With Zhang Tianshen gone and Old Li on his way to find Wang Gen, Shen Cong put Zhang Youhai to use.
“Go through the scavengers. Ask if anyone has broken electronics — computers, anything with components. Food in exchange.”
He didn’t expect much. These were people who’d been paying tribute on everything they found just to eat. The likelihood of useful electronics surviving in their possession was low.
Zhang Youhai came back in ten minutes with five people.
A Shenzhou laptop. Two tablets. A smart TV, screen cracked. Several phones. A digital camera. A printer with a missing paper tray. Three smartwatches. And, from a particularly resourceful individual, an Asus home router in reasonably intact condition.
The sellers were anxious and polite and trying to read whether food meant more or less than what they’d been hoping for.
Shen Cong sat at the cargo section’s rear door and worked through the devices methodically. For each one: connect power, test for function, assess which components were salvageable for Vajra’s repair needs, make an offer.
Most of the devices showed corrosion well beyond what their age should have produced. The laptops in particular had keyboard surfaces that had oxidized in ways that would have taken years under normal exposure conditions, but clearly hadn’t.
He noted it. Another data point in the metal-Activity connection he hadn’t fully worked out.
His own equipment had survived in better condition. The Vajra Active envelope as a protective barrier — a possible explanation, unconfirmed, but consistent with what he’d observed.
“Two packs of compressed ration biscuits,” he told the Shenzhou laptop’s owner. “Or a kilogram of flour.”
“Just two packs?”
He showed the packaging — the military supply logo, the caloric density numbers on the label. “Enough for two days. Real military ration stock.”
The seller took the biscuits and thanked him three times.
Zhang Youhai managed the queue. Ma Laosan stood nearby, watching, apparently having appointed himself to a role nobody had assigned him.
The woman and her child arrived in the middle of the third transaction.
Zhang Youhai moved to intercept before she reached the vehicle — reading the room, positioning himself as intermediary, which was something he did naturally and that Shen Cong found useful without having asked for it.
“Liu Fang. What are you doing here?”
“I need to talk to the Huang boss.”
Shen Cong looked at her from the vehicle’s rear door. Late thirties, the particular thinness that came from months of inadequate food, a boy of about ten holding her hand. The same woman Wang Dong’s group had circled earlier.
“What is it?”
“Are you going into the main district? Could you take us? My husband is in Juchao District proper — he was there when the disaster hit—”
“No.”
“I can pay. My husband is the director of Kaixin Real Estate, he has resources—”
“No.”
He closed the rear door.
She knocked on it. He heard Zhang Youhai trying to explain something, and then she was talking again — about a truck full of electronics, about just sending her son, about her husband waiting.
He stayed inside.
The world was what it was. He couldn’t carry everyone who had a good reason to want to be somewhere else. He had a finite vehicle, a finite mission, and a set of responsibilities that began and ended with himself. He didn’t feel good about it and he didn’t feel bad about it. He noted that he’d made the right call for the wrong reasons and the right call for the right reasons simultaneously, and that the outcome was the same either way, and moved on.
Zhang Youhai eventually guided her back toward the main scavenger area.
The router was the interesting item.
Asus, top-of-the-line home model, retail price over ten thousand yuan. The kind of unit that competed with commercial-grade installations on signal strength and penetration. Rated effective range of over 400 meters in optimal conditions.
He powered it on.
Corroded on the exterior. Running fine on startup.
He sat with it for a moment and thought through the communications architecture.
The problem he’d been living with: the integrated WiFi hotspot on Vajra’s internal network had a twenty-meter range under current conditions. Enough to let him sit in the cargo section and access the driver’s-seat display feeds via his laptop — useful, but trivially useful, since twenty meters was one sprint.
What he needed was operational separation. If he could get 200 meters of reliable signal, he could park Vajra at the edge of a situation and go in on foot without losing situational awareness. He could monitor the cameras, receive radar data, communicate with the vehicle’s systems while he was physically distant from it.
At 200 meters, the drone became useful again.
The DJI Phantom 8’s 5.8GHz communication module had been his biggest equipment disappointment since the apocalypse — the radiation environment had killed its beyond-visual-range satellite linking, and the direct transmission had been limited to fifteen meters. But the 5.8GHz module was adjustable, and the router’s communication hardware was sophisticated enough to support the kind of band exploration he needed.
He wasn’t trying to get to the satellite systems. He was trying to find a band in the local electromagnetic environment that the radiation hadn’t saturated — a specific frequency window that would carry signal 200 meters in the post-apocalypse conditions.
The Eastern Theater radio signal had proven such windows existed. He’d received intelligible content from the direction of Nanjing on a specific band, and the signal had never repeated because it was probably jumping frequencies to avoid exactly the kind of saturation that had killed everything else.
If he could find one of those windows and route the router’s output through it — and route the drone’s communication module through the router — he’d have the 200 meters he needed.
At 200 meters of drone altitude, the camera’s native telephoto capability would cover a theoretical viewing distance of 20 kilometers. Adjusted for atmosphere and lens limitations: a reliable 10 kilometers of clear observation.
City south to Yinping was five kilometers.
The entire Juchao District fit inside a ten-kilometer radius from any position in the center.
If I can get the drone working at 200 meters, I can see everything.
He hadn’t been able to look at a wall and know what was behind it since the infrared system went down in the flood. Visual surveillance at this range would be qualitatively different from anything he’d had since then.
He set the router next to the drone controller on the workbench, pulled up the relevant technical documentation from his drive collection, and started reading about frequency band analysis and module reconfiguration.
Zhang Youhai knocked on the side of the vehicle.
“Elder Brother Ming — Old Li is back.”
(End of Chapter 62)