GWOT VII - The Ideogram For Strife
Mar. 14th, 2021 09:01 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
drewkittyGWOT VII - The Ideogram For Strife
As I did daily, I followed a safety and security procedure with the Object.
One of the professionally bored Strategic Defense Force troopers stood at the only door (no windows) to the closet I'd repurposed as my quarters, while I cuddled the Object under a blanket. A second blanket of the same type was spread out under me.
The blankets had several interesting properties. Ostensibly a heating blanket, at least according to its shipping label, it contained densely woven wire mesh with several different spacings and gauges of wire. It would function as a Faraday cage. You could wrap a cell phone in it and the cell phone would lose contact with the tower.
It was also heavy, fire-resistant, and doubled as a psychiatric restraint if you added straps.
Only when under these blankets did I open the chest in which the Object rested.
This required the use of a biometric system registered to three people: myself, the Ambassador (who didn't know it) and the Embassy bomb tech (who probably didn't know it, but likely didn't care.)
It also required entering a code, which changed by iteration.
Then I could open what appeared to be an ordinary laptop, and mostly was, except that it had been built by the Office of Naval Planning from a carefully selected stable of pre-War parts and ran a custom operating system vaguely based on early CP/M for which the sparse documentation was written in the artificial language Klingon.
That wasn't the interesting part. The cube it was plugged into using an ordinary looking USB cable (it wasn't) was the interesting part.
If you tried to remove that cable, the cube would behave poorly. I'd been taught an emergency procedure but was not promised it would work.
If you removed that cable, and then tried to plug in an ordinary USB cable to what looked like an ordinary port, the cube would become unhappy. And so would an awful lot of people. Briefly.
I didn't know the technical side of it, and if I'd had the scientific background (such as a Ph.D. in physics) it still would have taken months to teach it to me.
There was a ball in the cube. Inside the ball, held carefully in the center, was something I'd been told that I could think of as 'anti-matter.'
Whether that was true, or whether it was something else like a pocket singularity or a miniature black hole, was another thing I didn't need to know.
What I did need to know is that it had two features of strategic use.
It could be harnessed to provide a very slow but utterly undetectable and secure method of communication. Somewhere between 155 and 170 baud. So no good for a chat unless you made the time to wait ... for ... each ... character ... to ... appear.
The Office of Naval Planning had been looking for a secure communications method with the Naval Militia's submarines.
They'd also been looking for a method of detecting submarines, but especially nuclear weapons and nuclear reactors.
What they'd found was all of those things. But it had certain additional features that made it the killer app for California.
Gravitational anomaly detection. Magnetic anomaly detection. Chemical detection... more an elemental detector. You could mine for uranium, but much more interestingly, you could hunt for tritium. The third isotope of hydrogen necessary to trigger a fusion bomb.
So not only could all your submarines talk to each other, and to their bases, but we could reliably detect every nuclear weapon not only on the planet, but under it, and underwater as well.
But you had to keep the Happy Fun Ball happy. The physicists were still arguing over what it did if it became troubled. Or even worse, sad.
Best guess was that it would detonate, converting some large fraction of its golf-ball shaped but fifty pound mass to energy. Pocket fusion bomb, if you heavily reinforced your pockets, and undetectable. Another guess was that it would fuse all the naturally occurring nitrogen in the atmosphere and blow the rest of the atmosphere off the soon to be rapidly cooling, frozen hills of what been Earth. A third was that there wouldn't be any evidence left to show any sign of our former existence, except a handful of deep space probes that amounted to a mix tape and directions to our now missing house.
Just disconnect it from its little battery pack and we could find out.
Once this was all over, the Naval Planning Office very badly wanted to send one on an orbit around the Sun, to the opposite side of Earth's orbit, and with sensors watching from a variety of distances, do exactly that ... and with some built-in safety for the survival of the only planet we live on, find out.
Until then, every single Object we'd made had to be assumed to be somewhere between a fusion bomb and a planet killer. The first one - much, much larger - was kept happy in its lab at the California State University, Downey, guarded by more bored Strategic Defense Force troopers. The rest were at sea, so to speak.
And I had knowingly brought one into a Chinese city.
This would not endear me to our hosts.
Still less would my plans for it.
I read the message. A very slight change of plan. I was being sent a reliable helper whom I knew. That would be amusing.
I typed up my report of recent events. It would take hours to send. But it would hum along quietly on its own doing so.
I checked the quintuple battery packs, interconnected. They were nearly full.
Assembly line Armageddon.
We'd made enough of them to have a production line for the battery packs. Even though we had no idea how to safely un-manufacture them, or as a bomb tech would put it, demilitarize them.
That was the other reason for the explosives packed into the Cube. We were fairly sure that blowing up the Cube fast enough would make it relatively harmless. Aside from an explosion at arm's length, that is.
If we were wrong about that, every submarine carrying an Object was another Doomsday Device we couldn't hope to stop.
Just like this one.
I closed it up, carefully, folded the blankets, and put it all back in the padlocked travel case to turn back over to the SDF trooper.
###
Constantly going to the airport to meet our people inbound was just a tad too eager.
Sitting in my cubicle pretending to work on my laptop was just a little too passive.
So I compromised by greeting the convoy as it parked just inside the gates.
The couriers, openly and heavily armed, split off to deliver their little packages.
Nothing large enough to be a travel case for an Object.
This left me facing a buxom older woman in ill-fitting Republic Army dress uniform, wearing a major's rank tabs and no name plate.
I blinked. She was the spitting image of someone I'd known from Site, and briefly during a visit to Alviso Prison. Then as had so many other people I'd known, she'd gotten killed.
"Do I know you, Major ..."
"Rize," she said.
The voice confirmed the ID. Betty. Alive.
My jaw hung slackly. Which very likely saved it from being broken, when the roundhouse slap struck my face out of the thin blue air.
"You son of a bitch. Colonel. You never wrote! Just a letter, just one!"
I took the blow, noting that she had maintained military courtesy even while committing a military felony. Striking her superior officer.
Although we both knew I'd let her get away with it. I'd let her get away with worse.
"Major. While I was still at Alviso, I was officially informed that you were KIA. And with Bear Force one does not ask. You knew I was still alive. Why didn't you reach out to me?"
Now that I thought about it, I too was incandescently angry.
"I was told..."
"My career, unlike yours, has been fairly public. I suppose I can buy off on you never reading a Border Force list of sector commanders. I suppose you don't care about your rank so you don't obsessively read the Officer's List, and now that I think about it, Bear Force operatives aren't on it anyway. But my deployment to Iowa was very, very public and there were articles written about it in both the California and the American press."
"What did you do in Iowa?"
"Expeditionary Force commander. Hung around, shot the shit. Same as Alviso, really."
She blinked.
"I read the AAR. I thought the style was familiar. Do you need an ice pack for that?"
Her touch had awoken emotions in me which I thought were long absent.
I drew her aside while everyone tried their best to pretend not to watch.
"Major," I said very quietly, lower than a whisper.
"Sir?"
"You are subject to non-judicial punishment for striking your superior officer. Would you prefer wall-to-wall counseling ... or horizontal?"
Her breath caught.
"Yes, please. Sir."
We had a lot to catch up on. In my room, with the door closed, with the Object under my bed. And a gasping, trying to keep quiet Betty Rize bent over my knee and getting the spanking she had apparently been needing for some years now.
###
Afterwards we were entwined in the sheets.
Somewhere in the middle there, the cot's legs had broken for the Republic and we'd been kept from stopping by the case for the Object
Someday I'd tell her that we'd fucked on top of a weapon of mass destruction.
But if it had gone off somewhere in the middle there, I wouldn't have been surprised either.
As I did daily, I followed a safety and security procedure with the Object.
One of the professionally bored Strategic Defense Force troopers stood at the only door (no windows) to the closet I'd repurposed as my quarters, while I cuddled the Object under a blanket. A second blanket of the same type was spread out under me.
The blankets had several interesting properties. Ostensibly a heating blanket, at least according to its shipping label, it contained densely woven wire mesh with several different spacings and gauges of wire. It would function as a Faraday cage. You could wrap a cell phone in it and the cell phone would lose contact with the tower.
It was also heavy, fire-resistant, and doubled as a psychiatric restraint if you added straps.
Only when under these blankets did I open the chest in which the Object rested.
This required the use of a biometric system registered to three people: myself, the Ambassador (who didn't know it) and the Embassy bomb tech (who probably didn't know it, but likely didn't care.)
It also required entering a code, which changed by iteration.
Then I could open what appeared to be an ordinary laptop, and mostly was, except that it had been built by the Office of Naval Planning from a carefully selected stable of pre-War parts and ran a custom operating system vaguely based on early CP/M for which the sparse documentation was written in the artificial language Klingon.
That wasn't the interesting part. The cube it was plugged into using an ordinary looking USB cable (it wasn't) was the interesting part.
If you tried to remove that cable, the cube would behave poorly. I'd been taught an emergency procedure but was not promised it would work.
If you removed that cable, and then tried to plug in an ordinary USB cable to what looked like an ordinary port, the cube would become unhappy. And so would an awful lot of people. Briefly.
I didn't know the technical side of it, and if I'd had the scientific background (such as a Ph.D. in physics) it still would have taken months to teach it to me.
There was a ball in the cube. Inside the ball, held carefully in the center, was something I'd been told that I could think of as 'anti-matter.'
Whether that was true, or whether it was something else like a pocket singularity or a miniature black hole, was another thing I didn't need to know.
What I did need to know is that it had two features of strategic use.
It could be harnessed to provide a very slow but utterly undetectable and secure method of communication. Somewhere between 155 and 170 baud. So no good for a chat unless you made the time to wait ... for ... each ... character ... to ... appear.
The Office of Naval Planning had been looking for a secure communications method with the Naval Militia's submarines.
They'd also been looking for a method of detecting submarines, but especially nuclear weapons and nuclear reactors.
What they'd found was all of those things. But it had certain additional features that made it the killer app for California.
Gravitational anomaly detection. Magnetic anomaly detection. Chemical detection... more an elemental detector. You could mine for uranium, but much more interestingly, you could hunt for tritium. The third isotope of hydrogen necessary to trigger a fusion bomb.
So not only could all your submarines talk to each other, and to their bases, but we could reliably detect every nuclear weapon not only on the planet, but under it, and underwater as well.
But you had to keep the Happy Fun Ball happy. The physicists were still arguing over what it did if it became troubled. Or even worse, sad.
Best guess was that it would detonate, converting some large fraction of its golf-ball shaped but fifty pound mass to energy. Pocket fusion bomb, if you heavily reinforced your pockets, and undetectable. Another guess was that it would fuse all the naturally occurring nitrogen in the atmosphere and blow the rest of the atmosphere off the soon to be rapidly cooling, frozen hills of what been Earth. A third was that there wouldn't be any evidence left to show any sign of our former existence, except a handful of deep space probes that amounted to a mix tape and directions to our now missing house.
Just disconnect it from its little battery pack and we could find out.
Once this was all over, the Naval Planning Office very badly wanted to send one on an orbit around the Sun, to the opposite side of Earth's orbit, and with sensors watching from a variety of distances, do exactly that ... and with some built-in safety for the survival of the only planet we live on, find out.
Until then, every single Object we'd made had to be assumed to be somewhere between a fusion bomb and a planet killer. The first one - much, much larger - was kept happy in its lab at the California State University, Downey, guarded by more bored Strategic Defense Force troopers. The rest were at sea, so to speak.
And I had knowingly brought one into a Chinese city.
This would not endear me to our hosts.
Still less would my plans for it.
I read the message. A very slight change of plan. I was being sent a reliable helper whom I knew. That would be amusing.
I typed up my report of recent events. It would take hours to send. But it would hum along quietly on its own doing so.
I checked the quintuple battery packs, interconnected. They were nearly full.
Assembly line Armageddon.
We'd made enough of them to have a production line for the battery packs. Even though we had no idea how to safely un-manufacture them, or as a bomb tech would put it, demilitarize them.
That was the other reason for the explosives packed into the Cube. We were fairly sure that blowing up the Cube fast enough would make it relatively harmless. Aside from an explosion at arm's length, that is.
If we were wrong about that, every submarine carrying an Object was another Doomsday Device we couldn't hope to stop.
Just like this one.
I closed it up, carefully, folded the blankets, and put it all back in the padlocked travel case to turn back over to the SDF trooper.
###
Constantly going to the airport to meet our people inbound was just a tad too eager.
Sitting in my cubicle pretending to work on my laptop was just a little too passive.
So I compromised by greeting the convoy as it parked just inside the gates.
The couriers, openly and heavily armed, split off to deliver their little packages.
Nothing large enough to be a travel case for an Object.
This left me facing a buxom older woman in ill-fitting Republic Army dress uniform, wearing a major's rank tabs and no name plate.
I blinked. She was the spitting image of someone I'd known from Site, and briefly during a visit to Alviso Prison. Then as had so many other people I'd known, she'd gotten killed.
"Do I know you, Major ..."
"Rize," she said.
The voice confirmed the ID. Betty. Alive.
My jaw hung slackly. Which very likely saved it from being broken, when the roundhouse slap struck my face out of the thin blue air.
"You son of a bitch. Colonel. You never wrote! Just a letter, just one!"
I took the blow, noting that she had maintained military courtesy even while committing a military felony. Striking her superior officer.
Although we both knew I'd let her get away with it. I'd let her get away with worse.
"Major. While I was still at Alviso, I was officially informed that you were KIA. And with Bear Force one does not ask. You knew I was still alive. Why didn't you reach out to me?"
Now that I thought about it, I too was incandescently angry.
"I was told..."
"My career, unlike yours, has been fairly public. I suppose I can buy off on you never reading a Border Force list of sector commanders. I suppose you don't care about your rank so you don't obsessively read the Officer's List, and now that I think about it, Bear Force operatives aren't on it anyway. But my deployment to Iowa was very, very public and there were articles written about it in both the California and the American press."
"What did you do in Iowa?"
"Expeditionary Force commander. Hung around, shot the shit. Same as Alviso, really."
She blinked.
"I read the AAR. I thought the style was familiar. Do you need an ice pack for that?"
Her touch had awoken emotions in me which I thought were long absent.
I drew her aside while everyone tried their best to pretend not to watch.
"Major," I said very quietly, lower than a whisper.
"Sir?"
"You are subject to non-judicial punishment for striking your superior officer. Would you prefer wall-to-wall counseling ... or horizontal?"
Her breath caught.
"Yes, please. Sir."
We had a lot to catch up on. In my room, with the door closed, with the Object under my bed. And a gasping, trying to keep quiet Betty Rize bent over my knee and getting the spanking she had apparently been needing for some years now.
###
Afterwards we were entwined in the sheets.
Somewhere in the middle there, the cot's legs had broken for the Republic and we'd been kept from stopping by the case for the Object
Someday I'd tell her that we'd fucked on top of a weapon of mass destruction.
But if it had gone off somewhere in the middle there, I wouldn't have been surprised either.
