Spaceside

by Michael Mammay

  “Wow,” I said. “This is quite a setup.”

  “There are five rooms like this, sir,” said the major. “We monitor every distant station in SPACECOM. Not in real time, of course. Jump lag.”

  “Right,” I said. I’d known SPACECOM kept track of many things, but I’d never considered exactly what sort of overhead that required.

  She led me over to a tall female sergeant with broad shoulders who stood near two empty terminals, watching us. “Sir, this is Sergeant Kobiaski. She’s one of my best techs. If she can’t help you, it can’t be done.”

  I extended my hand to Kobiaski. “Good to meet you.”

  “Good to meet you, too, sir.” She glanced down for a split second, embarrassed. “It’s an honor, sir, if I might say so.”

  “Thanks. The honor’s mine. I really appreciate you doing this.” Nobody had given her a choice in the matter, but it never hurt to thank soldiers, even when they were just doing their jobs.

  “I’ll leave you to it, sir, if that’s okay?” said the major.

  “Quite all right. If it’s acceptable to you, the good sergeant here can escort me out when we’re done. That way you don’t have to hang around.”

  “If you’re sure it’s okay, sir.” The major had already started edging away. The last thing she needed was to waste an hour of a busy day babysitting a retired colonel. That fit my needs as well. I had no illusions. I wasn’t invisible. If I found something of interest today, it would make it up the chain almost immediately. But I had a better chance of controlling the spread of information with the sergeant than I did with the major.

  “Totally okay. Thanks. Sergeant K, you want to get started?”

  “Yes, sir. You can sit here. I need a little info from you. Dates, locations. Anything that you can give me that will narrow the search parameters.”

  I had the dates readily available, seared into my brain. I gave them to her, and she hunched over her terminal, clacking at keys so fast that I couldn’t follow.

  “It will take a few seconds to come up, sir. We’re pulling data from a distant server.”

  “Sure,” I said. “How hard is it?”

  “Not hard at all. It’s an unusual request, but not unprecedented. I’ve pulled stuff from further back than this.”

  “How far back do we keep it?” I asked. Showing interest in her work was smart business, but I found myself genuinely curious as well.

  “Forever, I think, sir. I’ve never looked, but I’ve also never gone searching for something and had it not be there.”

  I got chills at that, remembering other data that should have been there in the past but wasn’t. “I appreciate the effort.”

  “Here we go, sir.” A computerized image of the outline of a planet that I assumed was Cappa popped up on the screen, surrounded by blue dots that represented friendly ships. Two green ships showed as well. Green represented neutral, such as contractors or mining company ships. “We’ve got sixty hours of data. How do you want to look at it?”

  “Let me tell you what I’m looking for, and then I’ll defer to you on how we find it. You’re the expert.” She nodded at that, so I continued.

  “I’m looking for any ships that might have gotten through the blockade. Anything that got off the planet without being searched.”

  She thought about it a minute. “Should be easy enough, given where the blue ships are flying. It’s a pretty high orbit. The ships you’re looking for have to take off from the planet?”

  “Yes.”

  “So call it ten minutes from launch to reach the blockade. We can look at six data points an hour and we’ll catch everything. We’ll make it seven to be on the safe side. That’s just over four hundred images to check. Where we see a green track, we flag it, then come back and follow it to see if blue intercepted it.”

  I breathed out through pursed lips. “That’s a lot of data.”

  “I figure we can work through it in three hours or so.”

  I checked the time. “Three hours puts us past the end of the duty day.”

  “I get paid to be a soldier twenty-four seven, sir. I’m game if you are.”

  I smiled. “You’re a good soldier, Kobiaski. You’re really helping me out.”

  Her face lit up. “Let’s get to it, sir.” She punched some keys and the screen jumped forward in time. She flicked her cursor over the one green track on the screen and tagged it, then jumped the screen forward again.

  Two and a half hours later I felt like somebody had taken sandpaper to my eyes. We’d been through four hundred twenty screens and tagged nineteen ships leaving the planet. Mother bless the techs who stared at screens like this every day. After a short break for coffee, we sat back down and followed each of the tracks as it left Cappa’s atmosphere. Kobiaski ran the display at four times normal speed, but with space being so huge, we could easily follow them. One after another, each ship creeped across the screen, and one after another they rendezvoused with a blue track.

  When the nineteenth ship linked up with friendly searchers, I sighed. “Well, that’s that.”

  Kobiaski didn’t respond. She stared at the monitor, running the last track backward in time. She zoomed out and zoomed back in. She grunted. I didn’t interrupt her. When a tech got deep into her machine, you let her go with it. “What the fuck is that?” she asked, almost under her breath.

  “What have you got?” I peered at the screen, trying to gauge what she had seen.

  “Do you see that?” she asked.

  I didn’t see anything but blue tracks intercepting green. “Where?”

  “Over here.” She moved her cursor to the far side of the planet, well away from the green track, highlighting a blank part of the screen.

  “I’m sorry, I don’t see—”

  “Hold on, sir . . . there.” She paused the display.

  I couldn’t be sure I’d seen it, but for a split second it looked like a green dot blinked on and then off again. “I think I saw it. What was it?”

  She shook her head. “No idea, sir. But it’s not right.”

  “Can we zoom in?”

  She fiddled with her keyboard. “Not really, sir. The display doesn’t have as much fidelity on that side of the planet.”

  “That makes sense,” I said. “There’s nothing inhabiting the other hemisphere on Cappa. It’s all ocean and dead continents.”

  She scrunched her face up a bit. “Shouldn’t matter, sir. We get our feed from satellites that orbit the planet . . .” Her voice trailed off, then she punched some more keys, and several gold symbols popped up in orbit. “Holy shit.”

  “What?” I asked.

  “Sorry, sir.” She blushed slightly.

  “No, don’t be. ‘Holy shit’ is fine. What happened?”

  “The satellites. We use a network of both geosynchronous and orbital platforms.”

  “Sure,” I said.

  “At this exact moment, the two orbital platforms that should pick up departing space traffic are both on this side of the planet.”

  “That seems pretty ill considered,” I said.

  “Not really, sir. We’re not in a space war, and all the traffic leaving the planet is considered friendly. It takes a satellite ninety minutes to orbit, give or take. We’re talking about maybe a ten- or fifteen-minute window. It shouldn’t matter.”

  The hairs stood up on my arm. “It shouldn’t matter unless someone knew the time window and snuck off the opposite side of the planet.”

  She nodded. “Can’t rule it out, sir.”

  “That’s impossible, right? There are no launch facilities over there.”

  She thought about it. “I don’t know, sir. How much of a conspiracy-theory guy are you?”

  “In this case? A pretty fucking big one.”

  “Our system only handles high-altitude tracks. I assume that ground-based systems monitor the lower atmosphere.”

  “That’s right,” I said, remembering that from my time on Cappa. “The Cappans had their own air
control inside the atmosphere.”

  “So if you really wanted to get off the back side of the planet, all you’d have to do would be to fly low and avoid our ground-based systems, and you could get to the opposite side unseen.”

  “And all our ground-based stuff was heading back spaceside at that time.”

  “Even easier,” she said.

  “Is there any way to check this?”

  She looked at me for a moment. “The satellites run on set patterns. We can look at that.”

  “So if we look every time they’re partially obscured . . .”

  “It’s worth a shot, sir. I’ll back it up the length of the satellite orbit around the planet. That’s . . . eighty-eight minutes and twenty-seven seconds.”

  “Give it a window,” I said. She knew that, but I couldn’t help myself.

  “Yes, sir. I’ll give it four minutes on either side.” She tapped at her keyboard, then sat back and watched the screen.

  I almost forgot to breathe, staring at the little blips. After a few minutes it stopped moving. “Did it happen? I didn’t see anything.”

  “Me either.”

  “Back it up again,” I said. “Another orbit.”

  She did. We watched. Nothing.

  “Is there any other explanation for what we saw on the first one?” I asked. “Any chance that it’s not a ship?”

  “Yes . . . yes, sir. It could be . . . I don’t know. It could be interference.”

  “But you don’t think so,” I said, reading her tone.

  “I don’t, sir.”

  “You’re the professional. Back it up another orbit and let’s see.”

  She entered the data and started the feed. “There!” She paused the system and scrolled it back. “See it, sir? The same thing as before.”

  “I see it,” I said. “Let’s see how many we find.”

  By the time we finished it was an hour before midnight. We’d found four instances of ships departing the planet, all sequenced at exactly the right time to avoid detection. Almost. They hadn’t counted on one brilliant sergeant with a computer. We couldn’t get a fix on the type or size of the ships, and we couldn’t be sure we’d found all of them. The system didn’t have enough fidelity. To get that, I’d need data from the Cappan air-control system, and something told me they wouldn’t offer that up, even if I had a way to contact them.

  Despite my fatigue, my mind churned out the implications. I had no doubt, based on my previous experience on Cappa, that they had access to satellite information and the ability to manipulate it. Back when I’d been there, I assumed they’d got it from Karakov’s people, but given what I’d seen since then, I couldn’t rule out the possibility that the Cappans themselves had cracked the system. I didn’t want to make assumptions, though, because that would narrow my focus. I might miss something important. But someone had the satellite information and purposely used it to get ships off the planet. Those ships could have had Cappans on them, or they could have had special forces troops. Hell, they could have been smugglers loaded down with silver. No assumptions.

  Except I had a pretty strong belief that at least a few humans from Elliot’s experimental procedures got away, since I’d seen one of them on public transportation.

  At least I think I had.

  Kobiaski walked me to the main exit of the building and I stepped out into the night, immediately wishing I’d brought a heavier jacket. I thanked her for the fifth time. I’d have put her in for an award, but that would mean telling somebody in authority what she’d found. They would find out eventually—I hadn’t asked her to keep it quiet, because I didn’t want to put her in that position. But I had a head start, and even when they found out, they might not immediately know what it meant. She’d done the impossible for me, and I owed her. I put her on my long mental list of great people who did things they’d never get credit for.

  Chapter Twelve

  I had the next day off, but I couldn’t sit idle in my apartment. I’d have lost it. The information about the Cappans had left me stunned, and I didn’t have anybody I could talk to about it. I trusted Dr. Baqri, but even that had its limits. I decided that since I couldn’t do anything with what I knew, I’d try something else. I still didn’t know what was going on with Omicron, the police considered me a person of interest in a murder case, and I still believed I had people watching me. Action beat inaction, so I made something up. I programmed my drone to keep an eye on a radio-frequency marker, and launched the machine from my roof. I put the marker in my pocket and headed outside. In theory, if somebody was following me, the drone would capture my tail on camera.

  I didn’t have much to lose. That was one benefit to taking action in the civilian world over the military. In the army, I’d have had a lot of people helping me, following my orders. There’s good and bad to that. It puts a ton of pressure on a leader to get it right. Make a mistake and people who trust you end up getting killed. Sometimes even when you didn’t make a mistake, people who trusted you got killed. I’d made decisions in my career that I still played back in my head over and over, and I couldn’t find anything I’d have done differently. But sometimes they still turned to shit.

  In the civilian world, if I made a mistake, it only affected me. I could live with that. Not being responsible for the lives of others made it easier to try something that might or might not work.

  I didn’t have anywhere specific to go, but that helped my plan. The day was cool but not cold, so I could wander around and see what happened. I started off at a good pace, as if I had somewhere important to be. I fought the urge to look up. I wouldn’t be able to see the drone anyway. I tried to act natural. If someone was following me I didn’t want to do anything to make them suspicious. I couldn’t kid myself, though. I expected to find someone there.

  It didn’t take long for that theoretical person who was following me to go from one person to a group in my mind. It stood to reason that if I had a tail, they had a larger purpose, and that purpose implied a larger organization. I tried not to dwell on who the group might be, though deep down it prickled at me. A side benefit to the walking was that it helped clear my head and give me time to sort through my thoughts.

  Omicron was the most likely to be watching me. They’d been a victim of a breach, so they’d be wary of anything out of the ordinary. Gylika was dead, and they almost certainly knew that he and I had met. That made me think about the first time I noticed Cappan eyes, and whether it had been before or after I met with Gylika. And that led me further down the rabbit hole, and I found that the link that Dernier discovered between the Phoenix Project and ortho-robotics still gnawed at me. A lot of coincidences pointed toward Omicron.

  But I forced myself to consider other options. It could be a tabloid, or even a legit news source. Maybe they were following me in hopes that I’d lead them to a story—not about Omicron, but about anything. I was the Scourge, after all, and notoriety drove page clicks. A picture of me doing something seedy would let them drag my name across the net again. That didn’t seem likely, though. Everywhere I went, people knew me, and if I did anything like that, it would have already gotten out. Besides, they didn’t need to follow me. There were eyes and cameras everywhere. It could even be Plazz. As much as I trusted her, I had no illusions about how far she’d go to get an important story.

  It could have been somebody from VPC’s legal department, following me to try to keep me out of trouble. Shit, it could even be Sharon’s lawyers, trying to get more money out of me.

  But in the end, I didn’t believe any of that. No matter how much logic I applied to the situation, I kept coming back to the Cappans. I’d seen those eyes. Maybe. Or maybe the new information about them leaving the planet had me believing in ghosts. It’s easy to make what you see fit your own assumptions if you’re not disciplined with your thinking. I didn’t use to have a problem with that. I’d always been an organized thinker, able to compartmentalize and take emotion out of the equation. Lately I wasn’t so
sure.

  I made about a five-kilometer circuit, pausing a few times to look at things that interested me and once to grab a box of water from a local shop where I liked the owner, then made my way back to my apartment. I went inside and triggered the function to return the drone to its base. I retrieved it from the roof, bringing the base with it, and plugged it into my terminal to download the video. Before I started watching, I took the drone back to the roof and programmed it with the standard sequence I’d developed to watch my apartment building. If somebody had followed me on my walk, they’d have to have gone somewhere when I got home. Maybe it could spot them.

  I’d paid a lot for the drone, and the clerk hadn’t lied about the quality. I could make out faces, signs, and pretty much anything else I wanted. When I zoomed in, I could almost read what somebody had on their device screen. I’d purposely set the observation to a wide lens since it centered on me and I needed to find someone a reasonable distance back. I took still shots at every five-minute mark and sent them to my big video screen. I put eight pictures side by side to see if the same person showed up more than once.

  Pretty quickly I found one person who matched in both the first and last photo, but when I examined it closer she hadn’t actually moved. I’d simply walked by her twice at the same spot, once while leaving, once when I returned. It didn’t rule her out as somebody watching my place, but she hadn’t followed me.

  I compared other pictures. It took me thirty minutes before I found it. A dark-skinned woman in a beige pullover with a high collar showed up behind me in picture two and picture seven. It didn’t take long to find her in two other frames, as well. I captured her face from each angle that I had, then I watched back through the entire video, focusing on her. Once I knew what to look for, I tracked her easily. She broke off a few minutes before I got to my apartment and never reappeared, as if she knew my destination and got bored. Or she had somebody else watching my residence and didn’t need to approach herself. Why had she followed me on my little stroll but not done anything? She didn’t learn anything, because there was nothing to learn. I rarely went anywhere outside of the routine. I wondered how long they’d been following me. And why? It didn’t make sense to just follow. Unless I wasn’t the target. Maybe they wanted me to lead them to something, but if that were the case, I couldn’t imagine where I was supposed to lead them.