Stormhaven Rising (Atlas and the Winds Book 1) (31 page)

“Here, in the clear, cold desert of North-Eastern Arizona, one of the most famous leaders of the New Industrial Revolution is about to embark on the journey of a lifetime. And he’s planning to take us along on this visionary flight.

“It’s my privilege to interview this intrepid team, and act as spokesman for the press and the public. For those of you joining us online, the link at the bottom of your screen will allow you to send us your questions, and for those who are on interactive satellite, the BDC is open for uplink.” Pausing briefly, he watched the monitor on his desk verify that they’d established the server link.

Standing up, he walked around the desk to his mark on the front of the stage. The first of the minies settled to the stage directly behind him. There was a collective gasp from the audience as the ship floated silently into the light. Most of them hadn’t been around when the
Dancing Star
had made its dash across the skies, and Cole had ordered the minies out of the air all day just so the impact of this moment would be maximized. The other mini, orbiting slowly above, flashed its landing lights onto the stage, creating the effect of an alien encounter. Even Brad, who’d been told what to expect, stood for an instant with his mouth hanging open.

As soon as the crew had cleared the back of the first mini, Mica took over and it shot straight up. The other one settled into its place to unload.

The eight of them stood together on the front of the stage, bathed in the artificial lightning of photo-strobes.

Colton glanced up at the government camp on the hill. He knew Shapiro was up there, listening and watching the webcast online. The roar of the audience sounded like thunder, but he knew it was a war cry. And he knew that the agent understood that the battle was on.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” Brad said, his voice echoing over the sound system. “Please allow me to introduce Colton Taylor, and the astronauts of Stormhaven.”

***

Langley, Virginia:

The sun had long since disappeared from the sky, or so the watch on Stanley Murkowski’s arm told him. It was always dark in his basement office.

It was usually before sunrise when he began his work day, and always well after sunset before he finished, but this was the life he loved. Living like a caveman in a modern day crypt of an office.

He’d been married once, but now he barely remembered those days. On the shelf behind his chair was a picture to prove it, though no one had seen the photograph in years. It had become entombed in piles of printed reports tossed into the dusty mote of his memory. Now she was a deduction on his taxes, and nothing more. A thought in his awareness only when he looked at the alimony payment deducted from his government paycheck.

He rarely stepped out of his office and when he did, most of his co-workers looked at him in shock. His skin was a dull gray that blended into the walls of the catacomb building he called home.

He was lonely, but he’d come to like the feeling. It was an insulating blanket that left him warm in the glow of his monitors. A geek in the finest modern sense of the word, he lived with his computer systems. Breathing in the fragrance of hot circuitry, he felt alive. It was more exciting to him than the finest perfume had been on his lovely wife’s skin.

Stan was a hacker. Not the new generation of glory-grabbing whiz-kids. No, Stan had been an ordinary guy with a degree in computer science when his bosses discovered he happened to be able to get outside the box in cyberspace better than the best. Now he lived for the challenges of destroying firewalls and encrypted security systems, and the government paid him well for his skills.

He worked for the Department of Homeland Security, but was responsible for maintaining security for the Defense Department’s Gensix systems by continually throwing himself at their virtual walls. Occasionally he found a crack, and they’d quickly work to repair it. Then he’d try again the next day. And the day after that. And so on, ad infinitum.

Today, sitting in his personal vault, he had a visitor. An important man who’d given him two simple tasks and then disappeared, leaving no evidence of having ever descended into Stan’s labyrinth. A man who, in his passing, had added a momentary distraction to an otherwise fascinatingly dull encryption algorithm.

The Secretary had delivered a request: to slay a dragon before it gave flight to a terrifying rumor. In a matter of minutes, he’d dispatched his cybernetic warriors to overrun their network. A trillion individual digital requests overwhelming a specific set of servers. A wave of miniscule cyberbots relentlessly attacked and then sealed the information forever behind a layer of indecipherable noise in a crumbling tomb of shattered data.

The second task he’d been handed was far less challenging, yet more important even than stopping the Chinese. He’d found a wide open back-door through a phone system with a basic VPN for its IP telephony. From there he’d cracked their system with amazing ease and left the incriminating evidence in plain sight. He hadn’t opened the file, unconcerned with what it might contain. A simple delivery, made at the request of his boss.

On the way out he’d closed their open backdoor, smiling to himself for his act of kindness at improving their woefully inadequate security. With his tracks dissolving into cyber oblivion, he went back to the real challenges of his job without a second thought.

***

Stormhaven Rising

Stormhaven:

Dave watched the ISS sail overhead, knowing that Susan might, at this very minute, be looking down at him. A week ago he’d have been raging at the thought that she was living his dream. That was a week ago.

Today he was about to fly a ship that was beyond NASA’s wildest imagining. In a few hours, he was going to chase her across the stars, not to win her back, but to show her that dreams were never lost, only forgotten.

The press had shut down until morning and he stood in the shadow of the
Dancing Star
on the empty stage staring up at the darkness. Even the frozen chill of the night could not drive him into submission. He was more alive than he’d ever been, and each breath of cold air only reminded him of his passion.

Viki had left him alone in the hope that he would find a way to rest, and even Tom had warned him about spending the night awake. Nevertheless, the anticipation had kept sleep a fleeting fantasy.

“I expected to find you here.” Colton’s voice rumbled in the dark, startling him out of his moment of communion.

“Obviously I’m not alone in my insomnia,” he said.

“I live in fear of my sleep,” Cole said quietly. “I envy people who dream well.”

Dave turned toward him and could almost see his shadow in one of the chairs that occupied the center of the stage. “Really? Why’s that?”

“I used to enjoy sleeping, but a long time back I started having nightmares, and I’ve never had a night’s peace since.” He stood up and Dave could hear him walking toward the front of the riser. He followed carefully, not wanting to trip and fall in the almost pitch black.

“Can’t they do something to help?” Dave asked, feeling awkward exploring something as intimate as Cole’s psyche.

“Viki put me on something to make me sleep better, but all it did was wipe out my dreams altogether. No more nightmares, but no more creativity either.” Cole sat down on the front of the stage, hanging his feet in the air off the edge of the riser. His voice sounded hollow, like a ghost from the dust.

“That’s strange,” Dave said.

“I’ve always used my dreams as a sort of tool to dredge my subconscious for answers. I’d go to sleep with a problem, and dream the solution.”

“Sounds like you have a pretty smart subconscious. I wish I could do that.” Dave sat down beside him, and stared out at the edge of the sky. The stars were so bright that he could actually see the silhouette of things on the horizon.

“I think I burnt it out, and instead of getting answers, I started getting horror movies.” Cole sighed. “You don’t ever want to be cursed with seeing the things I’ve seen. Especially not when some of them are now happening."

“What do you mean?” Dave asked, confused.

“Why do you think we’d built this ship already?” In the darkness he could see Cole shake his head and sit forward.

“What the hell is that?” Cole whispered, pointing at something on the horizon.

“I don’t know. I don’t ... no, wait .. I see it. Almost looks like someone sky-lined against the horizon. Who’d be running around out here at this time of night?”

“Mica,” Cole whispered, “I know you’re monitoring the audio. I think we’ve got an intruder due southwest of where I’m sitting. Can you confirm that?”

Five or six seconds later, a mini whizzed overhead invisible against the sky. The only evidence of its passing was the wind of its wake.

The landing lights on the small vehicle blazed to life, revealing three men in black coveralls. Two of them froze in the illumination, but the third drew a pistol. A flash from the muzzle, and one of the halogens on the mini died.

Before he could fire a second time, every light on the stage came on and swiveled toward the men. Obviously Mica realized that given a hundred spotlights, they’d be forced to retreat, and that’s exactly what they did, straight back towards the government observation post. The media camp, awakened by the gunshot, lit up a split second later and several reporters caught pictures of the retreating agents.

“Well done, Mica. They’ll be cleaning the shit out of their pants for days,” Dave roared, pumping his fist in the air in a gesture of defiance.

“Since we’ve got everyone up with the false sunrise, think we ought to get on the road?” Cole suggested. “They might be coming back.”

Dave nodded, jumping up to head over to the ship. The mini, blinded in one eye by the bullet, settled onto the stage, and Mica said through the comlink on the small ship, “The intruders have been neutralized. I am concerned that they managed to get inside our perimeter. They were masking their thermal and electrical emissions.”

“Don’t worry about it Mica. You took care of it,” Cole said.

“If random chance had not operated in our favor, they might have managed to accomplish their objective. This is unacceptable,” The computer sounded frustrated at its failure.

“So adapt. Learn, and change our security strategies.” Cole smiled, watching Dave pacing back and forth in front of the ship.

“Well come on, let’s get everybody out here,” he said from the distance.

“Mica give the crew a wake-up call and let’s do it,” Cole said.

“They are already awake and en route,” it replied.

“What was that all about?” a reporter hollered up to the stage.

“I don’t know, but I’d wager it was an attempt at sabotage,” he answered, knowing that once the word got out over the online services it was going to turn the tension level up again.

“Why sabotage?” a different reporter asked.

“Go ask them.” He pointed up the hill toward the government camp. “I’m sure they’d appreciate the chance to tell their side of the story. Just don’t take too long, we’re going to be gear up in under a half hour.”

“Why the rush?” Brad Stone walked onto the set from the back.

“We’ve decided to bump up the launch so we can be out of here before they regroup and get back,” Cole said.

“Get back? What did I miss?” he stopped beside Cole, who was pointing at the bullet hole in the parked mini. “What the hell is that?”

“It looks to me like damage from an eleven-millimeter round. I’d say this tells us they’re pretty serious about stopping the flight,” he said, lowering his voice enough that his comment was only heard by Brad.

“If you launch now you’re going to miss the Prime Time morning news,” one of the reporters said from the front of the stage.

“I know this might seem strange to you, but there’s something a lot bigger going on than you know.” Cole walked to the edge of the riser and knelt down to talk to the gathering group. “I can’t explain it yet, but it’s more important that we get off the ground than getting good ratings.”

He looked at the hill where the government tents were barely visible. “You just try to figure out why they want to stop us, and make that the angle of your story. You’ll get all the ratings you ever wanted."

***

Camp Kryptonite:

“What the holy hell happened? That should’ve been an in and out operation,” Paul Abrams asked, breathing in gasps from the exertion and the adrenaline rush, even though he’d never admit to it.

“You were there,” the Marine sergeant said, flinging his headset on the table in frustration. “We were damped and chilled so there’s no way they could’ve seen us."

“I think those two we saw on the stage made us,” the other Ranger said.

“Not possible. They weren’t geared for night vision, and there’s no way they could’ve popped us at five-hundred yards without it,” the Sergeant said.

Abrams snorted. “Bullshit, they made us somehow. It really doesn’t matter. They got us dead to rights.”