GWOT VII - Meet and Greet
Aug. 11th, 2021 07:39 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
drewkittyThat night, Major Rize and I mutually decided to test the professionalism of the SDF troopers through the simple, rude expedient of fucking. Not them, of course, each other. With no one watching but them and the innumerable cameras the Chinese government had doubtless rigged the penthouse with.
No one broke in and tried to interfere with Happy Fun Ball. I still think that I could have uncoupled mid-climax, crawled over to the Object and pulled out its life support plug. Fortunately this was not tested.
As I was returning naked from my post-coital piss, the SDF corporal made a slight thumb gesture to pull me to the side. I nodded. This should be good.
"Sir, would you terribly mind watching the Thing for somewhere between two seconds and an hour?"
I nodded, and took up Happy Fun Ball watching.
WIth that the corporal matter of factly, non-verbally, and very directly made a pass at her boss. He took her up on it.
Two hours later, he took over Ball-sitting from me. She was blissfully asleep.
I have no idea what the Chinese thought of all the screaming.
"Sir," he murmured as I started to slink off to bed.
"Yo."
"We're not going to live through this, are we?"
"Nope."
"Didn't think so. Good night."
###
A discreet knock gave us warning that we should be somewhat dressed. George let himself in with breakfast for all of us the moment Rize finished dressing. Camera monitor on his phone, or a command post across the hall.
I didn't eat. George noted this with only the flicker of an eyebrow.
It wasn't that I wasn't hungry. It was that the stakes had gone up and poisoning us to get at the Object was now a non-zero possibility.
"I hope you don't object to a flight," George opened.
"Should be fun."
I'd been in a lot of choppers at this point. All California Republic owned and operated, until now, and that military or militarized birds with open doors and mandatory headsets to save what was left of your hearing.
Leather seats and a sealed cabin was new. A VIP transport had been sent for us.
"The cabin will be pressurized to sea level. We didn't know how your ... bag ... would feel about a flight."
Observant, weren't they.
But if they knew just a little more than they did, they'd have killed us all last night. Turn down the oxygen in the room, add just a little sleepy gas, set off the flashbangs and have the tac-team race the door blown off its hinges into the room. Shooting.
Pilot, co-pilot, a crew chief, George, and the four of us.
The crew chief's eyes narrowed at the submachine guns, carried openly at hand, by the SDF troopers. I think the grips of the guns reminded them that they couldn't possibly hold hands right now.
Of course, any sane country has the protocol that aboard aircraft, firearms will be secured with empty chambers and safeties set.
But we were of the diplomatic type of asshole, and were disregarding this nicety for imperative rather than imprudent reasons.
Rize and I didn't need to hold hands. I saw that she was now wearing on her belt a global satellite phone in a rugged soft case. If we survived the crash, and it did, and she had a minute to unfold the antenna and dial, she might get help from someone Chinese sooner or later. But not from California, at least as far as I knew.
However, there is a lot I didn't know, and my demonstrated ability to resist torture was one of my qualifications for this assignment.
The helo lifted smoothly from the hotel roof helipad and we flew due west, as best I could tell. It didn't really matter.
George, acting on instructions, made it a tour.
We banked over a crater along the side of a mighty river. It had been a city. Now it was glass.
Further along, there was a road, a modern highway. There was some traffic but a long stretch of the shoulders for miles and miles - or should I say kilometers and kilometers out of respect to our hosts - was littered with wrecked armored fighting vehicles. A 'highway of death,' so the saying goes.
Further along, shattered and burnt forest. The nuclear ignited forest fires had been three years ago. But no one was sparing any time for forestry, any more than California could.
Another crater. Provincial capital.
Clearly we were using the highway as a visual navigation aid. It was also convenient that we could fly over the craters rather than around them.
We landed in a mid-sized town with a chunk cut out of one side by another crater. An airport, a helipad, a refueling tanker truck trundling up after our rotors spun down. George stretched his legs. I did not.
I glanced at Rize. The SDF sergeant passed me his phone, on which he had been playing to all appearances a computer game.
The text spelled out, "I can fly this helicopter."
I cleared it and handed it back.
Good to know. But not immediately helpful.
Flying rotary wing aircraft is not a trivial matter. Flying a rotary wing aircraft you have not qualified on, much more so. We were all demonstrating unexpected talents.
Refueled and one of the pilots swapped out, we continued flying west. No meal arrangements had been made.
Finally I took a food bar out of a pocket, split it into four equal crumbs after George shuddered and declined, and that was our in flight snack.
You can take the soldier out of the infantry, but you can't take the infantry out of the soldier.
Now we gained altitude. And then some more altitude. By Chinese standards, these were high hills. By California standards, low mountains.
A pair of armored fighting vehicles I recognized flanked a helipad with blinking landing lights. ZSU-23-4. The four is number of cannon, the 23 is their caliber in millimeters, and ZSU is a tracked chassis. Radar directed anti aircraft tank.
We landed between. I noticed one was protected by an armored revetment so that the other could blow away a chopper on the pad without blue-on-bluing (red on red?) the other tank.
Thoughtful touches abound.
Polite young men and women in immaculate uniforms with thousand meter stares opened the helicopter doors and escorted us to the two jeeps. I drew the SDF corporal. Rize rode with the SDF sergeant. My hand went into the valise. Everyone pretended not to notice.
The jeep dropped us off at the edge of an enormous inward-sloped garden. Exotic plants and birds are equally lost on me. I hadn't had an ability to appreciate 'pretty' since long before the FIrecracker.
It was a boast of wealth, influence and power. Given the little labels on everything, it doubled as an arboretum and likely a zoo. Possibly even a genetics archive.
"We sweep for radiation five times a day," an ugly man in an ill-fitting jacket said. "A legacy you Americans have gifted us."
More than a simple "Fuck you!" was called for.
"... you fucking asshole," I found myself roaring a minute later, with absolutely no idea what I had just said. Rize had a grenade in her hand. The troops were calmly alert.
"You lost one city. Just one."
"San Francisco. Daly City. Brisbane. South San Francisco. Redwood City. Colma. Pacifica. San Mateo. Millbrae. Burlingame," I replied bitterly. "Plus the megafires in Marin and San Mateo Counties." I forced myself to subside. "And yes, I know, America nuke-fucked China too. But America fucked us first, and hard, and we'd done nothing _wrong_."
"Neither had we."
"It may seem petty to bring this up at this late date, but you were committing genocide against entire populations. Uighurs. Tibet."
"American propaganda," he dismissed.
"The truth is what it is, not what we wish it were, or what would be convenient or profitable or even safe. Fact: China didn't deserve to get nuked. Fact: Tank Man and T Square and anti-immolation firefighters in same. Fact: California was at peace. Fact: now we study war, and we're good at it. Fact: we want peace but we'll kill to get it."
He smiled. "I'm just the gardener. This way," he gestured.
No, he wasn't just the gardener. He had the hands of a man who worked with keyboards, not pruning tools.
We were served lunch. We kept our luggage with us. It was Major Rize's turn not to eat.
George looked worried. He didn't say anything, for all I knew he had orders not to say anything.
Before the War, my favorite slur on a product's poor quality was to say, "I ordered X but I got it from wish.com"
The food was American sandwiches, if wish.com sold sandwiches. A cook, probably a good cook, who had been asked to make home cooking for an unfamiliar culture.
After lunch we were escorted to a glass-walled conference room overlooking the gardens, in which there was a low table surrounded by a U-shaped conference room table.
The ugly man from earlier was there.
"Not the gardener," I said. I'd already fucked him off, so I had nothing to lose.
"No. Technician."
Now I placed him. His business suit had slipped open and there was some sort of closed holster with little items in it, not a firearm.
There were people good with their hands, as in killers like me, and then there were people good with their hands, as in with an arcane technical skill.
He was a bomb tech. Almost certainly a nuclear bomb tech.
The principal walked in.
I'd already met him.
Mr. Zhou, from the restaurant.
"Good afternoon, I hope the journey wasn't too exhausting. You've gone to great pains to attract my attention. You have it.
"Let's open up your valise and have a look at it."
The SDF troopers were immediately on high alert.
"Sergeant. I have that authority."
"You do. He doesn't," he said quietly with his subgun pointed openly at Mr. Zhou.
The guards were in sight and watching, but from outside the glass conference room. What they were not doing spoke volumes. They remained on guard. Whatever happened in the room - whatever! - was not their business.
I popped the valise, put it up on the low table, and took out The Object and its laptop.
I powered it up, typed my iterative password with no attempt to conceal it, opened a chat window.
"E18, CA1," I typed.
A wait. Characters formed on the screen.
"W." A pause. "W." Then finally, "GA. CA1."
"E18. Z8."
"Hi Z8."
"So, Mr. Zhou, what would you like to say to my boss. The governor of California."
He furrowed his eyebrows in brief thought. Motioned for the keyboard.
"Kill USA?"
I interjected out loud.
"Forty seconds per character. So the Governor will start the reply in about five minutes."
And the reply itself took about that long.
"If must."
The technician was pointing his cell phone, and more than his cell phone, at the Object.
"That thing is dead to the EM spectrum." And some swear words in Mandarin, that I vaguely recognized but could not repeat.
"I really must get one for staff meetings. Cuts out all the ..." and my ear heard "shi shi' but it was something else.
"How?" he typed, and we waited.
"E18 GA SK."
That ended the conversation and gave me my instructions.
"Sir, California is prepared to destroy America if she does not surrender Trident. We have committed alliances from Japan, India, France and the United Kingdom. On cue, we present the ultimatum. If America does not stand down, by surfacing the Trident fleet and allowing us to intern it, we attack."
"And this device ... is how you coordinate the timing?"
"That is one use."
"What else does it do?"
I changed tabs on the laptop. Typed a short query. No time delay, this functionality was on board.
"I kind of thought you'd have a fusion weapon lying around the house. And there is a strategic rocket regiment about thirty kilometers south-east of us. Flew past it, but not over it. Deep rock, probably a tunnel complex, but ninety fusion warheads pretty much matches a pre-War regiment."
"HOW DID YOU KNOW...."
"This device. We know where every nuclear weapon is on the planet. Not just communicator. Sensor. For every Trident America tries to hide, she loses something. We'll start small. Monuments, infrastructure. Cities only if she really pisses us off."
I tabbed again. Motioned Rize to back off that little bit.
"Move one of those regimental launchers somewhere you can afford to have it go off," I offered. "Then push this button here. And it will."
He gaped. And caught the implication that any time I was tired of living, I could hit TAB and set off the fusion weapon he kept lying around the house, if I wished.
"Remote detection ... remote detonation!"
"Don't piss off a California physicist."
California had more in the box than that. But this would do for openers.
He hadn't risen to the top by being a fool, any more than the Governor of California had.
"The Americans. They'll launch on you. They'll launch on us."
I shrugged.
"If it's some leakers, we can shoot them down. If things get crazy, we likely can - not guaranteed - but likely detonate them on boost or during re-entry. Unfortunately not during mid-course. Then again, EMP."
That was the problem. If we detonated one prior to launch, great, it blows up in situ, or in silo as it were. If we get it before it gets up above say thirty thousand to fifty thousand feet, rough on anything nearby for values of ten to twenty miles.
But at some highly classified altitude between 30 angels and 100 angels, the edge of space, setting off a nuke creates an electromagnetic pulse effect. EMP. Wrecks electronics, particularly consumer electronics. Also hard on the ecosystem with fallout, if any of us live long enough to complain.
That meant we had to detect and remotely detonate the launched American nukes on the chop-chop, or wait to take airburst damage on our own cities, if we used the magic detonator on them.
That's why we needed so many anti-ballistic missile systems. But America needed just one more nuke than we had ABMs.
Also why we had to defend China, not just wait for mid-course. Because China was halfway through reconstruction, more vulnerable even that pre-Firecracker China hd been.
If we'd been able to orbit a Cube with the right attachments, we might have been able to detonate them mid-flight, high enough to not affect the planet. Then again, the various fun EM fields you experience during an orbital launch might have made a Cube sad or wonky.
That was a greater secret I had no intentions of sharing. And California's final doomday weapon in the face of an enraged America.
"Where do we begin?" Mr. Zhou said.
No one broke in and tried to interfere with Happy Fun Ball. I still think that I could have uncoupled mid-climax, crawled over to the Object and pulled out its life support plug. Fortunately this was not tested.
As I was returning naked from my post-coital piss, the SDF corporal made a slight thumb gesture to pull me to the side. I nodded. This should be good.
"Sir, would you terribly mind watching the Thing for somewhere between two seconds and an hour?"
I nodded, and took up Happy Fun Ball watching.
WIth that the corporal matter of factly, non-verbally, and very directly made a pass at her boss. He took her up on it.
Two hours later, he took over Ball-sitting from me. She was blissfully asleep.
I have no idea what the Chinese thought of all the screaming.
"Sir," he murmured as I started to slink off to bed.
"Yo."
"We're not going to live through this, are we?"
"Nope."
"Didn't think so. Good night."
###
A discreet knock gave us warning that we should be somewhat dressed. George let himself in with breakfast for all of us the moment Rize finished dressing. Camera monitor on his phone, or a command post across the hall.
I didn't eat. George noted this with only the flicker of an eyebrow.
It wasn't that I wasn't hungry. It was that the stakes had gone up and poisoning us to get at the Object was now a non-zero possibility.
"I hope you don't object to a flight," George opened.
"Should be fun."
I'd been in a lot of choppers at this point. All California Republic owned and operated, until now, and that military or militarized birds with open doors and mandatory headsets to save what was left of your hearing.
Leather seats and a sealed cabin was new. A VIP transport had been sent for us.
"The cabin will be pressurized to sea level. We didn't know how your ... bag ... would feel about a flight."
Observant, weren't they.
But if they knew just a little more than they did, they'd have killed us all last night. Turn down the oxygen in the room, add just a little sleepy gas, set off the flashbangs and have the tac-team race the door blown off its hinges into the room. Shooting.
Pilot, co-pilot, a crew chief, George, and the four of us.
The crew chief's eyes narrowed at the submachine guns, carried openly at hand, by the SDF troopers. I think the grips of the guns reminded them that they couldn't possibly hold hands right now.
Of course, any sane country has the protocol that aboard aircraft, firearms will be secured with empty chambers and safeties set.
But we were of the diplomatic type of asshole, and were disregarding this nicety for imperative rather than imprudent reasons.
Rize and I didn't need to hold hands. I saw that she was now wearing on her belt a global satellite phone in a rugged soft case. If we survived the crash, and it did, and she had a minute to unfold the antenna and dial, she might get help from someone Chinese sooner or later. But not from California, at least as far as I knew.
However, there is a lot I didn't know, and my demonstrated ability to resist torture was one of my qualifications for this assignment.
The helo lifted smoothly from the hotel roof helipad and we flew due west, as best I could tell. It didn't really matter.
George, acting on instructions, made it a tour.
We banked over a crater along the side of a mighty river. It had been a city. Now it was glass.
Further along, there was a road, a modern highway. There was some traffic but a long stretch of the shoulders for miles and miles - or should I say kilometers and kilometers out of respect to our hosts - was littered with wrecked armored fighting vehicles. A 'highway of death,' so the saying goes.
Further along, shattered and burnt forest. The nuclear ignited forest fires had been three years ago. But no one was sparing any time for forestry, any more than California could.
Another crater. Provincial capital.
Clearly we were using the highway as a visual navigation aid. It was also convenient that we could fly over the craters rather than around them.
We landed in a mid-sized town with a chunk cut out of one side by another crater. An airport, a helipad, a refueling tanker truck trundling up after our rotors spun down. George stretched his legs. I did not.
I glanced at Rize. The SDF sergeant passed me his phone, on which he had been playing to all appearances a computer game.
The text spelled out, "I can fly this helicopter."
I cleared it and handed it back.
Good to know. But not immediately helpful.
Flying rotary wing aircraft is not a trivial matter. Flying a rotary wing aircraft you have not qualified on, much more so. We were all demonstrating unexpected talents.
Refueled and one of the pilots swapped out, we continued flying west. No meal arrangements had been made.
Finally I took a food bar out of a pocket, split it into four equal crumbs after George shuddered and declined, and that was our in flight snack.
You can take the soldier out of the infantry, but you can't take the infantry out of the soldier.
Now we gained altitude. And then some more altitude. By Chinese standards, these were high hills. By California standards, low mountains.
A pair of armored fighting vehicles I recognized flanked a helipad with blinking landing lights. ZSU-23-4. The four is number of cannon, the 23 is their caliber in millimeters, and ZSU is a tracked chassis. Radar directed anti aircraft tank.
We landed between. I noticed one was protected by an armored revetment so that the other could blow away a chopper on the pad without blue-on-bluing (red on red?) the other tank.
Thoughtful touches abound.
Polite young men and women in immaculate uniforms with thousand meter stares opened the helicopter doors and escorted us to the two jeeps. I drew the SDF corporal. Rize rode with the SDF sergeant. My hand went into the valise. Everyone pretended not to notice.
The jeep dropped us off at the edge of an enormous inward-sloped garden. Exotic plants and birds are equally lost on me. I hadn't had an ability to appreciate 'pretty' since long before the FIrecracker.
It was a boast of wealth, influence and power. Given the little labels on everything, it doubled as an arboretum and likely a zoo. Possibly even a genetics archive.
"We sweep for radiation five times a day," an ugly man in an ill-fitting jacket said. "A legacy you Americans have gifted us."
More than a simple "Fuck you!" was called for.
"... you fucking asshole," I found myself roaring a minute later, with absolutely no idea what I had just said. Rize had a grenade in her hand. The troops were calmly alert.
"You lost one city. Just one."
"San Francisco. Daly City. Brisbane. South San Francisco. Redwood City. Colma. Pacifica. San Mateo. Millbrae. Burlingame," I replied bitterly. "Plus the megafires in Marin and San Mateo Counties." I forced myself to subside. "And yes, I know, America nuke-fucked China too. But America fucked us first, and hard, and we'd done nothing _wrong_."
"Neither had we."
"It may seem petty to bring this up at this late date, but you were committing genocide against entire populations. Uighurs. Tibet."
"American propaganda," he dismissed.
"The truth is what it is, not what we wish it were, or what would be convenient or profitable or even safe. Fact: China didn't deserve to get nuked. Fact: Tank Man and T Square and anti-immolation firefighters in same. Fact: California was at peace. Fact: now we study war, and we're good at it. Fact: we want peace but we'll kill to get it."
He smiled. "I'm just the gardener. This way," he gestured.
No, he wasn't just the gardener. He had the hands of a man who worked with keyboards, not pruning tools.
We were served lunch. We kept our luggage with us. It was Major Rize's turn not to eat.
George looked worried. He didn't say anything, for all I knew he had orders not to say anything.
Before the War, my favorite slur on a product's poor quality was to say, "I ordered X but I got it from wish.com"
The food was American sandwiches, if wish.com sold sandwiches. A cook, probably a good cook, who had been asked to make home cooking for an unfamiliar culture.
After lunch we were escorted to a glass-walled conference room overlooking the gardens, in which there was a low table surrounded by a U-shaped conference room table.
The ugly man from earlier was there.
"Not the gardener," I said. I'd already fucked him off, so I had nothing to lose.
"No. Technician."
Now I placed him. His business suit had slipped open and there was some sort of closed holster with little items in it, not a firearm.
There were people good with their hands, as in killers like me, and then there were people good with their hands, as in with an arcane technical skill.
He was a bomb tech. Almost certainly a nuclear bomb tech.
The principal walked in.
I'd already met him.
Mr. Zhou, from the restaurant.
"Good afternoon, I hope the journey wasn't too exhausting. You've gone to great pains to attract my attention. You have it.
"Let's open up your valise and have a look at it."
The SDF troopers were immediately on high alert.
"Sergeant. I have that authority."
"You do. He doesn't," he said quietly with his subgun pointed openly at Mr. Zhou.
The guards were in sight and watching, but from outside the glass conference room. What they were not doing spoke volumes. They remained on guard. Whatever happened in the room - whatever! - was not their business.
I popped the valise, put it up on the low table, and took out The Object and its laptop.
I powered it up, typed my iterative password with no attempt to conceal it, opened a chat window.
"E18, CA1," I typed.
A wait. Characters formed on the screen.
"W." A pause. "W." Then finally, "GA. CA1."
"E18. Z8."
"Hi Z8."
"So, Mr. Zhou, what would you like to say to my boss. The governor of California."
He furrowed his eyebrows in brief thought. Motioned for the keyboard.
"Kill USA?"
I interjected out loud.
"Forty seconds per character. So the Governor will start the reply in about five minutes."
And the reply itself took about that long.
"If must."
The technician was pointing his cell phone, and more than his cell phone, at the Object.
"That thing is dead to the EM spectrum." And some swear words in Mandarin, that I vaguely recognized but could not repeat.
"I really must get one for staff meetings. Cuts out all the ..." and my ear heard "shi shi' but it was something else.
"How?" he typed, and we waited.
"E18 GA SK."
That ended the conversation and gave me my instructions.
"Sir, California is prepared to destroy America if she does not surrender Trident. We have committed alliances from Japan, India, France and the United Kingdom. On cue, we present the ultimatum. If America does not stand down, by surfacing the Trident fleet and allowing us to intern it, we attack."
"And this device ... is how you coordinate the timing?"
"That is one use."
"What else does it do?"
I changed tabs on the laptop. Typed a short query. No time delay, this functionality was on board.
"I kind of thought you'd have a fusion weapon lying around the house. And there is a strategic rocket regiment about thirty kilometers south-east of us. Flew past it, but not over it. Deep rock, probably a tunnel complex, but ninety fusion warheads pretty much matches a pre-War regiment."
"HOW DID YOU KNOW...."
"This device. We know where every nuclear weapon is on the planet. Not just communicator. Sensor. For every Trident America tries to hide, she loses something. We'll start small. Monuments, infrastructure. Cities only if she really pisses us off."
I tabbed again. Motioned Rize to back off that little bit.
"Move one of those regimental launchers somewhere you can afford to have it go off," I offered. "Then push this button here. And it will."
He gaped. And caught the implication that any time I was tired of living, I could hit TAB and set off the fusion weapon he kept lying around the house, if I wished.
"Remote detection ... remote detonation!"
"Don't piss off a California physicist."
California had more in the box than that. But this would do for openers.
He hadn't risen to the top by being a fool, any more than the Governor of California had.
"The Americans. They'll launch on you. They'll launch on us."
I shrugged.
"If it's some leakers, we can shoot them down. If things get crazy, we likely can - not guaranteed - but likely detonate them on boost or during re-entry. Unfortunately not during mid-course. Then again, EMP."
That was the problem. If we detonated one prior to launch, great, it blows up in situ, or in silo as it were. If we get it before it gets up above say thirty thousand to fifty thousand feet, rough on anything nearby for values of ten to twenty miles.
But at some highly classified altitude between 30 angels and 100 angels, the edge of space, setting off a nuke creates an electromagnetic pulse effect. EMP. Wrecks electronics, particularly consumer electronics. Also hard on the ecosystem with fallout, if any of us live long enough to complain.
That meant we had to detect and remotely detonate the launched American nukes on the chop-chop, or wait to take airburst damage on our own cities, if we used the magic detonator on them.
That's why we needed so many anti-ballistic missile systems. But America needed just one more nuke than we had ABMs.
Also why we had to defend China, not just wait for mid-course. Because China was halfway through reconstruction, more vulnerable even that pre-Firecracker China hd been.
If we'd been able to orbit a Cube with the right attachments, we might have been able to detonate them mid-flight, high enough to not affect the planet. Then again, the various fun EM fields you experience during an orbital launch might have made a Cube sad or wonky.
That was a greater secret I had no intentions of sharing. And California's final doomday weapon in the face of an enraged America.
"Where do we begin?" Mr. Zhou said.
