“It’s also within his discretion to restrict access to the critical portions of the ship to the personnel assigned there. You have no need to be in engineering, Commander Sanchez – or on the bridge, for that matter.
“I can understand that being short-stopped by Marines is an unpleasant experience, Judy,” he finished gently. “But I hardly see paranoid delusions in Captain Roberts taking reasonable precautions. Even if I found his actions unreasonable, Commander, the security of this ship is his responsibility – not mine, and most definitely not yours.”
Sanchez had remained silent as he lectured her, but her eyes flashed and she glared at him as he spoke.
“Sir, your faith in Captain Roberts is blatantly misplaced,” she told him. “The man is clearly out of his depth and unable to deal with the current situation. If things continue on this course, I cannot be sure I can keep you safe.”
“I am concerned about the completion of our mission, Commander, not my safety,” Dimitri told her. “Your concerns are noted, but I must warn you – if you ‘continue on this course’ you risk your career.”
Of course, it was unlikely that when the dust settled, he would be able to save or destroy anyone’s career. But Sanchez was already heading for a damning assessment report.
“I understand, sir,” she grounded out. “I will… endeavor not to cause issues with the Captain. But I will keep an eye on this. That is, after all, part of my job.”
36
Deep Space, en route to Barsoom System
05:00 January 20, 2736 Earth Standard Meridian Date/Time
DSC-078 Avalon, CAG’s Office
Michael had been having difficulty sleeping – something to do with nightmares about assassination attempts and watching worlds die. Normally, he’d see if Mason was awake so they could talk, but with the communication lockdown even that wasn’t an option.
Which left him in his office three hours before his shift technically began, catching up on paperwork. He was still over a month away from having to provide assessment reports on any of his people, but getting them ready in advance never hurt.
It was also boring enough he was grateful, if surprised, when a com alert pinged.
“Vice Commodore Stanford,” he answered, without bothering to even check who it was.
“I’m glad you’re awake Commodore,” Lieutenant Major Barsamian greeted him briskly. “I need to ask a favor.”
“What do you need, Major?” he replied, wondering if any of his people had managed to get into serious trouble while the ship was in FTL.
“Put simply, sir, I need hands,” she told him. “There are thirty-six Military Police and forty-seven Marines aboard Avalon at the moment. All of them are either currently asleep from pulling multiple shifts, or on guard duties I can’t pull them away from.
“However, one of my forensics people was burning the midnight oil and has finally tracked down the source of the drone that tried to kill the Captain. The Captain was pretty clear that we shouldn’t try to investigate anything without an armed escort, but I don’t have one. And he told me you were handling security for the flight deck.”
“So you’re wondering if I have a few leg-breakers to spare?” Michael asked dryly.
“Yes, sir.”
“I can rustle up a few boys with guns,” he offered. “Where am I meeting you?”
“You, sir?”
“I’m not up at this time because I’m busy, Major,” he pointed out. “Besides, you may end up needing a few more gold circles for firepower.”
“Won’t object, sir. We’ve identified the source as Auto-Fabricator Sixteen.”
05:15 January 20, 2736 ESMDT
DSC-078 Avalon, Auto-Fabricator Sixteen
The auto-fabricators were scattered throughout Avalon’s hull. Michael was most familiar with the four attached to the flight deck that provided emergency parts for his starfighters, but he was aware that there were twenty or so in the ship.
Sixteen was buried deep in the lower half of the ship, down on Deck Fifteen and towards the engines. It was technically in engineering, but not anywhere near the main spaces containing the engines or zero point cells. It was in the section of the ship Michael tended to hear engineering crew refer to as ‘the Dungeon’ – and that the rest of the crew tended to forget existed.
He had collected four of the Specialists he’d inducted into Guinevere and drawn weapons from the arms locker before joining Barsamian. All were big guys – or gals, in one case – and cradled the shipboard security shotguns like they knew how to use them.
“Stun blasts, people,” he reminded them as they met up with Barsamian and her tech. “If for some Void-cursed reason we actually have to shoot at someone, we want them alive.”
“Of course, sir,” Space Force Specialist First Class Anaru Tinker told his CAG. Tinker was a massive man, a shaven-headed tattooed individual who’d served on the old Avalon since before Michael had come aboard, and transferred over to the new ship with the fighter group. He looked almost insulted at the thought that he might shoot anyone he didn’t fully intend to.
“I’m glad to see you,” Barsamian told them. She gestured to the petite young woman next to her. “This is Corporal Filipa Kaczka, my forensics team lead.”
Kaczka was a sallow-skinned woman of perhaps one hundred and fifty five centimeters. Like Tinker, her head was shaven, but where the big Space Force enlisted was covered in tattoos, a glitter of silver circuitry ran over the forensic tech’s skin. Her augmentation clearly went significantly past the usual in-head implant and medical nanite suite.
“We’ve identified multiple serial number fragments inside the drone,” she said calmly, her voice strangely vague as if her attention was only half on reality. “While an effort was made in the manufacture to prevent any intact serial numbers surviving, statistical extrapolation of the fragments, combined with analysis of several chemical markers, eventually enabled us to identify the source as this fabricator.
“Primarily, I will require access to the fabrication material log and the local physical backup of the video footage. We hope that our perpetrator is unaware of our breakthrough and we will not be accosted. Given the degree of penetration demonstrated to date, this cannot be guaranteed.”
“Hence asking for your help,” Barsamian told Michael. “Let’s go, Filipa.”
The Marshal waved the golden badge of her office over the access panel for the auto-fabricator, which happily chirped acknowledgement of her authority and slid open.
The lights inside came up as Michael and the others entered, shining on a complex nightmare of computer screens, automatic arms, lathes, and other machines and tools the CAG couldn’t name.
“Have at her, Corporal,” he told Kaczka and stepped back to watch the door. The security shotgun weighed heavily against him – he was qualified on the weapon, but he’d last tested on it a long time ago. It had three separate magazines, each holding three shells. Right now, he had two loaded with stun blasts – ‘shells’ that contained one-shot electron lasers designed to disable a human without killing them – and the third loaded with flechettes.
He didn’t want to have to fire the weapon at all, but he really didn’t want to use that third magazine.
“The physical backup for the camera is missing,” Kaczka’s vague voice announced. “We’ve already checked records. The online records for this camera have no less than two hundred and seventy six hours of looped footage fed in at various periods over four weeks. There are also hundreds of hours where the fabricator is empty and unused which may contain looped footage we missed.”
“At some point, the cameras on this ship are going to actually be of use,” Barsamian half-snarled. “I’m getting sick of this garbage.”
“Given the previously demonstrated capabilities of our spy, we did not expect useful camera footage,” the forensics Corporal noted as she approached the main fabricator console. Instead of bringing up the screen or activating a hologram, she laid a visibly circuit-la
ced hand on the side of the console and paused.
“This is statistically improbable,” she said after a moment. “The fabricator material logs do not exist.”
“You mean there’s no record of us?” Michael asked.
“No. The logs do not exist,” Kaczka repeated. “There is no subtlety to this except that the alerts elsewhere in the system did not trigger. The entirety of the material usage log for this fabricator has been deleted, and the delete command wiped from the system.
“This should not be possible without high levels of access and sophisticated computer worms.”
“Much the same as our agent has shown again and again,” Barsamian concluded. She looked like she wanted to swear. “This spy has short-circuited every failsafe and every security measure aboard this ship. If Commonwealth Intelligence is this good, we are utterly outclassed in this war.”
“None of this adds up,” Michael pointed out. “If CI was this good, this war would already be over – plus, if their agent is this good, why are they wasting their time trying to off our senior officers? Just having this level of access on a Battle Group flagship is worth Avalon’s weight in gold to their war effort.”
He shook his head, looking at the clearly frustrated Barsamian and the not-quite-there Kaczka.
“You might be looking at this the wrong way,” he thought aloud. “We keep thinking of it as a security problem, but the hardware is being circumvented as well. Perhaps we should look at an engineering solution?”
“What do you mean?” Barsamian asked.
“You identified the fabricator from fragments of the serial code,” Michael noted. “My understanding of computers sucks, but I seem to recall that something isn’t actually deleted unless you write over it with junk. There could still be retrievable fragments of data.
“I think we want to talk to Wong,” he concluded. “If our enemy is beating us at every turn, we need to change the ground underneath them.”
05:45 January 20, 2736 ESMDT
DSC-078 Avalon, Chief Engineer’s Office
“You’re all up very early,” Wong told Stanford and his current collection of Space Force leg-breakers and Military Police as they entered his office. The room was surprisingly cluttered, with datachips and actual physical system parts scattered on every surface. “I presume there is something I can do to help you?”
A pair of engineering enlisted personnel stood guard outside the Chief Engineer’s door, though they’d happily stood aside when they’d recognized the CAG. The two big Specialists weren’t visibly armed, though Stanford made a mental note of a standard issue Navy duffel bag concealed under a bench only just out of reach.
“We had a breakthrough on identifying the source of the drone,” Barsamian told him. She took a seat, gesturing Kaczka and Stanford forward as well.
Michael leaned on the back of a chair, and sent his Specialists outside to mingle with their engineering equivalents with a jerk of his head.
“We then ran into a problem,” he added to Barsamian’s explanation. “And I realized that we were going at at least some of this the wrong way around. Corporal Kaczka?”
“The fabricator logs for the unit used to manufacture the drone that attempted to assassinate Captain Roberts are missing,” the strange Corporal announced. “Both the materials usage and the user logs have been completely deleted, turning the last week of my endeavors into a dead end.
“The Commonwealth agent is disturbingly capable and appears to have even greater access to our systems than we do,” she said flatly. “Stanford suggested speaking to you. I am not sure what assistance you can provide that is outside my own skillset.”
“I’m no forensic computer tech, if that’s what you mean,” Wong agreed, leaning back in his chair and eyeing his visitors. “If the logs were deleted and properly hashed – and I doubt our spy would suddenly become less than thoroughly competent – I would have no more success with the fabricator’s computer than you.”
“Then why…”
“What I am, Corporal Kaczka,” the gaunt shaven-headed Chief Engineer cut her off, “is a paranoid son of a bitch with direct access to all of the hardware on this ship.”
Wong smiled coldly, his dark slanted eyes sending a chill down Stanford’s spine.
“I may hide down in engineering – especially when we’re pushing the drives like this – but I am not oblivious to the ship’s affairs. Those two gentlemen outside didn’t position themselves there without my suggestion, after all.
“What you have missed, Corporal, and what Vice Commodore Stanford was expecting me to have thought of, is the people involved here – not the software, not the hardware, the people.
“Auto-fabricators are the single most abusable and abused pieces of machinery on a warship. I’ve seen them used for everything from illegal weapons rings to assembling entire drug labs aboard ship.
“The people who abuse them are, sadly, almost always engineering personnel who know the systems inside and out. These are very intelligent men and women who are determined not to be found out. Fabricator logs get edited or go missing a lot, people,” he finished calmly.
“And?” Michael prompted.
“And after getting caught up in an investigation that went on way too long and ended way too inconclusively back in the dawn of time when I was a mere Lieutenant Commander, I realized I needed to find a way to make sure that didn’t happen again.
“So, since you ask so nicely,” Wong continued with a cold smile, “it happens there is a hard, uneditable, backup being run on every single auto-fabricator on this ship. A backup that is not on the books and not otherwise linked to the ship’s systems. Which fabricator did you say built that drone?”
Corporal Kaczka was actually looking at Wong. In the most of an hour since he’d met her, Michael hadn’t seen the augmented tech actually directly look at a human being, and he mirrored Wong’s smile.
“Auto-Fabricator Sixteen,” the MP finally admitted.
Wong closed his eyes for a second, and one wall of his cluttered office flashed, the screen activated and covering the wall with hundreds of lines of text.
“Even with modification allowed, the fabricator logs are literally hundreds of thousands of lines of data,” Wong warned. “The hard backup records every change, every step back to fix a typo, every edit as a separate item. Finding anything useful in here, well,” he shrugged. “You have to know what you’re looking for.”
“May I interface?” Kaczka asked, her gaze now on the computer screen. Wong gave her a go-ahead gesture, and she stepped up to the wallscreen. Staring hard at the lines, the woman froze, her physical body stiffening almost completely as she dove into the data.
The screen flickered, the forensic tech allowing her data search to feed the screen as she worked. Michael wasn’t going to pretend he could follow what she was doing, though. Sections of requests lit up, then data around them highlighted, de-highlighted, and then the screen jumped to another section of the code.
“The logs were deleted… three days ago,” the forensic tech told them all, her voice even more vague than usual. “Via… a remote root override. Effective, but brute force. This backup would have prevented even a more subtle approach, but a cleaner removal of data may have prevented us looking.”
“Why take the brute force approach then?” Michael asked.
“A subtler approach would have required physical access to the computer. Perhaps our agent either couldn’t reach the system or was otherwise occupied and went for the fastest method? Now, I need to find the drone. With this quantity of data and the potential pattern manipulations, this will take some time.”
The pattern of sections being highlighted, searched around, and discarded continued. It accelerated as Michael watched until each series of highlights was a blur concluded in under a second.
“There!” The screen froze, and Michael finally had a chance to see what was highlighted. It was a series of part numbers and command codes he certainly didn’t r
ecognize, but Kaczka clearly knew.
“That’s the drone’s manufacture,” she concluded. “January tenth, oh four hundred twenty-six to oh five hundred thirty-eight. Middle of ship’s night, it seems unlikely anyone would have happened over our agent.
“That coincides with one of our looped sections of camera footage for about four hours on either side,” Kaczka admitted. “Given the area of the outage, potential candidates… exceed sixty.”
“Who was the user?” Wong demanded. “It should tell us that.”
The tech nodded, then froze mid-motion.
“That isn’t possible,” she said flatly.
“What isn’t?”
“I’m validating,” the Corporal said sharply. A moment later, she blinked and turned back to the officers in the room.
“Sirs, ma’am.” The Military Policewoman’s voice was very quiet. “The logged in user was Vice Admiral Dimitri Tobin. A lock was placed on that section of the log under his direct authorization code.
“The deletion was carried out three days ago using the same authorization code, remote from the flag deck.”
Her eyes were less vague than they had been before, and Michael realized she looked utterly desperate. A junior MP did not want to say what that evidence pointed towards. Even Barsamian couldn’t take that train of thought to its final conclusion.
There was only one man aboard who had any authority to judge the Admiral.
“We need to wake the Captain.”
37
Deep Space, en route to Barsoom System
07:30 January 20, 2736 Earth Standard Meridian Date/Time
DSC-078 Avalon, Flag Deck
There was something ominous to the even boot-treads of the four Military Police and two Marine bodyguards following Kyle down the corridor to the flag deck. Behind them, each of the heavy security hatches slammed shut and sealed as Kyle ordered Avalon to cut the flag deck off.
Avalon Trilogy: Castle Federation Books 1-3: Includes Space Carrier Avalon, Stellar Fox, and Battle Group Avalon Page 59