Fear the Future (The Fear Saga Book 3) (25 page)

But that was not the most important difference between these orphans and the one called Banu. They also lacked a vital element in their lives: Quavoce. They had been plucked straight from the most repressive and misinformed regime in the world. Plucked right from under the noses of the arriving UN and TASC forces as their once Supreme Leader caved to the demands of the interlopers.

She could not easily replicate the promise of infinite protection that Banu’s trust in Quavoce gave her. She must build that trust herself. She must give them what Quavoce had given Banu: confidence. She must let them fail and see that it would not be that bad. She must let them discover this world piece by piece.

“Yes, Supervisor,” said the commander, “this has been very successful so far. I am keen to see how they progress. I can see from the data that some are showing more promise than others.”

“Indeed, Commander. Though they fell among the first, the two I just flew out with show some of the strongest progress.”

“Good, good,” said the voice in Mother’s head. “I know it seems strange but that is a good sign, Supervisor. A very good sign indeed.”

“It is?” said Mother to the air, as she came up on the last of the gliders.

“Yes, Supervisor, it is. It means there is likely a range, as we had expected. And if there is a range then we can assume that Amadeu and Quavoce cannot have been so lucky as to hit the top of that range on their first attempt. Which means that somewhere among this first class, and among those that will follow them, may be pilots who can beat young Banu.”

The commander’s voice held an air of triumph. Mother did not share such premature confidence, though she quietly believed in the process she had developed. The truth would come out, the data would not lie. The best would rise and the others would fall. But the commander was right in one thing. Matching Banu would not do. They must beat her if they were to have a chance at victory.

Chapter 22: Riotous

The H5 Shinkansen bullet train moved at a pace that was merely an echo of its above ground cruising speed, but it still sped along at 85mph, and the effect within the Seikan Tunnel was akin to a piston within an engine.

Inside, Nagate Tanakaze did not feel the pressure, only the relatively gentle sway and rattle of the train’s progress. The view through the windows held only the black-grey blur of the passing walls. Above him was over 240 meters of rock and ocean, but down here that was all obscured. And even if he had have been able to see the tumultuous ocean above him, he was lost to the outside world, anyway. His attention was absorbed by an article he was reading.

It described the purpose of Hekaton from the perspective of one Shinobu Matsuoka, the wealthy and prominent businessman who had come out as a vocal supporter of the work of the newly publicized organization known as TASC. He was describing some of the technologies he had already become privy to and how they would help the Japanese economy, even as they helped support the coming war effort as a whole.

The war effort. The war itself was still very hard to grasp. The who and why of it lost in a dizzying array of perspectives, educated and otherwise, that were filling every second of television time and every byte of the internet.

Nagate only knew what he did
not
believe. He did not believe that the images of the flaring engines being referred to as the Armada was the second coming of Jesus, Isa, the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, or Godzilla for that matter. And he was pretty sure it wasn’t a hoax either. But that still left a great deal of room for conjecture.

Room that was being amply filled by even the most educated and reasonable of pundits. Conspiracy theories ran amuck and it was obvious that most, if not all of them, were untrue. But where in the sea of opinions, demagoguery, and vitriol did the truth lie?

If the truth was there at all, of course. Maybe it was all a smokescreen. Maybe it was all a giant diversion from the real threat. Like the ‘gadgets.’ He resisted the urge to start browsing for those again. He had been up all the previous night watching YouTube demos of some of the more elaborate and apparently soon to be available ones.

The spinal interface was something else. It was being developed by this agency called TASC for the war effort, apparently, but as a gesture of goodwill and, no doubt, an enticement to believe their version of events, it was going to be made available through a select set of tech companies across the globe, Matsuoka Industries notably among them.

Some governments were discussing blocking it, including Japan’s own, until it could be tested further, but they had been clever enough to also demonstrate its use in tandem with the new prosthetics that TASC was also offering, prosthetics that would benefit millions of elderly and infirm people across the globe. To block such a thing would be political suicide. At the very least, the power elite of Japan, many of them notably elderly themselves, would no doubt soon be making use of some version of the new systems.

He felt a rumble under the bass hum of the train and looked up. It was something separate from the usual rattle and hum, something just under the surface. But as he tried to place the sound, the feeling really, it vanished, like a buzzing insect just out of sight, imperceptible.

Now that his attention was brought into the present, he couldn’t help but notice the group of tourists arguing farther down the car. They were from Tokyo, or maybe Kobe, and they were debating avidly the same topic as everyone else. As usual there were those that spoke with the certainty and authority of some grand understanding that somehow only they had figured out, and there were those that argued reason, though usually without as much conviction.

It was the age-old conflict of willed ignorance versus true curiosity. Curiosity would always find the truth in the end, but so often it would only win out after an age of battling through dogma and instinctive fear. The oldest battle of all, the clash of science with mythology, of religion versus rationale, had never been more intense than it was now.

The fabric of society, Nagate feared, was being tested, and it was starting to fray.

But it was not just
starting
to fray. It was coming undone. The bass rumble became louder now. Nearly a quarter of a mile ahead the driver of the train tried to make out a darkness in the tunnel, an end to the stream of neon lighting vanishing off into the distance, now shortening somehow. A blackness coming toward him. The shout came through his radio, not so much an order as a scream of warning.

Only one word.

Breech.

Nagate felt it again now. Louder. It was unsettling. It felt like the ground through which the train was flying was moving as well. Like waves under a boat, a transferred momentum, a received movement. But this was no boat and the rails underneath them should not be going anywhere.

Suddenly the noise was rising exponentially and the movement was rising with it. Earthquake? No, that could not be, thought Nagate. Not this deep. This was supposed to be …

The train stopped. It did not slow. It stopped, the engine car hitting a wall of water that was moving almost as fast as the train itself, but in the opposite direction. Suddenly Nagate’s world was only madness and pain. The train was crumpling. Pressures driving it forward into itself as air and then water pushed its sides inward. Then the walls were liquid, blackness rushing in, a pounding in his ears as the pressure rocketed upward and then …

- - -

There had been no terrorist attack in Vienna a week before, of course, not in the sense that the public had been led to believe. But as events snowballed around the globe, that cover story vanished into a haze of similar ones, ones with real truth behind them.

It seemed to reach a peak with the attack of the Asahara Joshu Cult that blew up a Shinkansen train while in the Seikan Tunnel. Even with the force of the detonation, the tunnel had almost held, but the pressures had eventually rended the rock around it, and it had sheered.

Images of the thunderous geyser of water erupting from each end of the tunnel as it had filled had shocked an already reeling world. Three trains and their two thousand passengers were lost forever in the depths.

In Rome, an extremist Catholic group attempted to storm the Vatican. Apparently they sought to ‘restore the Papal State’ after the pope attempted a limited acknowledgement of the coming Armada’s true purpose, and a tepid call to support TASC’s work. While the fanatics were quelled with brutal force by a quietly efficient Vatican Police, their point of view was not going to die so easily.

In New York, a boat loaded with explosives rammed one of the pylons of the Brooklyn Bridge, a pointless but nonetheless shocking act committed by an enraged people seeking to punish what they now saw as an oppressive oligarchy, spreading lies about alien invasions in order to legitimize further civil rights abuses.

In Brussels, seven nations filed for succession from the European Union, mostly limited to smaller and financially moribund states, but notably including Spain, which was claiming damages for not being more involved in TASC’s activities, and more importantly in its technological advances.

But while some regions splintered, others were uniting. Through a combination of religious fervor and a return to some more distasteful leadership practices usually stopped by a more attentive world community, a band of nations was gathering strength and momentum. At its core were Iran, Syria, and Egypt, with large parts of Iraq and even some border regions of Jordan showing signs of allegiance.

It was actually being spearheaded by the ayatollah who had catalyzed the entire crisis, but he was wisely allowing others to take a front seat as the head of the military junta in Egypt rallied former allies to a battle cry as old as time.

At the center of their ire, as it had been a thousand times before, was Israel, on the menu once more, they hoped, as the UN crumbled and NATO scrambled for control.

Ironically, it was a new Russian secretariat that reached out to Jim Hacker to pass on his concerns about it. He was leading a cowed nation, and doing so far more reasonably than any of his predecessors going back nearly a hundred years. But that only made his position all the more tenuous, and his call all the more brave.

Maybe he called Jim because the Russian administrator had once held a role similar to Jim’s own, only Peter had been working under a borderline megalomaniac named Yuri Svidrigaïlov.

“Mr. Hacker, thank you for taking my call,” said Secretariat Uncovsky. “Are you sure you are comfortable speaking in Russian?”

“It is my pleasure to, Mr. Secretariat,” said Jim, able to actually enjoy the benefits of his spinal interface for the first time as Minnie allowed him to speak Russian as though he was a native. “And I am most comfortable speaking in Russian, if you will promise to forgive any errors or mispronunciations I may make along the way.”

It was a nicety. There would be no errors.

“Far from it, Mr. Hacker, I must say your command of my tongue is most admirable,” said Secretariat Uncovsky, with unfeigned respect.

“You flatter me, Mr. Secretariat. But if I may, I would like to take this opportunity to say it is most pleasant to hear from you. I hope this is the first of many such calls between TASC and the Russian Republic.”

Peter Uncovsky was equally hopeful. To say he saw the folly of his former leader’s actions against TASC would be a gross understatement. He had watched the man literally be obliterated by Neal Danielson’s wrath. And if he was honest, he could not deny the justness of the action that had seen him promoted to acting party leader, if only because few now dared take the job.

But fearing TASC was not the same as agreeing with them, and he would find little support in the Kremlin if he aired his true opinion of how much Russia should backtrack from its former expansionist efforts and put that energy instead into supporting the efforts of the group he was talking to now.

“A hope I share, Mr. Hacker. Though if I am equally candid, I will say that not all in Moscow share my enthusiasm. How that will change in the light of recent revelations I cannot know, but you would be surprised how far people will go to defend misguided action rather than admit fault.”

He spoke of the attack on Rolas. He spoke of the destruction which now appeared to have been a strike against one of Earth’s main arteries into the very region they were soon to need to defend.

Jim did not dwell on the topic. “On the contrary, Mr. Secretariat, I would not be that surprised at all, I am afraid.” There was a moment of shared understanding, and then Jim went on, “But I am being rude. You are a very busy man and I have yet to inquire after the reason for your call. How may the Terrestrial Allied Space Command be of assistance to Russia?”

Peter allowed himself a smile. This man was every bit the diplomat Peter had remembered from their brief encounters over the years. They both knew that Jim’s time was just as important as Peter’s, perhaps more so, given the current crisis.

Very well, he would get to the point, “Of course, Mr. Hacker. I call … more to offer warning than to request anything, per se. I call because my intelligence services have received notice of a growing conspiracy that I believe will concern you. I am very aware that the undeniably efficient operatives of TASC and its allies will have seen signs of the same, but I wanted to make sure that those signs were getting appropriate attention.”

He paused, deliberately, but Jim did not interrupt. He had a pretty good idea what the Russian leader was referring to, but he knew better than to staunch such a rare glimpse of cooperation, and so Peter went on, “I speak, of course, of rising calls for action from Persia to Egypt. But that is not the root of my concern.”

Jim’s curiosity was peeked, and when Peter paused, clearly reticent to go too far, Jim gently coaxed the other man along, “That is very interesting, Mr. Secretariat. While such matters are not really my purview, I am, indeed, aware of the protests in Tehran, Mosul, and Luxor. We had assumed they lacked the political and military backing to go much further than words. Do you have reason to suspect otherwise?”

Again a pause. Peter was treading carefully. Eventually he spoke up, “No, no, Mr. Hacker. Well, not really. But … as you know, my nation has enjoyed much closer ties to the Iranian government over the past decades than our counterparts in the West.”

That was putting it mildly, but Peter quickly went on, “Of course, no one in the Russian leadership supports any illegal action against the sovereign nation of Israel. But …”

Jim was growing a touch tired of the dissemination, but he had to let Peter Uncovsky get there on his own. Both men knew that Peter was no doubt being watched, not only by the countless international observers forced upon Russia since its surrender after the Hungarian War, but also by his own people. By hard-line remnants that would take months or even years to root out, if they ever could be.

“Well, since the justified actions of NATO forces against the Russian Army in Hungary, well, the military in Russia has been understandably splintered. And it has come to my attention that elements of it, not officially mandated elements, of course …”

He over-emphasized that part a little too much, thought Jim. He was performing for the call’s silent partners. They could not object to his releasing this information if he claimed he did not think any official member of the government was involved.