by P. R. Adams
“We’ve re-established contact with Gunship-028.”
“Oh? What happened?”
“Communications failure. They’re running on auxiliary now.”
“That’s something.”
“It is, sir.”
He twisted the heel of his boot against the deck distractedly. “What do we know about these attackers?”
Benson nodded at Chao. “Ensign?”
The young man stood straight. “Twenty-two ships ranging in size from gunship to cruiser or possibly a battleship.”
“Twenty…” The colonel rocked back slightly, as if he’d been punched.
“Commander Benson has a theory.”
McLeod turned to her. He seemed unsteady. “I’d like to hear it.”
She stepped down from the command station. “Azoren, Colonel.”
“Azoren?” Color drained from his face. “Attacking us?”
“The ships don’t look significantly divergent from our designs. They have technology at least similar to what that cruiser had over Jotun, maybe even exactly the same. We can see them with the Pandora, maybe enough to get a lock-on.”
“Against a cruiser? A battleship?”
Chao cleared his throat. “They’ve sent seven ships to deal with us, sir.”
“Seven? This task force had trouble with one.”
Benson nodded toward the giant display. “That was a cruiser. These are lighter. And they don’t seem to realize we can see them.”
“Numbers matter, Commander. I don’t have to be an expert in naval tactics to know that.”
“Of course, but this might be a moment where we’re the ones who have surprise.”
“Perhaps we should take advantage of that and fall back? Maybe we could hook up with more ships at another port, give everyone a chance to regroup.”
The idea was practical, rational, and safe. It was conservative. Even her little task force could mean something if it could be brought into another fleet and the technology from the Pandora reproduced.
But this was a golden opportunity.
She bowed her back. “We have a chance to save lives here, Colonel.”
“We do?”
“Maybe even to save our fleet.”
He blinked, obviously confused. “How’s that now?”
“Those ships coming toward us. If we can get lock-on—a real lock-on—and hit them, we’ve shown that this enemy isn’t invincible.”
Chao called out. “Lock-on, ma’am. Extreme range, but we have lock-on.”
Benson turned to the display again. “Have they locked on to us?”
“Not yet. It looks like they waited until they were pretty close to our fleet before opening fire. And they’re not performing evasive maneuvers.”
McLeod sucked in a breath. He seemed ready to run. “This is exactly what you were meant to do, Commander. I’ll defer to you.”
She had expected that but had also dreaded it. Saving lives meant putting other lives at risk, and that’s exactly what she was doing at the moment. “Thank you, Colonel.”
He turned in what she imagined was the sharpest about-face he’d ever managed in his career and sped through the hatch before it was fully open.
It really was on her. Succeed or fail.
So many lives at stake. But she couldn’t let the fleet be destroyed.
How crazy was it the threat she’d seen was there, right in front of everyone, and someone in her task force had pushed out garbage—
I need to see what else is in that package Lo sent me.
“Ensign Chao, the second those ships come within range of our full battery of weapons, I expect to give them everything we’ve got. Prioritize the frigates. I want them crippled, so one volley into the front one, another into the next.”
“Yes, ma’am!”
“Lieutenant Ferrara, the instant that second volley is fired, break off for evasive maneuvers.”
The sickly officer coughed but smiled. “Yes, ma’am.”
“Lieutenant Bales, if we manage lock-on, I want a clean channel to the defense fleet. Be ready to connect the Pandora to the Galvan or whichever ship is acting as flagship. It’s about time we give these Azoren bastards a little surprise of our own.”
The communications officer hunched over his section of the command console and began tapping and chatting.
Benson resumed her place in the command station, suddenly feeling lightheaded and hot.
In a few seconds, they would be committed.
And the fate of the Republic would be on her head.
6
Agent Patel exited his cabin amid the chaos that followed any operation such as maneuvers requiring acceleration couches. His eyes darted from one end of the passageway to the other to be sure no one saw him, then he jogged toward the lift.
And once the lift was gone, Lieutenant Brianna Stiles disconnected from her virtual reality surveillance system and pushed free of her acceleration couch. Normally, it took a few seconds to go from deep immersion to regular awareness.
Stiles wasn’t normal. Not at all.
She wore a black skintight shadowsuit that felt like a second skin, something that would draw attention in most situations, but in her case that wasn’t a possibility. By the time her hatch opened, the suit’s circuitry had activated, and she wasn’t even a shimmering flash on the cameras she knew Patel had left to watch her cabin.
The passageway was empty and silent. She padded down the stairs to the deck where Patel lived, then out of the stairwell. Time counted down in the upper right corner of the mask covering her face. It was a mask that fed her filtered atmosphere that would have a stale, boring scent to it if she hadn’t introduced her own modification: a pleasant, floral note.
And the mask presented a detailed augmented-reality view: power sources, comms signals, relative locations of people she was keeping tabs on. Finally, the mask interfaced with the security systems integrated into the suit gloves.
She held the left glove up as she approached Patel’s cabin hatch.
Numbers, symbols—patterns. Biometrics were used for security, but biometrics were stored in digital format. They were just data. And when the mission called for it, she could work magic with data.
The hatch opened, registering Patel’s entry for just a second, then deleting it.
Lights didn’t flicker on.
No one had entered. The security system was sure of it.
Stiles lifted her right hand and slowly swept it across the room. Faint heat signatures, loose strands of hair, food crumbs, greater accumulations of dead skin, dried body fluids.
Everyone left impressions on their surroundings. Someone like Patel knew to clean up after himself, but in the end, he was just a human.
She had the areas she needed to check, starting with the obvious places.
The bunk—pillows, sheets, beneath and inside the mattress.
The desk—under all the surfaces, in the corners, inside any binders or packets.
The closet—inside pockets, hems, seams, throughout the luggage.
The bathroom—in the drain, under and behind surfaces.
And always she kept an eye on the timer speeding by. Three minutes gone of the six minutes she’d given herself.
It was hard searching for something when you were dealing with a seasoned agent, especially one from a dangerous section of the SAID.
There was no doubt that Patel operated from one of the worst sections.
Section Four. That was the espionage side. Spying, sure, but also assassinations.
Section Six. That was counter-intelligence. It was the SAID way of saying assassination without using such an unpleasant term. And the difference between the section assassinations was that Section Four killed the enemy. Counter-intelligence included targets working for rival agencies. Any threat to SAID operations was eligible for elimination. The GSA had lost several agents to “accidents” and “misunderstandings.” Or the agents had completely disappeared.
Patel ha
d worked in that section for a while. She’d seen some of his work.
So she moved quickly, one part of her mind rushing through potential hiding places at the same time as another processed the most likely things she was looking for.
A small data storage device that could pass for a spare button, maybe to a coat that wasn’t in the luggage.
A processing system with the power of a dedicated, high-end engineering workstation like Parkinson spent most of his waking hours playing around on, but in this case it would be clear, plastic sheets no thicker than a fingernail used to provide structure to a travel bag.
A surveillance or hacking system stuffed into the center of a can of shaving cream, even though Patel had—like many others—opted to have his facial hair follicles deadened so he didn’t need to shave.
The images she’d memorized during conditioning flashed through her mind as she used her suit’s recording system to capture everything while she tore the room apart. She put every last item back into place within a micrometer or two.
Trained eyes could catch the smallest variance. Her suit had recorded an image of the room upon entry and traced out every individual component: chair, bunk, sheet, blanket, shoes. Everything was kept within tolerances and that was done quickly.
Yet she was already past four minutes.
She stepped back to the middle of the cabin, closed her eyes for a few seconds, then scanned again.
What was out of place?
Nothing.
She shifted position, turning left about thirty degrees, and repeated.
Again, nothing.
Another shift, another turn, another closing of the eyes.
And this time, she saw it.
Patel wore tailored outfits, things that showed off the hard work he put in to keeping himself in shape. He was a good-looking man, and he had a reputation for bedding the hardest to get playboys on Kedraal, and he supposedly carried that success into Gulmar Union space.
Yet there was a bulky, almost ugly jacket hanging in the closet.
Had he ever worn it?
No. His scent wasn’t even on it. Yes, his cologne was, but not his scent.
But everything looked normal. No signals leaked from the material. It didn’t respond to the triggering signals she sent with her right glove. In fact, there were no signals coming from anything within the cabin.
That meant nothing. The device could be inert at that moment.
Four minutes and thirty seconds, and she had to check the jacket manually.
She ran her fingers over the surface first, feeling for any shapes that shouldn’t be there or any change in texture or temperature. Even the SAID could slip up when it came to tricky things like smuggling devices. Technology had its limits.
But nothing felt off.
So she tested the seams and buttons and pockets and everything she’d checked before.
Because it was an ugly jacket that wouldn’t do anything to catch the eye.
Not like Patel would want.
But the thing kept telling her, “I’m just a jacket. Move on. Time’s running out.”
It was. Right at five minutes now.
Had she made a mistake? Had she misjudged Patel? Or had she looked right past an obvious storage device?
Because he had to have one. Just as Penn had undergone surgery years before to have his eye replaced with a cybernetic device that could record audio and video and whatever else he needed.
Petabytes. Exabytes.
And he could compress it down to the point he could have escaped Azoren space with all the knowledge of their operations. That knowledge would have been handed over to his SAID handler so that the agency could hide it and continue its efforts to undermine the rightful process of transparency and democratic government.
All so that there could be war.
The SAID—or at least the most powerful sections—wanted that, and they would do anything to have it.
That had been the whole point of Agent Penn’s infiltration of Azoren and Gulmar space: provoking war.
And it was Stiles’s duty to prevent it.
So with only forty-four seconds left, she probed the jacket again.
This time she found what she was looking for.
It was so simple and obvious that she almost chuckled. The heavy zipper that made the jacket doubly ugly and impractical was actually home to teeth filled with nano-processors, and the slider was a storage device.
Not the eyeball she’d plucked from Penn, but Patel’s device didn’t need to be.
How much time remained?
Fifteen seconds.
Far too little.
She snapped her fingers on the left glove, and the suit’s processors woke. Getting into Patel’s cabin had been a breeze. The jacket was going to be much tougher.
Almost immediately, an alarm flashed on the inside of her mask: toxins had been released on the zipper teeth, and the jacket was growing warmer.
Toxins weren’t a problem. Her suit was armored and almost airtight, and the filtration system could handle anything airborne.
But the heating?
The jacket was powering up the processors.
It was going to erase the data she needed.
A graphical interface overlay popped up on the center of her mask screen. These were her established, go-to tools for disabling systems like Patel’s. Scripts, apps, actual micro devices that could degauss other devices or physically tear apart objects smaller than a pinky tip.
She needed something to cripple the data erasure system. To be safe, she also needed something that could download the data.
Someone like Patel wouldn’t have communications enabled for the device. There would be a physical connection.
He liked physical.
Stiles tugged a thread-thin cable from the tip of her left pinky glove and attached it to the zipper slider, creating a physical network connection. Her suit began querying immediately, searching for any open ports now that it had access. At the same time, she launched an application that fired thousands of nanometer discs from her suit top. Those discs floated toward the jacket, speeding up when they detected heat or an electrical charge outside of the zipper mechanism she’d identified.
Whatever was heating up, preparing to launch a big data scrub, drew the discs in like a whirlpool. They settled all across the jacket, then fired off first simple scripts that could overwhelm dumb devices like those often used for data wipes, then firing off electrical charges that had nearly as good a chance of crippling the data wipe devices.
Simple systems, simple countermeasures.
And this time, the systems worked.
The data wipe threat sputtered.
But she still hadn’t managed a connection to the zipper device, and she was down to eight seconds.
There was no leaving now. It would take at least half a minute to suck up all the dead nano-discs that were raining down on the floor. And even if she got lucky and made a connection to the zipper device in the next second or two, it would take another minute to download the data.
While the suit continued trying to hack the zipper, she squatted and ran her right hand over the floor, letting it suck all the magnetized particles back up.
It would’ve been easier to attempt McLeod’s cabin. After all, it was him she was worried about. She knew from the second she was told that the GSA was conducting a joint operation with the SAID that her life was at risk. And she knew from the second she was briefed about Agent Patel that there was a good chance Kedraalian interests weren’t truly at the forefront.
But she’d thought Colonel McLeod might be someone she could count on. His record was relatively clean. He came from money and wasn’t the sort to be vulnerable to bribes. His interests weren’t so far out of whack that he was vulnerable to extortion, either, and he was getting up in years enough that he couldn’t really indulge in weekend trips to the places he’d once frequented.
Yet the warning had been there when the assignment came
in: Stay alert.
And in two missions, the GSA and SAID had managed to flail around like blind elephants and come close to starting all-out war.
Was it incompetence? Was McLeod as much in the dark about the SAID agenda as he seemed to be?
Or was the colonel in the Directorate’s pocket?
She had to know. And that knowledge could only come from Patel’s private data system. Getting into that system meant—
Her mask flashed.
Three seconds left.
Six minutes had been an arbitrary amount of time. If she could just get a connection—
Her mask flashed again.
She had her connection.
How like a trap it felt. But, no, the connection was real.
Stiles worked through her system’s interface until she found the attack code she’d created to create backups of Penn’s eye and of Srisha’s device, taken from her little bag of surprises. There hadn’t been time to fully break into either device, but Stiles had cracked the security interface enough to make duplicates. And that code was enough to allow her to break Patel’s security with a little time.
She launched the hack.
How long would it take? Assume a minute. Back into the passageway, then into the stairwell. That was ten, fifteen seconds. People would still be exiting their acceleration couch cocoons. Patel would be…
That was the great unknown. She’d timed his activities. Six minutes was just a little longer than eighty percent of how long he averaged on his excursions. To take the lift, he would almost certainly be traveling somewhere deeper into the ship.
But she could rely on the cameras to keep her informed if he started heading back. The one that recorded the area around the lift would be all she needed.
She opened a small window in her mask display, an area no larger than the timer that was now past the thirty-second overrun she’d left for herself. Into that window, she dumped the camera feed.
And blinked.
The camera was dead.
It happened sometimes. Small devices like that were sensitive to even minor static discharge. If the receiver was still active at any level, she could trigger a reboot. That worked quite often.