The Breach - Ghost Country - Deep Sky

it would be precisely targetable. You could influence a few blocks. Or a whole city. Or an area much, much larger than that.”
    No one said anything. They waited.
    “So we gave her the go-ahead,” Garner said. “Gave her access to everything we had. She dove into it. Lived and breathed it. She came back before the committee six months later. With a blueprint.”
    “Did anyone build it?” Paige said.
    “Nope.”
    Paige looked confused. “Why not?”
    “Because it was still a long shot. Even with a good blueprint there’s trial and error, details to hammer out in the prototype. That can be expensive even if you’re modifying a Humvee. For a satellite, tack on a couple zeroes.”
    “Come on,” Travis said. “The hubcaps on the stealth bomber probably cost a million apiece. Since when does the Pentagon get sticker shock?”
    Garner smiled. “There’s another reason, but it’s even less believable.” He considered how to frame it. “It’s like this. In the early days, when everyone was looking for a straightforward way to weaponize this technology, there was an urgency to figure it out. Get it before the other guys. That makes sense if you think there’s some big, obvious solution out there, the kind that everyone will eventually stumble onto. But Audra’s idea wasn’t like that. It was obscure as hell, based on an overlap of knowledge probably no one but she had. There was a good chance that nobody else in the world would ever come up with it. But they’d be more than happy to copy ours, if we went ahead with the project. You hear people talk about the atomic genie coming out of the bottle in 1945. Like if we didn’t let it out, nobody ever would have. It’s probably not true. Fission’s not exactly an unheard-of concept. But Audra’s satellite design was. And we just thought… why do it? Why bring the world into an age defined by something like this? So we sat on it. Locked the design away. Audra understood, though I’m sure she was disappointed. She got out of the design game after that. Went off to Harvard, got her other doctorate in philosophy, got into relief work. Married Finn. I didn’t hear about her again until 1995, when that little dustup happened with the paper those two tried to publish.”
    Paige had been looking at the floor. She looked up now. “Did you see a copy of it?”
    Garner shook his head. “Shredded and burned before it could make the rounds. I had a pretty good guess what it said, though. Maybe you can guess it, now.”
    Travis thought of what they’d just learned. Tried to put it in the context of Finn and Audra’s lives, in 1995—just back from Rwanda, permanently burned out on their life’s work.
    “Holy shit,” Travis said. “They wanted to use that kind of satellite technology on places like Rwanda. That’s it, isn’t it? If you had control over how strongly it affected people, you could do that. Target the whole region with some minimal exposure, something that creates the effect of a mild high, euphoria, whatever, just to quiet everything down. Sedate the hell out of the place until—what, a peacekeeping force could go in and get control? The peacekeepers would be affected too, but maybe with the right training to anticipate it…”
    He trailed off, thinking it over. Considering the implications. He saw Garner nodding.
    “My assumption at the time,” Garner said. “Point for point. I’m sure they glossed over the specifics of how it worked—revealing those would be treason—but yes, I imagine they advocated something very close to what you’re talking about.”
    Travis looked again at Paige and Bethany. Wondered if they were thinking the same thing he was. He guessed they were.
    “It doesn’t actually sound like a bad idea,” Travis said.
    Garner offered another smile. “No. It doesn’t. Not if all you did with it was stop genocides. But how long would that last? And think about it from a human-rights perspective. A right-to-privacy perspective. A global superpower using satellites to screw with people’s heads. It’s right out of Orwell. Is it any wonder Audra’s father saw his career flash before his eyes when he heard about it? What politician wants his name within a mile of a thing like that?”
    “So that’s it, then,” Paige said. She looked around at each person in the room, as if surprised the answer had dropped so neatly into their laps. “That’s Umbra. This technology must actually exist by now, and in a few months