by T S Hottle
Right. You're not the one who's going to be sitting on Mufaddhi's boot print for this. "Stand by. Accessing Gilead now." She dialed up Gilead's coordinates across hyperspace and pinged the colony's sole hypergate.
Unable to comply, said the AI in a disembodied soft, female voice Friese found annoying. Gilead hypergate unresponsive.
Well, that was all Friese needed today. Gilead's half-assed boondocks support crews couldn't be arsed to calibrate their own gate for orbital and temporal drift. She called up the astronomical data on Gilead, made some quick calculations for where the Metisian colony lay in space and time, and realized the coordinates she used were correct. She pinged the gate again. With one gate, maybe another ship had been in egress the last time.
"Unable to comply," said the soft voice again. "Gilead hypergate unresponsive."
"Shit." She opened her comm channel to Just Read the Instructions again. "Instructions, L5 Control, please free fall to a parking orbit. Gilead is off-line. We will need to report this to the Navy." She waited a few beats for the inevitable response.
"Have you tried pinging it again?"
There it was, that snide implication that Friese, or anyone else sitting in their nice, cushy control centers, could possibly have not known that repinging or recalibrating for a distant hypergate was the obvious follow-up. She had learned early in her career that "Why, no, Captain, the thought never occurred to me. Thank the gods of Asgard and Olympus that you're here to guide me with your wisdom and vast experience" was not an appropriate answer. Instead, she said, "Recalibrated and repinged. Gilead is off-line." And before the skipper could protest, she added, "Commence free-fall, report your parking orbit, and standby for word from the Navy. L5 out."
She knew the captain would be stewing on his bridge, muttering about schedules, lost time, and possibly lost bonuses. Physics was physics, however, and unless Gilead's hypergate began acknowledging its own existence when contacted, travel to the colony would not be possible except by projection drive vessel. Those would prove expensive, especially to the notoriously cheap owners of the Just Read the Instructions.
After that exchange, she sent her data and a short summary of the incident to her Naval Liaison Officer. Bureaucracy satisfied, she put it out of her mind.
Then Farigha started pinging her.
An alert had gone out for Farigha about a month earlier. Its hypergate had also gone offline, but no one, least of all the Citizens Republic of Mars, seemed interested in investigating. Pings from Farigha were to be noted, logged, and passed along to the Naval Liaison Officer for further consideration.
It had been a month. The Navy had not sent a ship. Nor had Mars. Nor had Dasarius Interstellar, the notoriously capitalistic monolith funding the terraforming project for notoriously collective Mars.
Collective, my ass, she thought. Those dome heads never met a credit they didn't like. The only thing collective about those hypocrites is their greed.
And, the thought occurred to her, everyone but Earth and Tian had to suck Mars's hind tit if they wanted to get anything out of the Compact. Hence the saying, "Better Red than bled."
It had been a month. Nothing had been noted or logged or passed to the Navy. Friese noted and logged the ping. She might have considered it an anomalous ping, a false ping, like some amateur or neophyte with a projection drive ship trying to find a hypergate because he or she got lost. False pings came either from nameless ships (because the noobs tended to forget to encode their transponder numbers into the ping) or from functioning hypergates sending out random test pings. Farigha had been silent for a month. Friese pinged it back.
When nothing responded, no return signal to accept a wormhole egress from the other gate, Friese noted and logged her return ping, made a few notes, and passed that along to the Navy for further consideration. She also left a note for her fellow controllers to keep an eye out for further pings.
Her palm tatt tingled, telling her it was 1830. Time to logout and catch the shuttle and the next beanstalk home. There was a bottle of Chardonnay waiting for her there. The port master might have been a tyrant at work, but the man knew his wines. She'd sit in a bath, listen to the local symphonic music, and forget about today's battles with Amargosa's port and the Just Read the Instructions.
NAJIRAN VALLEY PROVINCE, THE CALIPHATE
2037 - 9-Mandela, 429
Friese had barely made it through the front door of her cottage in The Caliphate's wine country when her palm began to tingle. It was Jafar Mufaddhi, the L5 Port Master, and the red text on Friese's palm tatt said "Urgent." She settled into a chair, not about to be denied at least one little comfort before the boss wrecked her quiet evening.
"What's up, Jafar?" she said. "I just got home."
The gate networks over most core worlds had an unwritten rule for civilian administrators: Don't bother junior officers and enlistees from the military at home when their shifts ended. The unwritten addendum to that went, "And if you do, make sure the Security Council has sent a declaration of war against someone to the Compact Assembly." Friese doubted the Compact had gone to war with anyone, or that colony poaching had resumed.
Or had it? Gilead, after all, was offline.
"Good evening, Patty," said Mufaddhi, clearly aware he had violated the One Rule. "Sorry to disturb you at home, but you logged an anomalous ping from Farigha near the end of shift."
"I did," said Friese, trying to work a boot off her foot with her other foot and not succeeding. This call needed to end. "Farigha was listed as non-functional, and neither OCD nor Command have sent instructions as to what to do about anomalous pings. I figured their hypergate might still be able to signal, and that the next shift should watch it."
"Understood." That meant the wrath of Mufaddhi would not be coming down on her tomorrow, at least on this matter. "Thought you'd want to know that it's happening again. And there's a pattern. Single ping. Then two pings. Then three pings. Then five."
Her foot stopped trying to dislodge the boot on the other foot. "Let me guess. Seven, eleven, thirteen?"
"Could you monitor your feed tonight? At least until midnight? Or until it reaches one ninety-nine?"
"Jafar, the signaling mechanisms are dumber than half the Compact Assembly. They're capable pinging in patterns, but it's a manual process. Someone has to tell it to ping in prime numbers."
Mufaddhi let out his breath slowly. "This comes from your boss, General Voraz himself. Between Gilead going silent and now Farigha sending pings, High Command is going to want to know if something's going on with those two colonies."
Right¸ she thought. You're OCD, Jafar. Officially, you can't say it, but you know something's happening. But you're dependent on us to tell you it is. Which, of course, made OCD's omnipotence evaporate. She seemed to remember that famous passage from The Art of War when she went through basic training: No bureaucratic red tape survives contact with the bureaucracy of the Compact Military. At least she was on the Border Guard's payroll and not on that of the Office of Colonial Development.
"I'll be in tomorrow at 0700 with a report," she said. "Your office?"
"Rashidun," said Mufaddhi, referring to The Caliphate's capital city. "The Navy is sending an Admiral Burke to be briefed on the situation."
Lovely, she thought. Five years in the Border Guard, and my perfect record of avoiding the brass outside of a parade ground is shot to hell. "I assume dress blues."
"Take that up with your colonel. I am just your humble civilian manager, paid to terrorize staff during normal business hours. Palm me if you need anything. Mufaddhi out."
Her palm tatt disappeared. With a couple of twitches of her thumb, she made it display the time. 2040. So much for streaming the finals between Metis and Bromdar before bed. She had to monitor her console from home.
"Ugh," she said. "Discharge can't come soon enough."
DAY 28
COMPACT NAVY COMMAND ANNEX, RASHIDUN, THE CALIPHATE
0928 – 12-MANDELA, 429
Commuter air between Friese's home in the Najiran Valley and Rashidun took over an hour. In reality, the valley lay not that far from the capital of The Caliphate, but heavy traffic between the Beanstalk and Rashidun's commuter lanes clogged both air and land. Friese arrived in half an hour but spent another twenty minutes waiting for a lane for her airborne flitter. She had opted not to take the maglev into the City to avoid the crowds. The maglev had arrived on time, twenty minutes after it left.
Friese did not find that data on her heads-up display very helpful.
She could have used her palm to brief this Admiral Burke, whom she had never seen even in the feeds. The chip in her wrist, though, would take forever to uplink to the Navy's grid. She'd be stuck holding her arm out to a reader for almost an hour if she did that. She dumped everything she had onto a tablet and tucked that under her arm.
She opted for her dress blues for this meeting. For Border Guard, the branch of the military tasked with safe-guarding the atmospheres and low orbits of core worlds, dress blues literally meant dress blues: Blue jacket displaying any medals the officer or enlistee had, rank pins on officers' collars and stripes on enlistees' arms, light blue shirt, and either blue trousers or skirts, depending on the officer's gender. Regulations further stipulated that those wearing skirts wear archaic hose and a "business-like pump." Pumps were shoes, and Friese hated them almost as much as the hose. If her legs were going to be exposed, let them be exposed. Better still, let women wear trousers. Other branches did. Well, the Marines and the Navy did. No one was really sure what a Cybercommand dress uniform looked like.
The Navy Annex sat in a squat three-story building in the shadow of the giant Burj Rashidun Tower. The Tower, almost a city unto itself, was a replica of the ruined building on Earth, though much larger than the original had been when it stood. The Annex was just a box. That figured. Friese had never seen a dull building the military could not resist. Someone once joked that the old Soviet regime on Earth had found new life among the High Command's architecture experts. Others called the tendency toward cinder block and uninteresting lines "The Dull Gray Way." Whatever the philosophy behind the military's lack of imagination in its buildings, they all functioned the same way.
No guard stood at the door. One's wrist chip determined if one were civilian or military, enlisted or officer, high clearance or restricted. The doors within would allow one access only to those sections within that were permitted. If one had an appointment with a flag officer, as Friese did, the building would guide her to her appointment. No ID needed.
Uninvited civilians would find themselves locked out of the building or, if they managed to slip inside behind someone authorized, locked down in the lobby and surrounded by very human guards with very large weapons. It got better. Friese had once seen how Cybercommand's extremely efficient Watch List triggered building defenses that left known criminals and terrorists disabled and, it must be said, humiliated while they waited for arrest. For starters, most military buildings had a mechanism that could strip an intruder of his or her clothes in seconds before even deploying its non-lethal defenses. It had foiled a dozen or so Cubist bombings, but the religious sect continued to try its attacks on the Compact's military without success.
The building's internal navigation led Friese to an area dead center of the first floor, where a guard in black Shore Police fatigues greeted her.
"Technical Sergeant Patricia Friese for Admiral Burke," she said, saluting in a manner that felt lazy. It was no different from how she normally saluted other enlistees and officers, even in the Navy. But the Shore Police had a reputation for being hard-asses even behind a desk.
The Shore guard pulled a pcom off his shoulder and repeated Friese's information into it. A person on the other end merely responded. "Copy that."
"Your escort will be down in a moment," said the guard. "Have a seat."
The MPs of the Border Guard and the Marines tended to be more relaxed in their demeanor, at least until they had to spring into action. Friese wondered if the Shore Police ever turned off the parade mode. It made her sit at attention.
Another guard arrived, this one a female version of the first one. She silently gestured for Friese to follow her. They took an old-style mechanical elevator to the third floor where the new guard marched crisply to the end of the corridor. She took hold of a metal handle on a frosted glass door emblazoned with the words "Executive Conference Room" in Humanic, the local dialect of Arabic, and in Neo-Latin. Finally, the guard spoke.
"Admiral Burke is within," she said. "It will be the same as briefing a flag officer of your own service. Good luck, Sergeant."
Well, no shit, Sherlock, she thought, but I've never briefed a flag officer before.
She expected to see an older woman, perhaps one that had allowed her rejuve to lapse into her fifties to give herself an air of authority. She would be standing at a picture window staring out at the street, hands behind her back, her dress jacket smartly pressed to razor sharp creases.
Instead she found a young-looking redhead, one who looked younger than Friese if truth be told. She wore a flight suit and her hair up in a ponytail. She looked much like the young post-grad Friese's ex-boyfriend had run off with. The Admiral had a mug of coffee in one hand and a tablet in the other. She looked up.
"Sergeant Friese?" When Friese nodded, she put down the coffee and the tablet and reached across the conference table. "Eileen Burke, Outland Command."
As Friese shook her hand, she saw the tell-tale signs of rejuve, faint wrinkles on the neck and around the base of the ears. Burke could be over two centuries old for all Friese knew, but she looked stunning even if she were in her fifties or sixties.
They sat. "So," said Burke, "tell me about the prime numbers. What's going on with Farigha?"
Friese explained what was happening, beginning with that first anomalous ping. "It happens all the time, though usually from functioning hypergates. I've never seen one from a damaged gate, especially one that's been offline for almost a month."
Burke looked Friese over. "Rejuve, Sergeant? Not being nosy, just trying to gauge your age."
"Thirty-seven, sir. I decided to wait until the end of my tour. I should still be able to cycle back to twenty."
Burke smiled. "Don't cycle too far back. Men respect a woman in her thirties or forties. Cycle back to your twenties, and you'll spend the next two centuries being looked at like a piece of meat. Anyway, I'm a hundred and ten, and I've never heard of a dead hypergate coming back to life. Continue, please."
Friese explained how the Farigha gate began pinging at fifteen-minute intervals the previous evening. First one, then two, then three, and so on until it reached four hundred ninety-nine pings. Then it started over at one."
"Why 499?" asked Burke. "Why not 500?"
"Well, as my report stated," said Friese, "these were prime numbers. Only an intelligence, artificial or organic, could do that. And the gate itself is about as non-sentient as an advanced piece of computing equipment can get. It has to be manually reset for each ping and each transit. Inefficient, but it keeps us from putting our lives into the hands of an AI with delusions of godhood."
"And 499 is either sheer or simulated human laziness," said Burke. "I'm inclined to think someone's alive there and that it took them a month to figure out how to access the gate. Or what's left of it. Tell me, Sergeant, what did you do when you received the first ping?"
"I responded," she said. "A ping comes through, we open the gate."
"And?"
Friese never understood why the brass needed someone to state what had already been said or written. Burke also did not seem like an idiot. No, this woman wanted people to look her in the eye when they talked to her. "With no functioning gate at the far end, we were unable to generate a wormhole."
"And you are certain the gate is nonfunctional, despite receiving pings from it?"
"Yes, sir."
Burke looked down at her palm, flexing her fingers and thumb in sequence
. "Burke to Caliphate Naval Yard. Admiral Upton, please."
A few moments later, a male voice emanated from the palm of Burke's hand. "Upton, here. Good morning, sir. This is an hon—"
"Save it, Admiral," said Burke in a tone that told anyone listening she was only one star shy of full admiral. "I need a projection capable ship prepped and ready to go to Farigha immediately."
"Sir," said Upton, "the Farigha gate has been offline for twenty-eight days."
"And…?" She waited just long enough for the admiral to formulate a response, then added, "I said nothing about using the Farigha gate. I said get me a projection drive ship."
"With all due respect, sir, OCD has placed Farigha under quarantine."
"Does OCD have authority over Naval operations?"
"No, ma'am, but the Fleet Admiral does."