She swung her legs off my lap, placed a hand on my thigh, and pushed herself up. Michio stood up next to her.
“What are you waiting for?” she asked. “An invitation from the bloody queen?”
No. I was waiting for the blood to stop rushing to a particular part of my body.
Down the street from the hotel was a small café with three tables set out on the sidewalk. Like most businesses in the post-storm world, the owner operated the café under the barter system. When we ordered our tea, Shannon gave him a small jar of fish paste, a product of her island chain, and a kiss on the cheek. I’ll bet he would have given us the tea just for the kiss. I would have.
I sat down and listened as Shannon launched into one of her many tall tales. It was a story I hadn’t heard before. She was a great storyteller and I could listen to her for hours.
“And so there I was, out in the middle of the channel trying to teach these six Buddhist monks to surf. The boat had dropped us off and wouldn’t be back for an hour. I had to admit that for pudgy fellas, they had pretty good balance. Anyway, after about ten minutes, I grabbed a beautiful curl and thought I’d show them a few tricks. The curl broke unexpectedly and I went down like a sack of potatoes. When I came up for air, I realized that my bikini, top and bottom, were gone… just gone.”
Michio and I laughed.
He asked, “So what did you do?”
“Well, I figured these gentlemen paid for a full hour lesson and I wasn’t about to welch on the deal. So I climbed onto my board and paddled right back to the where I left the pack of them floating. I sat up, legs straddled on either side of the board, and said, ‘Alright gentlemen. Who wants to be the first to shoot the curl?’ I’m not sure what they thought I was talking about, but all six hands shot up, and a few were raising other parts of their anatomy, if you know what I mean.”
Tea spurted out of my nose. I grabbed the edge of the tablecloth to dry my face. When I looked up, Jin was standing there. I sprang out of my seat, nearly dropping my cup.
“Well I’ll be goddammed… look who it is.” We shook hands and I asked, “What are you doing here? Did something break in the radio tower again?”
“It is good to see you too, Aron.” He nodded politely towards Shannon and Michio before saying, “No. There is nothing wrong with the tower as far as I know. I came to speak with you.”
I gave him a puzzled look, but Jin’s round baby face remained impassive. The only indication that something was amiss was his eyes. Jin was the third member of the IICN musketeers. Rick, Jin, and I worked our asses off building the IICN. I knew him almost as well as I had known Rick. So when I saw his eyes, I knew something was wrong.
“It is a private matter,” he said. “Can we go for a walk?”
Looking at my watch, I said, “I don’t have a lot of time. Can we meet later for dinner?”
He shook his head. “It is important that I speak with you now.”
I looked over at Shannon and Michio. “I’ll see you guys back in the Council. Send me a message if something important pops up.” Not that I expected anything important to happen in that worthless meeting.
I looked at Jin and said, “Okay, let’s go.” Jin’s expression worried me. The last time I saw him like this was when his son had almost fallen from the top of a hundred-foot communications tower.
We walked in silence on the cobblestone street in front of a string of small, pastel-colored hotels facing the ocean. Hell, most of the buildings on Male faced the ocean. The island was only a mile long and a half mile wide. It was hard not to face the ocean.
We crossed the street and headed down toward the beach along the promenade. When we reached the base of the communication tower he stopped.
Sheathed in overlapping curved stainless steel panels, it looked more like a modern art sculpture than a communications tower. A hundred years ago it had housed equipment used to detect signals from tsunami buoys. Later, it became a memorial for the thousands killed during one of the largest tsunamis in recorded history. Now it was the main equipment hub and communications tower for the IICN.
Jin didn’t say anything, so I did, “What’s up, Jin? You look worried.”
He looked around, and then finally said, “I have learned something disturbing.”
“Okay.” Now he had me looking from side to side and I didn’t know why. “It’s just you and me out here, what is it?”
“You know that I was once in the Chinese Army?”
I nodded.
“Did I tell you that I was in the Cyber Warfare Division?”
I nodded again. He had brought it up one night about six years ago. Rick, Jin, and I were celebrating the first operational test of the IICN with one too many bottles of moonshine. We all let a few skeletons out of the closet that night. The Chinese Army secret was his, although it wasn’t a big deal. The United States and China hadn’t been at war for over twenty years and either way, I didn’t care. And it wasn’t likely the war would start up again given that the United States and China didn’t exist anymore.
“Yes.” He nodded as if he had remembered that night too. “But what you don’t know is that my specialty was hacking into satellites.”
I wasn’t surprised. During the war, both sides hacked into each other’s communications systems. “So? There’s nothing left up there to hack. What’s this all about?”
He looked up and said, “You are wrong, Aron.”
I stared at him, not sure what he meant.
He continued, “Three years ago, I built a device to transmit signals to satellites over a secret command-and-control frequency.”
“You did what? Wait a minute. There is no way that any satellites survived a solar storm as big as the one that hit twelve years ago. And even if one did, you’d need a laser uplink station to communicate with it. Are you telling me that you built a laser uplink?”
“No. I did not build an LUS. I did not need to. You see, most satellites have back doors, communication paths that use radio frequencies.”
“Jin, I worked in the satellite communications software business for twenty-three years and I never heard of any back door RF channels.” From what I remembered, the last RF satellites were decommissioned around 2030.
He looked down at his feet. “These were not… official communication capabilities. My government had some of our manufacturers surreptitiously install this capability in the satellite components. It enabled our military to keep track of certain information.”
“So wait… you’re serious. You actually communicated with a satellite.”
He nodded.
I walked a few feet away and stepped onto one of the massive concrete rocks that served as a breakwater for the harbor. Closing my eyes, I let the ocean breeze fill my lungs. I needed to let this sink in.
Jin stepped onto a rock next to me. I opened my eyes and looked at him. “What was the point of building the transmitter?”
He shook his head. “After we completed the IICN, I needed something to keep my mind occupied, so I built the transmitter. Each night I would point it at a different part of the sky and try to connect to a satellite. I never really expected to find one, but it helped me pass the time. Then, a few weeks ago, I received a signal from a satellite.”
“So what kind of satellite? A communications satellite? A weather satellite?”
“No. It is a military reconnaissance satellite, an Indian reconnaissance satellite. It is in orbit over Pakistan. It sustained some damage from the storm, but I was able to hack in and assume control.”
“So you’re in control of a reconnaissance satellite? This is big, Jin. Really big. The MDF could use it to—”
“No! Nobody must know about this.”