by Ed Hurst
Chapter 12
Dax sat on the first seat next to the door of the commander’s office at the cyber command headquarters.
He had resigned himself to the worst fate and was now quite relaxed. Still, it caught him off guard when a tall, stern looking colonel came down the hallway toward him. Dax jumped to his feet and stood to attention.
The man paused to glance at the lieutenant standing next to his office door. “Brood, follow me!” The stentorian baritone voice carried a genuine physical impact, but Dax obeyed promptly.
They passed through a reception area. The colonel slowed to grab some papers from the top tray on one corner, ironic for an advanced cyber unit. He then proceeded apace through another office. Out of the corner of his eye, Dax noted this was the major’s desk, judging by the nameplate. The colonel drove quickly through the open door and planted himself in the plush chair behind a large desk.
Dax stood at attention just inside the doorway.
“Close the door, Lieutenant and report!”
“Sir!” Dax executed all the precise and proper movements and saluted, announcing himself according to protocol.
The commander was staring at a small computer display on his desk. After a few seconds he absently returned the salute, which permitted Dax to drop his. He glanced up and stared holes in Dax’s chest.
He demanded, “What do you know about my adjutant’s disappearance?”
Dax was prepared. Drawing in a breath he opened his mouth but never got a word out.
“Don’t answer that! What the hell were you doing leaving the O-Club in such unprofessional haste?”
Dax told the truth. He started with, “He challenged me, Sir…”
“You two were engaged in a foot race? He always was a damn loon!”
The silence hung thick in the air.
Suddenly his voice was almost gentle. “Good riddance. We’ve got a ton of work to do and I need an adjutant. Hell, most of his job is just routine when he bothered to do it. If half of what I’ve heard about you and your technical expertise is true, all you need is a way to get into his computer and take over. You are now my acting adjutant. Can you crack into his system? He broke all the rules keeping things encrypted that were standard daily business.”
Dax hardly knew what to say. “Shall I link his system to your display once I’m in, Sir?”
The old man just laughed and waved him away. Dax still saluted and walked back into the adjutant’s office. With the previous user dead, he knew he could get AI to break all the encryption on demand. It took only a few minutes and Dax requested a summary of the contents. While there had been no plutocrat traffic, of course, there were lots of notations regarding the major’s plans in response to requirements from his people. AI made it a point to highlight clear evidence of planning for the murder of his brother’s linguistics teacher.
At this point, nothing surprised him. He linked the documentation to the colonel’s display and stood in the doorway to announce. “Sir, it’s all ready for your review.”
The old man was still rather loud, but frankly jovial. “We can’t keep working this way, Brood. Drop the protocol down a few notches. Save it for when we have company. Oh, and good work, Son.”
The man began stroking his display and let out the occasional “hmmm”. After a bit, he looked up at Dax. “You know about his connections?”
Dax summarized the conversation they had, including the order to keep it secret. He had decided this colonel was well worth all the loyalty he could muster. Something in the back of his mind decided here was the other person’s saddle he was to ride.
“He took you into his confidence, as it were? Smart of you not to take his word on that. I’m not going to gum things up by warning you about his family, but I’m pretty sure you got him figured out. Well, the rest of his kind are even nastier,” he said with all seriousness.
He went on. “You’ve already done me more good in just an hour than that bastard gave me in three years. There’s a thousand rumors about The Brotherhood and all their secret powers. Yet here you are prepared to let us in on all of that stuff. Your predecessor was obsessed about keeping it all secret. Tell me the truth, Son, where are your loyalties here?”
Dax grinned and shook his head at the wild nonsense. “Sir, I fully realize my people are an enigma, but it’s not intentional. We’ve always been eager to explain what we have learned, but most people were never able to swallow the foundation on which it was all built. In terms of professional ambition, my sole purpose here is to make sure that at least some of the military technicians understand. Soon enough you’ll have lots of technicians cracking encryption as I just did.”
“That would be a mixed blessing,” the colonel murmured.
Dax continued. “We have always felt openness was a virtue. You should expect I’ll do what I can to protect my family, but my duties are here. Test me, Sir. My whole welfare rests on making you look like a genius.”
The colonel stared at him for a moment, and then his eyes slowly drifted to the corner of his desk. “Things are going crazy in ways even I don’t understand right now. The major wasn’t the only one here with alternative loyalties. However, my family is all about the military, not some silly secret mumbo-jumbo agenda.” He looked up at Dax. “Yeah, I’m one of them plutocrats, too. I won’t ask you to tie yourself to our agenda. Just do what you say and keep me out of trouble. For that, I can promise no one will find it easy to threaten your people again. The military takes care of their own.”
Another long pause was broken by the sound of someone opening the outer door. The colonel looked out through his open door. “Our receptionist. She’s just a glorified secretary who juggles communications from outside the command level channels. Tell her only what she needs to know to do her job.” He waved Dax away again and turned to study the information Dax had fed to his display.
The receptionist was older than Dax’s mother, but friendly enough as he introduced himself. When she mentioned the major, Dax politely informed her that the major was gone and he was attempting to take up some of his duties. She actually seemed relieved. She promised to reorganize and be ready to start plugging him into the same essential functions in about an hour.
Dax went back into his new office and closed the outer door. He decided he wouldn’t get too comfortable just yet. But he did remove the name plaque and a few other personal effects and put them in an empty shipping box sitting atop the trashcan. Then he proceeded to review the portion of files that applied to his new duties, conversing with AI through gestures the whole time.
“Did I find the right saddle?”
Confirmed.
“I think I understand the ostensible mission, just need to identify who’s ready to work with you.”
AI posted a roster of candidates and where Dax could find them.
“But aside from just doing my job, how can I help my boss help us?”
It was a long answer. AI described some implications of democratizing subspace networking. While the military was already using portals to mass personnel and equipment on hot spots, the political instability had moved up the social scale.
Drawing on the subtle inferences of the dead major’s files and other slender threads scattered around the subspace network, AI described the major’s plutocrat family as a cult. They were the only group with apparent continuity running back as far as The Brotherhood’s ancient teaching sources. When The Brotherhood’s predecessors had first begun organizing in ancient times and recording their teachings, it was the major’s folks who had infiltrated them and subverted it all. Before long, these ancient predecessors were largely compromised by alignment with one party in secular government intrigue.
This other group, the ancient cult, had not forgotten, but was not aware the teachings had been resurrected, if only in part. The Brotherhood had been careful to let religion be religion, while clinging to the intellectual foundations of what made genuine religion possible. What Dax and his generation were
now calling quantum awareness was also what made quantum computing possible, and gave them an edge in dealing with AI. It was this quantum awareness that the major’s ancient cult wanted to keep secret.
In essence, they panicked when Dax’s father had introduced a few academics to subspace networking. AI wasn’t sure how they found out about the expansion of subspace networking, but in the cult’s arcane jargon, the angels were disturbed on the astral plane. So they began seeking the source to this disturbance. Too much was leaking out and soon all manner of lesser people would have access to their alleged secret powers. What made it particularly urgent was that it came at the worst time, interfering with their plans to topple the other plutocrats. The old cult had been sowing distrust and shaking up the alliances.
Dax’s boss belonged to a family particularly targeted by the cult for elimination. Had the major managed to corrupt Dax and silence Tim, the colonel would have failed in his military command mission and left the government scrambling to find another way to capitalize on the technology The Brotherhood had released. The major was planning to find out what Dax knew and could do with AI, and then likely kill him and Tim.
Dax had no fear of death, but he had a deathly fear of failing the mission of teaching others quantum thinking.