Net Force--Kill Chain by Jerome Preisler (e book reader txt) 📕

“Just a bit of target practice. Why do you sound pissed?”

Kai stared at him. “We don’t need the racket,” he said, and left it at that. One hand on the wheel, he motioned toward an inlet on the north side of Chacagua. It was calm and green and narrow, running between the island and a high, sheer rock face across the water.

“That’s where we’ll pull in,” he said.

“Seems quiet enough.”

“And protected. Look at that cliff. It’s a fucking beast.”

It was, Kai thought. Bare, solid bedrock, and rearing hundreds of feet out of the inlet. If they landed on the island right there, they wouldn’t have to worry about anyone spotting them from the opposite shore. There was nothing on that cliff but the birds.

He looked out over the water. They were a quarter mile out. His brother gave the wheel a slight right turn, angling the bow away from the shell beach dead ahead, and toward the inlet’s mouth.

“We’ll rec out a mooring and then get the boat tied up,” he said. “You ready?”

Kai nodded.

“Ready, willing, and able,” he said.

Chapter Seven

Chacagua Island

April 14, 2024

“Bry, this is incredible,” Natasha said when he’d finished talking. “It’s like your mom’s project is a next-level adaptation for life on earth. Plant intelligence meets artificial intelligence meets human intelligence.”

He nodded. “She calls it unified intelligence,” he said. “They installed a beta version of her NICAST software at the Caribou weather station. It models atmospheric changes based on imperceptible changes in plant behavior. But there isn’t a one-to-one correlation. You can’t just say, ‘The trees are doing this, so the weather’s going to do that.’ Her AI’s calculus fills in the gaps.”

“Alice’s algorithm, huh?” Natasha said.

Bryan nodded, looking proud. “That’s kind of what they call it.”

“Seriously?”

“Yeah,” he said. “It’ll change how they forecast weather. Make it more accurate than ever before. And save lives.”

Natasha stood there in the shadow of Rhea’s outspread branches. As she’d listened to him, her five senses had somehow spun together, merged into a perceptual ball. Rhea’s bark was the color/taste of strong, dark coffee. The pine cones on the ground, walnuts and butter. A tuft of mossy earth to her right had a brown-caramel flavor/smell. The tiny insects flitting around her had faint traces of light/taste around them...lemon yellow, strawberry red, peppery orange.

It was like that wherever she looked. And not only where she looked. She could hear/feel the rhythmic lapping of the bay tide on her chin, the sound lacing the air with lavender. She heard/saw/felt the chirping of birds as bright snaps of blue tickling her neck. The chitter of squirrels in the trees was a flinty-brown roughness on her arms.

She glanced upward, studying the tree’s thick, high limbs. The uppermost ones were easily 150 feet above the ground, deep green through a curtain of pink.

And Bryan...

Bryan was mostly amber and sweet, like warm honey. But there were also traces of emerald and fuchsia. The colors made her feel calm, safe, confident.

It was all strange and trippy but somehow also perfectly normal...and not even slightly overwhelming, like at Fallout the other night. It was as if a switch had been tripped inside her.

She wondered if Chacagua was somehow part of it. On some deep, instinctive level, she was convinced it was. She wanted to walk around the island and take it all in.

“Tasha...”

“Yeah?”

“Is anything wrong?”

“Why do you ask?”

“I don’t know.” He shrugged. “You’re being kind of quiet.”

She smiled. “I’m all right, Bry,” she said. “Righter than I’ve felt in a long time.”

He stood there looking at her for a second, then nodded his head. “There are some other things I want to show you,” he said. “Then we should make camp for the night.”

She made an after-you gesture. “Show away.”

They got started, Natasha once again falling back a little as he threaded along between the trees. But they had gone less than ten yards up the slender trail before she abruptly paused behind him. A second later, he stopped too.

She cocked her head to one side, listening. The noise was coming from back toward the water. “Hear that?”

He nodded. “Sounds like a boat.”

She listened some more. Considering that they were on an island with no roads for cars, the low, throbbing buzz would have been hard to mistake for anything else. And while she hardly knew enough about boats to assume she could tell one from another just by its engine noise, she nevertheless thought she recognized it.

She turned to Bryan. “I could be wrong, but—”

“I think it’s the Big Dipper,” he said, taking the words right out of her mouth.

A hundred miles north at NWS Caribou, Bill Caldwell was in the Operations Room with hydrologist Bernadine Mills, both of them looking up at the bank of weather monitors mounted near the ceiling.

Specifically the one under the sign that read CHACAGUA ESOP ML/DL NICAST.

Which was now zoomed in on the island.

“Check it out, Bernie,” he said. “Not the barometric drop. That on its own wouldn’t worry me.”

He moved his fingers, using his wearable controller to add a data overlay to the map. Mills stared up at it, studying the rapidly changing numbers.

“The trees are stirred up,” she said. “The whole social network’s in a messaging frenzy.”

Which were words she once would not have ever, ever imagined leaving her lips. Not in a million years.

It was an understatement to say Mills had been reluctant to accept Alice Ferago’s tree-centric weather-forecast model, dubbed the Alice Algo by her colleagues. Just eighteen months earlier, in fact, she had testily called the idea of making trees watchdogs of the weather “greenie pygmy mouse shit” at a meeting with Caldwell and those same colleagues at the station—insisting that the research behind it was too lightweight to even qualify as respectably solid bullshit.

But that was before Alice scored a federal grant and NOAA permission to run the Caribou trials. As a scientist, Mills went where the evidence led, and the information generated by the Chacagua Experiment—the pinpoint accuracy of