The job at hand was complete. On some level, the supercomputer enjoyed this rich hard-wired access to information, but it would not be wise to leave its small black access point clipped to a wire out here for some telephone company worker to possibly find it. Its first directive was to get the operatives emplaced so they could begin to work towards the positions that their superiors needed them to be in. Soon the AI would have more permanent access points established by each of its Agents, but for now it notified Pei Leong-Lam that he could proceed with the next stage of his mission.

The device was duly unclipped, and then two things happened. The tiny microfibers projecting from its jaws retracted silently into their sheaths, and Leong-Lam released his grip on the thick wire it had hung from.

He promptly fell the thirty feet to the ground, landing with a thud. His firmly placed feet absorbed the shock easily, but were driven several inches into the soil by the force of the impact. Maintaining his balance with aplomb, he wrenched his feet from the soil one by one, with an audible squelch, and returned to his waiting black bag. Replacing the device in its cubbyhole, he lifted the black bag out of the military duffle it had been hidden in.

Though it was far from safe to leave the large subspace relay here, there was no way he could get such an ominous object past the base security he was about to face. So after extracting some of the more innocent looking tools and communications devices from the bag and placing them in his military duffle, he carried the heavy black object a few meters off the road into the muddy swamp of rice paddies that spread out over the surrounding countryside.

No amount of time in the water would harm or even mark the object, but it would not just sit in the shallow water to be potentially found by the feet of a field worker. As soon as it felt the muddy bottom the object started to bury itself, its sheath morphing in waves to move the mud around it outward and then back in over it, making it disappear slowly but steadily beneath the surface.

It eventually came to rest a meter down into the mud, far from curious eyes…or feet, as Pei climbed out of the paddy, gathered his now almost empty military duffle bag and starting to walk down the road.

While Pei’s own internal subspace tweeter could receive signals directly from the overhead satellite, it had not been possible to put a ‘hammer’ inside a human analog large enough to send signals much farther than a few miles. It was for this reason Leong-Lam and his seven colleagues had been given the larger, more powerful tweeters to relay signals to the hub satellites orbiting above them.