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

its local weather predictions—had converted her into a devout believer.

“I want you to take a look at something,” Caldwell said. “Then tell me what you make of it.”

He wriggled his fingers, and the Chacagua map came to resemble a radioactive isotope scan of the human circulatory system, with glowing, interconnected veins, arteries, and capillaries.

Mills knew it was a view of the island’s subterranean mycorrhizal network. And it was crackling.

She was not a botanist. She was not a biologist. She was a hydrologist. By training and inclination, she knew about water. Its movement, its properties, its distribution.

But she had learned about the trees. Over the past year and a half, she had learned a great deal.

She brought her attention to the numbers onscreen. Watched them with widening eyes. There were multiple counters with readouts that had only recently become meaningful and germane to her.

Semiochemical Release rate: Acetophenon: 0.77. (Z) 2-Hexen-1-OL: 0.50. (E) 2-Hexen-1-OL: 0.50 Verbenone: 0.57

“It isn’t just the messaging,” she said. “They’re throwing off stress hormones left and right.”

He nodded. “Right before you got here, I was looking at real-time pitch and sap flow maps,” he said. “Overall, those tree hormones are flying across the island. And as that would lead us to expect, the sugars are really pumping through their phloem tissues. It’s like looking into the bloodstream of a football team in the end zone. Linemen, backs, receivers. Thirty seconds on the clock, and they need a touchdown to win.” He paused. “But here’s the rub.”

His fingers wagged. The map transitioned again, bringing the northeast quadrant of Chacagua into large detail. It encompassed the part of the island facing Eagle Cliff across the inlet and rounding into its eastern, seaward shore.

The counters looked like this: Semiochemical Release rate: Acetophenon: 0.95. (Z) 2-Hexen-1-OL: 0.70. (E) 2-Hexen-1-OL: 0.72 Verbenone: 0.93

She shook her head. Those elevated hormone production levels were far beyond what she saw in the other quadrants. The sort of numbers that would normally indicate a major gale was brewing north of the island.

“What’s causing all the commotion?” she said. “It can’t be the nor’easter we’ve been keeping tabs on. That’s already moving off from the Gulf into the Atlantic. I checked the sat data a few hours ag—”

She cut herself off. The problem with traditional forecasting was that it relied primarily on information transmitted by two classes of satellites. A geosynchronous satellite hung in space at a stationary altitude of 22,500 miles above Earth. The newer polar orbitals flew much closer, within five hundred miles of the planet, passing over both poles with every twelve-hour revolution. Because of their lower orbits, the polar orbitals were able to relay more detailed information about rain, wind, and temperature near the planet’s surface.

Still, five hundred miles was five hundred miles. The distance, say, between Manhattan and Calico Bay, Maine. While satellites were very good at long-range forecasting models, many violent storms evolved within a few hours or even minutes. The shorter their evolutionary cycle, the harder they were to predict. The harder they were to predict, the more dangerous they became to those in their immediate path.

For a fisherman or lobsterman on Calico Bay, an accurate local forecast was serious business. It might be the difference between a productive day’s harvest or getting capsized and sunk by a rogue wave. It could give them rapid early warning of a blinding sea fog or an offshore thunderstorm roiling with hail, high wind, and deadly waterspouts.

The whole point of the Chacagua Experiment was to use the island’s largely undisturbed, millennia-old forest to detect building weather events too localized for satellites to pick up. To turn the forest itself into an advanced, first-alert nowcasting system. Its Alice Algo took all the data gathered from the island’s trees and other plants, mathematically put it together with old-school values gathered from the satellites, and drew an aggregate forecast for the area.

As Mills had acknowledged these past few months—cussing, kicking, and screaming all the way—it was a revolutionary method. A game changer in its up-to-the-minute reliability, far and away surpassing any forecasts produced by conventional means.

All this shot through her mind in the space of ten seconds. Then she turned to Caldwell.

“Bill,” she said. “What’s the Alice Algo showing us?”

“One second,” he said. “Again, I want you to tell me.”

He moved his mouse arrow into the Atlantic waters south of the Canadian border, zoomed in on the mouth of the Bay of Fundy. Which both of them—and Mills in particular—knew was among the wildest marine bodies on earth, its incoming tides funneling 160 billion tons of water between giant, craggy basalt cliffs to pound them with restless, whipping, rearing, roaring, crashing waves.

On an average day.

Mills studied the separate satellite-Chacagua readings, then the Alice Algo’s combined forecast, unconsciously raising a hand to her mouth as the gravity of it sank in.

“We’re getting hit with a goddamned bomb cyclone,” she said.

Tai brought the lobster boat up to the island in the long shadow of the cliff and killed the engine. As he left the wheel to drop his bow anchor, his brother went below and found a battered, heavy old wooden boarding ramp. Lugging it topside, he laid it back from the stern and went ashore with a couple of lines.

The bog at the waterline offered nothing in the way of a mooring, so Kai looped a rope over each shoulder and slogged uphill to drier ground. At the forest’s edge, he wrapped one around a tree trunk, did the same with the other, and tugged both a few times to confirm they were secure.

In the meantime, Kai had squished through the mud in his waders and climbed the bank. He was all geared up, wearing a waist pack with a couple of pockets for water bottles, his long gun in a sling bag on his back, and the jammer in its case over his right shoulder. His binocs were hanging out over his jacket.

“Any sign of the kayak?” he asked.

Kai shook his head no.

Tai considered a minute.