G. Fields - Under Vanishing Skies

“Hey Helen, any food left?”

William and I entered the kitchen followed by a rain-soaked Gurkha. Helen turned and I watched her cheerful smile dissolve.

“Who’s this then?” She asked.

“This is Pun, he’s the guest that I mentioned in the message.”

She looked from me to Pun to me and then back to Pun again. Her hands rested on her hips and she said, “Bless me, you’re soaking wet… Pun is it?”

He didn’t respond. He just stood there.

“Well, I can see that Aron didn’t do a very good job of caring for his guest. Let’s get you some towels.” She went over to a cabinet, opened the door, and pulled out a stack of towels.

“I tried,” I said. “But he preferred hanging out in the rain.”

“Nonsense,” Helen said bringing the towels to the Gurkha. “Here, dry yourself off before you catch a cold.”

I looked at Pun. He stared at Helen and then at the towels. He seemed conflicted.

“Come on. Start drying off or I’ll dry you off myself. I can do it. I had six boys you know, all of them bigger than you.” She pushed the towels into his arms.

He took them, but didn’t move. So Helen grabbed the towel on the top of the stack and started to dry his face. “Honestly,” she said. “A grown man like you acting like a child.”

He reached out and grabbed her by the wrist. The stack of towels wobbled in his other hand. I looked around the kitchen. My eyes fell on the meat cleaver hanging on the side of the butcher’s block. I was just about to make a move for it when Pun said, “Thank you, miss. It is very kind of you, but I will dry myself.” He took the towel from her and started to mop his face.

I took several breaths to calm myself.

“That’s a good boy,” Helen said, giving me a sideways glance. “And I’ll go pour a nice cup of soup for each of you. That’s the trick for a rainy day… hot soup.”

We ate at the small table in the kitchen. I tried telling myself that he was just following orders, but it was hard… especially with him staring at me all the time.

Helen did most of the talking. We listened. Helen asked Pun a few questions. At first he didn’t talk, but he was smart enough to answer when she repeated her questions. Helen was a force of nature equal to or greater than the mountain of a man sitting next to her.

She got him to tell her where he was from. I was right. He was from Malaysia. He’d been a Gurkha since he was in his twenties. He was part of an elite team that protected a Sri Lankan government minister. He came to the Maldives with the group of refugees that had settled on Hanikada. The minister died and so Pun joined the MDF and took a vow to protect the inhabitants of the Maldives. That was pretty much all the information she got out of him.

When we finished our meal, we thanked Helen and walked back to the hut. Pun transformed back into his old quiet self. We passed one of the empty huts that Helen had recommended for Pun. I pointed it out, but he followed us back to my hut. William and I went inside. Pun took his post in front of the door.

I checked my watch. It read 8:00 p.m. Michio would be here soon. I had to figure out some way to ditch Pun. It would come to me. But until it did, William and I kept trying to connect to the Chinese satellite.

The storm had subsided, but the clouds were still pretty thick. Even if the clouds weren’t blocking our signal, there was no guarantee that we could connect to the computer. It was a long shot at best.

I looked over at William. He was lying flat on his back and staring up at the ceiling. I could tell that he was frustrated.

“Let’s try the sequence again,” I said.

“Why? It’s still raining.”

I switched screens on the data mat, pulled up the satellite console, and clicked on the tab titled Communications. A new screen appeared with a window that listed the available communication channels. There were only two. One was the Single Frequency Laser (SFL) channel, which had been the industry standard for all satellite communication channels since 2037. The other was the Advanced Extremely High Frequency (AEHF) channel, the one that Jin had used to hack into the satellite.

I clicked on the AEHF channel and another window opened. It displayed more detail. At the top of the screen was a SCAN button. I pressed it for the twentieth time tonight and was presented with the same data entry screen. By now, I had the latitude and longitude of the Chinese quantum computer memorized. I entered the data into the respective fields and pressed the button. As I waited for the CANNOT CONNECT error, I thought about Shannon again. I wondered how she was holding up.

Suddenly, a message appeared.

CONNECTION ESTABLISHED.

“Holy shit, we’re in.”

“Really?” William jumped up from his bed and looked over my shoulder.

“Well, that’s what it says.” I pinged the satellite from my data mat and watched as successful data packets scrolled down the screen. “Yup, we’re in.”

William reached for my data mat, but I pulled it away. “Hold on, cowboy. Go and get your data mat and give me the name of the quantum computer so we can see if we can connect to it too.”

He jumped off my bed and grabbed his data mat. A few seconds later he said, “Weishan. It’s spelled W-E-I-S-H-A-N.”

I used the satellite to scan for available nodes and the only one that appeared was WEISHAN. This was a lot easier than I thought it would be. I pressed the CONNECT button and waited. A second later, the following message appeared on my screen:

UNABLE TO CONNECT

“I don’t get it,” William said. “Why can’t you connect to the computer? It’s right there.”

I ran my hand through my hair and said, “I don’t know. The computer isn’t recognizing the commands that I’m sending. I think it’s using some weird kind of command language that I don’t know. Here, watch.”

I clicked WEISHAN and a new screen opened. It had a user name and password field, so I entered the ones that were next to WEISHAN on the Jin spreadsheet. Below that were four other fields without any labels. “These fields are the problem. I think it wants routing strings, but the fields won’t accept IPPR network routes.”

“What’s that?” William asked.

“IPPR? It stands for Intelligent Prioritized Packet Routing. It was the standard network protocol before the storm. The one we use for the IICN is similar, but it’s not as sophisticated. The standard routing strings for the IPPR are twenty-four characters and these fields only accept sixteen.” I tossed the data mat onto the bed next to me. “We’re so goddammed close.”

Why the hell would Jin leave us all the login credentials for the computer, but not for the fucking routing strings?

I got up and walked to the window. Water rippled on the glass against a backdrop of blackness. Somewhere out there Shannon was—no! I slammed my hand against the wall. I wasn’t going there.

“Don’t worry, Aron. We’ll figure out how to connect to the computer.”

I turned my head and saw the concern in William’s eyes. He still didn’t know about Shannon or what I’d promised to do tonight.

“Sorry. It’s not about the computer.”

He looked puzzled and said, “Then what is it?”

“Do you remember that girl, the one that came over that day?”

He smiled and said, “You mean your girlfriend ?”

“I told you she wasn’t… yeah okay… my girlfriend. After she left that day, her boat was—”