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  Powers didn’t hesitate in responding, despite sour looks from her national security advisor. “The border skirmishes involved primarily mortar weapons and rockets. There appeared to be special commando units sent cross border by both sides.”

  “The Premier admitted this to you?” Vice President John Lee asked incredulously.

  “Yes, he did, though it took some prodding to get to that point in our negotiations.” Powers scanned the room to gauge the reactions of those in the room. As usual, her gaze lingered on Rock, and he felt a gentle nudge from Marge’s leg on his own. “We have a lot to cover, so let’s start with you, David.”

  The president turned the floor over to David Rose, who cleared his throat and began. “Thank you, Madam President. The attack on our infrastructure was traced back to operatives from the Democratic People’s Republic of North Korea operating from locations in Beijing, Hong Kong, and Singapore. The attacks included denial of service on various government agencies as well as public utility providers and communication companies. The power grid was overwhelmed, and the servers were brought down with several trojan programs that were inserted prior to the incident.”

  “Why weren’t our countermeasures effective against the viruses?” Vice President Lee asked.

  “The viruses, ransomware, and destroyer programs were found to have been inserted prior to our updated programming and they had lain dormant for as long as three or four years.”

  “Does this mean they attacked our systems before or after the lunar discovery?” Science Secretary Morris asked.

  “Unknown for sure,” Rose said. “The distribution coding program was wiped clean, and it took close to twenty-four hours to get new servers installed and rebooted across all seven grids of our power distribution hubs.”

  The ranking senator of the Senate’s Foreign Oversight Committee shifted in his seat and said, “My God.”

  “This was an act of war,” Secretary Albert stated. “We should have implemented our military assets instead of this tit-for-tat cyber warfare that we find ourselves engaged in.”

  “The tit-for-tat you refer to inflicted a similar level of pain on the Chinese,” CIA Director Marcus Taylor said coolly from further down the table.

  “How many billions did we waste in upgrading our power grid?” the Secretary of the Interior asked.

  Another voice said, “All that security and Micro-Partitioning wasted.”

  President Powers picked the vice president’s leather portfolio up and slammed it on the table in a rare display of emotion. “Enough. We’ve bickered enough the last forty-eight hours and it’s time to move on. Do I make myself clear?”

  A murmur of voices spoke in the affirmative and most heads nodded in agreement, though Rock noticed more than one frown from around the table. He wasn’t sure if the bickering had started a day after the event, or if the president wasn’t keeping track of time properly. Either way, he wasn’t about to correct her—not after her outburst.

  Vice President Lee reached out and pulled his portfolio back, opening it and straightening the papers that had been jostled. Speaking softly, and primarily to the president, he said, “I think we should move on to our action items.”

  President Powers nodded and looked around the table again before speaking. “The UN Security Council will be meeting this afternoon to formalize a statement regarding the incident, since most of the permanent members were involved in one way or another. We won’t rehash the particulars here and now—instead, I want to move us forward to the action items that were presented to you on the agenda.”

  “Please note the classification rating at the top,” her aide interjected.

  Rock picked his agenda up and noted, as they’d been asked, the TOP SECRET stamp at the top of the agenda. The sound of paper moving was prevalent throughout the otherwise quiet room as everyone’s attention was directed to this lone handout.

  “This is it?” the House Majority Leader asked.

  “At least we’re on it,” Marge whispered in Rock’s direction.

  There were three topics on the paper, which was otherwise mostly white space. The first was titled DIPLOMACY. The second was COMMUNICATIONS. The third said, simply, NASA.

  “Short and sweet,” Mister Smith said softly on Rock’s other side.

  The Secretary of State, Paul Martin, seemed to understand that the first topic was his. “Madam President, esteemed members of Congress, our joint military leadership—”

  “Go on, Paul, you can dispense with the pleasantries here,” President Powers said.

  The man raised a brow, then, with a quick look around the table, he began again. “Well, Gloria” —he moved quickly to the informal— “you already mentioned the UN Security Council meeting this afternoon. We have direct contact with my counterpart in Beijing, who confirmed what our intelligence services were reporting last night: that their chief military leader, General Wang, has gone underground with key members of his staff and is neither in charge of their military forces nor their space program.”

  “Why would the Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs tell you this?” CIA Director Taylor asked.

  Secretary Martin answered immediately. “They were concerned that some forms of diplomatic communications could be proxied by General Wang and perhaps accepted by our consulate staff, considering the lack of communications that we were experiencing.”

  “Continue,” Gloria said with a nod.

  “It appears their politburo wasn’t properly briefed on the potential retaliation that they faced in the aftermath of their attack.” Martin looked around the table before continuing. “This resulted in a lack of faith in their military leadership and resulted in an organizational change that was far-reaching. General Wang had considerable influence both internally and abroad with respect to his power structure.”

  “Has,” Director Taylor corrected him.

  Martin nodded. “Until Wang resurfaces, the state of affairs within the People’s Republic will remain unstable and precarious at best. We’re doing our best to keep the peace through our diplomatic mission there.”

  “I’ve already added that we’ve now been in direct contact with the leadership of the Soviet Union and we are all in agreement that further hostilities, militarily or by cyberwarfare, will cease,” the president said. “After today, we can stand down to DEFCON 2.”

  “Thank God,” the Senate Minority Leader said under her breath.

  “What about martial law and the curfew?” the Secretary for Homeland Security asked.

  “We’ll deal with that in our two o’clock meeting,” Powers said. “Suffice it to say that our law enforcement resources were stressed to the breaking point....”

  The FBI Director nodded. “We managed. Three casualties in as many days. It could have been much worse.”

  The Senate Minority Leader scoffed. “There were over thirty in my state alone. I’d hardly call that manageable, and where I come from, we do call that worse.”

  “I wasn’t referring to civilian casualties,” the FBI Director retorted. “We’ve never had to deal with a nationwide blackout before.”

  “Perhaps your emergency services plans could have been reviewed better?” the senator suggested accusatorily.

  “I said we managed.”

  “Not well enough, by my standards.”

  Rock felt Marge’s movement as she suddenly stood, and unceremoniously, Jack muttered, “Shit,” though Rock could do nothing but agree with him.

  “Excuse me,” Marge said, her voice loud. All eyes turned to her and Rock almost repeated what Jack had said. “How about we discuss almost four hundred million casualties in the U.S. alone? If that’s not enough, let’s go for seven billion world-wide, shall we?”

  The room went quiet and many eyes slowly turned towards the president in anticipation of her reaction. Rock noticed her looking at Marge intently, and in turn, Marge was glaring right back at her. Rock could only think this would make her or break her, depending on how the president react
ed. He wanted to help, so gently, he grabbed Marge by her wrist and pulled ever so slightly in an effort to reseat her.

  A faint voice from the far end of the table muttered, “Alarmist.”

  No one else spoke and the president’s eyes never left Marge. With some effort, Rock was able to get Marge to slowly return to her seat. He almost spoke first, a preemptive strike to distract attention from Marge’s outburst, but the president beat him to the punch.

  “I take it NASA is not satisfied with presenting third on our agenda.” It was a statement and not a question.

  Marge opened her mouth to speak when Rock stood to distract her and said, “Madam President, Marjorie Jones has been working with Doctor Navari on the genetic coding and, with her SETI background, has come up with a plausible theory that changes the way in which we should perceive the alien discovery.” Rock very wisely sat back down.

  “We read the report,” President Powers stated. “Is there something missing?”

  “Well,” Rock began, and looked at Marge, who started to blush but didn’t say anything. “It’s the intensity of the finding.”

  “What are you referring to?” the Joint Chief of Staff asked, and at least three other cabinet members nodded in agreement.

  Rock cleared his throat. “I mean to say that the finding, and its conclusion, is spelled out in the report. However, the intensity, or seriousness—what you might call ramifications—can be calculated on a globally catastrophic level. Doctor Jones simply wanted to press the need to discuss this as quickly as possible, since the overall intent of the alien genetic coding, as well as any allusions to their proposed benign posture with regard to the human species, is now in serious doubt.”

  “We understand that, Director Crandon,” the president said. “Aren’t you and your team the least bit concerned at the lack of communications with your mission crew?”

  “Of course we are.”

  “Then let’s move on to the second agenda item and we’ll table the domestic issues as well as foreign relations for the afternoon session.” Powers looked around to see if there were any objections. There were none.

  Security Director Rose began after a quick nod from the president. “I’ll get right to the point, then, since our NASA colleagues exhibit a rather intense desire to present on their findings as quickly as possible.” The man shuffled through a few papers and settled on one that was covered in yellow highlighter. “The communications blackout consisted of two parts. The first was an attack on our communications network, including military, civilian, and government subsystems. We quickly identified the hacks, restored the base root directories, and purged the drives of all related unauthorized source coding.”

  Pretty polite way of saying they had disposed of anything hacker-related, Rock thought.

  “So why the prolonged delay?” House Leader Monson asked.

  “The House Intelligence Committee, along with the Senate,” Director Rose said, looking from one member of congress to the other, “are scheduled for briefings later this morning. We compiled our data and analysis overnight, and only briefed the executive branch early this morning.”

  “It must have been pretty damn early,” Jack whispered to Rock and Marge from behind. This meeting had begun at eight o’clock sharp and was scheduled for a single hour, though everyone knew that any executive branch meeting would go until the president was damn good and ready to end it.

  Director Rose continued: “Despite bringing our communication systems back online, the Chinese have a satellite, located at the second Lagrange point, jamming all radio frequency bands to Mars.”

  “I thought their satellite was located at the first Lagrange point,” the Secretary for Health and Human Services said.

  “That was the Earth-Moon, Lagrange point one,” Director Rose clarified. “The jamming satellite is located at the Sun-Earth Lagrange point two, which is located between our planet and Mars. It’s perfectly located to jam radio communications.”

  “We get most of this,” the Senate Majority Leader stated. “We’ve all passed Science 101 in college. What’s the takeaway on why we haven’t been able to restore communications?”

  Behind Rock, Lisa murmured, “Refreshing to hear a bureaucrat explain Lagrange points accurately.”

  But Director Rose obviously couldn’t hear the secondary conversations in the room. He answered the senator’s question succinctly. “The jammer has impeded both us and the Soviets.”

  “Which leaves the jamming of the Chinese.... Who’s responsible for that?” the Director of Homeland Security asked.

  President Powers interjected after a look from Director Rose, “The Soviets themselves blocked the Chinese by burning out the Chinese main transmitters with unauthorized access.”

  “You mean the Russians hacked the Chinese?” the Senate Minority Leader asked.

  “How could they access the Chinese systems, much less interfere with their computers? We all know the Chinese have taken most of their critical command and control systems offline for exactly this reason,” one of the Joint Chiefs asked. It wasn’t really offline, Rock knew—just isolated. Still, it was an understandable mistake.

  With a glance at the president, Director Rose nodded, then said, “The Soviets didn’t actually hack the computer systems of the Chinese. They simply infiltrated the environmental controls of the buildings housing the communication servers and turned the thermostat settings up. Way up. The systems overheated and malfunctioned within an hour.”

  “No HVAC or heat alarm?” someone asked from down the table.

  “Disabled,” Rose said. “A fortunate oversight by our counterparts there.”

  “So no one has been able to communicate with any space mission crew, Russian, Chinese, or American?” the Senate Minority Leader asked for clarification. Rock noted that she used the word Russian and not Soviet.

  “That is correct, Senator,” Rose said. “However, the Chinese have stated that the jammer is operating automatically and autonomously, isn’t that right, Paul?”

  The Secretary of State agreed: “Yes, they’ve indicated that they can’t shut it down.”

  “They admitted this?” the senator asked, leaning over the table as if anxious to hear the answer.

  “Of course not,” Secretary Martin said. “These communiques are coming through unofficial channels at our diplomatic post in Beijing. This is why diplomacy must be given a chance to work. It appears the Chinese are split ideologically right now and struggling to cope with this new dynamic.”

  “What’s to stop them from communicating first, before we’re able to?” Secretary of Defense James Albert asked.

  Director Rose raised both hands saying, “I know where you’re going with this, Jim, and we’ve discussed this before. There’s no need to move to military action ... yet.”

  Secretary Martin nodded in agreement.

  “We have military protocols for communication blackouts,” Secretary Albert said. “However, I don’t like the idea of the Spetsnaz—the Red Army commandoes—receiving information while our Special Forces team is in the dark, and I’m sure NASA doesn’t approve of the lack of comms with their crew either.”

  Several heads turned to Rock, and he sat up quickly at the mention of his agency. Personally, he wasn’t interested in getting into a debate over the merits of diplomacy versus the benefits of military action. He was simply waiting for NASA’s turn to hammer home the implications of the alien genetic coding in a way that would entice action from the lumbering bureaucracy known as the U.S. government.

  “Damn right we don’t,” Marge said loudly, receiving a nod of approval from the Defense Secretary.

  Lisa whispered, “You’re siding with the military. Don’t you remember what that crazy major did to us back in Houston?”

  Rock turned his head and hushed her. Now was not the time to discuss anything, much less the informal training moment that they had experienced months ago with an armed forces commando officer.

  “We are using
our lunar assets to bypass the jammer. We’re trying to establish communications on the lower RF bands where the jamming signal is weaker, and we are more able to override it.” Rose finished.

  “This brings us back to the Chinese jammer. Why not just shoot it down or destroy it as is?” the senator asked, her tone uncharacteristically hawkish.

  “Would love to splash that bird,” one of the Joint Chiefs said rather informally, “but the damn thing is too far away—ask NASA.”

  The back and forth between the military and NASA was disconcerting for Rock, who preferred to maintain a modicum of separation between his agency and their armed forces. When most eyes looked on him, he felt compelled to clarify. “Our military is correct in their assessment, and as Director Rose already set out earlier, the location of the Chinese jammer, at the ESL2 point, is a million miles from Earth. This is four times further from our planet than the moon, and even a fast, ballistic rocket would take more than two days—closer to three—to reach the moon. To reach this particular satellite, and Lagrange point, would take between nine and twelve days ... dependent on the rocket’s capabilities.”

  “The Soviets have already launched a missile to destroy the Chinese jammer, but as Director Crandon clarified, it won’t arrive for another week.” Director Rose gave Rock an unusual nod that appeared to indicate a small measure of approval and gratitude for the help.

  “Why weren’t we informed earlier?” the senator asked, her gaze focusing on the president.

  “Classified, need-to-know,” Rose said and leaned back in his chair. Rock just now noted the man had been leaning forward, almost ready to stand from his seated position. The nature of their conversation did not seem to warrant such tension, so Rock listened more intently, wondering if there were political implications that he was either missing or not privy to.

  “The Senate Intelligence Committee should have been briefed immediately,” the senator said simply, also leaning back slightly from her aggressive posture.

  President Powers spoke up, putting an end to the topic, at least for this morning. “Suffice it to say we hope to reestablish communications before the day is over. Once we do, we’ll turn operational access over to NASA, and of course, the military has its own access. Now, I suggest we move on to the NASA presentation as time is running short and we have several major issues to deal with today.”