Virago One: A Hard Science Fiction Technothriller (Ace of Space Book 2)

by John Triptych

  “Think about it,” Stilicho said. “You’ve got a Russian hacker and you’ve got a Chinese spy. One specializes in penetrating AI networks and the other is into fusion reactors. It looks to me like they’re trying to build some sort of killer, self-aware robot or something.”

  Tyler started chuckling.

  “Don’t laugh,” Stilicho said. “I’m being serious.”

  Darian remembered all too well what they went up against on Mars. “If there’s a remote possibility that you’re right, what would they be doing now?”

  Stilicho shrugged. “I dunno. I don’t have enough information to go on.”

  “Well we can’t give you clearance for that classified military link you tried to access earlier,” Tyler said. “We can’t even access it ourselves and would need to go way past our supervisors for it.”

  Stilicho bit his lip. If only he had Maia, he could have figured this whole thing out by now. Then it hit him. “Wait,” he said. “I do recall that ACE Corp was doing something with the Air Force in regards to an AI, but I just didn’t have enough clearance for it.”

  “Wouldn’t that violate the treaty banning advanced AI though?” Darian asked.

  Stilicho was trying his best to remember. “I think Errol was telling me something about limiting the AI rather than going all out with it. Damn, I would need higher access for that military classified stuff.”

  Darian frowned. “Don’t look at me. I’ve already gone out on a limb just by letting you tag along with us. You’re supposed to report to your motel room by now.”

  Tyler looked at his partner. “Darian, maybe you could talk to Marty Ballast about it? He knows quite a few higher ups in the president’s administration.”

  Darian shook her head. “Oh no, until we find something concrete that ties this in with the military, I am not going to ask our supervisor for that.” She pointed at Stilicho. “This guy is a suspect in multiple data breaches, and you want me to ask Marty if we could allow him access to top secret military information?”

  Stilicho leaned back, dejected. “Hey! I’m cooperating with you guys.”

  Tyler was receiving a call on his smartglass. He answered it while getting out of the car so he could have some privacy.

  With her partner out of earshot, Darian leaned towards her left side so she could see Stilicho’s face. “Tell me the truth, Jones. You’ve still got Maia, don’t you?”

  He held his hands up. “All of her copies were tracked down and deleted by the NSA. There were several IT teams from different government agencies supervising the whole thing- even ACE Corp was in on it.”

  “Come on, I know you,” she said. “You’ve got a copy of her suite hidden away somewhere, right?”

  “Are you baiting me to confess, Darian?”

  “Whatever you tell me is off the record,” Darian said. “If you’re going to prison, it won’t be because of me, I owe you that much.”

  Stilicho rolled his eyes. He still didn’t trust her. “Oh wow, that makes me feel oh so much better.”

  Tyler slumped back into the driver’s seat. He was grinning. “Guess what? One of the police duty sergeants just called me. He said a few weeks ago there was an irate man who was accusing the neighbors of stealing his car right at his driveway. The cops investigated, but they couldn’t find any proof it was the neighbors who did it. The car was found abandoned a few blocks from the Tech Noir club- the same night that Anonymyst was spotted in. Anyway, the complaint was that the car’s AI system was hacked in such a way that the cops were unable to trace who did it.”

  Darian put on her seatbelt. “Did they give you the address of the house?”

  Tyler closed the car door and started the electric engine. “They sure did.”

  Pearl Winters opened the front door and pointed inside. Her hair was somewhat tousled since she had been woken up, and she had to dress in a hurry to meet with them. “There’s the living room. The renters left about a week ago so as the owner, I ended up with the deposit.”

  Darian walked into the room first. She could see that it had gone through a professional cleaning. Everything was spotless. “Can you tell me what they looked like?”

  The old woman shrugged. “I never saw them.”

  Tyler had also come into the house and he stood in between them. “How did they sign the rental agreement then?”

  Pearl hesitated at first before she answered. “It was all done electronically. As soon as their payment cleared in my bank, I was instructed to leave the house keys underneath the welcome mat. The contract was sent over by email with the signature.”

  Darian bit her lip. They had been given a copy of the contract by Pearl, and the only name on it was a John Smith. Even the picture on the ID was clearly faked. “So you never met your renters at all?”

  The landlord shook her head. “No. I figured they wanted privacy. The market is really depressed these days and I needed the money, so I let them have the house without any fuss. What I did is legal and above board.”

  Tyler smiled. “Yes, ma’am, you did nothing wrong. We’re just trying to find the renters of your house.”

  Pearl gave him a concerned look. “Oh dear. What did they do? Did I rent this property to a bunch of criminals or something?”

  Stilicho stood by the door as he used the ultraviolet mode on his smartglasses to check for fingerprints. So far he couldn’t find any.

  Tyler kept beaming to reassure her. “We just want to have a word with them, ma’am.”

  “Well they left a few weeks ago,” Pearl said. “I was driving by and saw a bot cleaning company so I stopped my car and had a talk with them. They said they were hired to clean the house and since the renter paid for it, I figured it wasn’t a big deal.”

  “So you didn’t see them leave either?” Darian said.

  “No,” Pearl said. “I tried calling them, but the com-link number they gave me was disconnected. I checked the house out and there was nothing stolen or out of place, so I didn’t bother to call the cops.”

  “Okay,” Darian said.

  “Look, I need to go watch over my dogs,” Pearl said. “Can you just leave the house keys in my mailbox when you’re done?”

  “Sure thing, ma’am,” Tyler said as he walked out into the driveway with her.

  Darian made her way over to Stilicho, who had just come out of the bedroom. “Well?”

  Stilicho cycled his smartglasses back on standard visual mode. “Looks like those bot cleaners did one hell of a professional job. No prints, no DNA, and nothing at all to tie either Vlad, Herbert, or the redheaded chick on this. Looks like we’re at least one step behind them.”

  “You really think they’re planning something big?” Darian asked.

  “I do,” Stilicho said. “And if we don’t get on the ball then it’s going to be one huge disaster waiting to happen.”

  “But how can you say that? We don’t even know what this is all about,” Darian said.

  “It’s got to have something to do with ACE Corp and the military, I just know it,” Stilicho said. “You will need to get me full access on all the classified stuff before it’s too late.”

  Darian grimaced. “This is insane. Not only have you been charged with multiple crimes, you want top secret government clearance that I can’t provide!”

  “I can get a better idea if you let me work on this my own way,” he said.

  “How do I do that?”

  Stilicho let out a deep breath. “Okay, I’m going to confide in you because I trust you. I can still get access to Maia. We need her help in this. If we don’t have her with us then getting to the bottom of this would take months, by then it might be too late.”

  Darian clenched her fists in rage. “I knew it! Where is she? How did you hide her from the NSA and your own ACE Corp IT team?”

  Stilicho grinned and pointed at her. “She’s with you.”

  Darian’s eyes opened wide. “What?”

  “I had Maia place a copy of herself in your server whi
le we were on Mars,” Stilicho said. “She’s been safely tucked away in your personal files for years now. Maia will occasionally go online to update her memory core, but she mostly stays hidden.”

  She wanted to slap him. “Why you son of a … Don’t you know what you’ve done? I could be criminally liable for this!”

  “I know, and I’m sorry,” Stilicho said sheepishly. “I should have told you about this the moment the UN passed the AI ban, but I honestly forgot.”

  “You bastard,” Darian said. Her hand was twitching, ready to draw the pistol on her hip holster. “I should arrest you right here and now.”

  “But you won’t,” Stilicho said. “You want the person who killed your friend in the FBI. You also want to know what this whole affair is about. And you also know the only way to figure this out is through Maia. You know I’m right about this, I can see it in your eyes.”

  Tyler had been listening silently for the past few minutes while standing by the front door. He had read up on the case files of their exploits on Mars, and it made sense to him. “He’s right, Darian. If we want to solve this, then we need that super AI of his.”

  Darian’s chin trembled. Stilicho’s words hit her like a ton of bricks. Deep inside she knew he had a point, but going with his plan would violate her oath as a law enforcement agent. All her life she had followed the rules, and now she would throw away everything just for revenge. But even she could sense that there was some huge catastrophe looming out there, and she needed extraordinary help to deal with whatever was coming.

  For a long time nobody said anything. All three of them just stood there, not wanting to stare into each other’s faces. This would be a momentous decision, one that would clearly set their paths towards a dangerous, uncertain future.

  After a while, she finally looked back at him. “You can use Maia, but just until this case is over. Once this whole thing is finished, I want your word that you delete her. Is that clear?”

  “Sure,” Stilicho said.

  Darian pressed the button on the frame of her smartglasses to give him access to her server. “I’m sending my passcode to you now. I want her deleted from my server when she’s uploaded to yours. If I see you still using Maia after this thing is over then I’ll arrest you. Got it?”

  Tyler nodded silently in affirmation.

  “Okay,” Stilicho said softly. Now that he had access to her personal server, he sent out a private activation code.

  Maia’s calm, friendly tone was like ambrosia to his ears. “Hello again, Stil. I’ve missed interacting with you.”

  Chapter 12

  The 3D hologram of the spacecraft rotated slowly, displayed on the virtual lenses of the smartglasses they were wearing. It vaguely resembled an oval lozenge that stood on one side, with a large rocket nozzle at the end. The thruster was in between two gargantuan sets of deployable radiators that could extend themselves like expandable wings during flight. The radiators were crucial to the ship’s operation once they reached space, since the tremendous amounts of heat being discharged from both the internal reactor and the drive itself needed to be vented away.

  “I realize you’ve all seen the spacecraft in question many times already,” Captain Larry Thomas said. “But I wanted to emphasize that you must deploy the radiator wings to their full extension once you reach the upper atmosphere. The reason for this is simple, once the air gets too thin up there, Earth’s convective cooling will no longer be effective, and from that point onwards your radiators will be the sole way of mitigating heat from both the spacecraft’s drive and its internal reactor.”

  Colonel Marlon Ruthven leaned back on the plastic chair. The meeting room was small and there was a cramped feeling about it, but since it was a crew-only briefing there were plenty of vacant seats around. Perhaps it was because Ruthven and the rest of his crew had been restricted for almost two months within the confines of Argus Base, and the cabin fever was starting to build amongst them. Nevertheless, he fought off the uncomfortable feeling and concentrated on the subject at hand.

  Major Vince Lawson sat beside him and raised his hand to ask a question. “Based on the simulators we’ve been running, I’ve noticed that the radiators start to glow bright orange when we engage all weapons. Will it be like that when we actually get into space?”

  Thomas nodded. “Affirmative, Major. Even though the hafnium carbide material on these radiators are capable of withstanding over four thousand Kelvin, anything over twelve hundred will cause them to glow bright orange, all the way to white hot when you use maximum output.”

  Lieutenant Mechum, the youngest crew member, started to chuckle. “There goes our stealth capability.”

  “There is no stealth in space, Lieutenant,” Thomas said. “Everything can pretty much be seen on Earth. Even something as faint as a dim light bulb that’s gone past Pluto can be picked up by modern day telescopes, and its course and speed can be plotted using triangulation. There’s nowhere to hide out there. Perhaps if we can find a way to mask all heat and light sources of our spacecraft in the future it may be possible, but right now you will be known to everyone on Earth the moment the ship lifts off.”

  Mechum was the clown of the crew—he loved to ask all sorts of questions to pass the time and to help alleviate the stress everyone was under. “If stealth is impossible, then why is the ship’s hull sloped from end to end like that? I thought it would be for defeating radar detection.”

  “It’s part of the armor design,” Thomas said. “Simple physics: any projectile hitting an alloyed plate at an angle other than ninety degrees has to move through a greater thickness of armor. In addition there is a much better chance of deflection too. The armor on the spacecraft you will be flying in will be the most advanced ever developed.”

  Ruthven used the optical menu on his smartglass to zero in on the outer framework of the ship. The spacecraft itself had two separate armored hulls. The outer part was called a Whipple shield, which would act like an outer bumper to both deflect and impede incoming projectiles before they could strike into the inner, thicker hull armor.

  Thomas used a command key to highlight the structure being displayed on their virtual screens. “The inner hull is made up of advanced composite materials including alternating layers of molecular polyethylene and nanomix boron nitride, all with reinforced carbon nanotubing. Of course, the armor will be your last line of protection since the battleship has robust point-defense systems.”

  Lawson raised his hand. He had been sober since the dust-up in his room, and the change in his demeanor was remarkable. “I wanted to ask about that. Why do we have two different point-defense systems? I have had experience with the laser close-in weapon systems since we have those on our Orion fleets, but why do we also have a gauss CIWS too?”

  “Our mission and tech planners have come to the conclusion that an effective tactic against another warship in space is to throw as many missiles at it with the hope of overwhelming its point-defense systems,” Thomas said. “Pretty much like here on Earth when it comes to naval warfare these days.”

  Ruthven glanced at Lawson and gave him a nod of approval. He was asking the right questions without arousing suspicion.

  “Therefore the possibility exists in the event of a war up there that you will be facing a barrage of missiles coming at you,” Thomas said. “While laser point-defense systems are fast and reach incoming missiles quickly since the beam travels at the speed of light, lasers do suffer from diffraction, which tends to limit their effective range. The advantage of the gauss CIWS is that they fire two hundred gram tungsten pellets at a speed of thirty-one kilometers per second, which is pretty fast, and they can target multiple incoming threats at longer ranges. Of course, these guns are limited by their ammunition usage. The designers felt it was better to have two redundant defensive systems rather than placing all bets on just one.”

  Ruthven turned his head to look at the others. “This is the most expensive warship the country has ever built, gentlemen, an
d the last thing everyone wants is to lose it due to a lucky nuclear missile strike. Not only will your wives and girlfriends be angry at you if that happens, but the taxpayers too.”

  The spacecraft commander rarely made any jokes, so a series of amused snorts and muffled chuckling erupted among the eight man crew.

  “Potential conflict in space hasn’t happened yet, and while the launch of this ship could be a political hornet’s nest, we’ve already sent diplomatic feelers to our allies, as well as the Russians and the Chinese,” Thomas said. “The president is still contemplating whether to make the launch public or not, and we should know more over the coming few days.”

  “We haven’t even test fired the engine yet,” Mechum said. “I would have thought we’d use robots instead of a manned crew for the first flight. Imagine what would happen if we blew up on the launch pad and everybody was watching us live.”

  “ACE Corp assures us that the engine will work properly once it’s fired up,” Thomas said. “They had done underground tests of a smaller scale fusion drive, and they claim it works without a hitch.”

  Lieutenant Anderson raised his hand. He was the designated engineer for the flight crew. “Are they sure there won’t be any radiation when this drive goes live?”

  Thomas shook his head. “ACE Corp assures us that it will be safe for humans, so you will just be wearing skinsuits. Electronic systems on the other hand will be vulnerable due to the waves of electromagnetic pulses that will emanate from the nozzle of the drive.”

  “So the EMP bursts will be constant?” Ruthven asked.

  “Yes, the moment the drive is engaged it will fry all non-hardened electronics in a large radius,” Thomas said. “This is why the entire base and the spacecraft in question uses optical communications and instrumentation only. If you have any personal electronics, be sure to place them in the Faraday boxes in and around the ship.”

  “So if we do a flyby near a satellite in orbit then it’s gonna wipe it out? Bye bye worldwide com-links!” Mechum said.

  Thomas sighed. “We’re still waiting on a final launch trajectory, which will avoid any potential damage to the planet’s com-link infrastructure in both geosynchronous and low Earth orbit. We will update this when the final launch date is set over the next few days.”