Nexus

42 A MATTER OF PERSPECTIVE

Kade woke slowly. He'd fallen asleep at some point, his head against the car door.

Sam was still awake. She felt tired, strung out, tense. He could feel the same thoughts cycling through her head. Mai. Her responsibility for the girl's death. The things she'd done in response. The men she'd killed. The hunters who'd be coming for them.

And plans. Plans. Cambodia. Laos. Burma. Where could they escape to? How?

Kade had no answers for her. He was completely cold inside. There was no emotion but an icy rage. The serenity package held him. Or perhaps it was shock.

The car wound left and right. They were up high above the Thai plains now, climbing a winding mountain road. Half the slopes were covered with rice paddies, terraces of green, yellow, and muddy brown. The rest was jungle, wild and thick. The sky was blue, dotted with white clouds. It was beautiful. He felt it not at all.

They came over a rise, and a structure appeared in the distance. A complex, nestled on a ledge in the side of the mountain. White buildings. Courtyards. Red roofs. Ornate gold towers above them. A waterfall sluiced out from below it, falling down a sheer cliff to crash into a jungle lake hundreds of feet below.

Twenty minutes later, they were there. The Tata pulled in through a gate in the wall, stopped in a wide stone courtyard. Monks met them at the car. A nun. A doctor. They hauled Sam away in one direction, Kade in another. They carried him to a monk's cell. A monk shaved the hair off his head with electric clippers. The doctor examined him, changed his dressings, peered at the swollen closed eye, injected him, put drug patches on his neck, made him swallow something. Darkness closed over him like a welcome friend.

The call came at 3am. Becker reached over to the nightstand to get it, struggled to pull himself back to consciousness and comprehension. It was Maximilian Barnes. Did the man ever sleep? It didn't matter. Becker had approval for the recon drone launches. He started to thank Barnes, found he was talking to dead air. The connection had ended. Becker looked at the phone in his hand, shook his head slowly.

"Who was that?" Claire asked sleepily.

"Just work, honey," Becker answered.

He rose to get his robe. He could call the Boca Raton from his secure home office. It was 2pm in Thailand. They could have the recon birds up tonight.

"Go back to sleep, Claire."

She was already out.

"Where are we on the candidate list for the surveillance drops?" Becker asked.

"Transmitting to your slate now, sir," Nichols answered.

Becker studied them. One hundred and twenty targets for a first wave of drops. They'd intercepted a call between Shu and Ananda. It had been in a language no system could translate. They'd hired a linguist, discovered it was Pali, a dead Buddhist ceremonial tongue. Translating it had confirmed their suspicions. Ananda had agreed to take on custody of "the boy" and "the woman with him" and help get them out of the country.

These target sites were largely places associated with Ananda. Monasteries he had influence in. University facilities he could use. Places where two Westerners could be hidden.

"When do we start?" Becker asked.

Nichols glanced at another screen, then looked back at Becker.

"The UAVs are fueling now, sir. First sorties launch tonight, after dark. 2300 hours local time."

"You're going to lose the eye. I'm sorry. There's nothing I can do."

Kade lay in the tiny bed in his little cell, ran the doctor's words through his head again and again, played back the moment when the ERD agent he'd attacked had bashed him in the face with the butt of his rifle. Lee. Sam said the man's name had been Lee. Wats had killed him not two minutes later.

Wats, who was dead, like so many others, while Kade was still alive.

He touched the data fob hanging around his neck. Wats had died to give him this. Had died trying to get him free.

All he'd lost was an eye. Just one puny eye. He should have lost more. He should have been the one to die.

And now Ilya and Rangan… He scanned the article again.

DEA BREAKS UP MAJOR WEST COAST DRUG RING

Friday 9.49pm, San Francisco, California

The DEA is announcing this afternoon more than a hundred arrests and the disruption of what they're calling one of the largest West Coast distribution networks for the street drug Nexus. […]

Rangan and Ilya had been taken. They were on their way to a National Security Internment Center. They'd never make their way out.

Kade understood Shu, now. He understood her anger, her rage.

They'd killed and imprisoned his friends. They'd killed Narong and Lalana and Chariya and so many innocents he had just met. They'd killed a little girl, a special little girl.

They deserved the worst. He was icy with rage. He wanted to hurt them. He wanted to tear them down. He wanted to annihilate them. Slowly. Painfully. Inch by inch.

It was too much. He had to get out of this cell. He had to think of something else, anything else.

He levered himself up on the crutches a young monk named Bahn had brought him, awkwardly propelled himself out of his cell, into the hall, around the corners, out another door into the courtyard.

A hot, muggy, late-afternoon rain was falling. Kade propelled himself along under covered walkways towards the main hall. He could feel the minds of the monks in there, even from a hundred yards away. Thirty of them. Forty of them. He could feel them breathe in. Breathe out. They were practicing a meditation of some sort. It wasn't heady like the Synchronicity had been. It was pure and clean and self-aware.

He let himself into the meditation hall, found a cushion in the very back. He tried to lower himself as silently as he could, wincing at the pain in his ribs, in his leg. A crutch slipped from his hand, clattered on the ground. He felt the collective mind in the room observe the sound, recognize it, pull its attention serenely back to its breath.

This calm was remarkable. It made a joke of the "serenity" code running in his head. This calm ran deeper, truer. He wanted it.

More than calm. Union. Concordance. He had more Nexus nodes in his mind than any monk in this room. He was sure of it. Yet somehow, they were using those nodes to achieve something he'd only dreamed of. They were doing what Ilya had long talked about. Together, now, as they meditated, they were creating something greater than the sum of their parts. They were more than a set of monks meditating. This room was alive. This room was conscious. This room was a mind, and they were each part of it.

Kade wanted that union as well.

He lowered himself painfully, awkwardly down, sat with his splinted broken leg protruding out, closed his eyes, and joined them.

Sam leaned against the stone balustrade, gazed south as she finished her third bowl of stew. Her body demanded calories, demanded protein to heal the damage done to it. She flexed her injured leg. It felt noticeably better after less than a day. The miracle of modern science. A mere muscle tear was nothing to her body's augmented ability to heal. She gulped down more stew, more fuel to power her body's accelerated recovery.

What was she doing here? Where to next? There was something wonderfully tranquil about this place. Something had settled over her here, something she hadn't expected, a calm, an acceptance.

It brought with it no answers, though. Nor would it deter an ERD attack squad.

Sam needed to leave. She needed to keep moving. And, if by chance she evaded capture and death, she needed something to do with her life. She needed a purpose.

She'd embraced the ERD with a passion at a young age. They'd been the ones that fought evil, the ones who would stop the men who'd do what had been done to her and her sister and her parents. But now…

Mai is dead because of me. A little girl.

It was too late to change that.

Her job now was to stay alive. She'd need a new identity, a new face, new prints, everything that came with that.

And then? Sam wondered. What do I do with my life?

She kept thinking of Mai, of her sister Ana, of the young Sam that she'd been.

I want to protect them, Sam thought to herself. Above all. I want to keep them safe.

She turned and faced south. Out there, somewhere near a village called Mae Dong, there were more children like Mai.

"Samantha?" It was Vipada, the young nun who'd been assigned to Sam. "It's time for meditation."

Sam turned, suddenly aware of what she looked like with her nearly bald head and her white robes – a Buddhist nun. It brought a smile to her lips. She brought her hands together in a wai to Vipada.

"Thank you, Vipada," she answered in Thai. "Please lead the way."

She headed into the hall, to meditate with the nuns, to feel their minds in the practice called vipassana, the observation of self, in the meditation called metta, the state of loving-kindness, of compassion towards the self and others. They would meditate, and they would become one.

She couldn't remember ever having experienced anything so beautiful in her life. The touch of another's mind in that deep serene state, the touch Nexus enabled… How could it be wrong? How could she have fought so hard to stop it?

Who am I becoming?

At 2249 hours, under a dark, cloudy night sky thirty kilometers off the coast of Thailand, a portion of the radar and sonar absorbent upper shell of the Boca Raton began to open. Fissures appeared on the rounded foredeck of the submersible covertoperations ship. The fissures defined previously invisible panels. The panels became depressions as the ship drew them in. They slid slowly, silently to the side, opening to reveal a combat deck below. As the stealth hull retracted, rounded launchers on the combat deck canted up, tilting from their horizontal resting positions up to an angle thirty degrees above the horizon, pointed north towards the Thai mainland.

For a moment, all was still. The dark ship bobbed silently in the tropical swells of the Gulf of Thailand. Then the first launcher fired. A dark elongated shape streaked out and into the night sky. Seven hundred and eighty milliseconds later, the second launcher fired, then another, then another. In under ten seconds, the Boca Raton put twelve Viper class UAVs into the air. The recon/combat drones opened their stealthed, downturned wings one second into flight, activated their own jet engines, eased into level subsonic flight ten meters above the waves, and scattered.

As each Viper streaked into the night, its attendant launcher began to tilt back towards horizontal. Within seconds of the last launch, the radar and sonar absorbent panels of the stealth hull began to slowly slide back into place, obscuring the combat hull. Secrecy must be maintained.

In the air above the waters of the Gulf of Thailand, the AI in control of Viper 6 got its bearings and compared them to the plan. The drone banked its wings, turned to head north by north-east, angling around Bangkok's crowded airspace and traffic control radar and towards Saraburi and the mountains to the north-east. It had payloads to deliver.

[ EXCERPT FROM TRANSCRIPT:

Face America with David Ames, Saturday 4/21/2040 ]

Host: …and welcome back everyone to Face America. We're here this morning with National Security Advisor Dr Carolyn Pryce. Dr Pryce, thank you again for being here.

Pryce: It's a pleasure, David.

Host: Dr Pryce, let's move on to the situation in Thailand. A fire and multiple shootings in Bangkok yesterday reportedly left more than thirty people dead in a location connected to distribution of the street drug Nexus. The Thai government alleges that US forces were involved. What can you tell us about this?

Pryce: David, our hearts go out to the families who lost loved ones in that fire. Of course, the US was in no way involved in this. Thailand is a close ally and an important partner in regional issues, and we hope that as emotions cool the Thai authorities will realize that they're mistaken.

Host: What do you make of these reports of heavy gunfire in the area?

Pryce: Well as you say, David, this building was apparently being used to distribute illicit drugs. We've seen drug-related violence in Mexico, in Afghanistan, in Columbia. Quite possibly this was a turf war between rival syndicates. These well-armed crime syndicates are part of the reason that President Stockton has made cracking down on the drug trade one of his top foreign policy priorities.

Host: The Thai authorities are saying the DNA evidence has identified an American at the scene, a man named Michael Lee, who they assert was an undercover American agent.

Pryce: Well, David, while Mr Lee lived in the US for a number of years, he's actually a child of Chinese immigrants to Thailand. So to use his presence to allege that the US was involved, when the same evidence provides a tighter link to China just to the north, is a bit odd. I hope the Thai authorities are asking Beijing some hard questions.

Host: So this man was not a US operative?

Pryce: Absolutely not.

Host: And there were no US operatives there?

Pryce: None whatsoever.

Host: I'm going to play you a clip here, from a press conference this morning in Bangkok, where Thai authorities showed off evidence found at the scene of the fire, which they say conclusively links the US military to the event. Roll film.

Host: What do you make of that?

Pryce: David, I think that film speaks for itself. Those guns are so warped and melted, it's difficult to even tell what models they are. And unfortunately, it's far too easy to acquire weapons of all sorts, from any country, on the black market today. That's why President Stockton has made combating the international arms trade, especially of the newest, most high-tech weapons, one of his highest priorities.

Host: Let's move on the situation in Turkmenistan…

[ END TRANSCRIPT ]

Viper 6 banked after its sixth drop, circling to the left to come around north by north-west towards the mountains north-east of Bangkok. It flew low, barely five meters over the rice paddies and sugar cane plantations, under the radar. Its AI steered it clear of villages and farmhouses.

It flew past Rop Mueang, past Nakhon Nayok, past Phrommani, paralleled Highway 33 at a safe distance until it saw the village of Ban Na, then curved around north and east, hugged the terrain as it went from flat to rugged, followed a ravine carved into the stone millennia ago up towards greater heights.

At twelve hundred meters it popped out of the ravine, acquired its target with its onboard optics, calibrated against its internal GPS. This was target seven, its AI confirmed.

Viper 6 opened Weapons Bay 2, flew low and slow over the monastery, and launched a spray of tiny eight-limbed surveillance robots out and into the night air.

One by one they drifted down and onto the target.