“We need to contact Malcolm,” Erik muttered, looking at the data windows. He gestured at his PNIU, which had cracked in half.
Jia tapped hers and brought up a virtual keyboard. After a couple of seconds, she nodded. “We had plenty of drones left at the hangar. If Malcolm’s smart, he sent more after we lost the others. I’m trying to ping him on a coded frequency, then he can use the drones as relays.”
“Jia!” Malcolm’s voice came from her PNIU. “I’m so glad you guys figured it out. I was watching things as best I could from outside the jamming zone, but there was a lot of interference. Having to mess around to connect as it is.”
“Okay, can you use my PNIU to connect to the local system?” Jia asked. “We’re looking at something interesting, but I don’t know exactly what it is.”
“Give me a second. Okay.” Malcolm laughed. “This is easy when you have the access codes and protocols already. It’s like I’m Emma.”
“She’s got better sense,” Jia murmured.
“I heard that!”
“Start copying everything,” Erik ordered. “Plus, look for anything that might have to do with the nukes. I’ve got a hunch. This isn’t the first time I’ve had to deal with loose nukes.”
Jia gave him a worried look. “Before the moon?”
“I’ve lived a colorful life.”
“That’s one way to describe it.”
“Okay,” Malcolm replied. “But that will take more than a second.”
Agonizing minutes ticked by, Malcolm mumbling under his breath. Erik and Jia waited, the threat of a nuclear explosion still heavy in their minds. They’d destroyed the tank Elite, but some of his friends had escaped.
“I’ve remotely disabled the primary activation sequence,” Malcolm explained. “And I purged the other codes and the remote interface protocols. I figure that’s what you were worried about.”
“Exactly. Good call. That should stop it from blowing up unless somebody messes with it directly.” Erik nodded, satisfied. “The Army can handle the rest of the cleanup.”
“So yeah, I just totally saved the world,” Malcolm crowed. “This world, anyway. I know it’s not Earth, but it’s got its own blasted, rubble-filled charm.”
“You did disarm the bomb, yes.” Jia rolled her eyes. “But a lot of people played their part.”
“Just saying. I’m a hero.”
“I’ll give you that.”
“Maybe I’ll get a cool nickname,” Malcolm continued. “’The Aloha Shirt Guy.’” He sighed. “It doesn’t sound as cool as the Obsidian Detective.”
Erik chuckled. “We’re not done yet. Let’s see what else we can find that might help.”
Twenty minutes later, Jia and Erik returned to Cabrina and her squad. The lieutenant paced nervously, glancing at the damaged wall and fence. Gunfire continued to echo in the distance. The occasional bright flash marked an explosion. Their battle at the camp might be over, but the rebellion wasn’t.
“If more Elites show up, we’re fucked,” Cabrina announced. “No offense, Jia, but one exo isn’t going to cut it, and Erik’s is torn up.”
Jia smiled. “It’s okay. Malcolm’s handling that problem.”
“The data guy?” Cabrina’s brow lifted. “How, exactly? He’s not going to get reinforcements here quicker than they’re already coming. If it’s taking this long when they know we have nukes here, they aren’t slow-pedaling it because they want to.”
“The room your people found.” Jia gestured at the door. “It’s a command and control node.”
“That makes sense. If they brought the bombs here, it has to be more than a random camp.” Cabrina looked hopeful. “Please tell me you can shut those monsters off remotely. That would make my whole damned decade.”
Jia shook her head. “If there’s a way to do that, Malcolm hasn’t found it yet, but he has information on the major mercenary and rebel camps. He’s feeding that directly to the garrison to direct their attacks. And while he can’t directly control any Elites, he’s been able to, with the help of our data girl’s info, hack through their feeds. We’ve been able to identify most of the Elites, either directly or indirectly. From what Malcolm found, he can estimate the position of a lot of them based on where the system thinks they should be, but otherwise, he is detecting jamming.”
“How can they have that kind of C2 coverage throughout the city with all the jamming and barely any drones?” Cabrina shook her head in disbelief.
“It turns out they prepped well in advance if the dates are correct,” Erik explained. “Malcolm’s overwhelmed between copying data, sending files, and everything else, but from what he told us, they spent months hiding low-power LOS narrow-beam receivers all over the city. It’s not perfect, and it’s not a replacement for all comms, but it’s one of the reasons they’ve been able to do hit and runs so effectively. They jam the hell out of an area to disrupt things, blow up or disable the local cameras, and rely on their receivers to coordinate things. Not good enough to take over, but fine for raids.”
Cabrina scratched her cheek. “That explains how the Elites guarding this place suddenly knew to run.”
Jia inclined her head toward the remains of the gate. “They’re still running the opposite direction, by the way, and our allied forces are closer than any group of Elites.”
“Their own assaults would degrade their own network—what a weird-ass strategy.” Cabrina folded her arms. “But…they didn’t care because they never intended to win the rebellion. They just needed to stall long enough to get these nukes to the planet and in position. Then they’d hide somewhere and blow the hell out of the rest of us.”
“Some of them might not have even bothered hiding,” Jia noted. “But it’s hard to tell with mercs and the Elites.” She shrugged. “I think this all makes a lot more sense if you think of it as a giant terrorist act rather than a rebellion. In a way, the rebels were victims too. None of this would have gotten as bad as it did if it wasn’t for the people off-world pulling the strings.”
Cabrina grunted in irritation. “Isn’t that what the rebels were bitching about? Having to listen to people who weren’t even from their planet? Shadow manipulation?”
“True, but it’s all over now,” Erik commented, pointing at the roof. “With Malcolm streaming them that data, and your people here to take control, all those Elite hit and runs are going to fail. Without the mercs and the Elites, the rebels are weak, and they’ve lost a lot of their forces. It’s only a matter of time before this is over.”
“You think so.” Cabrina stared at the tank’s wreckage. “If they’re all as committed as Sokov, they’ll fight to the last man.”
Erik grinned and moved closer to Cabrina. He lowered his voice so only she and Jia could hear. “We had a bunch of access codes from our data girl, so we can pull directly from in the data Malcolm’s finding in that system. He’s concentrating right now on helping the garrison forces, but between the nukes and whatever other scraps are left in that system, there has to be more than enough intel to convince most people that the rebellion’s on the wrong path.”
“You know how the brass is.” Cabrina shook her head. “They’re going to sit around for weeks debating what to tell people and worrying about messaging, PR, and political implications if it’s going to cost some guy a governorship when he retires from the Army.”
Jia put her fist to her mouth and coughed. “It might leak that the mercenaries brought nukes onto the planet and that a rebel changed sides and sacrificed his life to lead the Army to those nukes to save his beloved colony.” She gestured at the front of the garage. “There are cameras around the camp. We’re going to have Malcolm put something together. Maybe even add stirring, dramatic music.”
Cabrina chuckled. “You two don’t want any credit? If it wasn’t for your team, from your systems people to you two doing exo work, the Elite would have gotten away with the nukes.”
“We were never here. Sure, rumors will go around and people will ment
ion things, but we can deny it. We even have a pretty good alibi, but it’d take too long to explain that.”
“You were never here?” Cabrina echoed. “I thought you said you weren’t ghosts? That sounds like ghost talk to me.”
Erik shrugged. “Consider us ghost-adjacent. After our recording goes out, not everyone will believe it, but enough will. Combined with the loss of the Elites, the rebellion is done.”
“True.” Cabrina looked thoughtful. “If they were planning to nuke the place, that means they don’t have any more reinforcements coming.” She managed a hopeful smile. “It really is all but over then.”
“I know that doesn’t bring anyone back to life,” Jia replied with a sigh. “But at least this colony can begin rebuilding.”
“And you two? You going to get aboard your fancy ship and fly to the next colony, looking to stop secret conspiracies manipulating people?”
Erik nodded. “Pretty much. There’s something you should know, though.”
Cabrina frowned. “What?”
“We had our guy send the code access the garrison needs for the C2, but the rest of the files they’ll have to figure out themselves, other than whatever we leak before leaving.”
“Why? What are you playing at?”
“We got data, and we’re helping stop the rebellion,” Erik explained. “We did our job, but that job doesn’t include pursuing possible leaks in the Army. If it’s a little harder to crack into that information, or the Army needs to lean on what’s left of ID here, that’ll make it safer.”
“This is all way above my paygrade.” Cabrina slumped and lowered herself down the wall. “But at least it’ll be over soon.” She smiled at him. “I’m beginning to understand why my brother loved serving under you so much, and I know you’ll hunt down every bastard responsible for his death.”
Chapter Fifty-Two
October 20, 2230, Gliese 581, Private Cabin of Dr. Raphael Maras aboard the Bifröst
Raphael loved numbers—their shape, their meaning, their utility. There was nothing more exciting than a good stream of numbers and the depth of meaning hidden behind those simple digits and symbols. It was a pure form of communication that made normal words seem like the crude grunts and growls of beasts. After all, the most fundamental aspects of reality, space, and time were best expressed numerically. Humanity’d had to invent new forms of math to explore the rules underlying physics.
He sat at his desk, surrounded by his beloved numbers filling data windows. Erik and Jia had finished their business on the planet and were on their way back to the jumpship, but that still gave him a couple of days to focus on examining the jump drive’s power utilization data. During their transit to the planet and mission time, he’d been too worried to get much work done. There was always the threat of another pirate attack or even worse, something happening to his heroes. Concentration and even sleep had proven elusive.
Raphael tried to tell himself that Erik and Jia wouldn’t go down on some random frontier world. They were the Obsidian Detective and Lady Justice! But being a fan didn’t blind him to the realities that there were people who, while they had succeeded through iron will and careful application of skill in countless dangerous situations, also needed a good amount of luck. Heroes in action movies might not always die in cheap, tragic ways, but real life wasn’t like the movies.
He sighed and let his head fall back. It was over now. There was no more reason to worry. They’d stopped the bombs, and if things continued the way they had for the last couple of days, they might have even stopped the rebellion. Lives saved, bad guys’ plans disrupted. That was what they did—just another job for the best partners in the UTC.
Raphael sat up and shook out his hands. Erik and Jia had done their parts. So had Lanara, Wei, Janessa, Malcolm, and Emma. Everyone had something only they could do, some way they could turn a mere possibility into luck for the two heroes. He could do that too by improving the jump drive for them.
He slapped his cheeks. “Concentrate. Get that drive to fifty light-years a jump. We can skip across the galaxy, save everyone, and stop bad guys the ghosts don’t even know about yet. Make this ship live up to its name.”
Raphael made a figure-eight motion with his hand. All the data windows around him except one shifted away, leaving a string of numbers next to a complicated graph displaying stacked overlapping and intersecting hyperbolas that formed a complicated irregular tube. It was a crude visualization of hyperspace travel that concealed its true complexity, another aspect of physics that had required new math to be invented.
He wondered if one of the other races had a better inherent understanding of hyperspace travel. If not one of the Local Neighborhood races, then the Hunters or the Navigators. People used to complain about how quantum mechanics was non-intuitive, but it now seemed childishly obvious compared to the bizarre principles underlying hyperspace physics.
Raphael brought up another data window and connected it to one of the power redistribution subsystems. If they ever built a new jumpship, he had mounds of data and suggestions on how to improve things, but for now, he needed to optimize what they had available, and that would require working closely with Lanara. She might not care for his personality, but she did seem to enjoy coming up with suggestions to improve the power and energy efficiency of his ideas. Once she got back with Erik and Jia, she could brainstorm with him and direct Wei and Janessa to help with the adjustments between jumps on the way back. He might be able to get them to agree to stick around for a couple of days on Penglai.
He tapped his bottom lip. “We can do two light-years without trouble. Maybe if we concentrate more on the Xing Field interface by redirecting the modulation and doing something about the auto-attenuation, we could improve it, but that’ll require customizing the system code so it doesn’t have to be adjusted in real-time.”
Raphael pushed the other windows aside before bringing up the underlying code. He’d always considered himself talented at this sort of thing, but with Emma and Malcolm around, he was more useful for figuring out potential optimizations and then letting one of them figure out the best way to implement it at the system level.
His eyes narrowed as he skimmed a section of the code. He knew this part well. Although he had not changed it since joining Erik’s team, he’d worked with it extensively before they’d installed the jump drive on the ship. Some of the key parts of the code were clearly different than he remembered, but the change date suggested they had not been modified since the drive was on Earth. Something was wrong.
“Emma, are you busy?” Raphael asked.
She materialized in her white dress, sitting on the edge of her desk, her legs crossed at the ankles. “Yes, but since you’re not completely unpleasant for a fleshbag, I’ll make time for you, Dr. Maras. What’s the problem?”
Raphael gestured at the window. “This code. It’s been changed, but I think someone is trying to cover it up.” He frowned. “I’m worried someone at Penglai has been messing around with the ship’s systems without my oversight. I know they can technically do that if someone higher up says they can, but we’re the ones jumping around. We need to know.”
Emma raised an eyebrow. “But you, for all intents and purposes, live at Penglai unless you’re out with this team. Those would need to be subtle modifications to escape your notice.”
“It’d be one thing if they were marking the changes with dates and logging them,” Raphael explained. “But whoever’s doing it isn’t, and the way this system is set up, that should be automatic. That means they had to have done it on purpose and then gone out of their way to edit the logs.”
“Let me check.” Emma slipped off the desk, an almost creepily cheery smile on her face. “Oh, I see. This is my fault.”
“Your fault? What do you mean?”
Emma gestured at the window. “I should have paid more attention. The changes you’ve noticed are the result of my modifications, not anyone at Penglai.”
Raphael blinked.
“Oh. They are?”
“Yes.” Emma nodded, continuing in her cheery tone, “I’ve been attempting to optimize the code for efficiency. It also involves adaptive evolutionary utility function techniques. Since there is no easy way to explain why the improvements work in human terms, I have not bothered to note the changes unless it’s something serious. I figure it’d just confuse people. I know that technically I’m not supposed to be permanently modifying the code yet, but I’m not going to waste time waiting for the uniform boys to allow me to do something I know will be helpful.”
“I don’t know if that’s the best way to go about this.” Raphael peered at the code. “But that explains why it seems so odd. I’m not familiar with the vast majority of the code running the ship or the AI. It’s just that this particular routine is potentially relevant to power utilization during a jump.”
“Is it now?” Emma continued smiling as if she was stuck in that mode, a stark contrast to her usual sarcastic demeanor. “I was about to ask you why you found this of interest. It is such a low-priority bit of code that it hasn’t been modified during any of your other optimizations since we’ve started working together.”
“I know. I’m having to pull out all the stops to improve things is all. My range of interests, both hardware and software, has expanded accordingly.”
Emma circled Raphael, her hand on her chin. “So, your interest in this purely concerns improving the fundamental efficiency of the underlying systems’ power transfer via the code?”
He nodded. “Yes. I know Lanara and her team can do wonders at their level, but to push the jump drive to the limits of what physics allows will require improvements at the hardware, software, and navigational levels. This isn’t necessarily something that should be actively managed by you.”
Emma folded her arms and gave him a derisive look. “I’m continuing to improve navigation.”
“You’re not the rate-determining step.” Raphael waved his hands. “I’m not going anywhere near implying that, and I also get you can only do so much based on what the drive can do. I’m just saying, we need more power, and small tweaks, including in code like that, is how we’re going to get it without trying to do a lot of this dynamically and distracting you or Lanara during a very sensitive operation that requires your full concentration.”
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