The angry gods of the sea had thrown a typhoon against the two fleets, halting their battle after a few opening salvos. In the interim, the Americans, the British, and the UN had all stepped up their efforts to negotiate peace.
Surely that would fail. The Communists had lost an aircraft carrier and countless men. The storm would multiply the damage done to their ships. They would want revenge.
The Indians too would fight. They understood this battle was about their survival. If the Chinese and their Islamic allies were not stopped, the Hindus would be crushed.
Chen Lo Fann stood on the bridge as the storm lashed against the lass and rocked the long boat mercilessly. He had always understood that, as necessary as they were, the Americans were not, at heart, their brothers. When their interests did not coincide, they would betray his country—as Nixon had shown a generation earlier, bringing the criminals into the UN.
Lao Tze had spoken of this.
The god of heaven and earth show no pity. Straw dogs are forever trampled.
Now, his government was making him the straw dog. He needed leverage.
The American Megafortress had been shot down; undoubtedly its crew was dead. Americans were charmingly emotional about remains; a body or two, handled with the proper military honors. Even an arm or leg. Such could be found and prepared if the authentic article were not available.
Two of his ships were in the area. As soon as the storm abated, they would begin the search. After a short interval, they would find what they were looking for, one way or another.
Meanwhile, he would sail for Taiwan, as ordered.
Or perhaps not.
Aboard Iowa
August 29, 1997, 1036 local (August 28, 1997, 1936 Dreamland)
“Not there, Jen,” Zen told her.
“I’m working on it.”
Jennifer jammed the function keys on her IBM laptop, trying to get the requested program data to reload, Zen tapped anxiously on the small ledge below his flight controls. He was usually very good at corralling his frustration—to survive as a test pilot you had to—but today he was starting to fray.
Of course he was. If it was Tecumseh instead of Breanna down there, she’d be twenty times worse.
This ought to work—the program simply needed to know what frequency to try, that was all it needed, and she had it right on the screen.
It had accepted the array—she knew it had because when she looked at her dump of the variables, they were all filled.
So what the hell was the screwup?
Shit damn fuck and shit again.
“Dreamland Command—hey, Ray,” she said, banging her mile button on. “What the hell could be locking me out?”
“The list is exhaustive,” replied the scientist.
“Yeah, but what the hell could be locking me out?”
“You’re not being locked out,” he said. “The connection gets made. The handoff just isn’t completed.”
She picked up one of the two small laptops from the floor of the plane, sitting it over the big IMBer in her lap. It was wired into the circuit and set to show the results of the coding inquiries. Data was definitely flowing back and forth; something was keeping it from feeding into the Flighthawk control system.
The security protocols of C³ maybe? The system had a whole series of protocols and traps to keep out invaders. Even though the UMB plug-ins were being recognized as “native,” it was possible that, somewhere along the way, they weren’t kicking over the right flag.
She’d put them in after C³ was up. Maybe if she started from scratch.
Right?
Maybe.
But, God, that would take forever.
Kill the Flighthawk. They wouldn’t use it anyway, right?
That would save shitloads of time.
“Jeff, I’m going to try something, but to do it, I have to knock the Flighthawks off-line. You won’t be able to launch it.”
“Do it.”
“I guess I should check with Major Alou in case, you knot, it interferes with her mission.”
“Just do it.”
She guessed he’d be angry, but she went ahead and talked to Alou anyway.
“We won’t need the Flighthawk,” Alou told her. “Go ahead.”
“We’re doing an adequate job from here,” said Rubeo when she told him what she had in mind. “We’re already over the Pacific.”
“I think this might work.”
“You still have to take the computer off-line, enter new code, then reboot it. Twenty minutes from now, you’ll still be in diagnostic mode.”
“I’ll skip the test.”
“How will you know you load right?”
“It’ll work or it won’t. If it doesn’t, what have I lost?”
She found an error in one of the vector lines before taking the system down. She fixed it, then began the lengthy-procedure.