Orbital Cloud Read online

  Ozzy stared at his monitors, transfixed.

  “This is big, Ronnie …”

  Three minutes later, SAFIR 3’s second stage disappeared beneath the eastern horizon, and the brief show came to an end.

  Reviewing the video, Ozzy found that the light had flashed five times in total, including a couple of flashes he hadn’t noticed.

  Now things were getting interesting. What was the most sensational way to report his findings? A weapon, he decided—that would be the most suitable for X-Man, who was well known as a kook. NASA and the professional astronomers would be sure to ignore his outlandish claims, and the stuffy astronomy community was starting to catch on as well. “There he goes again with his crazy theories,” they’d say. Fine—let them talk. All Ozzy wanted was for people to look up at the sky. Geeple would run the story. Their geeky audience would love it.

  “Nuclear weapons are old hat. Aliens and Area 51? Naw! But a killer satellite … ?”

  It couldn’t be some obscure idea that only specialists knew about. On the other hand, it didn’t have to be original either. Most of the failed start-ups from Ozzy’s time at the converted warehouse had been trying to come up with something new and original, but the key to Ronnie’s success had been founding something that actually was original but insisting on calling it a bank, one of the least original business models people could think of. Ozzy couldn’t just call it “a man-made object propelled by bursts of light,” obviously. That would go over like a lead balloon. He needed a name that would astound the gods themselves …

  “That’s it! Rod from God!”

  That B movie about a superweapon that rains giant tungsten warheads on Earth from orbit! Awful film, of course, rumored to have wasted half its budget on the lead actor. The critics hadn’t thought much of it, but any self-respecting geek would remember it.

  Okay, so this object was a Rod from God. What was its target? Since the rocket was Iranian, probably Israel or the United States, but a Rod from God aimed at the Earth wasn’t very original. Better to twist the narrative and say it was headed for … the ISS. Now that would be out there. Best of all, the average reader would have no idea how unlikely it was.

  “ ‘Rod from God attacks ISS!’ Perfect. I’ll need an illustration at some point too.”

  Ozzy quickly sketched a cylinder with a few thrusters sticking out, then took a photograph with his cell phone and uploaded it to MegaHands, a job-matching site with a thousand-dollar reward for the best image. Freelance illustrators with Hollywood aspirations would be all over it.

  He hadn’t been able to take a gigapixel photo, but stills captured from the video would be enough for Geeple. He’d put the original images and the radar observation data up on his blog, the Seychelles Eye. The professional-looking data would be enough in itself to make the story seem reliable. He accumulated more data every day than he knew what to do with—might as well make some use of it, even if only as decoration.

  Oh, and one more thing—a complaint to Meteor News. They’d almost made him miss his chance to photograph SAFIR 3 accelerating.

  “Fuckin’ shitty TLE data …”

  Thu, 10 Dec 2020, 19:58 -0800 (2020-12-11T03:58 GMT)

  80 Pike Street, Seattle

  Seated outside at a café on the edge of Pike Place Market, Chance glanced at their reflection in the window to check how the rendezvous would look to passersby. Her hair was blond, dyed black at the roots, and she wore oversized sunglasses and fashionably vibrant rouge. A black pantsuit and long coat concealed her toned body, while the battered editor’s bag she carried suggested a career in advertising without offering any specifics.

  The man sitting across from her was dressed in a turtleneck knit and designer jeans. Over these he wore a black coat much like Chance’s. His name was Ageha Shiraishi. He could have been an artist, with that long black hair of his. Chance wished he’d ditch those old-fashioned metal-framed glasses for a newer pair, but they weren’t bad enough to actually attract attention.

  Sitting across from each other with a tablet between them, the two could have been a media salesperson and a designer. No one in an IT industry hub like Seattle would look twice at a meeting like that.

  Pretending to brush back her hair, Chance checked the external security cameras. Two at the intersection, one at the entrance to Starbucks where the tourists milled about, and one over their heads. None had been added since she’d checked last week. All four cameras had been taken care of for the duration of the meeting.

  Chance tucked her hair behind one ear and picked up a leather portfolio. Brushing off the powder snow that had fallen on it, she extracted a sheet of paper and offered it across the table to Shiraishi.

  “Email from Koyanagi at Sound Technica about the D-Fi cable,” she said in Japanese. “You haven’t read it yet, I assume?”

  Shiraishi looked at the paper, his glasses steamed up from the caffe latte he was holding. “Ugh, Japanese people, right? Even in English, they can’t help themselves from starting with small talk about the weather … What, so it’s just a thank-you?”

  “It turned out to be a good deal for both sides.”

  Chance took the printout back and reread it herself before slipping it back into the portfolio. Sound Technica, a Japanese audio-equipment maker, had been the official distributor of D-Fi, a line of USB cables for audiophiles “invented” by a dummy company that Shiraishi had set up in Portland. Manufactured in Singapore, more than a million of the two-foot cables had been sold worldwide, despite costing $300 each. Koyanagi, their contact at Sound Technica, had responded to Shiraishi’s curt message announcing that the line would be discontinued with a polite letter of thanks.

  Shiraishi put his mug down and wiped the condensation from his glasses. “How much did we make?”

  “Around 2.2 million net, I think. They were practically free to manufacture, after all.”

  “Not bad at all. That’s more than we made selling poison gas to the Iranians. Make sure you report the good news to El Leaderino in the North.”

  “Don’t call him that.”

  “Who cares what I call him? No one here understands Japanese anyway.”

  “I said stop it.” Chance lowered her sunglasses to glower at Shiraishi. “And start thinking of how you’re going to clean up the mess you made this week. There’s talk of canceling the whole project. “

  “What are you talking about?”

  Chance extracted a second printout from her portfolio: an article from the online tabloid Geeple. Under the headline “ROD from GOD attacks ISS!” was a series of photographs apparently taken through an astronomical telescope. “Your work, I presume,” began Chance, but Shiraishi snatched the printout from her hand before she could continue.

  “Wow,” he said. “Wow. I never thought anyone would get a photograph of that. Who’s the shutterbug? Must have a pretty good telescope.”

  Shiraishi reached for the tablet on the table and followed the links from Geeple to its original source: the Seychelles Eye.

  “X-Man, huh? Who’s that supposed to be? Oh, I see. A kook.”

  “This isn’t something to celebrate.”

  “Are you kidding? Of course it is. Now you can tell those idiot generals who never believed in my project that it’s already in motion.”

  “But targeting a rocket belonging to an ally—”

  “Shut up,” Shiraishi said, cutting her off with an open palm. “We can use this.” He made an odd gesture, as if grasping something in midair.

  In her mind’s eye, Chance visualized a blank sheet of paper. Shiraishi was about to get to work. She would have to memorize his planning word for word. There could be no notes, handwritten or electronic.

  “Can you get moving right away?” Shiraishi asked.

  “Yes,” Chance replied.

  “The Supreme Leader should have a speech scheduled for this weekend. Pr
obably just the usual whining. I want you to switch the script.”

  “Document number?”

  “It’s 034524,” Shiraishi said. “The one I wrote. Remember it?”

  Chance nodded. The script bearing the six-digit number he’d just given was a criticism of the great powers for their irresponsible development of space, most notable for its harsh criticism of the US’s support for commercial space development.

  “Next,” Shiraishi continued. “The Cyber Front.”

  Chance wrote the name of North Korea’s cyberwar squadron on her internal notepad. They hadn’t achieved much in the way of terrorism so far beyond bringing a few websites down with denial-of-service attacks, but over the past few years Shiraishi had trained them into a formidable team capable of implementing sophisticated tactics.

  “Get them to corrupt Google’s translation engine.”

  “Translation engine? What are you planning?”

  “Is your brain blond too?” Shiraishi snapped, rapping on one temple. “We’re going to bring this crazy story of X-Man’s to the attention of the intelligentsia. People can never resist if they think they know something someone else doesn’t. Anyway, it doesn’t matter whether you understand or not—just do as I say.”

  Chance nodded. Shiraishi’s arrogance reached intolerable levels when he was concentrating.

  “Next—ready?—pull out those plans for a low-orbit ASAT weapon from the North’s archives. There should be some negatives they got from the CIA.” Shiraishi then explained how the plans were to be used.

  “All right,” Chance said. “But is this Geeple story really that important?”

  “No,” Shiraishi said. “It’s bullshit. I doubt X-Man believes it himself. No one with a professional interest in space believes in this ‘Rod from God’ orbital weapon business.”

  “So NASA will clue in that it’s a lie right away, then?”

  “Exactly.” With a crooked smile, Shiraishi used his middle finger to push his glasses back into place. “That’s what’s so great about it. The experts will tell the truth, and everyone who ignores them is going to get taught a lesson.”

  The smarter you were, the easier it was to fall into that trap, Shiraishi explained. Then he pointed at the advertisement to the right of the article on the tablet.

  “Also, web advertising. Get a few accounts ready. The Cyber Front should have plenty to spare. Got it?” Shiraishi blew his hair back from his forehead and leaned back in his chair.

  “That’s everything?” Chance asked.

  Shiraishi nodded.

  Chance went over Shiraishi’s orders in her head. Replace the script for the speech. Corrupt the translation engine. Find the plans for the real low-orbit ASAT weapon. Prepare an advertising account. The goal was to muddy Shiraishi’s intentions and conceal what had actually happened to SAFIR 3. The world’s intelligence agencies, not least the CIA, would be beside themselves trying to figure out where the ASAT information that only North Korea was supposed to have had come from.

  “All right, my turn,” Chance said. “First, the replacement SIMs.” She pulled her editor’s bag toward her and felt inside the lining at the edge. There was the sound of Velcro, and then she produced two plastic cards from the secret compartment inside. The markings around the square cutout in the middle of the cards identified them as international roaming SIM cards from China Mobility.

  “Hey, what did you do to that bag? That’s a genuine Balenciaga. Cost me twelve hundred dollars.”

  Lowering her sunglasses again, Chance fixed Shiraishi with her coldest stare.

  “I found a transmitter while I was making this pocket,” she said. “I suppose Hedi Slimane put it there?”

  Shiraishi laughed. “Should have known better than to mess with a pro,” he said, taking the cards from her.

  “Don’t think you can work around me,” Chance said. “I don’t know how the last Chance ran things, but until this project is over you’re under my supervision.”

  “All right, all right,” Shiraishi said. He was already removing the SIMs from his cell phone and tablet to replace them with the ones he’d just received from Chance. The two of them changed the IC chips and SIMs they used for their mobile contracts weekly. All communications in America were hoovered up by the CIA or the NSA. Even if you used a roaming SIM, your messages and calls were still eavesdropped on via AT&T. Only constantly changing your number could reduce the risks.

  Each week, their old SIMs were sold on to cell phone stores in Chinatown. When some Chinese tourist in Seattle bought one and used it to phone home, this helped cover Chance’s and Shiraishi’s tracks. And, when necessary, they could activate the virus they were careful to install before selling each card and use that tourist’s phone as they pleased. This had been Shiraishi’s idea.

  Shiraishi looked up from entering the SIM activation code into his phone. “By the way, what hotel should I go to tomorrow?”

  Chance slept with Shiraishi exactly once a week, to keep sexual frustration from endangering the mission. It would be far too dangerous to have him find a prostitute in the US.

  “I’ll let you know later,” Chance said.

  “You’re so standoffish,” Shiraishi said. “The last Chance was much nicer to me.”

  “That’s why she was recalled.”

  “Oh, so she really was in love?” Shiraishi adopted a look of regret. “I should have been nicer to her.”

  Up until two months ago, Shiraishi’s handler had been a young Korean American woman. But that Chance—the fourth one—had been so smitten by his boldness and genius that she had stopped sending accurate information to the North. The current Chance had been contracted to replace her.

  “That reminds me,” Chance said. “I got distracted, but let me emphasize this. SAFIR 3 can’t be helped, but make sure you do everything according to plan from now on. Do not touch that billionaire’s rocket.”

  “Aw, and I was looking forward to messing around with it,” Shiraishi said. “Fine. Whatever. I’ll satisfy myself with SAFIR 3.”

  “So SAFIR 3 was intentional.”

  “Pure coincidence. I swear it. Want me to make an affidavit right here? Got a Bible? If we need a witness, that barista—”

  “I’ll leave this out of my report,” Chance said curtly, rising to her feet. She’d only been working with Shiraishi for two months, but she could already see the appeal he had for certain people. His mind, his background … He had a mysterious magnetism that some just couldn’t resist. It wasn’t surprising to learn that a young woman without much life experience had gotten in over her head with him.

  Knowing that Shiraishi would be eating dinner at the Pike Street Market, Chance turned her back to him and began climbing the hill in the opposite direction. Once she’d confirmed that Shiraishi had left the table, she’d have to return the security cameras around it to normal operation.

  Sound Technica would send back the unsold D-Fi stock. She would have to think of a way to dispose of it before it arrived next week. Shiraishi would have to move out of his warehouse by the docks and into a safe house in the business district. There was a lot to get done. The sloppy tradecraft of the previous Chances would not have sufficed.

  In a country where every communication, every street corner was under surveillance, there was no sure way to get away with illegal activity for long. The only reason Shiraishi had been safe these five years was because he hadn’t actually done anything yet.

  Things were about to change.

  The Cloud was coming online.

  Thu, 10 Dec 2020, 23:40 -0500 (2020-12-11T04:40 GMT)

  Project Wyvern

  Judy Smark here. Luckiest journalist in the world—but I’m getting ahead of myself.

  As many of you already know, the day after tomorrow I’ll be accompanying that respected visionary, supremely influential entrepreneur, liberator of spac
e itself—am I overdoing it? Yes, I’ll be accompanying my father, Ronnie Smark, as he sails his twenty billion–dollar luxury yacht, the Wyvern, into space. That’s right, space.

  Outer. Space.

  We’ll be blasting off from Launchpad 36 at Cape Canaveral, just like the Space Shuttle, on top of the reusable and eco-friendly rocket Loki 9. Once the Wyvern reaches orbit, it’ll go around the Earth for an entire day on autopilot. Then we’ll spend five days in a zero gravity, one-room orbital hotel. I hear it’s a suite room, at least.

  Then comes the part I’m looking forward to most of all: docking with the International Space Station, where we’ll be staying with the astronauts through Christmas before returning to Earth. Don’t miss the livestream of the docking! It’ll be history in the making, that much I can promise.

  The hardest part will be spending all that time alone in a single room with that irascible old mule Ronnie. I’ll just have to try to remember the time when we used to get along … You know, back before I started elementary school. I wonder if he’ll be okay. Did you notice him peeking at that phone he was hiding behind the mic stand at the press conference? I can hear him yelling at someone on the phone right now! Is this a man ready to spend two weeks in orbit?

  P.S. I’ve decided to update my blog with my thoughts in real time. Don’t worry, though, I’ll write it all up professionally for the book afterwards. (See, K.? I wouldn’t leave my favorite agent out in the cold.)

  Judy Smark

  Florida

  2 A Proclamation

  Fri, 11 Dec 2020, 03:23 -0800 (2020-12-11T11:23 GMT)

  Pier 37 Warehouse, Seattle

  Beneath the Alaskan Way Viaduct cutting north-south along Seattle’s coastline, Chance parked her Porsche Cayenne, checked to make sure that no one was around, and then headed for the warehouse at Pier 37 where Shiraishi was lying low. The very location revealed how incompetent the previous Chances had been. An East Asian person walking around in such a sparsely populated warehouse district was bound to stand out. To make matters worse, just past the warehouse was an office of the United States Coast Guard. A pier crawling with guardsmen 24/7 was simply the worst spot imaginable for a hideout.