a smile in her eyes. “I’ll continue.” She took a breath. “The notion of creating a conduit or path to the target triggered something in me. I realized that it might be a useful way of first marking a target—to make sure it’s correctly aimed—and then secondly, delivering a massive blast of some sort. But still, a major issue blocked this notion.”
“The water,” I said.
“Exactly. Water is the major problem! It’s very dense. It’s full of material. It causes massive blooming issues with any light beam.”
“Light only travels two hundred meters or so underwater,” Johnny said.
“From the surface, yes. The brightness of the sun can only penetrate that far. But we can create something far brighter, Mr. Chang.”
“So, it’s a laser?”
“In a way,” she said with a smile.
“Wait a minute,” I snapped. “Just—”
“Let me continue, Mac,” she said. “I do use lasers to mark the target. But it’s not the real weapon.”
My heart dropped. Damn. I hoped that she hadn’t hoodwinked us.
“I use an insulating beam of ten extremely powerful lasers to fire at the target. The beams enclose the eventual channel. They vaporize the water in a path, and it’s down that channel that I fire the real weapon.”
—••—
I exhaled. Then I swore. “So, it’s a laser.”
She shook her head vigorously. “No, Mac.”
“How powerful are your lasers?” Richard asked. I recalled what he’d said earlier, about the LaWS system being thirty kilowatts over a century earlier.
“Each is a terawatt, firing at the wavelength that best penetrates water, but it’s an adaptive weapon. It samples the salinity, temperature, and suspended sediment first. It decides the best wavelength before it fires.”
“Ten terawatts?” Richard gasped.
“It’s a massive cluster of lasers, yes.”
“My god.”
Fish farms, I thought.
The alarm that Chalam’s sonar system had been screaming.
It was bubbles, created by that laser cluster.
It was definitely not a quiet weapon, but the sonar system had signaled the only thing it could interpret from the noise: a bubble fence meant to contain fish.
“What is the size of the channel you create?” I asked.
“It’s about twelve inches across.”
“And it’s full of . . . what?”
She frowned. “It’s hard to answer. At first it’s a plasma. Superheated gas from vaporized water. But after a prolonged period of firing, it actually turns to vacuum.”
This made me perk up. A vacuum channel, underwater? And they could control and sustain it for minutes, and aim it directly toward a warsub target?
