Springboard

18

Jay was studying the holographic projection on the bridge of the Enterprise with Bretton when the alert light and Klaxon began flashing and blaring.

“All hands, Red Alert!” came a stentorian voice.

Jay nodded at his VR companion.

“I’d better take this.”

George just nodded, and Jay stepped back into an alcove to take the call, muting the scene with a privacy screen. He could see out, but Bretton couldn’t see in. Only Saji and Thorn could intrude on one of his scenarios with this level of urgency, so he knew it had to be important.

“Jay?”

It was Saji. She sounded worried. All of his calm curiosity disappeared when he heard the tone in her voice.

“Yeah, babe?”

“It’s Mark.”

A bolt of fear stabbed through the VR jock as the words registered.

Mark.

Was he dead? Had someone kidnapped him? Jay had thought his imagination fairly good, but parenthood thus far had shown him that he had entirely new realms of worry to discover.

“What is it?”

“I don’t know!” Her voice rose on the last word.

He was unnerved. In all the time he’d been with her, Saji had never sounded like this. She maintained her calm, had held her center under the most severe stress. She hadn’t even sounded this bad when he came out of the coma.

“We were playing in the living room, and suddenly he started coughing and acting funny. I got worried and called the on-duty nurse, and she said we ought to bring him in.”

She paused.

“And then he seemed fine, but he started jerking around like he was having a seizure, and we’re stuck in traffic, and he’s not getting better!”

Oh, God!

“Where are you now?”

“I’m on — on Sherman, heading towards the Children’s Hospital. Traffic is jammed!”

Jay stared through the privacy screen at the quiet bridge of the Enterprise, stars flickering on the main viewscreen, the hologram of the Dyson sphere floating in the center of the space. His emotional distance couldn’t be farther from the calm scene — it seemed like hours had passed since he’d taken the call. He looked over at the chronometer readout and noticed it had only been a minute. Less.

For a moment he just sat there. Saji’s terror and his concern for his son froze him. But only for a moment. He hadn’t gotten where he was without being able to work under pressure.

Come on, Gridley, let’s get something rolling here!

First Saji: “It’ll be okay, babe,” he said, not having any clue that it would be. But he had to say something. She had to keep it together, and it was the best he could do.

“I’ll fix the traffic — and I’ll meet you at the hospital as soon as I can. Hold on, babe. How’s he doing now?”

Calm, Gridley, radiate calm.

“He seems a little better.” She paused. “I love you, Jay.”

“I love you, too. Drive. It’ll be okay.”

He disconnected and broke the privacy screen.

Bretton looked up. “Something wrong?”

“Family emergency. Gotta go — I’ll check back with you when I can.”

Bretton nodded. “Good luck.”

Jay killed the VR he’d been using to link with Bretton, and shifted his work space from the military network he’d been on to regular VR. Even though they had secure filters all over his link, and the transfer packets were all a different protocol than his regular VR, he was still very careful not to mix his VR access.

And with what he was going to do, he certainly didn’t want the military to be able to access him now. Or anybody else.

He tabbed to a different scenario — he was in a large office with filing cabinets all around. He ran to a large green one and jerked open the top drawer. The drawer squeaked as it had since he programmed it years ago as an exercise in office interface, the VR equivalent of an old-school desktop.

From a hanging file folder labeled Recent he pulled a thin red folder, opened it, and hurriedly leafed through the pages inside.

He tapped a sequence on the floor with his foot, and a voice-input box appeared by his head.

“Find Saji,” he said.

“Acknowledged.”

The program he’d called was a subset of a larger FBI project that had been scrapped several years before. Officially, at least. Through a combination of GPS satellite and ground-based radio repeater triangulation, the software could identify the location of a particular cellular telecom signal, if it was on file.

Ostensibly, the project had been killed due to a lack of interest, but the real reason had been to avoid big-brother backlash — a concern that, unfortunately, was not completely unwarranted. Jay had used the program a few times for Net Force operations, and once, when checking the satellite logs, he’d seen that several other agencies within the alphabet soup of Washington’s security apparatus had Lazarused the software more than a few times.

A tiny map appeared, hanging in space where the vox input had been.

There she was—

While the program had been working, Jay found the codes he’d been looking for.

The Greenies were about to ride again.

A few weeks ago, he’d helped the District Public Works Department track down some hackers who called themselves the Greenies. They had been messing with local traffic signals using stolen codes they’d run through VR that could read traffic light IDs and change them at the push of a button.

At the moment, the only buttons they were pushing were on phones at the county jail. Jay prayed that those codes still worked.

He tied the search program to software he’d used once for following money across VR, changing the input parameters to track Saji instead. He tagged a locator for the nearest traffic signal on her route to the hospital, just… there, and set the light to go green.

Now, wherever she was, all the lights were going to turn and stay green until she passed them.

For a second, Jay thought about what he’d done. He’d just hacked public transportation for personal reasons — no excuse under the law, and if he was found out, there would be trouble.

True, he’d bounced the program across several hundred VR nodes in the net, spanning the globe several times, with spoofed router codes that would make it virtually impossible to trace. It was unlikely anyone else could catch him, but the risk didn’t matter. It was his son’s life, and there was nothing — absolutely nothing he wouldn’t do for him. If somebody was going to be late on their commute because of what he’d done, that was just too bad.

He set the program to dissolve after Saji reached the hospital, and slipped out of VR. He had to get to his car—

He nearly ran over Thorn as he bolted through the door.

“Sorry!”

“Where’s the fire, Jay?” Thorn smiled.

“Mark’s on the way to the hospital with Saji — he’s having seizures!”

Thorn’s smile vanished. Immediately he said, “We’ve got a helicopter on the pad. Go there — I’ll clear it.”

“Thanks, Boss.”

Jay ran.

Now and again, General Wu had occasion to travel, and this time, it was to attend the retirement dinner of his old comrade, General Pei, a salt-of-the-earth fellow who had risen through the ranks from foot soldier to commander. Pei had been a peasant who had joined the army during the Cultural Revolution and progressed quickly in rank. This was due less to his military genius than it was by virtue of his uncanny ability to not offend anyone. Sturdy and steady Pei, he was known as. After rising to the top ranks, he had been put in charge of supplies at a base near Tibet, where he had served honorably for ten years before time to retire.

Now Pei was leaving, probably to go back to his family farm in the sticks, and his friends and comrades were going to raise glasses and toast his departure, knowing their own time would be coming soon enough.

The event was being held at a new military building on West Chang’an, south of Nunhai Lake and near the Beijing Concert Hall.

Since Wu had arrived more than two hours before the dinner was to start, he took the opportunity to stretch his legs a bit.

The area was thick with museums, including Monuments to the People’s Heroes, Mao’s Mausoleum, and the Museum of the Chinese Revolution, which were conveniently located across from the Gate of Heavenly Peace, which led to Tian’anmen Square and the Forbidden City.

There was also more than a little smog in the air, undoubtedly negating any health benefits the walk might confer. Wu smiled at this thought. He had been living on borrowed time since the riot at Manchu Station twenty-four years ago. A little smog wasn’t going to worry him.

The day was warm, with no rain in the forecast, so the air would stay murky for a time. There were more than a few people on the sidewalks, and foreign tourists strung about with cameras in loud shorts and shirts gaping at the buildings and monuments. It was always busy at the main gate to the Forbidden City.

Would that he had lived two hundred years ago, to have been a general in an age when it really mattered.

Even fifty years ago, it would have been a nicer walk. Now, there were McDonalds’ and Burger Kings and Kentucky Fried Chicken fast-food places, French bakeries, and signs advertising Coca Cola and The Gap and Ford automobiles. Holiday Inns and Sheraton Hotels. The Olympics in 2008 had left more such dross behind. Like pox sores on a beautiful woman, these things made Wu feel ill to behold, here in the heart of his homeland.

He liked to believe that he was a realist. He knew he could not single-handedly roll back the clock and erase all Western influence here. But perhaps he could undo some of it, and certainly he could make a difference. One did what one could.

And certainly he would do that.

He looked at his watch. Still plenty of time. He might stop in at the new military library, which was not far from Pei’s event. Or perhaps he would just walk. It was smoggy and warm, but he was fairly relaxed. He had seen Mayli just before he had left, gotten her report on Shing, along with her more intimate ministrations, plus he had managed to nap for a couple hours on the flight. One thing you learned to do in the military was sleep when the chance came up — you never knew but that you might not get another opportunity for a while.

Yes. He would walk through the city, and try to ignore the Western bastardizations as best he could…