Operation Cobalt – A Military Science Fiction Thriller: The Biogenesis War Files

by L. L. Richman

  Micah agreed. {The only good thing about this situation is I don’t have to bother hiding the Banshees’ emissions. Those damn fools are lighting up that little spot in the black with so much EM, there’s no way those dicks can spot them.}

  A warning ping on Scimitar’s defensive systems sounded, the tone indicating a missile had been detected.

  {What the hell?}

  {Where’d that come fr—}

  {Platforms aren’t equipped with—}

  {Oh shiiiiit.}

  The cacophony of voices cut off as the tug erupted in a large cloud of fire and vaporized gases, and silence fell upon those inside Scimitar.

  Asha’s voice broke the quiet. The medic’s soft declaration was layered with guilt, anger, and the sense of powerlessness they all felt.

  {She was just a kid, for star’s sake.}

  * * *

  Scimitar continued on its least-time intercept with the platform, the Unit warriors conferring in quiet, intense tones as they determined the best location to infiltrate without being seen.

  Micah pulled himself out of the moody funk he’d fallen into after the destruction of the defenseless tug, when Lane straightened and pivoted toward the cockpit.

  {We’ll insert here.}

  The Unit commander pushed an image to Rafe, who dropped it onto the forward holoscreens. A pulsing icon indicated a spot on one of the platform’s spars.

  Rafe enlarged the image as Lane began to lay out the plan for them.

  {That access hatch is at the end of the southernmost spar. Not a whole lot down that way, mostly warehouses and a few auxiliary powerplants. It dumps directly into the maintenance tunnels. From there, we’ll have our choice of any number of ingress points.}

  Lane sat back and pinned an expectant look on Jack, who nodded and took up the briefing.

  {It’ll also give me plenty of time to infiltrate their systems. What I gleaned from your buoy download,} the intelligence officer inclined his head toward Cass, {suggests that the platform’s OS is at least two generations behind most modern Cobalt Mining rigs. Their physical infrastructure’s so out of date, they’re forced to run a legacy system. Should be easy to hack.}

  Rafe scraped a hand along his chin, his eyes thoughtful as they shifted between Cass and Jack. {Cass will establish our own backdoor, as per SOP. We’ll monitor you as best we can, give you backup if you need it.}

  Jack lifted a chin toward Rafe in thanks. {You have an ETA?}

  Micah looked at the ship’s telemetry; they’d entered the no-wake zone a few hours earlier.

  {Another hour before we reach the spar,} Rafe told them. {Call it…another half hour after that before we arrive at the hatch.}

  Lane nodded and turned back to the team. {Gear check in thirty.}

  * * *

  Katie’s heart hurt when the tug exploded in a flash of heat, light, and expanding gases.

  Sorry, Goblin. You were a good ship….

  She shook herself, resolutely averting her eyes from the sight. She’d done all she could; now it was time to focus on her imminent arrival.

  Her eyes remained fixed on the spar as the distance indicator spooled downward and her velocity continued to decrease. Her feet touched down beside the maintenance hatch with a little more force than she’d intended, but she was ready for it and immediately activated the magnetic soles in her boots.

  In the next instant, Katie slammed the canister in her gloved hand onto the hatch’s palmpad. The action triggered a Crowbar she’d customized and coded herself.

  The code wasn’t technically legal, but it was something most Cobalt miners kept on the data partition of their wire implants. Working on an older mining platform meant occasionally bumping into antiquated equipment that required a hack in order to get it up and running again. It had been a simple matter to transfer it to a small canister of nano formation material she kept in her toolkit aboard Goblin.

  The preprogrammed hack insinuated itself into the system, overriding its security lock within seconds. Another, slightly more sophisticated program followed on its heels, bypassing the platform SI’s monitoring systems. If she’d done her work correctly, the hatch would continue to register as closed, and no one would know she’d arrived.

  Katie moved swiftly the moment the hatch cycled open, pulling herself inside and reeling her tethered bag in behind her. She dropped lightly onto the airlock’s metal deck, relieved to once more feel the influence of artificial gravity, generated by the platform’s spin. Keying the outer hatch shut behind her, she crossed to the inner hatch, footsteps ringing in the airlock’s long, narrow confines.

  Anyone used to the modern conveniences of a torus-shaped space station would find the configuration between the inner and outer hatches a bit unusual. The thing was oddly shaped, only three meters wide, but more than seven long.

  She knew the distance she traversed was the thickness imparted by a meters-thick water bladder, inserted just beneath the platform’s outer hull. It was an old-school way of providing an extra measure of protection against ionizing radiation, both from galactic solar rays and the particles flung from Sirius’ main star.

  Water shields fell out of use once the new, modular magnetospheres were invented. Plasma-tube-fed artificial magnetospheres were much more reliable, and designed in such a way that if one sector were to fail, the overlapping sectors on either side could easily compensate until the failed tube was repaired and brought back online.

  There’s a lot about Sierra Twelve that’s old-school, she thought as she eyed the worn palmpad embedded in the bulkhead above the inner airlock.

  She planned on taking advantage of that fact as much as she could.

  Katie curled her hand protectively around Fred as the pup wriggled to be set free. He whined, a small, high-pitched noise, and she shushed him with a comforting murmur.

  “Hang on, little dude. You’ll be out soon.”

  Stripping her gloves from her hands, she danced her fingers over the palmpad, entering a hack she’d introduced into the platform’s systems back when she was still a preteen.

  The backdoor was something she checked periodically; old habit, not that she ever used it. She was thankful now that she’d bothered to maintain it.

  Her first action was to trigger a subroutine that would tell the SIs that maintained Sierra Twelve to look the other way where the maintenance tunnels were concerned.

  Nothing to see here, move along.

  That done, she reached for the inner airlock, but then paused, her hand hovering over the plate. There was no real way to know if anyone was on the other side, since Cobalt hadn’t deemed the tunnels important enough to monitor with sensors.

  She sucked in a lungful of air, gave a small, decisive nod, and then whispered, “Here goes nothing….”

  * * *

  Scimitar was closing in on its target. For the past ten minutes, the team had been crowded silently around the aft airlock. Mike was the only one inside, his drakeskin suit sealed against the vacuum of space.

  In one hand, the demolitions expert held a Bravo Charlie. The other was poised above the controls for the outer hatch, ready to cycle it and deploy the umbilical that would secure Scimitar to the platform’s hull.

  Micah was watching from outside, his connection to the drones giving him an up-close view of the airlock as the ship eased closer. It stopped scant centimeters from the opening. He saw the demolitions expert reach out with the breaching canister, and then freeze.

  {We have a problem.}

  {Sitrep,} Lane barked, and Micah could hear the Unit operator expel his breath as he pulled his hand away from the hatch.

  {Someone beat us to it,} he announced. {This hatch has been breached, and recently. I’m seeing evidence of a crude Crowbar, but then it’s overlaid by some sort of homemade hack that I—}

  {Don’t touch that!} Jack shouted, and Micah heard a flurry of movement as the intelligence officer sealed his own drakeskin and joined his teammate inside the airlock.

  The
crew waited silently for Jack’s assessment. When it came, it only added another layer of complexity to an already charged situation.

  {This doesn’t carry the same signature as anything the SS has used in the past,} Jack said slowly. {It’s like it’s been cobbled together by someone self-taught. There are parts of this that are freaking brilliant, actually, but—}

  {Campbell,} Lane’s voice cut in. {Will they be able to tell we’re here if Mike applies the Bravo Charlie? Do we need to seek another location to breach?}

  {Sorry.} The fascination in Jack’s voice had muted, his tone once more crisp and professional. {No, ma’am. We should be good to enter here. But the BC isn’t technically necessary. Someone’s already applied a bypass to the platform’s sensors.}

  {Do it anyway. And I want this intruder found.}

  NINE

  Sierra Twelve

  Auxiliary Environmental Plant

  The rattle and wheeze of the pipes threading through Sierra Twelve’s auxiliary enviro plant was a familiar sound. Its humidity was less familiar, although it was a welcome change from the perpetual chill that permeated the unheated maintenance tunnels.

  This had been Katie’s hideout when she was younger. Today, it would play a strategic role as she went about planning her attack.

  Her first step was to ensure that neither she nor Fred were in danger of discovery. She unsealed her suit and set Fred on his feet, securing his magnetic leash to a nearby pipe. Then she ducked out to do a quick recon of the tunnels that ran nearby.

  She checked every access point that led from the tunnels into the platform’s living spaces—and found nothing.

  Katie allowed herself a small, satisfied grin. The invaders either didn’t know about the tunnels—which was totally dumb, because maintenance tunnels were everywhere—or they didn’t see them as a threat.

  Their mistake.

  When she returned to Fred, he acted as if she’d left him for days rather than minutes, pawing at her ecstatically and making pitiful whining noises that made her roll her eyes.

  “Drama much?” she whispered, taking his little face between her hands and rubbing his ears. “Now, be good. And stay quiet while I check on one more thing. Then we’ll go see Doc, okay?”

  Fred wiggled energetically and gave another whine, recognizing the name of the platform’s medical officer—someone who often slipped him treats under the table.

  “Yeah, I know. Your favorite human.” She booped him on the nose and set his front paws back down on the ground. “Now remember, quiet, or no visit.”

  She had no idea if Fred understood her or not, but the puppy obediently circled twice and then flopped to the ground with a little whuffing sound.

  Satisfied he’d remain silent for at least the next few minutes, Katie moved over to a seemingly blank section of bulkhead, behind which was stashed her equipment.

  As a teen, she had come across a supply of raw, unused ActiveFiber material, the kind used to line the interiors of ships and other, smaller space habitats. It had taken weeks’ worth of research, of combing the public net and requesting data sheets from industrial libraries on Heliodor, before she fully grasped how versatile the material truly was.

  Aside from reclaiming waste and repurposing it, ActiveFiber was capable of reshaping itself into any form a person could devise. Imagination was one thing Katie had in abundance, so she’d whiled away many hours in the privacy of her hideaway, learning how to manipulate the material. With a bit of trial and error, she concocted a skim coating, keyed to her palmprint, that she could use to mask an access panel, behind which she’d hidden her belongings.

  Now, she reached out to rest her palm against the blank wall, and the material beneath it began to move. The coating retreated, thickening into a border that was the same shade of battleship gray as the bulkhead it rested upon. The access panel it revealed squeaked on its hinges as she opened it, and she made a mental note to lubricate it before she left.

  The cubby inside held all the things a younger Katie had treasured: a pilfered stash of meal ration bars, a few bottles of water, and data cubes filled with her favorite shows from several years past. Blankets and cushions were tucked around her stash, the essentials for her own private home away from home.

  Her most prized possession, though, was a console she’d rescued from a recycle bin and painstakingly restored. She blew a layer of dust from the tarp covering it and removed it from the cubby. Her fingers traced over its surface, the familiar shape fitting comfortably in her hands as she set it on top of a nearby crate she’d upcycled into a makeshift table.

  Placing her hand on the palmpad, she smiled when the creaky old thing came to life.

  The screen itself was a simple 2-D affair, an antiquated biocrystal display that dated back to the colony ships. It didn’t matter; it still functioned and was perfectly capable of delivering the information she needed.

  She dragged over an old chair and tried to dust off the cushion, succeeding only in smearing the dirt with her sweaty hand. With a shrug, she wiped the grime off onto her shipsuit’s pantleg and took a seat in front of the unit.

  Katie carefully navigated her way through the virtual keyboard projected by the console, slowly picking up speed as she refamiliarized herself with this old form of communication. She experienced a moment of regret that she’d never gotten around to installing a wireless connection to her own evanescent wire implant, but she’d lost interest in the project after her father’s death.

  She shoved the painful memory back where it belonged—in the past—and focused on the task before her.

  One of the endeavors she was most proud of during her years of learning to understand and map the code underpinning the platform’s operating system was the hack she’d managed to insinuate into the secured communications of the control room via the platform’s public net. She’d perfected it when she was thirteen.

  At the time, she’d been sorely tempted to tell her father about her accomplishment, knowing he’d be proud, but she had worried he’d ban her from using it.

  In order for the backdoor she’d set in place to work, she’d had to find a way to disguise it, hiding it in plain sight and forcing those maintaining the network to dismiss it as an irregular system glitch that popped up from time to time—annoying, yet harmless.

  The wheeze and clank of the auxiliary enviro room was what had given her the inspiration, so she’d tied it to that. Each time the unit kicked in—and Katie had mapped how often it did—her system would introduce a low-powered carrier wave masked as RF interference into the control room’s comm channel.

  To her surprise, it had worked beautifully. She’d been able to eavesdrop on official conversations, and never got caught. As a kid, she’d listen in for hours, especially on days when her dad was due back, hoping to hear his voice over the STC channel.

  Now, the auxiliary environmental unit roared to life as she established access to her backdoor, just as it had so many times before. She wasted no time. She slipped through the network, insinuating herself into the control room.

  What she saw there confirmed her worst fears. Ten men and women, heavily armed, stood watch over the platform manager and his first shift team, including Jeremy. A few of the stations were empty, though; she wondered about that.

  As she watched, an alert sounded on the workstation that held the network’s control interface.

  One of the armed men stepped forward, gesturing threateningly at the woman who crewed that console. “What the hell is that?”

  The woman moved to silence the alarm, but froze, hand extended, when the man fired his weapon. Katie heard the metallic ting! of the bullet that skimmed just past the woman’s head, impacting a corner of the console.

  “You move only when I say you can,” ordered the terrorist. “Now, tell me what that alarm signifies.”

  The platform’s manager stepped forward cautiously, and Katie saw half a dozen rifle barrels snap up, trained on him.

  He raised his hands, p
alms forward, in a gesture of supplication. “It’s an old alert.” He cleared his voice nervously. “We get an RF interference bleed every time the auxiliary and viral plant comes online. It’s been this way for literally five years, and we’ve been unable to trace it.”

  Katie saw the man holding them hostage narrow his eyes suspiciously. She could practically taste the tension in the air as the manager continued.

  “It’s true. Headquarters said it was too expensive to replace, but we can’t do without a backup, so we’ve just had to work around it as best we can.”

  The man holding the gun on the woman at the console gave her a sharp look, and she nodded timidly, confirming the manager’s explanation.

  “I can show you, if you wish,” she offered, voice shaking.

  He motioned with his weapon for her to continue, and she pointed to her display, pulling up a schematic of the platform and zeroing in on the warren of maintenance tunnels that wove throughout.

  “The interference is being generated by unshielded equipment in the auxiliary enviro unit. It’s located at the base of this spar, here.”

  The area flashed as she highlighted it.

  “Indira, check it out.”

  One of the women holding a weapon on the manager brought her gun to its high ready position at the snapped order, then stepped toward the control room’s doors.

  “Hold on,” one of the armed men protested. “We already have Agnew and DeVries patrolling the plant, Grayson and Smalls in lodging, and Zeff, Todds, and Moran on the dock. You really want to stretch us that thin?”

  “You trying to tell me how to run this op, Gardner?”

  “No, man. C’mon.” He gestured around at the seated Cobalt employees. “Isn’t everyone on the platform accounted for? If they’re not out on ships, then they’re under lockdown inside their quarters, except for the doctor and those of us in here.”

  The leader paused, his gaze thoughtful. He looked down at the schematic, pointed to the maintenance tunnels, and asked the comm operator, “How many tunnel entry points are there?”