Trilobyte by J.L. Bourne

Author:J.L. Bourne [Bourne, J.L.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: JL Bourne
Published: 2020-06-30T22:00:00+00:00

With the sub a few days out from the terminal, Hanover started making plans. Every day since my arrival, I’d sat in on the briefings. The intel we were getting came in via voice on shortwave. Information moved very slowly.

When I was a lot younger and faster, the EM War had brought the world to its technological knees. It only took an hour for the Chinese to knock our GPS and reconnaissance satellites out of the sky, crippling most of our fighters and communications, and strangling our drone bandwidth. Space was rendered unusable from all the battle debris. The world lost navigation, power, digital communication, everything. I still remember hearing about the teams sent out to raid government-surplus stockpiles of Vietnam-era comm equipment. Shit that didn’t need a satellite to talk over the horizon.

The only reason I bring this up is for the younger intel types—the EM War taught us a lesson about technology. If not for that lesson, we’d be in even worse shape than we are at the moment. We figured things out back then. We figured out how to function with lower technology. My parents went six months without power. Some people went longer. We lost 10 percent of the population while our industrial base figured out how to actually make things with lathes again.

The EM War was devastating to life and wealth, but in the end, we recovered. We rebuilt our grid to be stronger and decentralized. We no longer relied fully on satellites orbiting hundreds of miles above the Earth in the harsh blackness of space to hold the keys to our military and economic might.

I’m trying to speak to the younger people reading this like my parents spoke to me about the September eleventh attacks. Just like back then, we adapted to the situation. The government funded research into replacing critical space-based assets with intelligent unmanned blimps. A joint military-and-private-sector research facility was set up in Lakehurst, New Jersey, of all places. After initial proof of concept, telecommunications companies quickly warmed up to cheap, replaceable blimps that could stay airborne high above commercial air traffic for a decade, powered by solar in the beginning but later by massive breakthroughs in gravity-point energy collection.

We could have not only survived a second EM War, we could have decimated the enemy quickly.

My grandfather was right when he said, “We’re always training to fight the last war.”

We hadn’t expected the Chinese to poke out our eyes back then, but it still pales in comparison to the sucker punch we got from our own creations. I’ll say this, there aren’t too many Terminator jokes being told in the hallways and around the water coolers of Mount Weather these days.

Back to what happened at the terminal. Hanover gave the order to take operational and tactical control of the USS Indiana (SSN-789). At first, the captain refused to acknowledge his authority until Hanover read her the US Code and a few classified directives.

In the days prior to the sub’s arrival, Hanover pulled me into his office, which overlooked the Atlantic Ocean and the terminal’s helicopter pad.

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