Shadow Tyrants

FORTY-TWO

“How are you feeling?” Juan asked Linda as they walked to the Oregon’s boardroom for a meeting of the ship’s executive officers.

“My headache is gone,” she answered. “Ten hours’ sleep helped.”

Juan had to agree. According to Julia, they had both suffered mild heatstroke, but rest and fluids were all they needed to recover.

“I just wish we could have retrieved the bag I dropped,” Juan said. Eric had tried, but by that time the lava had buried it along with the remainder of the Colossus 3.

“It wasn’t a total loss. At least we got the name of the ship, and I know Eric has been reading through that scientist’s notebook since we separated the pages and dried them out.”

“Let’s see what it can tell us about this whole mess,” Juan said as he went through the boardroom’s open door.

Waiting for them were Max, Eric, and Julia, as well as Eddie and Murph, who had arrived from Mumbai that morning. The small country of Djibouti on the Horn of Africa had the closest city to the Red Sea volcano with an international airport where Tiny could land the Corporation’s Gulfstream. The Oregon was now tied up at the port’s container terminal.

Maurice was serving dishes of local Djibouti cuisine prepared by the chef. The plates practically overflowed with Berber lamb, banana fritters, lentils, and samosas.

Juan took a seat at the head of the table and said, “Eric, what have you been able to find out about the Colossus Project?” Maurice set a plate in front of Juan and closed the door as he glided out. Eric presented his findings with the aid of pictures from the notebook pages displayed on the room’s giant monitor.

“Even though the notebook is made from archival paper, some of the ink ran from exposure to the water,” Eric said, pointing to the letters that were smeared across the pages. “Many details about the biocomputer schematics are lost, but I was able to figure out how it worked.”

He switched to a view of the video that they had recorded from Little Geek and paused the image when it showed the damaged vat inside the hold. Murph frowned at the screen, still unhappy that his ROV had been destroyed in the explosion.

“Those vats contain a matrix of proteins, amino acids, and DNA molecules in specially designed biological cells,” Eric said, the excitement in his voice noticeable. “They literally grew this computer.”

“What’s the advantage over a silicon-based computer?” Julia asked.

“Silicon computers work in sequence, so you can only perform one calculation at a time. You’re limited by the speed of the electrons flowing through the system. But with a biocomputer, the DNA can process information in parallel, which means the speed of its calculations is a thousand times faster than any other computer’s processor.”

“If they’ve solved how to do this at scale,” Murph said, “they’re way ahead of anybody else. I couldn’t find any biocomputers bigger than a loaf of bread in the scientific literature.”

Linda said, “Why put this thing on a ship?”

“According the notebook, Colossus is fed by plankton,” Eric said. “That’s another advantage. Although the computer servers that help with the processing require normal power delivery, the vats run like any other biological organism. They feed and then produce waste. Not only that, the artificial intelligence could be destroyed by a self-destruct mechanism if it got out of control. That’s what sunk the ship Colossus 3. The sea really is the ideal environment.”

“If the ship was called the Colossus 3,” Eddie said, “does that mean it’s the third attempt to do this? Did they sink the ship because the AI already went haywire?”

Eric shook his head. “The scientist theorized that four ships would need to be linked together by microwave transceivers to achieve the processing power required for the AI to become self-improving, meaning it could write its own programming. At the time the ship sank, there were only two other Colossus ships, with a fourth nearing completion.”

Max spoke up. “While we were preparing for the dive at the site of the underwater volcano, I noticed three ships with those helical masts steaming north together. It was only after Nomad returned and we knew what Colossus 3 looked like that I realized that those were the other Colossus ships. The Colossus 4 must have been completed since the Colossus 3 sank.”

“Which means they must be building a Colossus 5 to complete their plans for four total ships,” Juan said. “I talked with Langston Overholt about our discovery, and he connected me with NUMA. They checked their database of shipyards around the world and found that the Colossus ships were all built at the Moretti Navi facility in Naples.”

“Is that our next stop?” Eddie asked.

“No, there was an ‘accident’ at the shipyard last week, the night before the attack on Diego Garcia. The ship was damaged and moved to another facility for final outfitting. But NUMA reported that they found it being finished under a different name at a shipyard in Cyprus. And it’s almost complete, so we don’t have much time to act. Lang has given us the green light to disable the ship, but before we talk about the operation, I want to hear about Mumbai.”

Eddie recounted the incident at the party. The media was labeling it a terrorist event targeting high-level Indian government officials. After checking with the CIA, Murph identified the attacker at the gala as Natalie Taylor, a former British Army Intelligence operative who’d been dishonorably discharged and now worked for Xavier Carlton. When Eddie got to the part about planting the barnacle on Mallik’s computer, Juan asked Murph if he’d been able to get any actionable intel.

“You had to ask,” Murph said. “The data download was going well until I hacked an internal firewall. It must have had a built-in silent alarm because the download shut down right after that.”

“What were you able to get?”

“The files confirm that Mallik has developed a weapons system for the Indian military that causes effects similar to an electromagnetic pulse, but I wasn’t able to find out how it operates.”

“Then they used Vajra to take out the electronics at Diego Garcia?” Juan asked.

“That seems likely.”

“Have they mounted the weapon on a ship or aircraft?”

“Neither,” Murph said. “It’s satellite-based.”

They all thought about the ramifications in silence.

“They can target anywhere on earth,” Max said.

“For the limited time the satellite is overhead,” Murph said.

“Which makes us vulnerable no matter where we are.” Juan looked at Max. “How are those modifications coming?”

“Still working on it. It’s difficult because the Oregon is so dependent on her computers. We’re hardened against most forms of EMP attack, but so was Diego Garcia.”

“Why would India attack the U.S.?” Linda wondered.

“I don’t think they did,” Murph said. “In fact, I’m not sure the Indian military even knows that the weapon was installed on the Vajra satellites. As far as everyone knows, the satellite system is merely a communications platform for the Indian armed forces.”

“So Romir Mallik is behind the attack?” Juan asked. “And Natalie Taylor, who was involved with the hijacking of Xavier Carlton’s private plane, tried to kill him.”

“There was another interesting tidbit from the notebook,” Eric added. “It said that someone named XC visited the ship for an inspection a few months before it sank.”

“I wonder if Carlton is one of the Nine Unknown Men. We did find that symbol on the plaque on Colossus 3’s bridge, which implies that the Nine Unknown Men are involved with the project or even bankrolling it.” Juan and Eric caught up the others on the research they did on Ashoka and the legend about the men to whom he’d entrusted his most important knowledge.

“If I had to guess,” Murph said, “I’d bet Mallik is one of them as well.”

“And I saw a news report today that two other major CEOs haven’t been seen for days,” Max said. “Jason Wakefield and Daniel Saidon are supposedly missing. Wakefield was targeted in an attempted kidnapping last week in Sydney, and Daniel Saidon just happens to own the Moretti Navi shipyard. Those can’t be coincidences.”

Juan pushed his plate away and sat back as he tried to get his head around the strange events. “So we have at least two of the Nine Unknown Men fighting each other for some reason. There’s a satellite-based weapons system that can temporarily disable all electronics within a fifty-mile radius anywhere on earth. And, a highly advanced artificial intelligence is about to be released upon the world, which Lyla Dhawan thinks will be able to control any computer hooked up to the internet.”

“Is that all?” Murph joked.

“Which do we take on first?” Eddie asked.

“Info about the Nine Unknown Men doesn’t help us unless we know who the rest of them are,” Juan said.

“Reports say that Mallik is getting ready to launch a twentieth satellite in his communications constellation in a few days,” Eric said.

“So what?” Murph said. “Nineteen satellites, twenty satellites — one more isn’t going to make much difference in the scope of its capabilities.”

“Lang told me our highest priority is Colossus,” Juan said. “After the near debacle caused by the quantum computer, the U.S. government doesn’t want an even more sophisticated one out there that can not only crack our codes but rewrite them.”

“Do we sink the Colossus ships?” Max asked.

“If it comes to that,” Juan said, “we might have to. Max, I want you to take the Oregon and set off in pursuit of the three Colossus ships heading north on the Red Sea.”

“You’re not coming with us?”

Juan shook his head. “There might be a more elegant way to disable Colossus. Eric said they need all four to get the AI fully functional. So all we need to do is take out just one of the ships.”

“The one in Cyprus,” Max said with a nod.

“That’s what I’m thinking.” Juan turned to Julia. “Remember the blue-green algae bloom that was poisoning the seas around Qatar a few months ago?”

“The cyanobacteria?” she said. “Sure. Those countries were grateful that we stopped it from wiping out all the wildlife in the Persian Gulf.”

“Do you still have samples of it?”

“A few vials… Why?” Then she looked at the still image of the vat inside Colossus 3 that was up on the monitor. “Wait, you mean…”

Juan nodded. “If we can infect those vats with the bacteria, will it poison the computer?”

She thought for a moment, then said, “Blue-green algae usually require sunlight to reproduce, but since the biocomputer has to be bathed in a nutrient-rich environment, the cyanobacteria should have everything it needs to reproduce and release its toxin.”

“How long will it take to work?”

“Maybe a few hours to begin killing the cells. Most of it will be infected within a day. They’d have to flush the whole system and start over from scratch.”

“Perfect. Ready a sample for us that we can insert into the Colossus system. That will buy us some time to figure out how to wipe it out permanently. Eddie, get your team ready to go again. And tell Tiny I want to be wheels up for Cyprus within three hours.”

“Aye, Chairman.” Julia and Eddie left, but before the rest of them could follow, Eric stopped them.

“Chairman, there’s one other thing we should take into account before we go ahead with sinking the Colossus ships.”

“What’s that?”

“You know the passengers from Carlton’s plane that Lyla said were taken off Jhootha Island by Taylor?”

Juan nodded.

“According to the scientist’s notebook, they’re currently being forced to work aboard the Colossus 1.”