Synopsis:
When China steals advanced artificial intelligence microchips from an unknown source and uses them to attack the USS Enterprise, Ty Stone and his partner Alexis Kane are called to find its vulnerabilities before China capitalizes on its new first-strike capability.
To defeat this new technology, Stone and Kane need to find the lab making it. But whose technology is it? No known lab can print semiconductors this detailed. Stone and Kane must hunt the globe under the ticking time bomb of war.
You can go back to earlier chapters, here: https://wyattwerne.substack.com/s/blackbird
Davidsonville, Maryland
The thousand-some-page report’s glare impaled his eyes but unraveled nothing. Ty Stone puffed his cheeks and swiped through two more pages. 3:30 am. Outside his kitchen window, a snowstorm drifted through his floodlights. His partner, Alexis Kane, would be here soon in her four-wheel-drive SUV. The planes at Joint Base Andrews could takeoff in Arctic conditions, so he’d be in the air with no sleep, no caffeine, and nothing to go on. Empty moving boxes scattered around his kitchen and dining room squawked resentment, their open mouths demanding he reconsider.
He could close the file and text his boss no to this assignment, but then he’d be back to staring at his bedroom ceiling in a stalemate with the boxes. The shadows couldn’t answer his question: why hadn’t he moved out three months ago, after his soon-to-be ex-wife called him crying that she’d slept with someone else? His mother said to take time and think things through. That the disgust and anger would fade. It was just one mistake, Ty. She told you, and she’s remorseful.
He shook his head, skimming over a few more pages. Remorseful she’d been caught, maybe. Mom was rationalizing why she stayed with Dad.
He tried to stop the movies reeling through his head. He never had a reason to distrust his ex until three months ago. She told him everything. How they met at the hotel bar, how they flirted, how she invited him back to her room, how they had sex multiple times. All because she’d seen a wrinkle, and wanted to know whether she still had it.
Now, he doubted every memory, like he was seeing his life as an outsider. Every image of her coming through the front door, late. Every work conference and girl’s weekend. His paranoia whispered about her personal trainer at the gym, who he knew was gay. Christ, he was so stupid.
His brother said to hire a private investigator, to confirm it wasn’t the first time, but why? He was supposed to be a military intelligence specialist. He aced all the Space Force training and handled classified information. It would be like a teacher humiliating him in front of class by making him read aloud every exam question he bombed. Ten years to identify red flags and he scored a zero. He didn’t need a report to know how painfully all his training and instincts failed him.
His kitchen espresso machine interrupted his careening thoughts, humming deep bass notes as it heated water.
He rubbed his eyes and set his pad on the kitchen island.
The file, Blackbird, was the Pentagon’s new Holy Grail, and as enigmatic as the reason he still lived in this house. Allegedly, it was an artificial intelligence chip that packed transistors onto silicon in a novel 3D configuration five times as dense as what was on the current market.
Five times as dense made it five times as dangerous and infinitely more valuable. The National Space Force Intelligence Center had amassed millions of pages on it. An AI-disguised voice on a burner phone yanked him out of bed a half hour ago. It told him to pack for a long flight, then whooshed NSFIC’s thousand-plus page synopsis to his pad.
Destination unknown.
NSFIC’s tome glowered at him, like the boxes, demanding he do something. He’d read the first few pages and then lost focus. Now, at 3:34 am, with his divorce settlement conference in a few days, the boxes pleaded for attention. He’d skipped to the end of the report, then reversed, skimming through random pages in between.
He didn’t need to read the report to know the Pentagon thought war was coming to Southeast Asia, or why the US hunted this technology.
The Chinese Navy had been harassing ships along trade routes for a decade or more. The People’s Liberation Army Navy disabled ship’s engines with water cannons, blinded crews with military lasers, rammed ships, and on and on. In national security circles’ vernacular, these were gray-zone tactics, or creeping annexation, because China operated in the gray zone between peace and war. They didn’t limit themselves to the sea, either. China built roads across contested areas in the India-China border, then sent military units to defend them, provoking skirmishes and troop buildups on both sides. China pressed as hard as they could, wearing down their neighbors. Like a lunchroom bully poking kids in the chest, after each successful shove, China encroached further.
In the last few years, China escalated, adopting tactics Russia used to drive the US out of the Middle East. They’d begun arming terror groups to attack shipping lanes in the South China Sea. China intended to sow chaos, and then declare a security emergency as a pretext to invade Taiwan.
The Pentagon hunted Blackbird because America didn’t have it. America outsourced manufacturing leading-edge microchips decades ago. DARPA had been experimenting with AI coordinating multiple unmanned fighter planes in a dogfight while a human supervised the battle. Blackbird’s computing power took the human out of the equation, which meant the losses in the Taiwan straight would be lopsided against America by ten, maybe twenty to one.
War was about human submission. Kill the enemy until they submit. It wouldn’t take too many youthful death masks on social media before Congress demanded America pull out of the region. China’s megalomaniac dictator would crush Taiwan like it had Hong Kong, using Blackbird’s AI capabilities to silence and censor dissent, and then jail and poison his opposition. Success in Taiwan would make him hungry for more.
America depended on strategic partnerships in Vietnam, Malaysia, Taiwan, and elsewhere in Southeast Asia to produce chips. China’s gray zone tactics caused the US to look impotent, so those partnerships looked increasingly fragile.
He gleaned none of that from the NSFIC’s magnum opus.
In fact, browsing through the report, he felt sure Blackbird didn’t exist. Every page was like a report on Bigfoot. Here are pictures. We zoomed in and investigated, but it’s not here.
Nobody knew who built it, or where. There were lots of images of warehouses, fabrication plants, and drones, but none of it, Blackbird, which would be a five-inch by five-inch colorful board, or maybe a one-foot by half-foot box.
Most damning, no evidence where Blackbird was manufactured. Making leading-edge chips required hundreds of megawatts of power, thousands of people, hundreds of thousands of cubic yards of concrete, millions of square feet of factory floor space, and billions of gallons of water a year. There would be electric lines, roads, bulldozers, trucks, parking lots, and cooling towers.
Making Blackbird would leave a planetary stain somewhere. Over three years, every suspicious structure bigger than a shed had been imaged, tagged, and engaged.
The AI voice that rousted him from bed to hunt Blackbird promised a new lead. The empty cartons on his floors rasped that every lead was a dead end, urging him to stay and pack.
The burner phone on his kitchen island vibrated, “Two minutes cafe. Roads are fine.” His partner, Alexis Kane. She meant jefe, not cafe. The voice-to-text in her SUV scrambled the word. “Wheels up in 60.”
Decision time.
Trisky, his Belgian Malinois, had been sleeping on her bed in the dining room. She sat up, ears perked, and then strolled over.
His espresso machine hissed and wheezed dark roasted willpower. Trisky sat at his feet and whimpered. She knew what the sound of a vibrating phone and the smell of oh-dark-thirty espresso meant.
Stone kneeled and let Trisky lick his face while he scratched her spine’s gray and black fur.
“I’ll miss you too. Jeff will take good care of you.”
Trisky whined disagreement. Jeff-the-almost-vet, his neighbor, watched his house and ran a dog daycare. Although, Trisky didn’t like the daycare, and this house wouldn’t be his soon.
“I can’t take you where I am going.” Although, he didn’t know that.
Trisky barked. A smart dog. She knew.
“Don’t worry. The little terror won’t be there.” Stone gave her another pet and stood to get his espresso. One of Jeff’s daycare customers had some yappy, stubborn little Yorkie groomed like a drowned rat that growled and barked at shadows. It nipped Trisky. She could have killed it. Instead, she treated it like a playful puppy. Its owner, some pampered stroller mom with thousand-dollar hair, blamed Trisky for scaring her little poo and threatened to call the police.
“We’re only here another few weeks.” Stone eyed the empty boxes lining the walls. “You only need to keep from killing that thing twenty-six more days. Then, we’ll find you a new daycare.”
Trisky moaned and lay down with her head between her paws.
“If I could take you with me, I would.” Wherever that was. The NSFIC report only identified where he wasn’t going.
Stone lifted the half-full vodka bottle next to the espresso machine. Lately, it muted the shrill audiobook of his wife describing blowing another man, crying over it, and then crying over him leaving her.
Before he poured, his front door opened up. Trisky barked and hopped to the door, tail wagging. Metal grated on metal as Kane inserted her door key.
Ty would have bet a taco Kane rolled here in sweatpants or pajamas. Instead, she stomped across his threshold in gray and black digital camo fatigues, leaving a trail of snow. White snowflakes salted her short black hair. Her ice-blue eyes surveyed the empty boxes piled along the walls, then the vodka bottle.
Stone put the vodka down and slugged his espresso.
Kane gave Trisky a pet. “You ready, jefe?”
“Not really.”
“I see that. You need help?” Her eyes flicked over the boxes.
He shook his head. “Want an espresso?”
“I’m good. I thought you’d be packed by now. Didn’t you finalize the settlement?”
“Settlement conference is Friday.”
“You’re not having cold feet, are you?”
Stone didn’t answer.
“I didn’t save your ass twice only to see you poisoned by a snake, jefe. Once a cheater—”
“Right, I know.” Kane acted like she knew more than she let on about his soon-to-be-ex, but he never asked. “Truth is, I go back and forth between leaving it all here and throwing gasoline over it and burning it to the ground. I can’t look at it. Why would I want to take it?”
Her lips curled into a smirk. “Count me in for the housewarming party. But we won’t be back for a while. Definitely not before the closing on this house.”
“I don’t need to be there. Just one more opportunity for her to badger me into counseling. You know she called my Mom last night, hoping she’d convince me not to move out?”
“You can tell me in the car. Do you need any of this stuff?”
He didn’t. He shook his head.
“So leave it here. It’ll give her hope you’re coming back.”
“Why would I do that?”
“So we can crush it later with one of those Ginsu missiles.” Kane meant the RX9, a Hellfire missile equipped with six blades that shredded terrorists inside buildings at Mach 1.3.
“Thanks for having my back through all this.”
“I always have your back. We can continue this on the road.”
Trisky sat at the front door and barked. Kane looked at Trisky panting and wagging her tail, then back to Stone. “No.”
“Message didn’t say not to.” To Trisky, Stone said, “Isn’t that right, girl? You want to go with us?”
Trisky double barked.
“They might not let her on the plane, jefe.”
“Teams take their K-9 units all the time. I not leaving her as a hostage for my marriage.”
Kane and Trisky exchanged looks. Trisky whimpered. Kane shook her head, saying, “Fine,” and then Trisky barked and panted enthusiastically.
Stone grabbed his coat on the kitchen island. “Did you read the file?”
“A who’s who of stalled careers looking for the Pentagon’s latest cryptid.”
“That doesn’t bother you?”
“My career stalled out a long time ago. That’s why I took a job as a contractor, same as you. More money, less bullshit.”
“I mean, doesn’t it bother you the file has zilch?” Stone asked, sitting on his stairs and donning his boots.
“World biggest disinformation campaign is what I thought a few hours ago. To get us to spend three years and billions of dollars—not to mention burning up top agents. All that’s missing is a meme of General Greer with big hair saying, I’m not saying it was aliens, but…”
“Disinformation was my read too. Why would they wake us in the middle of the night?” Stone laced his boots and eyed the espresso machine, thinking about a second.
“Well, they didn’t wake you, jefe.”
That was true. He’d been tossing and turning. “Wake you then—”
“Who says they woke me?”
“You had a date?” Stone stood.
Kane stood at the open front door, waving Trisky through it. “If you call sitting on a couch for three hours talking instead of kissing a date. She invited me in. Promised kissing. We never got to that, so I was ready to leave anyway.” She retrieved a key fob from her pocket and clicked it. Outside, her SUV started and hydraulics groaned, opening the rear hatch so Trisky could hop in. “The timing, I can explain. I said, thought. Enterprise is in the Pacific and was attacked a few hours ago.”
Stone eyed his expresso machine behind him, and then the snow beyond his front door. “We know who’s responsible?”
“China is responsible. No doubt about that. Some other group pulled the trigger, but they haven’t released a name yet.”
“And you think it’s Blackbird?”
“There’s video,” she said, waving at the open door. “Our satellite was jammed during the attack, but we have something from Indian Intelligence. We can watch it in the car.”
“If China has Blackbird, and they think it works, they’ll be blasting us out of the Taiwan Straight.”
“They know it works, jefe. Five dead.”
“China can’t make it. They’d have used it before now.” He stood and aimed for the blizzard.
“They stole it. Which means, we need to find it before they reverse-engineer and mass produce it.”
A whiteout blanketed Stone’s front porch. Behind him, metal scraped. Kane, inserting her key. “Leave it unlocked,” he said to the wall of snow. “I’ll text her I had to leave in a hurry and she needs to watch the place.”
Stone felt a smirk on his back. “Evil. Giving her hope. I like this plan.”
He inhaled and blew out a ragged breath. Kane crunched past him, towards her black SUV speckled in snow, a duffel bag in each hand. His duffel bags. Distracted, he’d forgotten his luggage.
He smiled. A knot in his chest untied and let him breathe. He knew he’d made this decision months ago and was just now realizing it. The duffel bags reminded him of the first time he met Kane. “Just like old times, when we deployed together.”
“We are being deployed, jefe. The war is in the Pacific this time. And if you keep up with that old-timer shit, you’ll be my first kill.”