Diamond Rain: Adventure Science Fiction Mossad Thriller (The Spy Stories and Tales of Intrigue Series Book 2) (16 page)

“Now,” said Thomas
slowly, “if I manipulate the DNA at this level a little, watch what happens.”

The crystal evolved
into another shape, equally easy on the eye, but much less bright.

“You see, the second
shape takes far less power, as you can see by the level of illumination, but
contains infinitely more information.  This is very significant.”

“You’d be a good
chemistry teacher, Thomas, but can you tell us what the application does for
us?” Ekaterina asked.

Thomas just grinned. 
He turned to Yatsick, who had returned from showing Jean Pierre to his
accommodation.

“I can see in your mind
Yatsick that you’re on the right track, but you need to dream.  Don’t hold
back.  And here, take these molecules for a new suit.  It’ll help you make the
logical jump necessary to understand the implications of Jean Pierre’s
suggestion by giving you access to my thought processes too.  This is a major
step forward and I know you won’t waste it.  Now, everyone, relax.”

As Yatsick eased
himself into the suit, understanding dawned on him quickly.

“Ekaterina,” Yatsick's
pride was apparent. “Watch, I'll show you.”

Thomas smiled and
without any further warning he funneled himself into the computer systems,
appearing on every screen in the room.  As they watched in fascination  he
wrapped a copy of his new, replicating suit around each person present.  At
first they felt smothered and maybe a little frightened, but they rapidly
absorbed a sense of comfort and confidence.  Thomas controlled the experience
carefully.  He eased back on his mind control and allowed them to share the
powers he chose for them in their replicated suits.  Communication among them
erupted spontaneously without the restriction of speech, dazzling all of them. 
Once he’d allowed them to experience the full effect, Thomas dropped the suits
and let them notice the difference.  They sat there stunned and weighed down,
but amazed in their developing confidence.

Chapter Six

General Chou's Game

Within earshot of St Mary-le-Bow’s church in
the East End of London, there is an eating emporium which makes it into all the
Michelin guides.  ‘Ben’s Fish and Chips’ is indeed special.  During the day,
tourists fight to get in the lines in front of the establishment.  At night the
crowd changes to locals, inebriates and workers on their way back to their
apartments.

A kid with spiky hair stumbled
his way with his friends into Ben’s and ordered his usual on the way home from
a binge.  A portion of good, greasy fish and chips was definitely needed to
soak up the several pints of ale sloshing around in his stomach.

“How much did you say,
mate?” he said.

“Twenty-two pounds.”

“Twenty-two quid my
arse.  When ’d the price change?”

“Sorry, mate, it’s the
new Chinese tax.”

“Fooken slant bastards.
I ain’t paying it,” he said in a sudden fit of anger.  He pitched his wrapped
order over the glass partition of the counter, missing the cashier by inches.

He and his friends
tipped over tables and spilled onto the street, intent on starting a fight with
the first oriental man they found on the street.  It was a poor decision; today
was not destined to be their lucky day.

Hours earlier, in parks
all over London, pairs of young Chinese men launched handheld drones over the
city and slipped back into the crowd unnoticed.  The drones circulated and
anyone of Asian origin, both tourists and residents, heard someone talking to
them in their own specific dialect of Chinese.  As if hypnotized, they all
halted and looked up. The fog descended on or seeded its targets. Each foglet
contained face recognition technology on its neural network.  Every Chinese
person got a new suit.  At first they stumbled around, overwhelmed by the
cacophony of voices in their heads.  For each of them, changing from being an
individual in control of his destiny, to part of a connected social unit
possessed by a single-minded purpose, took some getting used to.

The familiar voice
dominating the multitude of other voices commanded them to await the signal and
to prepare to follow orders.  They nodded dumbly.  As newly indoctrinated
‘walkers’ they felt safe and strong.  Many learned the power of the suits
fast.  Some took advantage but most followed orders, just as intended.

A man called Chao
happened to be walking near Ben’s Fish and Chips when Spiky and his friends
spotted him.  His suit warned him, not them.  At first, Chao tried to follow
the directive to make himself inconspicuous, but the unlikely mixed group of
punkers and skins gave him no choice.  Others gathered around watching the
spectacle.

“You see that?  The ‘chink’
disappeared and reappeared an’ those two freaks fuckin’ socked each other. 
Holy fuck,” said one of the drunk onlookers.

A gray mist surrounded
the gang, obscuring the show for bystanders. Anguishing moans came out of the
haze and then all at once, the thugs staggered out into plain view.  All of
them were holding their eyes and blood seeped through their fingers.  When they
took their hands away from their faces, only bloody eye sockets stared at the
crowd.  Panic let the culprit walk away calmly, but similar scenes were repeated
all over the city.  And the globe.  Attacks on Chinese people were met by a
sudden and extreme reaction.

CCTV had caught the Ben’s
Fish and Chips group and someone leaked it onto the internet. YouTube
broadcasts of the terrifying power of the Chinese suits went viral.

The effect was dramatic
and inescapable.  Although resentment against the Chinese grew, so did the fear
of retribution if there was any resistance to the taxes.  The elevated prices
resulted in something of a wartime spirit for the phlegmatic British, reluctant
to give in to coercion.  But for most of the world, faced with accepting the
usurious demands of the Chinese or suffering, even dying, there was little
option.  The Renminbi was about to become the world’s reserve currency and
there was nothing anyone could do about it.  The twenty-five percent
consumption tax negotiated in return for not attacking the world after the fall
of Qatar and the failed nuking of the Chinese on Armageddon Valley started to
take its toll on the world’s financial systems.

****

Thomas exercised his mind and his suit.  He
needed to try a new test, something he hadn’t attempted before.  With a supreme
effort of will he partitioned his mind and projected a part of it into a
newborn suit, a physical but limited replica of himself.  He was satisfied, at
least for now.  Through several previous iterations of testing he had
discovered that he couldn’t make infinite numbers of the diamond suits. Their
molecules resisted more than a few generations of copying and even Jean
Pierre's new modifications of the helix couldn’t yet solve the problem.  Jean
Pierre and Yatsick worked day and night to upgrade the storage system but a
breakthrough eluded them.  The solution was somewhere in the future.

Thomas arranged to meet
Sue Ann and persuade her that they needed to resume their tasks as professional
journalists.  Although he wanted to join her in person, it seemed better to him
that he used the replica;  he simply had too many things to achieve back at
Yona Street and Yatsick’s facilities.  He sent the limited replica to Sue Ann,
monitoring it all the time.

The ploy worked.  Sue
Ann was absorbed in her work and her goal of professional advancement to the
point that she didn’t notice Thomas’ apparent absence of mind, at least, not
enough to cause her concern.  On the second day of their series of interviews
of victims of ‘suit swallowings’, as the incidents came to called by Londoners,
Sue Ann and pseudo Thomas stopped at the Ben’s Fish and Chips in the East End
for lunch.  They had an appointment with the cook who had sold the spiky guy
food.  They were going to catch him before he came on his shift.

“Wanna try the fish and
chips, Thomas?  It’s on me,” said Sue Ann.

“Fish and Chips?”

“Jesus Thomas, you’re a
bit thick. Jetlag or what?”

“Maybe.  Tired too.”

There’s something
weird about him.  He’s really on the ball about his job but there’s a creepy
space in his social skills. 
Sue
Ann offered to get the food since she was paying, but couldn’t shake the
strange vibe she was getting from Thomas. 
The old Thomas would’ve insisted
on getting the stuff and probably never would’ve let me pay.  What gives?

When she returned with
the tray of food, she couldn’t help but ask.

“Hey, space cadet, you
sure you’re okay?  You look kind of out of it.”

“No really, I’m fine. 
Just tired, like I said.”

The cook appeared at
that moment.

Saved by the bell,
thought Thomas.  Their interviewee smiled at
them and sat at a table beside Sue Ann.  Thomas busied himself with the camera
end of the story.  The cook didn’t have anything new to contribute, but millions
of news junkies sought out Sue Ann’s slant since the success of her coverage of
earlier parts of the Chinese invasion.  Her treatment of the issue combined with
Thomas’ clips had become the benchmark to beat.  As a team, they couldn’t go
wrong.

Meanwhile, in cities
all over Europe, America, and Australia, in fact anywhere where there were
Chinese, General Chou flexed his muscles.  Drone ‘seeders’ fed sleepers that
had been planted all over the world.  The sleepers in turn launched drones filled
with the contents of small containers concealing nanofog that they had received
by mail on a regular basis.  Some of the drones got lost or destroyed, but most
returned to the places they were launched, ready to be used again to replenish
the fog of their controlled social network.  The beauty of Chou’s plan rested
in its simplicity and succeeded based on the sheer numbers of players.

On the eastern coast of
America, people noticed loads of Asian tourists at the Jersey Shore, but
despite the news from everywhere, most people locally thought little of it.  On
the evening news, just before the weather report, one newscaster in Jersey City
even said: “It could never happen here,” in reference to the nanosuited
invasion ‘over there’.

Most media outlets
remained focused on racism against blacks.  Even though governments were
monitoring the situation, and people grumbled about the new taxes and higher
prices, none reacted until every city in the US and Europe found its airport
and boat terminals flooded with oriental families made up mostly of young men. 
Police departments in beach communities like Ocean City started expressing
concern first but it was too little, too late.  Reports showing unusually high
concentrations of Chinese outside of traditional ‘Chinatowns’ raised some alarm
bells.

In cities where law
enforcement purchased a spying technology, tested in Afghanistan and Iraq, and
mounted on the bottom of airplanes, the search for witnesses to the Chinese
invasion took on the form of dropping into the middle of a murder mystery.  The
camera system resembled equipment used by Google for making maps. 

In London, after they’d
seen the cook, Thomas and Sue Ann interviewed the senior police officer
responsible for the new system.

“Look at this,” said
Chief Inspector Kilpatrick.

“Looks like a bunch of
dots.  I thought you’d be able to see the people’s faces.  How can this help
you solve a crime?” Sue Ann asked.

“It’s all about
patterns.  Look, here’s our offender from the Fish restaurant.  Now look at the
dot he’s approaching.  See, they touch and the melee starts and finishes.  Very
definite.”

“C’mon, Chief
Inspector.  So the dots are in a pile.  It’s useless information. Looks sort of
like Monty Python. Surely you remember those guys dressed up in old ladies’
clothes pretending to enact the Battle of Britain again-"

“Well, Sue Ann, if you
don’t mind me interrupting and calling you by your first name-”

“No problem, Chief
Inspector.”

“Good police work is
mostly persistence and legwork.  This technology lets me follow suspects right
back to their homes.  Watch.  I can color that spot on the screen and it’ll
show up all the time.  Let’s make it red.  Red Chinese, eh?”

“Jesus, I never thought
of that.  I mean I didn’t know you could color code the dots.  So you don’t
need the face.  You just go and get the bad guy based on his habits.”

“Ah, the penny
drops...  Good, eh?”

“Well, did you get the
Chinese guy who removed those peoples’ eyes?”

“We followed him with
no problem and we sent a Tactical Unit to arrest him early this morning.  The
strange thing was that he’d vanished.  He just wasn’t there.  He never left the
house – we’d have seen that - and we didn’t find any tunnels or passageways. 
It just doesn’t add up.”

Sue Ann smiled and
signaled for Thomas to end the recording.

“That was great stuff, Chief
Inspector.”

“Thank you, Sue Ann.  Will
I get on the telly or the Net?”

“Net for sure.  Can’t
predict news content on the TV.  Editors sift that stuff, but you might make
the news shows ’cause this is breaking technology.”

“Excellent.  Make sure
I’m not misquoted or taken out of context.  The Police Complaints Authority is
very hot on individual interviews.”

“As if!”  Sue Ann
laughed.

Chinese consumption taxes and the strain of
buying Renminbi at elevated rates amounted to extortion.  Deflation reared its
ugly head compounding the problem.  Though China won the opening gambit of this
unusual war, its management of the power stemming from its new economic clout
based on reserve currency status lacked skill.  The habits of centralized
government and the old regime would die hard.  As a result of centralized mismanagement,
growth stagnated and demand for goods dropped.  

Chinese bureaucrats
didn’t grasp just how much money the world economy needed to stay liquid, in
fact a lack of understanding of financial principles hampered their progress in
many areas.  Almost overnight, banks stopped trusting each other and borrowing
slowed to nothing.  Confidence in the economic system rested on a delicate
balance and it couldn’t tolerate an abrupt change in the reserve currency. 
Unemployment, first in the periphery of the system, then in the most
industrialized countries jumped to unprecedented rates.  This combined with
disappearing demand for goods and services created a difficult mess to
unscramble.

Faced with a world
depression after a just a few weeks in power, China, flush with military
success, searched around the globe for sources of support for its free-falling
currency.  Russian gold, oil, reserves and minerals looked tantalizing.

****

Sino-Russian relations had fallen to
historical lows when a seemingly random Russian Akula submarine succumbed to
strong currents while passing close to Oman on the way through the Strait of
Hormuz.  It was the Admiral's first and last miscalculation as captain of the rogue
Akula. It had been captured by the Chinese; the information it provided was
more than significant.