by Jay Posey
“Walk through this with me again,” Lincoln said. He brought up an image from the Elliston medical examiner’s report, all the violence reduced down to five man-shaped black outlines on a plain white background. Lincoln closed out the ones representing the security team for the moment. In the simplified depiction of Dekker, there were four markings indicating the locations of the entry points of the rounds. There were no exit wounds. Three of the shots were scattered around the torso: low right, near the appendix; center right side, through a lung; mid-center, an inch or so above the solar plexus. The fourth, and presumably final, shot was about a quarter-inch off center from being right between Dekker’s eyes.
“The official version goes like this: the shooting starts, Dekker gets three rounds in the torso,” Lincoln said, pointing to those markers, and then over to Henry’s image. “And Henry gets hit by a stray, here, through the neck.”
Henry’s image also showed four wounds: the entry and exit wounds through the neck, and then two more entry wounds in the center of his chest. Well placed.
“Dekker then gets it in the head, so that makes him the primary target. Then Henry gets cornered, and they finish him off. Target of opportunity.” Lincoln tapped the two indicators in Henry’s chest.
“Two rounds, center of mass,” he continued. “Those were the kill shots. This here,” he pointed to Henry’s neck wounds, “is a fairly clean pass-through. He maybe could have survived, if he’d gotten aid fast enough. So here’s the kicker for me.” Lincoln cleared out the panels with the coroner’s report and brought up the background profile on Sann. He pointed at the relevant facts as he talked through them. “Henry’s not your usual NID civilian officer. He’d been doing this sort of thing for a long time. Before NID, he was law enforcement. Worked gang units, organized crime, under cover. Moved to contracting for UAF, ran with high-risk details in Mumbai, Jakarta, all over the Philippines during the war. So he can obviously handle himself. He doesn’t strike me as the kind of guy who would freeze up when shots start popping off. Nor does he seem like the type to lie down and let himself bleed out from a small-caliber wound.”
Lincoln looked back at the actual image of Henry’s body, collapsed on the ground, and focused in on the wound through Henry’s neck. And now, having talked it out, saw what it was that had been bothering him. Sann’s shirt had dark splotches from his chest injuries. But there was hardly any blood around the collar or shoulders. Not like it would have been if he’d been upright when he’d taken the wound. Mike saw it too.
“They shot him in the neck after he was already on the ground,” Mike said.
“Yeah,” Lincoln said. “And why would they do that? If they were trying to guarantee the kill, why not the head?”
“Because they’re pros, trying to look like amateurs.”
“And they don’t want anyone to think he’s the primary,” Lincoln added.
Coleman was looking up at them now.
“Shouldn’t the Elliston police have picked up on that? If that round went clean through his neck, there’d be a bullet impact somewhere underneath him.”
“I don’t think they did the most thorough job checking this one out,” Lincoln said, shaking his head. “Once they ID’d Dekker, I’m guessing they wrote it off as some kind of bad-guy-on-bad-guy hit. Henry was the only victim they didn’t already have a sheet on, and I’m sure NID did a good job making sure the locals didn’t find anything worth investigating further.”
“So Sann was the target. Dekker and his guards were the cover,” she said.
Lincoln didn’t like the implications of that, but when Coleman said it, he felt tension release, as if he’d just solved a particularly difficult crossword puzzle. It was the only way the pieces all fit together.
“That’s how it looks to me,” Lincoln said.
“Yeah,” Mike said. “Yeah, I can see that. Don’t much like it, though.”
“Me neither,” Coleman said. “Because I can’t see my way around LOCKSTEP being anything other than a direct attack on our intelligence gathering abilities.”
“What makes you say that?” Wright asked from the far end of the table.
“Because somebody got deep into their sensor systems to make sure they never saw it coming,” Coleman answered. She ran light fingers over the holotable’s controls and expanded the panel she’d been looking at for the past couple of hours, and sent it to the head of the table where everyone could get a good view. Lincoln couldn’t make any sense of the stream of characters. “You want me to walk you through it, or you just want to take my word for it?”
Lincoln had gone through all the basic training on code like everybody else, but he’d never taken it any farther than absolutely required. Even so, as much as he wanted to take Coleman’s word for it, he needed to understand her reasoning.
“Give me the executive summary,” he said. And then added, “But the idiot’s version.”
“Oh, you mean the officer’s summary, then,” she said with a quick smile. “Easy day. You know how a sensor suite works on a hop…?”
“Remind me,” Lincoln said.
“Yeah, OK,” Coleman said, and she leaned back in her chair. “A refresher then. Space is big, it’s got a lot of stuff floating around in it. If you’re out there, mostly you don’t want any of that other stuff floating into you.”
“Maybe not the complete idiot’s version, sergeant,” Lincoln said.
She held up a hand. “I’m getting to it. On a hop, you’re not usually moving all that fast. By galactic standards, you might as well be stationary. And space is big, like, really big, right? So you can’t see everything all the time. So most stations don’t even try. They just keep track of things that are close enough to matter.”
“Which is relative,” Lincoln said, to show he was following along.
“Which is relative, right,” Coleman said with a nod. “Very good, sir.” When she said that, Mike glanced over at Lincoln with an amused look and gave him a one-shoulder shrug that told him Coleman most likely didn’t actually mean to be condescending.
“A rock a thousand klicks out and moving towards you fast enough,” she continued, “matters a whole lot more than one that’s just about in your hip pocket but not moving at all. So just because something’s far away doesn’t mean it doesn’t matter. And in space, things can be really, really far away, and still matter.
“Sensor suites… they have to be a combination of active and passive. Active sensors shoot signals out, and measure whether or not anything comes back. But you can’t rely solely on those, because what if you miss, right? So you complement them with passive sensors, which just soak up whatever’s coming their way. And you can’t rely solely on those, because not everything’s emitting something for you to soak up, and also because there’s so much other stuff out there spewing radiation at you that doesn’t matter. You’ve got to filter out the vast majority of what you’re picking up. So you use the active sensors to check up on whatever the passives are telling you about, and vice versa. A passive sensor’s like ‘Hey man, do we need to be worried about this?’ and a couple of actives check it out and one says, ‘Nah, don’t sweat it,’ and another one says, ‘Looks OK to me’, and a third one says, ‘Man, I don’t even see what you’re looking at’. That sort of thing.”
Lincoln was beginning to wish he’d just taken Coleman’s word for it. She must have read it on his face, because she held up her pointer finger and nodded.
“I know,” she said. “Hold on, you’ll see how all this matters in just a minute. One more thing, and then I’ll get to the good part, promise. To make things even more complicated, your long-range active sensors have to have a really tight beam to make sure the signal doesn’t dissipate over distance to the point that it becomes useless. The problem is, space is really, really big, so at the distances we’re talking, a thousandth of a degree of variation in your tight-beam sensor might be the difference between seeing a hundred meter-wide rock hurtling at you and missing it complet
ely. Even the vibrations from normal operation can make a sensor beam hit an object one second and miss it the next. You can’t count on sensors being able to consistently track the same object. So you have to sample it, take an aggregate, do all kinds of crazy math to figure out whether or not it’s something you should be worried about.
“Just like ships, hops have overlapping sensor fields from tight-beam and wide-beam arrays, and all of that data from all of those sensors gets dumped into a central point where all the crazy math gets done.” Here, finally, Coleman sat forward again and highlighted a large block of code on the panel she’d enlarged, sitting in the middle of an even larger block of code.
“Ignore all this nonsense, that’s all pretty much standard solution,” she said, indicating the portions of code that she hadn’t highlighted. “This is the key part here. And it’s subtle. But the executive summary, sir, is that this section here is designed to force YN-773’s sensor suite to ignore a particular threat.”
Lincoln couldn’t follow the code, but he understood Coleman’s explanation perfectly well. “So someone gave LOCKSTEP’s sensors a blind spot.”
“Not just a blind spot,” Coleman corrected. “I’m saying, statistically speaking, they knew the exact rock they wanted the sensors to ignore. Composition, size, everything. For all intents and purposes, one, specific asteroid. The chances of there being another asteroid that fits the profile that also just happens to be anywhere near 773…?” She shook her head. “And this code is custom. I mean, really, really custom. These guys knew what they were doing. Even stylistically, it reads like everything else around it, even though it was inserted later.”
“Inside job?” Lincoln said.
“Every cyberattack is an inside job, sir,” Coleman said with a smile. “But if you mean, did they have a plant at Veryn-Hakakuri, then yeah, that’d be my first guess. Current, or former employee. Or someone obsessed with VH’s particular brand of internal software.”
Mike chuckled at the last sentence, and Coleman looked at him. “I’m not kidding, Mikey. You’d be surprised how weird some people can be about code.”
“Not that surprised,” Mike said, and that made Sahil chuckle.
“Can you figure out when that code was inserted?” Lincoln asked.
“Maybe, if I can get access to LOCKSTEP’s systems archive. I wouldn’t count on it, though. Even if NID has access to it, I doubt that’s the kind of thing they’re going to share.”
“Let’s get a request in,” Lincoln said. “Might as well ask.”
“Yes sir.”
“How’d they plant it?” Wright asked. “Operative on board?”
Coleman shrugged. “Probably, but not necessarily. I don’t know. This isn’t the sort of thing that’s usually going to be accessible to your average corporate drone, even their top-tier techs. We’re talking deep, deep level stuff here.”
Lincoln said, “Deep enough that they’d need access to the hardware?”
Coleman looked back at the code and shook her head. “No, I can’t say that for sure. I mean, with a hop, we’re talking a massive system-of-systems here, so it’s possible they attacked some other point in the architecture and the payload skipped to target. It’s not quite down at the firmware level of things, but it’s pretty close. In the actual control code. The thing is all these corporations have proprietary systems. Some of them are built on similar foundations, same concepts, like you see here,” she waved her hand at the un-highlighted code on the panel, “but they don’t share this stuff with anyone outside. Corporate security issues, you know. Only reason we’re looking at it is because NID had access. It’d definitely help to have someone on the inside, but I can’t say it’s strictly necessary.”
“Would it be somethin’ you could do from a ship?” Sahil asked. He and Wright were still at the far end of the table from everyone else, but they were both now fully engaged in the discussion.
Coleman paused a few moments before responding.
“Yeah,” she said. “Yeah, if you had the right access codes and the right people, I guess you could do it from about anywhere. What makes you ask?”
Sahil touched the holotable and sent the panel he had in front of him over to join the one Coleman had enlarged. On it were several images and specifications for a hauler called Destiny’s Undertow.
“That fella right there,” he said. “Showed up to 773 unannounced.”
“That’s weird,” Coleman said. “I didn’t catch that in the packet.”
“Yeah,” Sahil said. “It’s sorta a footnote. Lost with all hands when the hop went down. I figure our folks checked it out a bit, coded it ‘wrong place, wrong time’.”
“Sounds familiar,” Lincoln said, recalling his impression of the analysts’ summaries of Henry’s death. Both events had an element of the coincidental that nagged at him. It raised the ghost of a familiar feeling, strong enough to sense but too vague to be grasped. “They dig up anything interesting on it?”
“Not much. Hauler, registered out of Luna. Original plan had it travelin’ out to the Belt, slingin’ off Mars on the return trip. Everything about it seems legit.”
“Except for it being way out by 773,” Mike said.
“Roger that,” answered Sahil. “Logs say 773 sent tugs out for it. Some kind of engine trouble. Musta been gettin’ to dock right around the time the rock hit.”
“Do we have access to any of the traffic between the ship and the station?” Coleman asked.
“I think so, yeah,” Sahil said. “One sec.” He worked a panel at his end of the table for a minute or so. While he worked, Lincoln looked back at Coleman.
“Pros and cons, Sergeant Coleman. On an op like this, would you say it’s definitely better to have someone on the inside?”
“Can you just call me Thumper, sir?” she said.
The comment caught him off guard. “I didn’t think I’d earned it,” he replied.
“Yeah, not really,” she said, “but half the time I forget you’re talking to me. Nobody else around here calls me that, so it just feels awkward.”
“I think I could probably manage it,” Lincoln said with a smile. “If you can give me the story behind the name.”
“You definitely haven’t earned that, sir,” she answered.
“All right, fair enough. So, Thumper,” he said, “between on-site and remote, what’s the deciding factor for this sort of breach?”
“Mmm… comes down to a matter of intrusion detection I guess. Are you more likely to get caught with someone poking around on site, or when you connect to the system and start injecting code?”
“Here we go,” Sahil said, and he sent a panel from his end of the table over to Thumper.
“Cool,” she said. “Gimme a few.”
While she was heads-down in the data Sahil had just sent her, Lincoln got up and grabbed a bottle of water and poured himself a cup of coffee. “Anybody else?” he asked, waving the pot around.
“No thanks,” Sahil said. Wright glanced over, shook her head, and went back to studying whatever she was working on. Coleman didn’t respond.
“Yeah, I’ll take a hit,” Mike said.
“Anything in it?”
“Nah,” Mike answered. “I’m sweet enough already.”
Lincoln poured a second cup of coffee, then balanced both cups in one hand, grabbed his water bottle with the other, and carried them all back to his seat at the table.
“Man of many talents,” Mike said, as he took the offered cup of coffee. “You must’ve done time in a restaurant.”
Lincoln shook his head. “No, this right here is all officer corps training. First two weeks is all coffee prep and delivery. Basically all I did as a lieutenant, too.”
“OK,” Coleman said. “So this is interesting.”
She didn’t look up, and she was quiet long enough that Lincoln started to think maybe she’d just been talking to herself.
“Thumper,” Mike said. At the sound of her name, she looked up at them, b
ut there was a distance in her eyes that said she wasn’t entirely with them. After a moment she shook her head, and her eyes focused.
“Yeah, sorry. So here’s something,” she said, and she enlarged a panel and flipped it around so the others could see it. It was series of waveforms. It took a moment before Lincoln realized he was looking at the communications between the ship and the station. “You see this,” Thumper said, pointing to a short but sharp peak at the head of several of the forms. “… it’s a little hitch, each time the captain of Destiny’s Undertow responds to 773’s traffic controller.”
“And that’s significant?” Lincoln said.
“Well, yeah,” she answered in a tone that implied that should have been obvious. She glanced around the room at her other teammates. Lincoln was relieved to see they all looked as perplexed as he felt. Thumper sighed and gave a little eye roll with a shake of her head. “Does anybody besides me pay attention to anything?” She fiddled with the holotable and a few seconds later another panel appeared, next to the first. It, too, was a series of waveforms.
“See anything familiar?” she asked. Lincoln scanned the forms and sure enough, at the head of each one was an identical triangular shape.
“What’s this one we’re looking at now?” he asked.
“That’s me talking to Mom, from Phobos last time we were there,” she said. She mentioned it casually, but Lincoln couldn’t help but wonder what they’d been doing on the Martian moon.
“Uh…” Mike said. “Do you keep archives of all our communications?”
“Sure,” said Thumper. “We pretty much have to.”
“Yikes,” Mike said.
“Anyway,” Thumper said, pointing again to the recurring shape. “That blip is from a quantum relay. Same kind of stuff we use for deep-range commo.”
“Military grade?” Mike asked.
“Not necessarily, no,” she answered. “Can’t tell that from this. But what it does tell us, is that the captain wasn’t on his ship.”
“What do you mean he wasn’t on the ship?” Mike said.