by Lee Correy
Vaivan was waiting for us. She and Ali embraced. I would have liked to because in the two months we’d been gone, Vaivan hadn’t lost a bit of her sensuality. I had to be satisfied with a friendly hand touch.
“Where’s Father?” was Ali’s first question. “I want to get this matter settled right now!”
“Ali,” she said in a comforting tone as we quickly walked off the landing stage in the cold drizzle, “didn’t you recognize that as an excuse to get you here?”
“Sandy had some suspicions along that line,” Ali admitted as we reached the covered veranda of a wood-sheathed house.
We settled around a table in the warm front room. It seemed strange to sit at a table again. Vaivan produced hot cups of chai for us. It must have had some supaku in it because it warmed me as it went down, then sat in my belly radiating heat outward into the rest of my body.
As we sipped chai, Vaivan put up her hand to silence Ali and explained, “Ali, we had to get you and Sandy back here in spite of the urgency of the RIO operation.”
“What’s going on, Vaivan?” Ali asked his sister.
“We urgently needed a critical planning meeting.”
“But why must we be here in person? We’ve got a scrambled telecon net.”
“Not any more. The scramble code’s been broken.”
“Broken?” Ali sounded incredulous. “It’s so complex that nothing’s supposed to be able to crack it.”
“It was cracked. Our telecon net is no longer secure.”
“Even on lasercom?”
“Tell me, are you set up at Ell-Five for lasercom yet?”
“Uh, no. Jeri reports mid-June at the earliest. Something about equipment delays.”
“We’re getting a lot of delayed shipments and back orders,” Vaivan observed. “In some cases, we’re having to deal through secondaries to get equipment from Tripartite countries.”
“Vaivan,” I put in, “this was an inside job. A complex code can be cracked only by compromise. Someone dump-copied or modemed the computer memory.”
“I think that’s what happened.”
“Who?”
“I don’t know.”
“All right, since we know the net’s not secure, and since they don’t know that we know, we can use it to provide some misdirection and false data.”
“Of course,” Vaivan replied. “But, in the meantime, we have no secure comm until we get lasercom installed, and that means face-to-face meetings.”
“Anybody working on a new code program yet?” Ali asked.
“That takes time we haven’t got,” his sister said.
“Look, what’s the best code in the world?” I put in.
“There’s no unbreakable code,” Vaivan reminded me.
“I know. That isn’t what I asked. But I’ll answer my own question: The best code in the world is one nobody believes is a code. If we come up with another scramble code, it’ll get compromised the same way,” I told them.
“Did you have something in mind, Sandy?” Vaivan asked.
“How much commercial comm traffic goes on in the Commonwealth?”
Ali whistled. “I don’t know the exact number, but there must be over ten thousand voice channels available along with at least a thousand wide-band video and video-holo channels. As for data exchange channels, I haven’t got the foggiest idea of how many thousand there must be.”
“How many people would it take to monitor all the commercial communications of the Commonwealth?” I persisted.
“Several thousand at least.”
“Co-ordinating that effort would be extremely difficult, wouldn’t it?”
Vaivan nodded, her shoulder-length hair bouncing across the scarf pulled over her shoulders against the cool mountain air. “And every monitored channel would have to be screened to determine whether it contained any important information. Then that would have to be evaluated. It’s a massive effort, almost too expensive and time-consuming to be considered.”
“There’s our answer. We use ordinary, everyday commercial telecom in the clear. Each day, we’ll use a different channel determined by a computer utilizing its random number generator. The information about the next channel will be passed along each day as a password,” I explained.
“Password? That’s ancient technology!” Vaivan objected.
“It works.”
“Not if the spy knows the password,” Ali pointed out.
I held up my hand. “Aha! Ali, you’ve served in the Airlmpy, right?”
Ali nodded.
“Did everybody on base know the password?”
“No, only those on guard and those with permission to leave or enter.”
I shrugged. “My point is made. The password must be known only by a selected few. Vaivan, you’re the one to select those few.”
Vaivan was thinking out loud. “Ali, Sandy, Wahak, Shaiko Stoak, Kariander Dok…”
“Don’t make the list too long,” I reminded her, then suggested, “You might also set up a second list, and we’ll use that to trap our spy.”
“Nice move,” Ali commented.
“In the meantime, we’ll keep fake telecons going on the compromised net; we don’t want to reveal we know they’ve broken our code. Teleconferencing in the clear need be known only to those with the password; let everyone else believe it’s being scrambled.”
“The new system won’t work forever,” Ali pointed out.
“What does? And it doesn’t have to,” I told him. “This situation is going to come to a head soon. Look, even if they discover we’re teleconferencing in the clear, they’ll have to monitor thousands of channels. They’ll have to know the modulation characteristics. We can drive their monitors absolutely nuts!”
Ali looked at his sister, and she looked back at him. “Well,” Ali said with finality, “now that that’s settled, let’s shag out of here back to Ell-Five!”
Vaivan shook her head. “Not yet. You just arrived. It would look strange if you and Sandy left immediately.”
“Who knows we’re here?”
“Most of the Landlimo Corporation officers and executive committee, plus President Nogal, Defense Commissioner Abiku, and the impy indunos. We took the precaution of getting Induno Dati of the Airlmpy to issue flight restrictions and clear you in via the north approach. Anybody tracking your beacon with a hand-held unit at Vamori-Free would have seen you disappear up the Dekhar Valley in the direction of the Saddleback Recreational Area where we’ve established a dummy control post.”
“Vaivan, they could have tracked us from orbit,” I told her.
“Not into the Vicrik Valley,” she replied adamantly. “There are four mountain peaks around us with summits above four thousand meters. There are particle beam generators on those four peaks. We’ve got lots of hydro power to run them, and they create a layer of partly ionized air of higher dielectric constant that lays over us. This valley can’t be seen clearly from orbit by any sensor operating below the infra red. That doesn’t hide the mines and other facilities from infra red snoopers, but it certainly makes it very difficult for anybody in orbit to keep radar on anything flying in or out of here. Right, Sandy?”
She was. The United States Aerospace Force had a similar radar-smeared installation at Tincup in Colorado’s Taylor Basin.
As it was, I was learning more and more that the Commonwealthers had already done an outstanding job of getting ready for what The General had known was coming for more than fifty years. Sometimes I wondered why they needed me.
Vaivan and Ali had told me. I offered them both modern military expertise as well as anobjective critique of their activity. After all, critiques are an important tool in defense preparedness as well as military training.
Vershatets was a super-secure Commonwealth keep, but it was more than Cheyenne Mountain or Tincup. It was used by commercial firms as well as by the defense forces. If there was military action against the Commonwealth—outright invasions, terrorism, or blockade—business had to
go on. The Commonwealth had to continue to function. If Topawa, Oidak, Manitu, Hitason, of any of the other commercial/industrial centers were damaged—it had been accepted for over a century that the Trenchard area-bombing doctrine combined with nuclear explosives made such centers prime targets—the commercial/industrial leadership had to be as secure and continuous in operation as the military leadership.
All but the most trusted customers of Commonwealth firms were met in Topawa and most business affairs were conducted there, albeit now under heavy but unobtrusive security because there’d been a definite increase in terrorism since the Santa Fe meeting. Trusted friends of Commonwealth businesses were wined, dined, entertained, and negotiated with in Vicrik or Saddleback. But no outlanders saw Vershatets.
About two hours after we arrived, Wahak informed us that our presence was requested at an emergency meeting of the Commonwealth Commerce Council about the powersat situation.
The weather had cleared, and it was the sort of bright, clear day that reminded me of springtime in the Rockies and the glorious breaking of winter’s grip on the Rampart Range above the Academy. I wanted to get out and utilize the walking muscles that had been so useless at L-5. But I didn’t get the chance. I found myself with hundreds of meters of rock above and around me in the heart of Vershatets and seated in the conference room of the Commonwealth Commerce Council, called “C-cubed” in the vernacular.
This was the big-time in the Commonwealth. The top people in the Commonwealth, all CEO’s of their respective organizations, were in that underground conference room. This time I recognized most of them because I’d met them at Karederu Center the night it burned: Shaiko Chuili Stoak, Tsaya’s father and CEO of Commonwealth Glaser Space Power Corporation.
Ali’s father, Rayo Sabinos Vamori, ComSpat.
Landlimo’s CEO and Vaivan’s husband, Wahak Gramo Teaq.
Marcu Sanostu Sabinos of Commonwealth Space Services Corporation or ComServ.
The pudgy Kariander Alhanu Dok of the Topawa Finance and Investment Company with his counterpart from the Commonwealth Bancorp, Komel Dok Kokat.
The beautiful Prime Manager of the Vamori Free Space Port, Vaya Volakata Delkot.
Two other Commonwealth women graced the Directors’ meeting—Emika Vaspua Kom who ran the Pitoika Sea Port, Drydock, and Ship Company, and Nanya Liputa Tahat, head of Commonwealth Tourism, Inc. or ComTour, the biggest firm in the huge Commonwealth tourist industry.
An obvious outlander was Donalo Jon Tomason, head of Rose & Mariyama, Inc., the engineering and construction firm. And there was Heinrich von Undine representing Chiawuli International Factors and Underwriters, Limited.”What’s the General’s role in this?” I asked Ali as we took our seats around the huge circular table.
“He’s Chairman of C-Cubed.”
I lifted my hand. “Ali, I can’t run this meeting as The General’s deputy! I don’t even know what the agenda is.”
“Don’t worry. My father’s going to run it for The General in absentia.” He laid his hand on my arm. “Listen, take notes, and comment if you wish. Father’s getting the show on the road.”
Rayo Vamori began, “The purpose of this meeting is to bring us all up to date on what’s transpired in the past twenty-four hours and to make the necessary decisions required to proceed with Phase Three of our long-range plan.”
Kariander Dok raised his hand. “Rayo, it’s rather unusual that our associate advisors from out-country aren’t on the screens.”
“We have some communications problems.” Rayo Vamori didn’t reveal that the scramble code had been broken.
“Tripartite interference?” Tonol Kokat of ComBank inferred.
“No. If we need to talk to Mukhalla, Phalonagri, Chung, or Sinclair, we’ll get them on the line,” Rayo replied gracefully. “But we probably won’t have to, Kariander. Things are going as planned.”
We’d decided we’d use teleconferencing in the clear if absolutely necessary; the passwords had been disseminated by courier. But Vaivan didn’t want to do it extensively.
Since we didn’t know whether or not somebody in C-Cubed was leaking information, she was also doing other things. For example, unbeknownst to the participants, the meeting was being videotaped; later, Vaivan’s experts would edit it carefully, insert false information, and squirt it out on the compromised, scrambled telecon net just to keep up the charade that we didn’t know we’d been unscrambled.
“Shaiko, will you bring us up to date on the powersat situation, please?” Rayo said to the tall man on his right.
“InPowSat, InSolSat, and PowerSat intend to shut down the additional power beams as they’ve threatened,” the Commonwealth Glaser CEO reported. “I’ve offered Hong Kong a split beam on a temporary basis provided they’d come up with the capital through the Chungs for R-and-M to build a dedicated powersat for the Hong Kong complex.”
“Pardon me,” Kariander Dok interrupted, “but I haven’t been advised of this. Anything that’s done out-country should by rights go through Chiawuli…”
“And ComBank,” Tonol Kokat added.
“You’ll get your usual percentage,” Shaiko told them.
“Shaiko, let us handle this with Wen-ling Chung,” Kariander pleaded. “We know the international financial scene. We can smooth the way for much of the international fund transfers, for example…”
“Sorry, but Chung insists. The capital sources who’ve come to him willing to financetheir own powersats wish to deal through Chung directly with R-and-M.”
“Isn’t that rather unusual and contrary to practice?” Tonol Kokat asked.
Shaiko shook his head. “These are unusual times, Tonol. Let me finish my report because there’s more.” He held up sheets of hard copies. “Wen-ling just informed me that we got more than we bargained for. The government of Ch’ien has authorized the Chung bankers in Hong Kong to request bids on three powersats.”
He was talking about the government of mainland China. The Chinese were still fiddling around with their spelling. China was now officially called “Ch’ien” and most of their city and province names had changed, too. They were having a very hard time standardizing the spoken languages in the country. The prime benefit of the ancient writing was that an ideograph meant the same everywhere in the country, regardless of the local dialect. But an ideographic script with more than 50,000 characters is incompatible with the WSICI code and machine instructions with which the rest of the world communicated.
Part of the inscrutability of the Yellow Peril was due to their incompatible writing.
Their penchant for doing things in old and established ways was obvious in their preference for carrying out their large international dealings through the Hong Kong financial institutions. Although the British treaty with China had long lapsed and Hong Kong was therefore a Crown Colony in name only, it was an extremely convenient doorway. With their mass of people, the Chinese government wasn’t yet able to establish a national policy of free enterprise and a free market; it would take several more decades of mass education through the comm/info network before the Chinese would be able to catch up to the rest of the world in the basic education it takes to make a free system work.
“How can they pay for them?” von Undine wanted to know.
“They’ve got the up-front money from their petro reserves,” Don Tomason of the engineering firm put in, referring to the fact that at that time China produced far more petroleum and natural gas than even the old OPEC nations at the height of their production.
“We can get started almost at once, Heinrich. Those three powersats can be on line in six months with ComServ supplying the lunar materials, ComSpat getting them from Luna to geosynch, R-and-M putting the powersats together, and Commonwealth Glaser operating them under contract. Sweet deal all around. Tonol, you’re our banker. Heinrich, the critical high-tech components will come through Chiawuli International…”
“Are those the Chinese bid requests?” von Undine asked Shaiko Stoak, indicating th
e hard copies.
“Yes.”
“Are we being sole-sourced?”
“As far as I know.”
“Shaiko, please find out. Get Sinclair on the line.”
“Our scrambler’s out, Heinrich,” Shaiko made up an excuse.
“Want to discuss this matter in the clear on an un-monitored channel?”
“How soon before we can use the scrambled channel?”
“Wahak?”
The chief of Landlimo Corporation replied carefully, “I’ll check.”
“Soon, please.”
Wahak looked over at his wife. “Vaivan, telecon net status, please?”
There was a moment’s hesitation while Vaivan consulted a VDT. “Vaka is up and available,” she replied. She was using one of the Esperanto passwords, indicating to Wahak, Ali, and me that she didn’t want to use the normal scrambled channel but had an in-the-clear channel ready.
“We’ll use it,” her husband told her and turned to Shaiko. “Coming up.”
Skinner Sinclair looked like he’d just gotten out of bed, which he had. He was groggy but his usual well-controlled self. He didn’t complain about the time differential.
“Did the courier bring you the hard copy?” Shaiko asked him.
Sinclair nodded. “Looks good, Shaiko. Why’d you call?”
“We think we’re sole-source, but we wanted to check to see if you know anything else.”
“The bid was sole-sourced to you, but I found out through the Old Boy Net at a Shelco-Phelps party tonight that there will be another bidder in spite of it.”
“What? On a sole-sourced RFQ?”
“Yup.”
“Who?”
“The Socialist Hegemony. More specifically, the Soviet Union.”
Chapter 11
A Matter of Opinion
“Underbid them.” Vaya Delkot of the Vamori Free Space Port broke the silence that followed Sinclair’s announcement. “I’ll cut revenues if I must.”
“Trip,” Wahak put in, “is that bid rumor or hard intelligence?”
“You know I don’t like soft intelligence. As far as I’m concerned, it’s no good unless it’s hard.”