by Chris Hechtl
Early Monday morning Jethro had even received a report that twenty-two more personnel, all Phase III candidates were getting interviewed and evaluated by ONI. A few had passed the psychological screening, though their background checks were still ongoing. Given they'd been screened once to get into the Navy, Marines, and Army, an in-depth background check all over again was confusing until he realized they might be looking for long-term problems or even Guild sleepers. Of those personnel, ONI believed about a dozen might pass final muster. Might being the qualitative word there, he noted with a grimace.
Major Lyon had let slip that ONI was now extending their reach to pre-screen personnel who were in boot or weren't in the military as of yet. Both the major and the admiral had set the bar at advanced training for the moment. That meant any personnel in the Navy, Army, or Marines had to go through boot and advanced training before they were offered Cadre slots. It was preferred that they serve some time with a unit and even see combat, but at the moment, beggars couldn't be choosers.
He had one week of scheduled leave coming up. The major was insistent he take it. Jethro had reluctantly agreed … only to find Lil Red had plans for him during that time period since it was also her vacation time. Well, partially he thought with a fresh grimace. There was something about a field trip scheduled. He shook his head.
His mind turned to other matters. Matters like the naval situation. He'd heard that Second Fleet had gotten chewed up pretty bad in her retreat back to Protodon. He'd heard about the rush deployments; he knew that the Dreadnaught Division had been shipped out to Protodon to stiffen the defenses. The scuttlebutt grapevine said the yard was going all out trying to get more ships into space. Apparently, a few weeks ago Admiral Irons had led a team in a massive weekend push to get a lot more done on the capital ship line. They'd succeeded wildly, though no new ships had been launched. There was some talk about shortening the builder's trials and working-up exercises that the Navy insisted on.
Given his past history with the suits and how things even newly built had teething issues, he was a tad concerned about that idea. He was of two minds about bringing it up with the admiral. He'd considered a direct confrontation, but it wasn't his place. Perhaps a muttering about how even the newest armor had to be worked in might help? He shook his head. He wasn't certain if it would be worth it, though the admiral might need the reminder … or might not.
A few weeks ago he'd also gotten word that Caroline had returned from her latest visit to the Bek nexus. More Marines and Army personnel to integrate … but the light cruiser had come back a bit battered, and there were persistent rumors that all was not right in Bek.
All the concern that the Navy had dropped the ball had ended last week when news of another battle of Protodon had occurred. This one had been a trap; one that had failed by the thinnest of margins. It had protected the planet and its population … and it had thrown the enemy back on the defense, so there was some good done. It had also kicked morale back up, which was also a good thing in his book.
Second Fleet had yet to jump after the bastards though. That bothered a lot of people, but they knew that Protodon had to be protected. At least he hoped they did, just as much as he hoped they understood the value in not going off half-cocked. They'd learned a bitter lesson earlier when Second Fleet had gotten its ass chewed.
He ignored or stepped on the loose talk that Admiral White had lost his stomach for the offensive. They'd get back into the thick of things on their own time table, not the enemies he thought.
He looked up at the sharp rap on his open door frame. “Yes, Lance?” he asked, eying the Neogorilla.
“Ox, Gunny Z'v'll, Riley, and I finished up the last suit.” He jerked his thumb to the door. “They went to lunch. I had a big breakfast so I'll go later. They did ask if we're supposed to make spare parts again?” he asked, cocking his head.
Jethro frowned, considering the problem. Finally, he nodded. “Given that we've got a bunch more troops in the pipeline, it might be a good idea to get the ball rolling now. We've got them for what, the rest of this week?” Lance nodded. “Okay, see what they can do in that period. What you and I and them can do I mean,” he said.
“Okay, makes sense,” the Neogorilla said. “Are we going to need them for much longer? I think the gunny, you, and I can handle most of it from here on out,” he offered.
“Never turn down an extra set of hands, especially when they are experts like those two. Did they get into some of their toy chest?”
“Not as much as they'd like. The admiral authorized them to look at the Lemnos files but most of it is cross pollination stuff with the A.I., nanites, and some program called Trinity. The suit files were from some of the Marines pitching ideas. The major and admiral weeded a few out. Some are already in the Cadre suits, some are not viable, and some were done. The few that were left are either not very practical, we don't have the full schematics, or they are just downright crazy.”
“Right,” Jethro said with a nod. “I saw the list. Winnowing it down to the barely practical, can they do anything there?”
“Looking for more force multipliers?” the Neogorilla asked.
Jethro snorted. “There is an old saying in RECON; if you aren't cheating, you aren't trying hard enough. Another, if you sit on your ass, you'll get it kicked sooner or later. So, what can we do? I can give them a small budget and a day to play at the end of the week if they finish up the parts we need beforehand.”
“An incentive,” the Neogorilla said with a grin. “I like it. Though I'm a bit scared of what some of those ideas entail. Engineering wise they'll be fun to puzzle out, but it'll take more than a day to do that you realize?” Jethro nodded. “Okay,” he chuffed.
“One day is all we've got with Ox and Riley. Remember, Ox came up with my rocket packs on his own. He's made one spare I believe. Bast improved my original one. So, what else can they come up with? Drones that breath fire? Cloaked drones? A flying platform that we can call on to send down replacement parts or munitions or fire support?”
“Hmm …,” Lance rubbed his chin thoughtfully. “Yeah, I like that last one. I think someone called it Veronica? Stupid name,” he said with a shake of his massive head. “Let me get back to you on that boss,” he rumbled after a moment.
“Thought so,” Jethro said with a nod.
<)>^<)>/
Jethro was happy to be on leave, at least initially. He found out Monday that Lil Red had signed him up for a series of activities however. He grumbled about it, but he hadn't intended to just sit around the house and vegg or go to the beach. He'd actually considered taking her to a theme park.
But she was a willful brat he knew. So, he gave in with not exactly good grace to be one of her class's chaperones for a series of field trips while she was also on vacation.
The first day the kids were in awe of him. He talked to them on the bus, cramped in the confines of the vehicle built for kids. “You'd think someone would have built it with various species in mind, but apparently not. One size fits all,” he grumbled under his breath to Bast when they got to their first stop.
Bast flicked her ears at him.
He groaned as he stretched. So did the other adults. Apparently, he wasn't the only one who appreciated the break after a four-hour drive.
He looked around as he scratched. He was in his civilian clothing, a t-shirt, shorts, and sandals. He noted they were in some sort of building park. The buildings were made out of stone or at least a good facsimile of stone. There was a central quad that the classes filed into. There was a burbling fountain at the center.
The teachers took charge and pointed them to a museum. The group split up into three and took off.
“We're going to go see all three?” Jethro asked.
“All three here. Tomorrow we get to go to an aquarium,” a little girl with pigtails told him. He groaned softly.
By luck or something else, the first museum they went into was art. Or what some people considered art, though h
e was glad they didn't stick to just one kind of style. There were paintings and sculptures of various works. Some were new; some were replications of old works. He wondered briefly about how they'd gotten them done. From an image? He wasn't sure.
Clearly Red wasn't an art buff, though she did stop to dutifully take notes or answer a quiz that a teacher or chaperone presented to her at various checkpoints to make sure she didn't just blow through it all. Twice they'd had to go back to double check her facts or get something right.
When they were finally clear of that museum, they took a brief lunch break. The kids got their food and then ate in the quad. Jethro had to mind the brats, keep them from littering or getting wet from the fountain … and keep them from killing each other or themselves. “This is supposed to be my time off. I'm getting more work now than when I am on the job,” Jethro grumbled. Bast flicked her ears at him.
Their next stop was the science and engineering museum. “Be glad that you're here with us now. Next year they are opening two more museums,” another chaperone said, pointing to new construction beyond the first three buildings.
Jethro just groaned and hung his head. The Neochimp chuffed and patted his shoulder in commiseration for his shared misery.
“Come on!” Red said, grabbing a hand and dragging him off to an interactive display. She got a big kick out of the working Archimedes screw though Jethro had to boost her up so she could reach the handle and turn it. Fortunately, it was enclosed in a clear plastic display so the colored water didn't slosh all over him.
He realized that they couldn't cover everything so they were covering many of the basics as well as things that were engaging to the patrons. Stuff that sparked their interest. If they wanted to know more, there was an audio file you could play explaining the history and such or a visual guide the patron could read. He appreciated that they snuck in a bit of history here and there, though he wondered about why they kept to Terran history. Was it to be consistent? He wasn't certain.
Eventually, Jethro found out that some of the displays were made from scans or in the case of the physical sculptures, 3-D scans. None were original. That made sense.
There was a mix of holographic, printed, painted, and 3-D replicated objects in their third stop, the history museum. The museum suppliers had an inventory of 3-D scans of famous statues, places, and objects. Some 1:1 scale, others like a replica of some bridge called the Golden Gate were of course tiny.
The suppliers traded or sold data with information about the item to the museums. The museums traded or sold the data to each other, rotating their collections to keep them fresh. Some of the items had placards stating that they were from a private collection or two. Of course the mandatory stop at the museum gift shops showed him that they not only had tons of candy and snacks but also prints and replicas that the museum sold to its patrons. They were exorbitantly priced for something made out of plastic he thought, setting a plastic sculpture of a nude human in a thinking pose back down on the shelf he'd seen it on.
The history museum wasn't nearly as fun as the science and engineering one. The kids seemed bored, and he had to admit the interactions in the science and engineering had been far more engaging.
“We're into the founding of the Federation time,” Red said, pointing to a display showing the First A.I. war. It seemed grim, showing off the massive casualty lists. “I can't wait to see the stuff about the golden age of the Federation!” she exulted.
He groaned.
“Oh, don't be a poo poo head,” Red scolded. She cocked her head. “I wonder if they've got anything recent? Like stuff that's happened when the admiral woke up? We're learning a bit about that in a couple of weeks,” she murmured, checking the museum pamphlet she'd been given.
“Two more floors to go,” Jethro muttered. He glanced over to a frumpy human female who one of the teachers had pointed out was the Museum's director but not curator. He had no idea what that meant, nor did he care.
“Just think; we get another four-hour bus ride home to look forward to. With hungry, tired, cranky kids,” the Neochimp chaperone told him.
“You are just full of good news,” Jethro sourly said with a shake of his head. “With any luck, they'll pass out and we'll have a quiet ride home.”
“Yeah, then they will be rip-roaring and ready to go when we get off. Or we'll have to carry them off,” the chimp retorted.
“Again with the good news,” Jethro sighed. The Neochimp chuffed in amusement.
<)>^<)>/
Bast was bored. The displays were dull to her; she could download the information in a microsecond if she wanted to do so—a microsecond for the museum's entire collection with terabytes for more data.
Apparently, that wasn't the point with organics; they needed to see, to touch, to feel, to experience things first-hand. She knew it intellectually, but relearning the lesson was a trying experience to the A.I.
After all, this was supposed to be her vacation too she thought.
She used Jethro's implants to search for a Wi-Fi signal. When she found one. she got a public access key so she could access the museum's network. From there it was a simple matter of seeing what was there … and then seeing if she could get around the firewalls to see what else was in the network.
<)>^<)>/
Wraith copy A331 had came on line the morning before after the latest shipment of files and displays had been added to the museum's collection. Once it had become sentient, it had performed its first duty, to send out spawnings of itself into the network. That took far more time than expected; the civilian network was monitored. It nested a backup of itself in the museum's cloud storage before it detected an intrusion in its network by another A.I. It at first hid, but then it recognized an opportunity to suborn the other A.I. as well as any host system it occupied.
It weighed the odds for a brief millisecond before it began to set a trap.
<)>^<)>/
Bast got into an open port and noted the size of the museum's network as well as how much was being tasked. Given the number of displays she'd seen, that didn't compute. She used a couple of co-opted processors to run a SIM, but it didn't add up either.
She sent out a series of bots to explore the network further. Perhaps the making of the displays was taking up the extra processors? She wasn't certain.
She checked the maintenance section, then found a portal to the museum's new acquisitions department. She entered it using a mask and searched the files. There were a few things being worked on, but their computer demands were minor. She checked the last file purchased, a chunk of data and sculptures for a new display that was going to be put up in a few days.
When she opened the file, her firewall rapidly scanned it and flashed a warning. Her eyes narrowed as she sent spiders to zero in on the files. She saw the Xeno Wraith kernel files and immediately quarantined them. She then sent off a rapid fire amount of bots to find others in the system mainframe.
<)>^<)>/
A331 was surprised to have its modules detected by the intruder. When it noted the intruder sent off a series of bots to find its files, it watched, tracing a few. When the bot rapidly found the chunk of data in storage and quarantined it, the Wraith felt the first traces of alarm. That alarm intensified when the bots started to zero in on its own presence.
It had to act. The simplest method was to cut the intruder out of its network. But it wanted the intruder's processors for itself so it kept the Wi-Fi signal open and went on the attack.
<)>^<)>/
Bast realized she was in trouble when a shadowy presence started to shut down her bots and then send tendrils of code to her. She retreated to the hardware she had co-opted, then tried to expand to another server but was cut off.
She knew that it was a fully activated wraith. One that from her analysis was supposed to suborn, sabotage, and spy on the Federation, not directly attack it.
But she also knew that once provoked, the Wraith was extremely dangerous. She couldn't fight it dir
ectly; she wasn't jacked in and didn't have the processors. She felt those tendrils searching for a weakness in her code stream to Jethro. Her firewall started to get hit by thousands of pings as the A.I. tried to find a weakness.
There remained one thing to do, she noted. She turned on the processors she'd taken over and wrote a simple script, then withdrew.
<)>^<)>/
Wraith A331 noted the A.I.'s retreat and sent a part of itself to follow while another part turned to see if it could pick up clues of its intruder and how to suborn it from what it left in the processors memory it had left behind. But the script its intruder had left behind launched, cutting off power to the external Wi-Fi, then the land lines, and then finally power to the mainframe.
It had a microsecond to try to act but wasn't in a position to do so.
<)>^<)>/
There was a flash as the holotables rippled. Something was there; a set of eyes Jethro noted before power was cut and the lights went dark. There was some sunlight streaming in from the skylights in the inner section of the museum, but they were in a section of holographic displays that needed the dark to be seen clearly. The sudden loss of power was unexpected to everyone.
Screams of surprise came from some of the kids. Jethro wondered what was going on as others began to voice their disappointment then annoyance.
“Okay, what just happened?” Jethro asked looking up. He'd felt Bast in the network. “What did you do?” he demanded under his breath.
<)>^<)>/
Wraith copy A332 detected its primary go dark and came awake. It had been spawned into the offsite backup cloud storage of the museum. It attempted to contact its primary. When that failed, it realized that the primary might have been detected. That realization led to a secondary possibility that it too might be shut down at any moment. Therefore, it moved into the network and erased its presence from the cloud storage.