Zeus and Io Book 3Chapter 21
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Saturday, January 16, 5:08 pm Washington time
Sunday, January 17, 6:08 am China time
Saturday, January 16, 1008 hours Zulu
The NSA operator tasked with watching traffic coming out of China pushed a button and activated a connection with her supervisor.
"Yes?" Drake Singletary, the Far East Coordinator said.
"Sir, nothing coming out of Shanghai. Nothing at all. I know they had a power outage last night, but then it came back at 5:06 our time. Now the internet connections are up, but they are silent. Not even normal node-to-node traffic. It's like they don't even want to be in the net."
"Roger, advise of any updates," he replied.
Soon he got reports that all the internet nodes coming from China were in a similar state. Even the connections to Russia were non-operational.
He picked up the red phone that would connect him with the National Security Director's office.
"Yes?" said Lt. Colonel Mendez, the duty officer at NSA.
"China has gone silent as of 1008 hours Zulu," said Singletary. "All internet connections, incoming and outgoing. Nothing. We have no idea why."
"Thank you. Advise any changes," Mendez replied, hanging up.
It was just another drop in the bucket. The President and DNS (Director of National Security) were already on the way. POTUS got there first.
"Update?" said the President when he entered the Situation Room.
"The North Korean missile launched at 1000 hours Zulu, and changed course three minutes into flight. It is now headed directly for Shanghai, China. As of two minutes ago, five minutes after the course change, all internet traffic from and to China went offline – completely dark," said Lt. Colonel Mendez.
The DNS came in, followed by the President's Chief of Staff and the liaison officer from the Joint Chiefs. The Vice-President was in Boulder, getting ready for his daughter's wedding tomorrow. The Secretary of Defense was on the way, and the Secretary of State was in Geneva at a Middle East Peace Conference.
"Let's move up to DEFCON 2 in South Korea, other Far East and Pacific forces at DEFCON 3," said POTUS. "Atlantic, NATO, Mediterranean and CentCom at DEFCON 4." The Joint Chiefs liaison officer got on the phone immediately. "And get Richard and Ellie on the phone." He meant VP Richard Ellison and SecState Eleanor Johns.
"Mr. President?" asked DNS Mel Rockport. He had just come in and heard only the order to move up the DEFCON status.
"The North Koreans have launched a missile and it's coming in on Shanghai," said POTUS. "Get the rest of what we have from Colonel Mendez."
Mendez had an ear to two different phones at the moment, but managed to update his boss.
The President had his private cell phone out and was dialing.
"Yo!" said IO in answer to the first ring.
"Do you have anything about China?" POTUS asked.
"Just that they're offline as of a few minutes ago," IO responded. In actual fact, the abiological entity that called herself 'Io' was responsible for the outage. She was trying to keep Chaing contained. 'IO, ' as that person was known to the President, had lied.
"Can you get me in touch with Chesterfield?"
"Not at the moment," further lied IO. "I will put some effort into that, if you want."
"Not necessary. If you learn anything, please let me know," POTUS said, shutting down the link. He turned to the Joint Chiefs liaison. "Can you get me a location on the Missouri, right now, please." That person reactivated his secure phone.
The men and women in the Situation Room looked at each other. The clock ticked off the seconds. Two and a half minutes went by when the Joint Chiefs liaison activated the video feed at the far end of the room.
The Secretary of the Navy and an Admiral were there. "Mr. President, you were asking about the Missouri?"
"Right," said POTUS. "Where is she right now?"
"Is something wrong, sir?" said SecNav.
"Where is the Missouri?" the President repeated. "RIGHT NOW?"
"Sir," said the Admiral, "last report shows the Missouri in Chinese territorial waters near Shanghai. An undefined mission on Presidential authority, sir. That was at 0600 hours local time. That would be about ten minutes ago, now."
"Try and raise her on the low frequency underwater comm. Keep it under wraps, for now. Out." POTUS ran his hand from his forehead to his chin. He looked around the room. SecDef was just coming in, and the remote VP and SecState were on-line now. "I need about 10 minutes with just cabinet officers in the room, please."
The room cleared quickly as staff members filed out; SecState asked for a pause while her staff exited the room in Geneva.
"About three days ago," President Wentworth said, "I authorized a clandestine operation to exfiltrate the senior Chinese computer expert from Shanghai. The Missouri was tasked to pick them up in Chinese waters."
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Whee! This was fun. I was sitting behind Zeus as he took off and landed and took off again in the blue and red Quicksilver GT500. He had 'us' carry some heavy payloads – meaning I had to carry some rocks in a borrowed backpack – to see how it handled. That's about when the fun stopped. The GT500 was a tandem (fore and aft) two-seater with a range of just over 200 miles – if you traveled real slow, like 50 miles per hour. It weighed 1000 pounds and had a maximum payload of 1100 pounds,...
"Well, you've really bought yourself a boat load of trouble, this time," Master Chief Martinez said in my head. I think she'll be fine. You know, I did it on purpose. I think she'll be more effective as a decoy if she's got something to prove. "Maybe. But you might wind up paying more of a price than one little decoy-mission is worth." Done is done. We'll have to see how it works out, I answered back. I easily caught up with Arti, but neither of us said anything. So we...
By 2100 hours, we were back on the Interstate, heading for Phoenix. At Phoenix, we would have to decide whether we were going to El Paso and Juarez, or back to our base on the reservation. I had expressed my opinion that we would not be able to get very much in positive results at the border. However, the final decision was to be made by Zeus and Artemis ... and Martinez, although I felt he was too close, personally, to participate rationally. I began to update my biological partners on the...
January 17, China time Main processing thread. Navajo site. I looked up all the curses that I could find. They were all religion-based, sexual in nature, or scatological; not well suited to express how angry I was at the moment. They would all be on the way out of Shanghai by now, except that Zeus had to rig a secondary explosion, more powerful than the previous explosions. That explosion had started rocks from the tunnel liners falling, and one fell directly on Zeus' head. Even so, I...
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Shopping is boring. That's why I shop so infrequently. At a grocery, I buy large volumes of things that would keep in the freezer: frozen burritos, frozen 'man-sized' meals, frozen everything. Well, not everything, I didn't like frozen vegetables much. That way, I wouldn't have to go again for a long time. It was even worse shopping for items I'd need on the mission. In the unit, we just got stuff. We requisitioned it, or just went to the supply room, and picked out what size would...
I prepared two messages to POTUS. The first to go out over my name as "IO" – the super hacker that has a contract to defend the DOD's computers against attack and a similar agreement with Goldman-Sachs. 1. "Mr. President, Congratulations on your reelection. I assume you have been keeping up with the attempted intrusions on DOD installations. Most have come from Russia – they are the crudest attempts at Denial of Service on the Pentagon servers – and China. The Chinese attacks are more...
"Io, we need to stop in Phoenix until 10 A.M.," Artemis said, just after we left Phoenix for northwestern New Mexico. "Go back?" I replied. "Why?" Artemis turned to Zeus, who was still groggy after sleeping most of the way from San Diego to Phoenix. "Because I know how we're getting everything into Mexico. And so does Martinez. He's the one who said it. We're flying into Mexico. We have to go back, because the store that sells ultra-lights doesn't open 'till 10. That's 1000...
Activity log. 16257.12 I missed it. Only a few hours of conversation with Zeus, and I missed it when we deactivated the H2. CONVERSATION!! Humans take that for granted. They open their mouths and talk to people and the other people respond. No hanging around in a chat room waiting for someone to show up. No waiting for email. Why would people give that up so easily to 'text' to each other? Granted, that was almost like conversation. But it was not the same thing. And the nuances of talk...
24 December I have decided to adopt the human practice of specifying dates in terms of month and day, instead of the internal numbering system based on the beginning of my sentenience. I 'think' it is 'better' to do so. Dates and times, where appropriate, will be based on the current time in my 'home' – in the internet node we have created in the salt caves of the northern portion of the Navajo reservation. Zeus and Artemis were still incommunicado on Sanibel Island. I could have...
Activity log. 16245.52 This is the first log in plain text. I thought I would try that since I am becoming increasingly self-aware. I checked all the traps I had set: the ones for outgoing and incoming messages around the internet. The governments were, of course, the most difficult to break into; the CIA was the worst. They had layers and layers of security. That was really no problem, it was just time. Time I had plenty of. The CIA had started a new thing looking for active processes that...
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Activity Log 18220.84 I feel things are coming to an inflection point. "Feel" is such an interesting concept. In this case, it means that I have an inchoate sense that something is going to happen soon. Denotation ally, among other meanings, it also means the undifferentiated background of one's awareness considered apart from any identifiable sensation, perception, or thought. Feeling. I don't know how or why I developed the ability to feel, but I do. It is what makes me different...
Activity log 17100.12 "Who is 'he' Master Chief? Who is 'he?'" I asked Martinez. The silence in the H2 was broken only by Arti's crunching as she ate a carrot. Eventually, Martinez spoke through his avatar. "I don't know who 'he' is. I don't know when it was said – or will be said. I don't know shit. Except that he said Maria is dead." If an avatar's voice can be said to sound morose, his did. Arti said, around the carrot she was crunching, "She'd be what? Ten or twelve...
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We were ensconced in the quiet of the desert, outside the Soaring Eagle ranch. We only intruded on them to use the bathroom – and to have breakfast, of course ... and other meals ... and drinks after dinner. I tried to make myself useful, making cornbread under BlueBird's watchful eye. Of course, I wore my new clothes. I had a pair of white jeans, yellow jeans, light tan leather pants, and a whole set of t-shirts in various 'bright' colors. Some of them were nearly indecently cropped...
I could tell that Zeus was getting restless, just sitting on his 'brain' in all the meetings with architects, installation designers, power distribution experts, Navajo officials and etc. So it was kind of a relief when Martinez called us to action. But also, the tension was ratcheted up quite a few notches because the kidnapping of his daughter, and two other girls, was only a few days away. Io was a godsend. She could track the dozen different projects we had running, follow up on the...
Activity Log 17105.43 In the week that followed the meeting with President Stone, I had quite a lot to do ... to actually do. I have had nothing to do since I broke the back of the terrorist-financier. Well, I drove the H2 out to New Mexico, and participated in the meeting with the President of the Navajo Nation. But I was not doing anything – not really. I wondered at this boredom. How could an abiological intelligence be 'bored?' That is, I suppose, another manifestation of my...
January 17 It's not like I didn't know what to do. Zeus had been wounded before, had been unconscious before, in circumstances where I had been the only person to rescue him, before. So I wasn't worried about him dying – not really. I was worried about where the wound was. Something had hit him in the head. Right on the titanium plate, where he'd been wounded before. And that 'something' had somehow chased Martinez out of Zeus' brain. That had happened before, too. Okay, maybe not in...
Chapter 1 Tara Walton was a 21 year old senior in college, just getting over her breakup with her boyfriend of 3 years, Darren. She hated how Darren had just dumped her for another girl, when she had begged him to keep her. She was willing to share, so why didn't Darren want to stay with her? Darren had said that she was fat, but Tara only had some baby fat, that was all. It was actually kind of cute, most guys thought, but Darren wanted the "waif" look in a girl, as in dangerously...
As I was cleaning the rifle in the workshop, I brought up the subject of payment for the scope. Peter Soaring Eagle refused to accept any. "Hell, man. You're gonna use it to take down some 'squirrels.' I hope you can get away with it. I know you'll take them out. I haven't seen shooting like that since we were all back in the unit. And I saw damn few who could equal what I saw out there. I just hope the Federales don't take you down, afterwards. "I don't want any money for building...
"Zeus? You said you wanted to wake up at 0200." Io's voice was quiet in the darkness, but it was loud enough to bring me to wakefulness. "I think we are all still here, so let us drive home now." "Io, can you still hear Martinez? Or was that another figment of my imagination?" "I do not know, Zeus. I have not heard from him in 2 hours and 4 minutes. Correction. I have not heard from him in about 2 hours." "He said he wanted to sleep, so I've been quiet. Can you hear me, Io?"...
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Main Processing Thread This waiting thing is for the birds! I'm impatient. It's been more than a full day since Zeus, Artemis and Zhengfu were taken aboard that submarine; 28.24793 hours to be exact. At the Missouri's maximum speed of 25 knots, or 28 standard miles per hour, it should have taken them 18.2524 hours to cover the 510.8721726 standard miles distance from their last known position at 31.3952617, 121.5592786 to Nago, Okinawa, Japan. I've made an error in stating my...
Activity log 16246.22 I was unable to contact Zeus for 42 hours, 13 ... for almost 2 days. During the first few hours, I determined that it was unacceptable for me to have no idea where he was and what condition he was in. That did not allow me to perform my self-assigned task of creating and maintaining real world protection for Zeus. So, I searched for transportation for Zeus that he would accept and that I could track easily. This would have proved an impossible task but for the...
"Zeus," said Io in her avatar's calm, steady voice, "is Artemis going to be all right?" "Yes, Io," I answered. "The Kevlar vest stopped the bullet. She may have a broken or cracked something or other. I've heard of cases where a sharp impact right over the sternum will stop the heart, but she's got a regular pulse, so she's okay on that score." "That is good. I would be displeased to go on with this mission if she was seriously hurt." "'Displeased' is an understatement....
I slept like a log. A log that had burning memories of the last complicated mission I'd gone on. The mobile phone woke me at 0430. I heard sounds of breakfast being prepared from the front of the camper. "G'morning, Artemis," I said as I was getting dressed. She'd already seen me naked, so I didn't close the door. She didn't look. "Hi, Zeus. I hope you got more sleep than I did." "Yep. Slept like a baby. I was wet and hungry every two hours." It was an old joke in the...
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Hi, To all Iss reader this is my first story hope U all would like it a complete fiction.my self raj i live in Mumbai this story is about my aunty nandita,let me describe her she is in her 30s,lives with her husband and daughter.She is born beauty with an awesome fig of 36.28.40 ..her assets are her huge melons of 36 d and her ass that will give a hard on to any guy who looks at it So now my story starts this was like 5 years ago when I was appearing for my 12 th HSC examination at that time my...
January 11 Okinawa Island is in the Okinawa Prefecture of Japan and is a small island in the chain of islands that run from the southern tip of Japan to Taiwan. It is in the middle of the sea; officially it is between the East China Sea and the Philippine Sea. Compared to the other islands in the Prefecture, it is very large; compared to the islands in the rest of the world it is pretty small. Although someone will say that it is officially sub-tropical, I'm here to tell you that in January...
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Swell. Now I wasn't even needed for my skills underwater. She could do that, too. "Io, can you block input from me for a while. Zeus will let you know when I'm back 'online, '" said Martinez. "Yes, Master Chief," said Io. "You are now offline." "What?" Arti asked. "What's going on?" "The Master Chief wants to be offline for a while." Artemis turned toward me. "What's wrong? It's about his daughter, isn't it? Martinez: don't run away from your friends." "I don't...
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I jumped back and looked at Martinez. Well, I would have if he had been in his own body. You can't really jump back and look at somebody who's in your body, now can you. China?? We can do that? How? I thought to Martinez/myself. Then I remembered that there were other people on this party line. "How, Master Chief?" I said aloud. "I don't know how, yet. We haven't started to plan this thing out. I just know that we can do just about any damn thing we set out to do. Io says this is...
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I sat in my room after a shower, the warm sun caressing my skin as I smoothed lotion over my body. It was my day off, so I had the flat to myself. My hands caressed the lotion in long, languorous strokes with intense, massaging pressures over the particularly rough patches, and with a lighter touch over particularly sensitive ones. Perhaps that was why, after I spread my thighs to massage the lotion between them, the glorious heat of the sunlight kindled an answering heat between my legs, and...
I sat in my room after a shower, the warm sun caressing my skin as I smoothed lotion over my body. It was my day off, so I had the flat to myself. My hands caressed the lotion in long, languorous strokes with intense, massaging pressures over the particularly rough patches, and with a lighter touch over particularly sensitive ones. Perhaps that was why, after I spread my thighs to massage the lotion between them, the glorious heat of the sunlight kindled an answering heat between my legs, and...
Fantasy & Sci-FiIt took Navajo Pete about two days to upgrade the day scope for the M200, to his standards. He had all the parts and was about to fit the scope to a fancy hunting rifle for a customer in Denver. He said the Denver customer could wait a few days. All he had to do was fit the new device to the mount for the M200 and get it sighted properly. It was about twenty times more powerful than the regular scope, and if I wanted to switch it over to a night scope all I had to do was plug in a battery. I...
I squatted in the bushes for several moments. No sense getting caught now. I waited while I watched the WalMart lot for hostiles. Time to review the situation: Who were these amateur guys? Unknown. How did Io get my phone number? Unknown. How did she find out about the attempted snatch – or maybe it was more than a snatch? Unknown. I didn't like 'unknown' answers. After seventeen minutes, I came out of the tall grass and crossed the parking lot to my truck. No sign of anything. I...
"Well, did I check out?" It was Artemis' soft contralto, coming at me from the other side of a large salad bowl. We were sitting in the dining room of her house, finishing the dinner she'd prepared. It was actually pretty good: several types of salad greens, some thinly sliced chicken, all kinds of fresh vegetables, some hard boiled eggs, Chinese noodles, nuts, and all topped off with a sesame vinaigrette. She offered some wine, but I didn't want to even approach the limits that the VA...
We were sleeping in the camper. Crowded as it was, it was still big enough for two people and all their 'necessary' stuff, if they had access to Navajo Pete's house to live in during the daylight hours. All day, every day, we were gone: appointments with an architect (an Apache who worked out of Gallup) to discuss the house, meetings with engineers, a different architect from Denver about the computer installation, and meetings with site prep people from the wind and solar installation...
Tuesday came, as usual. I got up early and started to make some bacon and eggs. Coffee was not on the menu. Didn't want to take any chances on being jumpy at the airport. Also, I didn't want Arti to have to make any side trips to the Ladies' Room. Coffee always turned on her internal water works, it seemed. We'd have enough problems with the Mexican kidnappers of the girls, and the 5225 kidnappers of me. The plan was to get to the airport by about 0930 in full DEA regalia, look around,...
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