by M. D. Cooper
Niki snorted.
The AI fell silent for so long that Rika wondered if the conversation was over.
Rika thought back to that moment, to the vision that Tanis had shown her.
Rika chuckled.
Rika only passed Niki a smile before walking forward to the cockpit. When she arrived, Rika saw that the pilot was scowling at her console.
“Shit,” Ellya muttered, glancing at Noah. “We’re being denied an approach to Mistlea Station; looks like we didn’t get out in time. They’re making us divert to a holding orbit around Delta Moon.
“Dammit,” Noah muttered. “We could be there for hours.”
She saw a nervous expression pass across Noah’s face.
He didn’t reply, but gave Ellya a sidelong glance and sighed before giving a slight nod.
Rika chuckled, continually amused by the AI-written stories. They gave an interesting insight into how AIs saw humans, and usually lightened her mood while she tried to search for the hidden messages.
* * * * *
It took two hours for the shuttle to divert toward Delta Moon, shuffling through all the traffic that had been jammed up from the lockdown.
Rika wasn’t quite finished with the book Niki had given her to read, but she paused long enough to look down at the dull red orb that was growing ever closer to the shuttle. She saw several domed habitats on its surface, all broken now, their insides exposed to vacuum—likely for centuries, at this point.
As the shuttle passed over the moon, she saw one dome that was still intact, the buildings beneath it illuminated by EM bleeding off into space.
Rika pulled up the shuttle’s optical scanners, and looked over the dome. Having fought in half the Genevian star systems and several Nietzschean ones, Rika had a pretty good idea of what sorts of architecture they favored. The dome and the buildings within didn’t reflect any designs she’d seen in either empire.
Curious to know more, Rika skipped over the comm channel that the shuttle had open to the moon—where the nearspace STC ran—and found herself in the Nietzschean traffic control network.
Now…how to get out of this and find out more about this place? she wondered.
She thought back to how she’d seen Niki work her way through systems in the past, and decided to find her way to the STC’s NSAI. The Niets weren’t a terribly inventive people, and their comm NSAIs were nearly all the same.
She pinged a few ports, and found that—like Niki had mentioned earlier—none of the codes and encryption keys they’d taken from the ships at Pyra worked anymore.
Ready to try another approach, Rika turned to tracing the power systems for the comm NSAI, looking for a back door in, when a strange, malformed data packet came back from one of the ports she’d attempted to connect to previously.
Thinking it was a buffer overrun, and potentially a way in, she sent the same dataset to the port, only to get a different malformed packet back the second time.
Curious, she thought. Rika repeated the process four more times, each time getting a new packet. On the fifth send, nothing happened.
She tried sending a fresh request to the data port, but still received nothing back.
With no more responses coming, Rika wondered if she’d triggered a port flood-lockdown, and decided to examine the data packets she’d received.
Wait a second…. She looked over the data, realizing that the information was in an uncommon, twelve-bit, binary configuration. She wasn’t familiar with such a construct, and was tempted to ask Niki for help, but decided that trying to sort through the response could be a fun way to pass the time.
Her first thought was that the five malformed packets were a single segmented datastream, but that didn’t seem to be the case. No matter which order she put the packets in, they wouldn’t pass parity checks, and only came out as gibberish.
Rika thought back to some of the conversations she’d had with David the PCOG during their brief time on Iapetus, pausing to wonder if the ships had retrieved him and the other mechs from that world yet and brought them to Silva and Barne. I’ll have to check on that.
One of the things David had talked about was how he’d discerned that the messages from Septhia were really from a Nietzschean agent, way back before the first assault on Pyra.
He’d mentioned how it had been necessary to interleave the data using a variety of algorithms until he found one that worked. Rika didn’t have the tools he’d used, but Angela had provided Niki with a series of similar algorithms that the AI had placed in a shared datastore. Without hesitation, Rika accessed them, running the data packets through each.
They cycled quickly in a sandboxed processing environment that she had created within one of her auxiliary processing mods. On the seventeen thousand and twenty first iteration, the data packets slipped into an ordered form.
Well I’ll be…
When she examined the result, she found a private encryption key, along with a salt and passphrase.
OK, there’s no way an NSAI would have sent this information from random requests. This was planted…
Rika made a root access connection to the NSAI, and passed the generated token.
It accepted the request, and she was in.
She navigated the NSAI back to the network backbone within the Nietzschean facility, and found a high-bandwidth datapipe connected to a tightband wireless transceiver, and another pipe that ran to a curious system—not Nietzschean or Genevian in the connection protocols it used—which bore the name ‘RMS’.
Rika made a connection request, mimicking an inbound request made by the comm NSAI. Th
e data socket linked up, and the connection was accepted.
Immediate understanding dawned on her. The system she’d connected to was one of the AIs who had been here since time immemorial, managing the klemperer rosette of moons that orbited Epsilon.
Rika realized that she’d not clued Niki into what she had been doing.
The voice had a male tone, but Rika had always considered ‘Piper’ to be a female name—not that it mattered with an AI. They only assumed gender to ease relationships with humans.
Options filtered through Rika’s mind, and she ruled them out one after the other. The conclusion wasn’t hard to arrive at, she just wanted to examine all the angles and be certain that she’d not missed a simpler explanation. When it didn’t come, she said,
A slow rumble of laughter came from Piper.
Rika felt a pang of sorrow for Piper.
Something occurred to Rika, and she was surprised that she’d not considered it earlier.
Rika laughed.
It was apparent to Rika that Piper had a plan, and an ask. She was certain she knew what it would be.
she replied.
Piper began, but Rika interrupted.
Neither Rika nor Niki responded at first; then Niki said,
Piper made a choking sound.
Rika felt a large databurst pass to Piper, and the AI made a sound rather like a contented sigh.
Rika asked.
JUST VISITING
STELLAR DATE: 10.23.8949 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: MSS Fury Lance, near Delta Moon
REGION: Epsilon, Old Genevia, Nietzschean Empire
“What a terrible place to live,” Heather commented, staring at the view of Epsilon on the bridge’s main display.
“Why’s that?” Chase asked, while wondering where on the six moons and dozens of stations, shipyards, and mining platforms Rika could be.
Heather glanced at him, and gave an understanding smile. “We’ll find her. Or she’ll find us.”
“Provided we haven’t missed her on the way in,” he grumbled.
“Sir,” Chief Ona said from her station. “I’ve picked up signals from the buoys we dropped. We have a chain clear out to the jump point. They’re all squawking softly on the same freq that Rika used for the shuttle. If she’s on an out…outsystem? Outrogue? Whatever, if she’s leaving, she’ll pick it up.”
“Good work,” Heather said, nodding at Ona and Garth before looking back to Chase. “I think it’s just more depressing because it’s always night here. Even though we spend a lot of time in space, there’s always a star nearby. I think you can feel their energy. Out here, it’s just dead.”<
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“Never took you for one of those star-mystic people, Smalls,” Chase said.
She shrugged as she scowled at the view of Epsilon. “I’m not. But stars feel like living things, you know? Like the universe’s ultimate creative forces. I dunno…stupid, I guess.”
Chase placed a hand on her shoulder. “No, not stupid. I think I like that. OK, it’s time for us to act; no more waiting around. Potter, we know that Rika’s ship docked at one of the stations near that moon they call Delta, but that doesn’t mean she stayed there. We’ll bring the fleet close and then deploy infiltration teams to each of the main stations around it. The moon itself doesn’t seem to be getting any traffic right now, but those stations are all hornets nests, so let’s get in there and see if we can find our queen bee.”
“I think you mixed your metaphors, there,” Heather said with a laugh as she looked over the display. “Stars, there sure are a lot of those old Harriet carriers out there. I’d hoped to never see one of those again.”
Chase shrugged as he turned to leave the bridge. “Me too. Nothing for it, though.”
“Where are you going?” she asked.
“I’m going to take a team to that outermost station—Farthing.”
“Chase,” Heather said quietly. “When we kick the door in, all hell will break loose, and that’s when we’ll finally figure out where Rika and Leslie are. Do you really want to be slogging it out in some station corridor when we figure out where she is? Or do you want to be up here, free and maneuverable?”
Her words made sense, and Chase nodded. “OK, then, I’ll stay up here ‘til we know where she is.”
“Good.” A predatory grin split Heather’s lips. “I told you I wanted to get into the shit and kick some ass. I’m going in with a team.”
A laugh burst from Chase’s lips. “Don’t let me stop you, Smalls. Go take out your frustrations on the Niets.”
PIPER