Ships of Valor 1: Persona Non Grata

by Aaron Kennedy

  Bribery didn’t bother me at all. Part of my own utilitarian streak. I didn’t even consider a bit of graft a crime, even though it absolutely was corruption at the basest level. I looked at it like lubrication, much like courtesy. Once acknowledging there was an acceptable level, and staying within that level, things became easy. When balance wasn’t maintained various societies stopped working correctly.

  Heart’s speaking of illicit measures had me thinking of physical methods since I didn’t consider a bit of graft illegal. He, however, put them all in the same bucket and I’m not sure how he divided those buckets. I’d like to believe I have some pretty black and white rules, but in reality, those lines are dark gray and very thick. I’ve stepped deep into those lines and only because I had buddies yank me back out of those shadows at the last possible moment I didn’t cross over.

  His suggestion did have merits, though. We were theoretically dealing with mercenary types. Why not use that to our advantage? The question I asked him was how. “GSI pays their employees extremely well. Both at the compensation level and in severance. They appear to run approximately twenty percent above market average. Bribery might be more difficult than I anticipated.” A pretty slick move, keeping folks from looking for other work while making recruiting much easier. Everyone wanted to be paid well, and it’s much harder to bribe someone who is. “Extortion is a possibility, but will require further research.” I was voicing an argument to slap the approach down viewing it as crossing a line when Heart countered. “They tried to kill us. I do not believe only the threat of harm to gather information is comparable.”

  That started a hell of a debate. I held my own for about five minutes before he managed to destroy each of my good arguments and then simply ignored my bad ones. Finally, I pointed out it wasn’t likely any of the people on our list even had any dirt we could exploit. “But Ari we do not have to use them at all.” He caught me off guard with the statement, in hindsight, where I actually lost. “We can use anyone in the entire company. Now that we know who our opposition is, why limit ourselves to GSI’s pawns?” Einstein’s Ghost, he wanted to take on the whole corp. “Not all of GSI, only the divisions based out of Hong Kong. It represents perhaps twelve percent of the company.”

  I could have put in an audition tape for training instructor with the litany of swearing I was spewing out after he said that. I was good enough Em lifted her head from the pillow and she normally wasn’t bothered by my incessant cursing. “I am not sure I see the problem. GSI does not know you still exist and if they did, it would take an inordinate amount of resources to attempt to find you.” That actually made sense. It was a form of insurgency. As long as they couldn’t pinpoint who I was, and couldn’t actively go after the population as a whole then I could operate in the relative open. The question then became who we targeted.

  “I have some ideas on that.” I’d heard that before and each time the phrase caused spikes in my adrenaline. “They would need to be high enough placed in the company to use security assets.” He had a point. Heart displayed what looked like a task organization chart on the hotel screen. I’d seen them before from my Legion days. He started with a simple flow chart the headquarters element, breaking down into smaller divisions until it got to the smallest echelons, each arrayed in a similar manner, except his was by department with a lot more dotted lines creating a maze that was very hard to follow.

  “This is a nominal corporate structure based on Luna Corporation, and what we know of GSI. I have taken some liberties and made some assumptions based on what is publicly available. Starting with known entities in green, then yellow for high confidence, and orange are mid-confidence. Red are low but assumed to exist in some form, however, may be part of another department.” What a confusing mess. I couldn’t help but wonder aloud how anything got accomplished in a corporation. “Decentralization and automation mostly.” Heart stated matter-of-factly, then continued without missing a beat. “We can assume that anything below this level could not be responsible.” About two-thirds of the structure collapsed into the chart. “Likewise, much of this section would not apply.” Another half disappeared.

  What was left were a handful of upper-level departments with offices underneath them. I asked why there were no names. “I am working on applying faces to those positions. If we can determine who occupies the roles, we can determine who has the means. I believe I can develop a profile.” I inquired about public information. “The Zhangs own the company fully. Although there are many assignments facing outward, it appears anything above middle management is closely held.” I wanted him to tell me whom we would target. It felt like we were about to attempt a bombing run through a city trying to pick off specific soldiers who weren’t in uniform. The irony wasn’t lost on me, seeing as how relying on the same type of camouflage as well.

  “We do not go after the department heads.” Heart said bluntly. “We are aiming for minor administrators. I believe the phrase you used was ‘worker bees.’ The goal is to cause noise and force our prey into the open.” He was speaking my language now.

  Unless studying protection the idea was counter-intuitive. It takes significant resources to defend a single asset, therefore, becoming a game of picking and choosing what is most important to protect. By scaring lower level resources, they scatter and the higher powers end up getting skittish calling on every bit of firepower available. The goal then is to rain hell on them while they’re all in one place.

  We weren’t out to destroy the group as a whole but to identify the leaders. If we could trick the players into surrounding themselves with as much security as they could afford, they would glow like we had dropped atomics on them. Their fear would remove their camouflage.

  Chapter 27

  GSI was a big company and attacking it head on would have been suicide. I have a well-developed survival instinct and I like my skin in one piece so we were aiming for the proverbial low hanging fruit. Finding fruit among the leaves was our problem, but that’s why I’ve always surrounded myself with smart people or more specifically, why exceptionally smart individuals have always surrounded me with smart people.

  Heart theorized the more important the person was, the better their encryption would be on the handhelds they carried. By planting some inexpensive repeaters near GSI’s headquarters and putting out a low-level attack on the comm signal we were able to eliminate the lowest level employees. We slowly ratcheted up the attacks to until we saw a response. When the reaction finally came it was not only impressive, it was hilarious.

  The nice part about using cheap repeaters was we could set them up, and broadcast on the public net channel. There was no way to track the signal back to us because we were effectively watching a public news feed as opposed to a dedicated line. By whittling away at the base, we created a progressively unstable structure, like one of those games, where a kid pulls a block from the bottom of a stack and places it on the top until the entire structure crashes down. Our barrage did that. When we got far enough up the food chain everything collapsed. It was epic.

  We made sure to space out the attacks and make them fairly obvious, in turn making GSI’s response much funnier. The trick to a good ambush is the simplicity. There’s a reason the bait and wait is so effective. The classic example is the roadside bomb. Wait for a convoy to trip it, and then unload as much firepower as quickly as possible. He who escalates fastest wins. The way to defeat that particular kind of trap is to get out of the box by identifying its sides and overwhelming one. Once through there is a chance of survival.

  What we did was set up the box and trap, but not the accompanying ambush. We wanted to see what GSI’s response would be. People are social creatures. We like to talk to each other and having our ability cut off makes us very paranoid. When done progressively, the paranoia builds like water behind a dam until something breaks. Denying the right people communications triggered that event.

  It was juvenile and I wish I could take credit for it, but this was all
Heart. He created a simple jamming program aiming for GSI’s lowest level comm protocols. The idea being communications much like water will find the path of least resistance. If the lowest path doesn’t work, people will try to go to the next higher ground. We could track who was given additional access even if we couldn’t read their comms, and assumed they were the de facto team leaders for the troops. As we escalated our efforts, we were able to spot the office heads, and so forth.

  We still didn’t know who any of the people were, but we now knew who held a specific device which was so much better. A standard comm unit is relatively smart by itself. It’s not AI smart, but most people are fairly reliant on them. They’re good for about a year before they’re upgraded, and even then most hold onto their ID number making it simple to get ahold of someone. I’ve had the same number since before I left Terra the first time, even though my real gear was safely stored in my vault back in White Caps. For most folks, the comm unit is merely an extension of themselves to the point they don’t even think about it. This gave us the ability to track GSI employees as long as their units were active.

  But back to our fun. GSI wanted to put a stop to our childish attack. It was almost two weeks in when the security teams swooped in and started destroying every repeater they could find. Since we were using cameras on a completely different system, we got a front-seat view of the two-man teams executing a precision attack on passcard-sized boxes hidden throughout the city. The real fun was when the teams started calling in they found them and each had the same sticker reading: “World Famous Pork Lo Mein” with a number, going to GSI tech support if anyone tried to call. I, of course, felt like a vintage film villain as I stroked Em from the comfort of my hotel while peeling off hunks of cheese and apple with my field knife while sipping the local tea.

  “You seem quite amused.” Indeed, I was. I’d been on the wrong side of similar events, which were much less good-natured and my Terran humor was in full force. I wondered what Heart thought of it. “I still do not understand the point of the decals. You kept breaking into giggles every time you were going to explain.” His confusion set me off again. Enough for to Em vacate her perch on my lap and sulked to the sink. I was out of cheese so that might have been part of her departure. I explained the stickers were me being a hair cruel. There was no actual meaning to them, which of course made no sense to Heart. That was their point. I wanted to screw with the people in GSI. I wanted someone, anyone to dedicate as much brainpower as possible trying to figure out what the little piggy emblem, the phrase, or the comm number meant.

  That elicited a sound I had never heard before. About halfway between a crackle and a screech, and for a second I thought we lost comms. “I am so sorry. I was not expecting that. I think I can adjust the sound for the future, though.” I asked him to help me out because I was a tad lost. “I believe that was an involuntary laugh. Or at least, what my audio processors translated as one.” Got me to laughing again. I had never actually heard him laugh before. I knew he had a sense of humor or something close to one. He found things funny, odd, or strange and could poke fun at them. He and I joked about things quite a bit. But this was definitely new territory. “You do not understand. I have spent several days trying to figure the purpose out. I knew you had a reason otherwise, you would not have done it, however, the entire point was to waste GSI personnel’s time thinking about something with no point. Being caught in the nuisance trap you set for our adversaries is rather grand irony.”

  That set me off again, in turn setting him off with something less of a screechy feedback loop and sounding more like a laugh. Knowing him, he had compiled it from other sources and would modify the sound over time. It was good to know what he thought was truly funny and he could laugh at himself.

  “Does that actually work on people? Making up erroneous data?” I told him it depended on the person. Some people would ignore the data while others would forget it, and others would be able to realize it didn’t mean anything. Since we were casting a wide net, it didn’t matter if everyone was looking at the stupid little pig if we could get even a couple of people to do so. My stickers were about creating distractions, about making noise. “It is so counter-intuitive. Now that I am aware that it is fiction, it does not matter in the least, but before when I assumed they had a purpose I was engrossed. It was so maddening. But that was your point.”

  “Applying that sophomoric prank to our denial of service attack I believe might actually change GSI’s long-term response. It may drastically change the context of the assault.” I nodded as I was chewing on the last of my apple but I was hoping for that. I told him I hadn’t shared my intent because I wasn’t sure how GSI would respond. The beauty of hindsight is seeing all the teams attack, but it could have as easily been a couple of guys walking from spot to spot with a bag gathering them up. “I see, but what does that do for us? I realize that it helps our anonymity but to what end?” I smiled because it was my turn to lay out a plan.

  Chapter 28

  General Campbell would have been proud of us. We had successfully infiltrated Terra. We believed we had identified the organization responsible for the political issues and Heart had a plausible model for why. What we needed was proof to confirm it. At our disposal was one of the best computers in existence. Of course, he was in the middle of the ocean, hiding from said corporation that had already tried to kill us. But just because he would have been proud didn’t mean we couldn’t do better. There was the rub.

  The easy route would have been to bolt back to Luna and report our findings thus far. But the easy out wouldn’t have been the hard right. What we had thus far only gave us a piece of the picture. It presented problems, not solutions. As long as Heart and I could still whittle away at the questions, we needed to continue doing so.

  My hotel’s wall-screen showed the current locations of each known GSI employee. Our gag resulted in new encryption protocols, but we could still track people’s movements. I didn’t want to overplay our hand but I also didn’t want to sit doing nothing. By tracking the comm units to home addresses, we were able to put quite a few names with IDs. This, in turn, filled out our company structure, making our puzzle look a lot more like a picture.

  Everything came back to the handhelds. If we could get ahold of one or better yet create a clone, we could open a backdoor into GSI. The risk with simply stealing one was the company would change their encryption again. We needed to gain legitimate appearing access. A lower level unit would be easiest, and likely wouldn’t cause a security sweep, but it also wouldn’t get us the entry we wanted. So yet again balance was a concern.

  My plan was to steal a comm unit of an upper-level employee, but in such a way they didn’t realize it was gone. I wanted to substitute a real unit and then destroy a fake unit in front our mark’s eyes so they didn’t report it missing. They needed to simply replace it instead. The trick would be making it appear accidental and genuine.

  As I’ve said, the key to a good ambush is simplicity. The more complex, the more chances for things to go wrong. Taking someone out is easy. All that requires is patience. A failed attempt doesn’t prevent a future attack. Keeping someone in the game is significantly harder. The first priority is choosing the correct person. The second is that they cannot know there was an attempt at all.

  I knew the theory from all the reading back at Tycho but this was delving deep into practical application areas neither Heart nor I had real experience with. I was stuck and couldn’t figure out the next step. Actually, knew the next move, but not the move after that.

  Despite being a center for international business for centuries, I still stood out in Hong Kong. I’m a big guy by Asian standards. Back in Auckland, my appearance wasn’t nearly as obvious mainly because I didn’t tower over the locals by an average of twenty centimeters. In Hong Kong, my size wasn’t something that could easily be hidden by a hat or creative clothing.

  “Ari, I am not sure how to approach this issue. Unlike myself, you cannot
transfer your presence to another shell to accomplish a specific task and this one is better suited to you than me. If only we had Robert here.” I stopped him as the realization hit me. I explained we didn’t need Robert. We didn’t even need me or Heart. We had been so wrapped up on what we had; we had forgotten we were inside the box. “I do not understand. If we cannot trust existing communications, how do we acquire more assistance?”

  I grabbed my dampers, jacket, gave Em a quick scratch between the ears, and slid out hotel door. The beauty of being in a city was I didn’t have to do dirty work. We could outsource the work. We needed to find someone reliable. I explained this to Heart on the way down the elevator. “I think I understand where you are going with this, but does not this create a lot of risk?” The farther down the yellow-bricked road we got the more this mission became about balancing risk. This was no different. Our best resources were back on Luna, but that didn’t mean we didn’t have good resources in Hong Kong.

  After I had pinned on my first stripe one of my sergeants had taught me having the best wasn’t needed because we only needed good enough. Sure overkill was great, but most of the time the best was a waste. Kind of like my dampers. Until I had a reason to have a good set, all those extra capabilities were almost worthless. Over the last couple of months, I had become so used to getting by having unlimited resources I forgot how to get by on scrounging off the land.

  Heart and I had become overly cautious. For the most part, I had stayed tucked away in the hotel venturing out only for food, and only long enough to purchase and set up the repeaters for the previous mission. Our thought process was out of sight, out of mind but in a city the size of Hong Kong that strategy wasn’t necessary. Who looks for a single ant in an anthill?