Deep Black (7 page)

10

Malachi Reese unclipped his MP3 player from his waistband and held it in his hand as the chemical analyzer took its sample
in the torture chamber leading to the Remote Piloting Chamber down the hall from the Desk Three Art Room. The sniffer was
ostensibly designed to detect the small range of chemicals involved in the manufacture of explosives; Mala-chi figured that
it was actually intended to keep cyborgs out. Which was why he had thumbed “Cyborg Trash,” an XeX
²
tune, into the player and cranked the sucker to 10.

The black suits didn’t catch the irony, but that wasn’t their thing. Malachi stepped forward as the green panel flashed near
the door and entered the empty room, which looked like a cross between a flight simulator and a dentist’s examining room.
Dull blue lights in the floor led to the control seat, which was canted back about twenty degrees from vertical. Sensors snapped
on soft yellow lights from the side of the room as Malachi sat in the chair, adjusting it to his preferences—he liked to sit
upright, as if he were at a desk.

Which, in a way, he was. The controls in front of him included three keyboards as well as an oversize flight stick, which
he wouldn’t need for this mission. At the front of the room was a large, configurable plasma screen; immediately in front
of the seat were three large LCD panels. At the left of the seat were several smaller, dedicated tubes with an assortment
of affiliated knobs, sliders, and dial controls. On the right were two more screens. The top tied into the Art Room down the
hall, feeding either a general shot or a picture of whoever was speaking to him over the dedicated circuit. The bottom tied
into either SpyNet or whatever was on the main screen at the Art Room; a simple toggle switch chose the view.

Malachi set his music player on the small shelf at the left side of the seat, then slid his headset over the player’s ear
buds, fiddling with the arrangement for a moment to get the proper alignment. When he thought he had it, he reached beneath
his T-shirt and took the small metal key from the string around his neck, placing it into the inset below the keyboard. The
key, which had a chip-based random number generator in its small cylinder, allowed him to enter his two passwords into the
keyboard. Given the elaborate security procedures required to get in here, the system designers had decided only a few modest
protocols would be required to operate the controlling unit; the screen flashed immediately with the main feed from Orbital
Platform Three, which the twenty-one-year-old had come to operate.

At the same time, the other screens popped to life. Marie Telach, who was in charge of the operation, popped onto the Art
Room video screen.

“Hey,” said Malachi to Telach.

“Hey yourself. You’re late.”

“Yeah, my shirt set off one of the alarms upstairs. Too much bleach—sniffer thought it was C-4.”

“There is a dress code, you know.”

Malachi grinned. She was undoubtedly referring to his jeans and T-shirt, which were a bit scruffy even for the NSA. Malachi
relished his role as a bit of a rebel, albeit one with a patriotic cause. He could play the rebel because he was undeniably
one of the best Ree-Vee ops on the planet, able to handle not only the complicated satellite platforms and their Vessels but
also the high-speed F-47C and naval assets as well. (
Ree-Vee op
came from
Remote Vehicle operator
. The Vessels were like one-way space planes that were configured and launched from the satellites.) Ironically, Malachi had
first attracted NSA attention for his math skills—he’d been accepted to Princeton as a fourteen-year-old—and had only stumbled
into the occupation after an interviewer found him playing a version of AirCombat XXVII he’d hacked into a GameBoy cartridge.

“Our team is almost in place,” Telach told him. “We need those sensors down. Now.”

“That’s why I’m here.” Malachi popped the 3-D “sit-grid” supplied by the Art Room onto the screen in the center of his workstation.
The grid was a computerized map showing his target. Based on satellite images, it could in theory be only a few minutes old.
In this case, however, it had been constructed from the image library and was nearly a year old. There were not enough satellites
and, frankly, not enough need, to have high-quality images of every corner of the Earth available 24/7. Malachi studied the
view for a moment—it looked like a junkyard with some outer buildings—then keyed in the target destination.

The Vessels were essentially space-borne dump trucks, preloaded with different payloads. Three basic configurations were stored
at the satellite platforms. All looked and operated the same. One held three dozen small sound sensors, bugs about the size
of a quarter that could transmit back to the satellites for about four hours. Another held two dozen slightly larger motion
sensors with roughly the same endurance. The last held a combination of both. The Vessels looked like small pipes with a sharp
nose cone and blisters halfway down the side. The boosters had steering fins similar to those found on a standard air-to-air
missile.

As the computer made its launch calculations, Malachi brought up the smaller panels on the left side of his console. He punched
up a weather radar in screen one, updating himself on the progress of a storm he’d been briefed on earlier. Screens two and
three had radar images of both the target area and a wasteland nearly a thousand miles to the northwest where the Vessel’s
parts would scatter after destruct. Neither of the images was particularly fine; objects less than two meters in length, such
as the Vessel he would be piloting, were essentially invisible. But they were enough to give Mal-achi a decent idea of what
was going on.

At least one of the previous Vessels had refused to blow itself up, and the operators had been instructed to make sure they
landed in as remote an area as possible if, in the irreverent slang favored by the tiny coterie charged with controlling the
space weapons, they didn’t “go jihad.” It was therefore important to know that he wasn’t flying his self-destruct pattern
into Army maneuvers. By the same token, he’d need to know if anything dramatic happened at the target area before making his
drop.

By the time he returned his attention to the forward screens, the computer had calculated its launch, wing inflation, and
ignition points, showing them in color-coded symbols on the main screen.

“Ready or what?” asked Telach.

“Almost,” he said, picking up his MP3 player. He slipped the RCA plug into his console and togged the number three preset.
G*ngs*rfx’s “Buzz” ripped up and down his back, the bass good enough to set off a hum in the NSA earphones. “Ready to fly,”
he said. “I need a target time.”

“Yesterday,” said Telach.

“Can’t you play some classical music?” asked Jeff Rock-man. Rockman was in the front row of the Art Room, running the agents
on the ground. “Springsteen or something?”

“Baby, we were born to run,” said Malachi, typing in his command password to unlock the platform.

“How’s the Civic?” asked Rockman.

“Chip’s supposed to come today. We’ll see how we do,” said Malachi. “I got the Monsoon speakers in, though. Sounds awesome.
Whole town shakes.”

“Cool.”

The computer queried for his mission authorization number; Malachi pounded it in, starting to catch the hard beat of the rap-metal
song he’d dished into his buds. Malachi did a quick inventory check of the platform’s available bugs—it was due to be restocked
by Shuttle next week—then selected one of the Mixed Bag Vessels as his entry vehicle. The main screen morphed to a video view
of the interior chamber—the top of the platform was covered by a solar array, as much to avoid observation by other space
vehicles as for power. He turned to screen two and toggled a preset to put the 3-D mission profile there. The computer was
suggesting a class one fuse—actually, a solid-propellant rocket motor—but Malachi, working from experience and still worried
about the weather, chose class two. He had to confirm his suggestion twice with the computer—an annoying nudge installed by
designers who basically didn’t trust human pilots. Finally he watched on the main screen as the stubby motor rode down a track
to the back of the selected Vessel.

The satellite platform’s parts were not unlike those in the sophisticated plastic-and-electronic Lego sets Malachi’s father
had bought the prodigy when he was three, and if Malachi had been the nostalgic type he might have flashed on a scene or two
of his dad, who had died in a traffic accident when Malachi was nine. But he wasn’t particularly nostalgic; he popped off
his headset, grabbed the MP3 player, and got up, walking to the back of the Chamber, where the small galley included a large
refrigerator. He bent to the bottom and took out a Nestle´’s strawberry drink (stocked here at his request), then took a straw
from the counter and went back to his station.

“Today?” asked Telach.

“I was thinking today.” Malachi slipped back into his seat. The engine had been strapped to the Vessel. The computer indicated
it was ready to launch and, in fact, had started to count down for him, albeit at ten minutes.

“Move countdown to sixty seconds,” he said, opening the bottle. He poked the straw through, still watching the screen. The
computer ferried the missile from its assembly point, extending the long arm that held it until it was twelve feet from the
bay. It then swiveled the missile slightly to obtain the proper launch angle. Platform Three was roughly twenty-four hundred
miles to the southeast of the Vessel’s target and, in fact, was closer to Tehran than Moscow. The rocket would propel it toward
Earth at speeds approaching Mach 6; it would hit the target area in just about an hour.

Or two and a half strawberry drinks.

When the countdown hit twenty seconds, the computer paused to ask Malachi for the go/no-go command. He quickly typed “GO”—it
had to be capital letters, or the computer would freeze, yet another safety feature.

At fifteen seconds, the computer again asked if it was allowed to launch. This time, Malachi gave verbal authorization, as
did Telach from the Art Room.

The frame jostled up and down as the main screen filled with pure white tinged by red and yellow. By the time the video camera
adjusted its aperture, the rocket was gone. Malachi left the image on the screen long enough to confirm that the launch had
gone smoothly; the rail was intact, with no visible scorching. He then thumbed exterior camera two into the screen. The yellow
diamond of the burning motor dominated the bottom left-hand quarter of the screen; he knew from experience the launch was
a good one. He tracked it from the camera for a few seconds, then took one last big sip of his drink and set it aside.

An old Beck song from
Odelay,
“Where It’s At,” rammed through his ear buds as he quickly worked through the instrument readings. Malachi watched the rocket’s
actual and projected trajectory on screen two, fingers starting to get twitchy. His control at this point was minimal, for
all practical purposes limited to the rocket motor itself; it was like controlling an on-off switch that could be used a total
of five times. The computer turned the dotted projected course into a solid line as the Vessel moved along, comparing it to
a projected 3-D path that looked like a long tube of yellow spaghetti on the screen. Malachi watched as the rocket began dipping
from the top of the tube toward the bottom; as it passed through the yellow into the black he killed the engine. Five seconds
passed before the dotted line once more found the proper course; Malachi waited another three before initiating the relight.
There was a slight delay in acknowledgment, almost enough to make him bite the inside of his cheek. The rocket engines had
a mean failure ratio of some thing like .003, and the restart wasn’t a sure thing. But the delay was due to a tracking glitch
on SpyNet, which was ferrying over information from DEFSMAC satellites—just working out the initials alone was a hassle—and
after a slight hiccup the main screen showed the Vessel was now perfectly in the middle of the spaghetti tube. Malachi leaned
back in his seat, soaking in “High 5” as the computer baby-sat the Vessel toward Point Hydra, where the winglets would be
deployed and he would gain more control over the flight.

“Looking for an ETA,” said Rockman over sonic drone.

“On course and on time,” said Malachi. He clicked in the main flight screen—similar to a HUD that might be found in a fighter,
it gave a crosshairs and artificial horizon against, in this instance, a simulated backdrop of space and Earth. The forward
video camera wouldn’t transmit until much later in the flight.

“So you’re ready to put the new exhaust in?”

“Yeah. Gonna be wicked hot.”

“I’m thinking about buying a Camaro,” said Rockman.

“A Camaro?”

“Classic ’68. Has a rebored 302 in it. Engine is probably for shit, though. I’ve seen the driver and maybe I might trust him
with a skateboard.”

“Can we have an all-around update, please?” asked Telach, who was addressing the entire team involved in the mission.

The chatter dissolved as the analysts tracking various developments gave terse briefings. Malachi fenced the updates off in
a corner of his brain, concentrating on his space plane. He leaned toward the control screens, gradually falling into the
zone. Once he was there, everything would be automatic. It was like typing; he wouldn’t have to look at the keyboard to know
where his fingers were.

Five minutes from Hydra, the onboard computer did a series of system checks. They were all in the green.

He came over the Urals. Telach had to give the final okay to drop the sensors from the Vessel. He updated her regularly on
the flight, even though she could track it from the Art Room.

“Preparing to deploy wings,” he told her, edging forward in his seat.

The blare of another new tune from G*ngs*rfx—a heavy metal–rap piece that found a way to incorporate a tuba—nearly drowned
out Telach’s acknowledgment. Malachi got the view in his main screen; the computer helped out with a white box showing the
Vessel. The streaking pipe was only forty-four inches long, counting the rocket motor. While theoretically detectable by three
different Russian ground radars, the programming on all three would reject any returns from it as errors.