Enter the Naked Mole Rat

Operative Theta Epsilon Gamma, or ΘΕƔ for short, sat hunched over his console, which was (along with three identical consoles ranged around it), the only source of illumination available in the inky darkness .  His responsibility for the remaining four hours of his six hour shift was a quadrant of sky and sea, 110 degrees worth once the boundary overlaps were taken into account, and his work ethic was bolstered by a very graphic understanding of what would happen to him if he screwed up in any way. Or if he was believed to have screwed up. Or if his supervisor thought he might be about to screw up.

He still remembered the briefing his team leader had given him two months earlier during his induction session, at the end of six months intensive training in the depths of a South American jungle. "Look at my chest…", he had said. "Epsilon… Beta… ; that's two letters. Now look at each of yours. Three letters. Do you know how many two letter operatives there are still working for WEE? One. Me. Do you know what happened to the all the rest of the two letter operatives, along with all the Alpha, Beta & Gamma range three letter operatives?".

Of course he had been curious. He'd really wanted to know what had happened to them. Had they quit? Been fired? Died heroically in action? But once Εϐ had gone on to show and tell the freshly trained cannon fodder exactly what fate had befallen so many of their predecessors, in gory detail, with occasional post-mortem pictorial slides, his curiosity had been supplanted by an almost-paralysing fear of what the future held for him.

Having got their undivided attention, Εϐ had then been perfectly blunt and straightforward about the  purpose of the briefing; he was looking after his own future health and wellbeing. "I'm still alive today for two reasons", he had said. "One is because I try to be a great commander. I look after my troops, I treat them all fairly, I cover for them whenever I safely can, and I always make sure neither I nor anybody on my team ever get caught screwing up. But the other reason, you should understand,  is that if any one on my team looks for even a moment like they are going to fuck up and get me fired out of a cannon with them, I'll decapitate them myself, and deliver their freshly severed head to Gemini on a sterling silver platter as soon as look at them! And by 'them', I really mean 'you', since you are all as of now assigned to work for me!".

There had been a general sharp intake of breath.  Εϐ had stared intently at each of his potential new team members one after another; when it was his turn, ΘΕƔ had found himself staring back into what looked like a black hole; Εϐ's eyes were utterly dead, devoid of any spark of human emotion. Once he had been right round the room in the same disconcerting way, he continued very matter-of-factly, "It's nothing personal, by the way.  And because it's just business, I'm going to give you a one time, never to be repeated offer. If you don't think you can live up to the exacting standards I will require of you, and you want out, just leave now with my blessing, and nothing more will be said!"

Half a dozen of the newly lettered operatives had stood up quietly and headed for the door.  ΘΕƔ would have dearly loved to have walked away himself; nothing would have made him happier, but he had made a point of reading the small print in the agreement he'd signed upon joining, and he suspected that the half dozen who had just left the room wouldn't be living long and happy lives hereafter.  And indeed, ΘΕƔ never saw them again, despite no vehicles leaving the site to head back to civilisation; it was hard to escape the conclusion that they were now providing nutrition for the grateful jungle fauna within stumble-at-gunpoint range of the camp perimeter. Or possibly even within dragging-a-sack-with-a-corpse-in range.

So here he now sat, in the dark, his concentration on the screen in front of him enhanced by the sheer, all encompassing, terror of making the smallest mistake.

A blip appeared on the scope, accompanied by a tag containing a screed of information. Whatever it was didn't have a radar transponder, and it was heading straight for him on a descending vector from 25,000 feet. More worryingly, it wasn't showing up on radar at all, having been detected purely as a result of the faint electro-magnetic radiation it was emitting .

Only five minutes ago, he had tracked India Papa 415, the regular morning International Parcels cargo flight out of Hong Kong, into through and finally back out of the far end of his quadrant, so his first thought when a blip appeared was that maybe it had turned round and headed back to Hong Kong with a technical issue; part of his duties when tracking a commercial flight through even the further reaches of 'his' airspace involved covertly checking the airport departure & ATC logs for the flight, logged communications traffic,  weather, customs records and manifests, looking for the tiniest inconsistency that might reveal a deception of some kind, or 'something  else' disguised as commercial traffic, and India Papa had come up squeaky clean,  so such a turn of events wouldn't have concerned him unduly, but an incoming stealth bogey certainly had him twitching!

He punched up the high-resolution long range tracking camera, aimed and focussed on the location of the sensor contact. He wasn't sure what he expected to see, but he definitely expected to see something!  Which meant that a picture of nothing but empty sky was more than enough to jangle his nerves!

It was only when he switched the magnification up to maximum that he was able to faintly discern a tiny spec, and what might turn out to be wings and a rotating prop when the target got closer. As he watched, the computers, the passive electromagnetic radiation detectors and the optical image  processor combined to calculate accurate dimensions, including wingspan, for the UFO.  These dimensions were added to the existing information tag on the sensor tracking screen. 

He hit the 'Call Supervisor' button.

It was about 45 seconds before Εϐ appeared over his right shoulder and asked "What have you got, ΘΕƔ ?",  45 seconds during which the bogey got about 2 miles nautical closer to him.

"I've got a bogey, Sir. It's 39 nautical miles down range and closing on a bearing of 284 decimal 3 degrees, at Angels 23. It is currently descending on a vector that brings it right here at about 140 knots ground speed. It has no radar reflection, but electromagnetic signature indicates electric motors and high power consumption electronics, with a wingspan just over half a meter. No weapons identified, no type identified, no information available concerning bogey load-out, capabilities  or operator.  Profile suggests ultra-lightweight advanced surveillance drone, possibly military in origin, launch platform unknown. Likely operator; any one of many national law enforcement, numerous state intelligence agencies,  our landlord's competitors or even Lloyds of London.  My recommendation; allow the bogey to close to within 15 miles, where it can be scanned and photographed in  sufficient detail  to achieve a positive identification, and possibly traced back to source.  Only then should we surgically bring down the drone using pulse laser fire at no less than ten miles range to disable it, and we should immediately scramble a retrieval team to pull the wreckage from the water for dissection and further analysis!", said ΘΕƔ, with perhaps a touch of over confidence.

"Just one thing about that recommendation…", Εϐ said calmly but icily. "If the drone is close enough to us at 15 miles that we can scan it in detail, then it might be close enough to scan us in detail. Do you want to explain to Gemini exactly why you decided to allow an unidentified surveillance drone to scan this island despite tracking it on approach for over ten minutes before it got into sensor range? Or why you then bought it onto the island substantially intact?"

ΘΕƔ sensed immediately, as the icy hand that had momentarily loosened its grip on his entrails clenched violently once again, that a wrong word uttered now could see him as shark bait within minutes.  "No sir, I don't. My revised recommendation is that we knock the bogey down, with the objective of total and instant mid-air destruction; that should prevent any useful analysis of our response by whoever is operating it. Suggest focused EMP to achieve that at ranges in excess of 25 miles. Bogey now 37 nautical miles down range, Angels 22,  still 150 knots ground speed, ETA at likely maximum on-board sensor range  is seven minutes", he said very calmly, as he screamed in abject terror inside his own head.

There was a silence that lasted mere seconds, but felt to  ΘΕƔ like many hours or even days, before Εϐ said, in his usual emotionless way,  "Recommendation accepted, ΘΕƔ . Take it down, take it down hard, and take it down now!".

"Yes sir!", said ΘΕƔ, hoping that he had dodged the bullet that he had been convinced had his name indelibly engraved upon it. Now all he had to do was hit the damned drone first time! He lifted a sprung transparent flap covering a red illuminated square button marked "Waveguide deploy" with his thumb, and stabbed the button with his forefinger. Immediately it began to flash amber, and several violet rotating beacons attached to the ceiling began to whir, as a mercifully not too loud klaxon began to sound intermittently.   In due course, the flashing amber button would change to glow solid green, signifying that the giant metal fabrications that made up the emitter waveguide connected to the flux compression generator of the EMP weapon had finished deploying from their concealed bay far above him and were ready for action . In his minds eye he could see the big hydraulic rams groaning as they pushed the rock cap aside on shiny metal rails, and then the massive greased triplex chain clanking one tooth at a time on the huge drive sprocket as the glorified giant telescopic drainpipe slid menacingly  up and into position.   In the meantime, he selected a power threshold for the shot.  Normally for a tiny target like this, 10% of maximum available power would be one hundred times total overkill  already. But, since he realised that his very life depended on the drone being entirely obliterated, he decided that there was only one way to be absolutely, positively, completely sure that the drone would never play the piano again; he pushed the 'Threshold' slider all the way to the safety gate at 80%, and then through the slight resistance, into the red zone and all the way to 100%. Then he turned his attention to the targeting computer…

 

oOo

Kim sauntered down the spiral staircase from the mess hall with a purposeful smile on her face,  stepping off onto level 6. She had just finished a cursory look around the sun drenched terraces at the top of the cliff-face rock steps she had sprinted up to return to the mess-hall level, and as was already blatantly obvious, there was nowhere that even several tons of rock spoil,  let alone several million tons, could possibly be concealed up there.  However, as she had glanced around the upper terrace  to confirm to herself the obvious, Kim had once again been intrigued to see the woman in the cream coloured shinobi-shozoko who had earlier reminded her of Shego. The woman was literally just finishing a series of stretches, some of which looked easier and less painful than others, and a minute or two after Kim caught sight of her, she stepped up to one of the long row of big stainless steel Win Chun dummies that lined the seaward edge of this large upper terrace and launched into a blisteringly rapid rendition of the classic Win Chun Dummy form, except (rather confusingly for Kim)  that at key moments she extemporised to smash her left thigh into the metal 'body' of the dummy with what appeared to be brutal force, and she did it time and time again. It looked to Kim like an act of calculated masochism, and yet, between the sickening thud of thigh on solid tubular steel,  Kim once again found herself reminded of Shego's form and style.  After five minutes of watching the woman curiously, she forcibly dragged herself away, berating herself silently for being foolishly delusional. Not only was seeing an obviously imaginary Shego everywhere during her waking hours a disturbing counterpoint  to her now regularly nightmare-disturbed sleep, but she was anxious to try out Lo Pin's simulation technology.   

Glancing along level 6, Kim was gratified to see that the indicator light outside one of the caverns was green, to indicate that it was vacant; presumably somebody had packed up practising early?  No  matter, rather than having to hunt for a vacant Holographic training cavern, here was one available right in front of her in the first place she looked. She jumped at the opportunity, jogging down the corridor towards it.

It was as Kim reached the door of Holographic Dojo 645, as converted bunker cavern 45 on Level 6  now  styled itself,  that the lights in the corridor dimmed significantly for about two seconds, and Kim could hear the background hum of machinery and distant whirring fans that  seemed to pervade many of the 'public' areas of the island change note briefly, accompanied by a chorus of annoyed yells and groans from the other holo dojos  within earshot. Then, just as she was starting to wonder what the problem was and whether it was going to interfere with her keenly anticipated training session,  the lights all brightened again, the sounds returned to their normal tone and level, and it was as if nothing had happened. She pushed open the door of the  bunker cavern and headed inside.

oOo

Wade blinked at the hissing snowstorm on the screen in front of him in utter disbelief. One moment he'd been monitoring the Kimmunicator as it flew itself towards Klaustaffen island and the presumably waiting Kim, the very next moment, nothing at all!

He methodically tried to re-establish communication via every channel, technology and route he could; he knew that if the device was still functioning, the Kimmunicator's on-board AI would itself be independently trying every means possible to re-establish communications with him!

From the Kimmunicator there came not a peep! He'd never actually lost all communication with the Kimmunicator for any period longer than half a second before; the most his clever algorithms had had to deal with was an abrupt blocking of one mode of communication, forcing him to jump to another. If the Kimmunicator suddenly lost sight of the sky then it might instantly shift from satellite communications to VLF radio, or its onboard AI might autohack a nearby GSM cell tower or even a Wi-Fi hotspot if one was within range, or it might piggyback onto a nearby high tension power transmission line and autohack the in-band switching control channel and then…  well,  the bottom line was that he had a hundred different ways of talking to the Kimmunicator, and the Kimmunicator had a hundred different ways of getting in touch with him.  So if contact had been broken entirely, something unprecedented had happened...

After about half an hour of fruitlessly attempting to reconnect with the missing device, Wade threw in the towel, accepted the inevitable, and turned to the logs to look for clues to what might have gone wrong.

It had all been going so well. The International Parcels flight he had hitched a ride aboard had passed within 50 miles of Lo-Pin's island at  35,000 feet. He'd disengaged the magnetic clamps and flown the Kimmunicator off the cargo plane's back without smashing the little electronic gizmo to pieces on the plane's tail.  Then he'd aimed the Kimmunicator at Lo-Pin's island and left it to get on with flying there while he sat back and sipped on the tall glass of orange squash that his mother had kindly brought in for him. When it got there he would have taken manual control and then started to optically scan the  area for Kim's unique hair colour...

The video feed from the last few minutes of the Kimmunicator's ill-fated flight showed a clear blue sky, a distant island in the middle of a sparkling azure sea directly ahead, and then... nothing.  The detailed telemetry feed was similarly suddenly cut off. But when Wade zoomed into the detail, he found an anomaly.  The last five hundredths of a second of the telemetry transmission before it ended abruptly showed a massive and building power surge, and an instantaneous massive rise in internal and external temperature. Only two things could cause that; one would be an internal short circuit caused by a fault of some kind, the other would be an incredible amount of external electromagnetic energy. The former could be ruled out, not that Wade didn't have confidence in his own abilities or the reliability of the Kimmunicator anyway, because the power cell telemetry didn't report the kind of additional current drain that a short circuit would cause. So that left an external power surge. And that… couldn't be an accident!

The power surge was incredible, literally, because  Wade had designed and built the Kimmunicator and he knew exactly how much active & passive EMP protection he had engineered into it, and exactly how vast an amount of energy it would take to overwhelm the shielding. He'd built the Kimmunicator to be able to survive a reasonably close encounter with the EMP from an airburst tactical nuclear weapon.   He had always considered that to be massive overkill, and only the technical challenge it presented had made it worth all the effort. But apparently, and surprisingly, he hadn't shielded the Kimmunicator enough!

A quick check of the global seismological monitoring network was enough to confirm what he already knew;  that there hadn't been a nuclear explosion in the Sea of Japan. That left only one obvious option, an extremely worrying one…

He went back to the video log. One of the benefits of the live feed from the Kimmunicator's Ultra High Definition camera, massive bandwidth hog though it was,  was the vast amount of detail it captured for later analysis. So when Wade keyed up the video of the last 5 minutes of the Kimmunicator's flight on one of the wall of huge monitors around him, and zoomed in on the distant island which was holding steady centre screen, instead of dissolving into a blocky blobby mess, a low resolution video image of an island appeared. It bounced about a bit, as the Kimmunicator was buffeted in flight, but it mostly sat filling the screen, its unchanging outline gradually growing.

Or… not unchanging! In last 30 seconds of the video, the silhouette of the island changed ; something rose sedately from the top of the volcanic plug, contrasting starkly against the twinkling blue sea, like a periscope rising from a submarine.  And then, the snowstorm as the transmission was cut off.

Wade couldn't be certain, but he suspected that he was looking at the waveguide for an EMP weapon.  Lo Pin had an EMP weapon on his island? Nothing in any of the briefings or intelligence files he had read about Lo Pin had prepared him to expect anything like that. Or indeed scanning technology that could spot something as small and stealthy as the Kimmunicator at 40 miles range! And now Kim was, as far as he knew, on that island, beyond his ability to help keep her safe. He felt a wave of fear and panic starting to rise, and he sternly forced them back down; he could be no help to Kim if he 'lost it'. He needed to be cool. He needed to be analytical. He needed to do what needed to be done to make sure Kim was safe. And then… then there would be no reason to be scared anyway.   

He made some rough dimension measurements  from the best image of the protrusion atop the island, and then his fingers flew over his keyboards as he mathematically modelled an EMP weapon in his planet-sized mind and designed a series of equations to determine its range and power for a given known input power. Then, he flipped the equations round and plugged in the range and energy numbers from the last few milliseconds of Kimmunicator telemetry, adjusted to take account of the Kimmunicator's EMP shielding. He hit 'Enter' with a triumphant final flourish.

And then he blinked.

He knew he didn't make mistakes, but he re-checked his working again anyway.   He found no errors. Which meant that the Electro Magnetic Pulse that had apparently taken down the Kimmunicator must have had at least…  2.8  Gigawatts behind it!  

2.8 Gigawatts…  Wow! That was enough, Wade knew, to power the entire city of Chicago! And yet..  and yet he had seen no smoke rising from chimneys on the island on the video, which rather hinted that the immense power that had fried the Kimmunicator wasn't developed by a fossil fuel fired generating station, leaving aside the fact that  it would be something of a challenge concealing a conventional power station inside the island.

 He checked the telemetry logs again, looking at the continuous air quality monitoring specifically; the lack of combustion products in the atmosphere rather supported the idea that there wasn't a conventional power station on the island,  and analysis of what Lo Pin had apparently purchased or hijacked over the past few years pretty much confirmed it. Lo Pin had certainly hijacked a few oil tankers over the years, but Lloyds register records indicated that they'd all been ransomed back to their owners, complete with their precious cargo, and a quick global trawl of the internal 'Bill of Materials' systems of every company in the world that was capable of building a generating plant large enough to power a city, compared against their published order books and related shipping manifests, sealed it; there was no city-scale fossil-fuel powered electrical generation plant on the island.  

Generating technology by generating technology, Wade considered and was able to eliminate every alternative. That meant, after everything else that could generate at least 2.8 Gigawatts on demand was excluded, that there was only one remaining possibility; nuclear power! 

Nuclear fission was a possibility, only because  of the large quantity of fissile material that, Wade was uncomfortably aware , was already on the island, all be it at the bottom of a shaft under miles of concrete; no other Uranium or Plutonium, enriched or otherwise, had made it onto the island as far as he could see, let alone sufficient imported nuclear fuel to keep a reactor fuelled and generating. 

It didn't really add up anyway. Wade realised that if Lo Pin had dug up the components of a giant nuclear bomb on his island but had then somehow fashioned the weapon's core into fuel rods for a nuclear power plant and used them to generate electricity,  then most of the people currently concerned about  the island and its buried secrets would breathe a sigh of relief and consider the problem to have gone away.  But he would still have needed to have found and dug up the bomb components, and then you would need to believe, having found the largest nuclear bomb ever built, all be it in 50 year old pieces, that the best plan that Lo Pin, a man well versed in the art of ransom, could come up with for monetising his discovery was…  developing a nuclear power plant and then using it to save on his fossil fuel bills? This seemed… unlikely.

Then there were the technical issues. Wade knew, having studied the British Atomic Weapons Establishment's top secret files, that the reason that the British had dismantled the weapon in situ was because it was never designed to be transported and could not be moved safely in one piece, and yet could not be safely dismantled either. A small cadre of brave technicians had therefore gone down the unfilled shaft with the giant bomb and dismantled the weapon in situ, moving the components as far apart as possible before positioning huge numbers of lead ingots around and between them to keep them separate, to prevent any tiny risk of accidental contact  between them leading to critical mass being achieved as the first of the concrete was poured over them.  Every single technician who volunteered to help with dismantling the weapon was dead of radiation sickness within days or weeks at most. It would seem likely that anybody attempting to dig up the buried fissile material after 50 years at the bottom of that shaft could expect, if they managed not to fatally irradiate themselves, to still release significant amounts of radiation into the atmosphere.  The telemetry did not reveal any abnormal atmospheric radioactivity, which would suggest that nobody had successfully dug anything up yet. 

Another problem would be cooling a fission reactor; although there were a couple of tiny fresh water springs on the island, more than enough to provide potable water for the crew of the old coaling station, the drinking and sanitary needs of  the large British garrison that had been based on the island in the 1950's could only be met by importing fresh water by sea. Without more plentiful fresh water on the island, Lo-Pin's additional small desalination plant notwithstanding, being certain you had enough fresh water available to cool a fission reactor in an emergency would be high risk to say the least. Sea water was so corrosive to a delicate reactor cooling system that if you needed to use that to cool your reactor down,  it would be nothing more than very expensive radioactive scrap afterwards.

Finally, Lo Pin had neither imported nor hijacked any fission reactor components either. In Wade's mind, that left only one intriguing, disturbing but vanishingly unlikely possibility; more investigation was required to confirm or eliminate it.

For now, though, Wade had but one priority. Turning on his swivel chair, he slid open a drawer marked 'Spare Kimmunicator' and pulled out an identikit clone of the one that was now missing presumed fried at the bottom of the South China Sea.  This was the first time that he had ever needed to deploy the spare he always kept ready! He pulled out the little plastic tab that was keeping the fully charge power cell insulated from its contacts, and the Kimmunicator slowly came to life, running start-up diagnostics as it tested its systems thoroughly.  While it was doing all that, Wade was reaching into another drawer of spares and pulling out a spare laser lipstick and slotting it into the secret compartment of the Kimmunicator.  Once he was satisfied that it was good to go, Wade turned his attention to the problem of getting the Kimmunicator to Hong Kong so that he could have a second attempt at delivering it to Kim. He tried to connect to Dr Director at Global Justice HQ, but she was still apparently completely off the grid, as she had been all day. Wade decided he couldn't wait for her to put in an appearance, and in the circumstances Wade was pretty sure she would have been very happy to help him do what he was about to do. Although possibly not in the way he was going to have to do it...

Wade hacked the International Parcels Priority Customer database and inserted himself as a gold tier customer, then arranged for a collection van to swing by the house urgently to pick up a Kimmunicator-sized consignment, and ship it priority overnight to Hong Kong. Then he charged the transaction to the Global Justice account...