Townsend hesitated for a moment, his curiosity piqued. Then his common sense elbowed it aside. He was already dealing with enough aggravation to ruin the health of five people, and Lydia wasn’t a child. If she needed his help she would ask for it. Until then, he had a meeting to attend nine decks below. With a final backward glance, he headed for the tube car.
The first thing Drew noticed when the door opened on L Deck was that the bulkheads and shelving were now turquoise. Not as shocking as hot pink, but still not a color he would want on the walls of his workspace. The second thing he noticed as he approached the drafting table where the two engineers were standing was that Singh was once more smirking archly. So their excitement over the comm really had been a sign of progress? Townsend hoped so. The past few days had been filled with frustration. Any good news would be most welcome right now.
“We were right,” declared Gouryas. “Remember when we went on that mission to Zulu and got their field generator to produce the invisibility cloak?”
“As I recall, you painted their entire landing deck purple in the process. And a few other surfaces as well. The Rangers still haven’t forgiven us for that.”
“Well,” began Singh with a dismissive wave of his hand, “we had already hypothesized that the generator would create the field, and that the paintbrush would act as the controller, establishing its nature and parameters.”
As though sensing Townsend’s growing impatience, Gouryas broke in, “We’ve been compiling our observations from the experiment on Zulu, searching for anything that might shed some light on our current situation. We’ve also been looking at the ship identification codes that Lydia procured for us from House Trokerk.”
“They’ve each got a pair of wave frequencies embedded in them,” Singh continued. “One is a constant in all the codes, and we’re guessing that it denotes the House. The other one varies from ship to ship. In tactical situations, it would make sense for that second frequency to keep cycling, like a password, to prevent an opposing vessel’s weapons from locking onto its signal.”
“Then how are we supposed to identify their ships when the tekl’hananni scoreboard goes up?” Drew demanded.
“Fortunately,” said Singh, “we don’t have to. Daisy Hub has extended docking privileges to the leading House, not to any individual participating craft. Our sensor field only needs to recognize the first embedded frequency.”
So far, so good. Townsend nodded approval. “And how are you coming along with the second half of that problem?”
“Not too well, I’m afraid,” Gouryas replied. “However, we’ve noticed that nothing we did on Zulu and nothing Beale and Oolalong have done here has disrupted the functioning of the Meniscus field on either of the short-hopper landing decks. We think it must be hardwired and on a protected circuit, triggered by the switch that opens the door to space.”
“So, even if the invisibility cloak is activated, we can still access and use Devil Bug,” Townsend concluded. “That could come in handy.”
Prompted by a head-jerk from Gouryas, Singh cleared his throat and said, “Actually, we were thinking that if we studied the Meniscus field, we might find a way to separate the invisibility cloak from the sensor field that triggers it.”
Townsend felt as though he was back in the ward room at the 33rd Precinct with the hyperactive four-year-olds. He did now what had worked for him back then — sucked in a deep breath and released it slowly, counting to ten as he consciously relaxed his face and shoulders. Then he said, enunciating carefully and with exaggerated patience, “If by study you mean tinker with, the answer is no. The Meniscus field is the only part of this alien contraption that’s currently working the way we need it to, and I don’t want to risk anyone messing that up.”
Just as the four-year-olds had done, Gouryas let out a small, disappointed sound.
Drew’s wristcomm buzzed. With luck, it meant he could finally question Karlov.
“Lydia?”
“Nope,” said Ruby’s voice. “I’ve got bad news and worse news, Chief. Which do you want first?”
“Give me the bad news,” he told her, already suspecting what it might be.
“The scoreboard just went up. Trokerk is ahead by eight, and the Krronn and her sister ship the Nannssi will be on their way here as soon as their battle damage has been repaired and both vessels are fit to travel. Their estimated ETA is about forty standard hours.”
Wonderful. In less than two days Daisy Hub would be receiving twice the usual number of Nandrians. Two ships that might open fire on the station if it disappeared while they were on approach. And if by some miracle it didn’t and they were able to dock, Townsend would then have to deliver two welcoming speeches from memory, one of them a first contact script. And there was worse news than this?
He braced himself and asked, “What’s the rest of it, Ruby?”
“We’ve received a commburst from Zulu. Rodrigues wanted us to know that he copied the Nandrian transmission and will be dispatching all three shuttles in time to protect us when our cloaking field deploys, angering the aliens. His words, Chief. He’s also sent out a call to the other Ranger detachments in the sector. No responses yet, but he’s pretty sure they’ll scramble.”
This was the icing on the cake: the Rangers and the Nandrians colliding on Daisy Hub’s doorstep, giving Karlov the cover he needed to make his move on Yoko. Rodrigues knew from experience what would happen when those three armed short-hoppers approached too close to the station. Clearly, he believed that there was nothing Townsend’s crew could do to prevent the aliens from tripping the switch first. Drew hated to admit it, but at the moment, he was right. Before asking the Ranger captain to stand his men down, the station manager would have to demonstrate beyond any doubt that their protection was not needed. Until then, he was stuck.
Townsend turned and saw his mood reflected in the expressions on his senior engineers’ faces. Singh’s smirk had wilted at the corners, and Gouryas’s normally swarthy complexion had visibly paled.
“You heard the lady,” he told them. “If you can’t find a way to either program or shut off that damned invisibility field in the next forty hours, we’re about to have our first interstellar war.”
— «» —
Lydia Garfield sat at her station, preparing to test the program she had just rewritten — again — and keeping her fingers crossed that the sixth time would be the charm. If the Doc was right, and this extremely long strand of reverse-transcripted DNA was storing encrypted information, then each of its possible base pairs could represent an alphanumeric character, and each character or group of characters might stand for — what? A pixel in a bit map? An Anglo letter or number or symbol? Maybe a letter from one of Earth’s older languages? Fortunately, Lydia had given top priority to upgrading the computer systems aboard the Hub. She hated to think how long it would have taken her to run each of these tests on the kludges she had found when she first arrived here.
She pressed the start key. Half a standard minute went by. Then lines began cascading like a waterfall from the top of her screen, some short and curved, others thick and straight. She watched in fascination as they arranged themselves in rows, forming a solid sheet of characters, mostly unfamiliar.
There was more than one alphabet here, and evidently more than one level of encryption. Some of the characters were Anglo letters. Others resembled piles of sticks or an assortment of stylized trees with broken or truncated branches. Her breath caught in her throat as she recognized one of the trees. It looked just like a cookie that she had eaten earlier, a tree shape that Karlov had told Nora was part of his name.
Quickly, Lydia composed and executed a subroutine that would identify the Anglo letters, then copy and paste them to a second document without changing their sequence. If this was a simple case of overlaying multiple messages one atop another, the Anglo text at least should come clear immediately.
Within seconds, her screen had repainted — with nonsense words.
Great. Either there was a third level of encryption or she’d been mistaken about the overlay.
“What are you doing?”
Lydia nearly jumped out of her skin.
“Sorry, kiddo,” said Ruby. “I didn’t mean to startle you. But what’s this? A cryptogram? Must be a tough one — you’ve been at it for a while. Maybe I can help.”
“I don’t think so,” Lydia began, then gave up as Ruby brought over a chair and sat down beside her. The Doc had wanted the contents of this message kept secret. Lydia weighed the odds of anyone understanding the garbage currently on her screen and decided not to create suspicion by arguing. She shifted to her left to give the other woman a more direct view.
Ruby stared thoughtfully at the jumble of characters for a moment. “That’s a word,” she said, pointing with an index finger as she pronounced the letters aloud. “Not an Anglo word, unfortunately.”
“No,” breathed Lydia, riding a swell of excitement, “it’s not Anglo. Ruby, you’re brilliant.”
“Of course, I am,” declared “Mom” with a grin. “Aren’t we all?”
— «» —
Townsend still had a card or two to play. He rode the tube car north to B Deck to find Lucas Soaring Hawk, the Hub’s propulsion expert.
Unlike L Deck, which appeared to be trying on a rainbow one color at a time, Hawk’s workshop was shades of gray. It looked dingier in the corners and wherever spare tools and used wipe-rags had gravitated into untidy piles, but it was unremittingly gray everywhere Townsend turned his gaze. The PLS suits hanging beside each of the three airlocks were gray. Even the drop sheets that littered the deck, each displaying an assortment of parts from Hawk’s current project, were gray.
Townsend looked up and saw Soaring Hawk striding sure-footedly toward him, skirting the drop sheets without so much as a downward glance. Tall and lithe, the man who had “souped up” Devil Bug wore his dark hair shoulder length, securing it in a ponytail at the nape of his neck when he was working, and tying a bandanna around his forehead to keep stray locks from falling over his eyes.
“I was wondering when you would get around to me,” said Hawk with a grin.
“You’ve been monitoring the situation?”
“I know that you’ve got half the crew working their tails off to keep Karlov from finding out what the other half are doing. So, where do I fit into this?”
“You’re my last-ditch guy. We’re doing all we can to prevent it, but there’s a good chance everything will hit the fan day after tomorrow, putting us in the middle of a battle between the Rangers and the Nandrians. At that point, getting ourselves out of harm’s way becomes top priority. Ruby tells me you’re the one to see about optimizing engines.”
“Ruby speaks the truth,” said Hawk sagely.
“It has also been pointed out to me that an invisible object moving at a constant speed on a predictable trajectory may as well be visible. Do our thrusters generate enough power to break us out of orbit?”
“The main thrusters? They can. And someone must have figured that they’d have to at some point, because the Hub’s outer frame is specially reinforced to keep everything in one piece during escape velocity flight. However, thruster burn can be tracked, even if we’re invisible,” Hawk pointed out. “If the Nandrians decide to target us, simply running away under power may not be our best option.”
“Actually, that’s not all I had in mind.”
Hawk cocked his head, intrigued.
“I understand that the Hub can be separated into three sections in an emergency,” Townsend continued. “Am I correct in assuming that each of them would then be equipped with its own thrusters and control panel, including communications?”
“I like where this is going,” said the propulsion wizard, his dark eyes acquiring a calculating expression. “Tell me more about your plan.”
— «» —
“This can’t be right,” Doc Ktumba declared. “There must be an error in your algorithm.”
But Lydia had checked and double-checked each word of her decryption and was prepared to stand her ground, even against the Doc. “It is what it is. And it came here with Karlov, who is genetically Human but different from us on a cellular level. You told me yourself that he could be the result of a laboratory experiment.”
“Yes! An experiment conducted by Humans in a laboratory on Earth.”
“So, you’re willing to believe that Humans would subject other Humans to genetic experimentation, but not that aliens would experiment on Humans?”
“If the test subjects referred to in this excerpt are Human,” said the Doc, “then it would mean there are two separate branches of the Human race. One of those branches was forcibly relocated to an alien world and left there to survive as best they could, and the other one has been mutated and manipulated to satisfy someone’s scientific curiosity — someone, by the way, who might not yet be done tinkering with Humanity. So, which branch of the species do you think we would belong to? Would the Humans of Earth be the test subjects, or would we be the control group? In either case, it would mean we’d been victimized in unspeakable ways — if this document is genuine, and if you’re right about what it says. And in the interests of my being able to sleep at night, I would prefer it if you weren’t.”
“Well, what about this other text?” Lydia persisted, replacing the Anglo characters on the screen with the sequence of sticks and treelike symbols she had lifted from the decrypted file. “We know that Karlov is familiar with this alphabet. He baked it into cookies in Jensen’s kitchen.”
The Doc stared thoughtfully for a moment at the display. “I’ve seen these letters before. Or something like them. They’re northern European, and very old.”
“Why don’t we ask Karlov to read the page aloud for us?”
“No. It arrived here encrypted. We have no idea who, if anyone, was intended to learn its contents, including the courier who brought it to us.”
“Then how about asking him to pronounce the letters individually for us?” Lydia suggested. “Nobody can claim their existence was supposed to be kept secret, since he formed them out of cookie dough and even told Nora they spelled out his name. And once we know how to pronounce them, I can feed the information into a database and continue trying out subroutines. Unless you’d rather I stopped?”
Evidently torn, the Doc fell silent. Finally, she said, “Don’t stop. Not until you can tell me with certainty when these experiments took place and where, and on whom.”
“I gather you still don’t want Drew to know anything about this?”
“He’s got enough on his mind right now. Besides, if the worst happens and the Nandrians blow the Hub to pieces, it all becomes moot, doesn’t it?”
— «» —
Townsend’s next stop was the caf on D Deck, where Ruby had told him he would find Gavin Holchuk and Teri Mintz. These two were inseparable lately, except when Holchuk was summoned to a senior staff meeting or Max Karlov needed to be detoured to U-Town to keep him busy. The interactive soap opera had been Teri’s passion since before she arrived on the Hub. Now it was Karlov’s as well.
In fact, it was the level of realism achieved by the U-Town programming that had given Townsend the idea he was now fine-tuning in his mind.
Gavin and Teri were sitting at a table in the middle of the room, silently basking in each other’s company. It was a shame to intrude on their moment. However, in less than thirty-nine hours Daisy Hub would become the epicenter of an interstellar war, and Townsend could practically hear the clock ticking down. He walked over and settled onto the third chair at their table, muttering a brief apology.
Holchuk frowned at the tabletop, then leaned back expectantly in his seat. “What’s happening, boss man?”
Teri remained as she wa
s, placidly sipping a brown liquid from one of Jensen’s tall mugs. It was too light in color to be java. As though sensing the question in Townsend’s mind, she raised her cup toward him in mock salute and explained, “Hot chocolate. Jensen saved some of the cocoa paste you gave him.”
The cocoa had come from Bruni Patel. Townsend let himself miss his friend for a moment. Then, meeting the curious gaze of the Chief Cargo Inspector, he got directly to the point. “Two things. First, despite what I said at the senior staff meeting, I’m very suspicious of Karlov. In fact, I think he may actually be here to complete Major Cisco’s mission.”
Holchuk snapped upright in his chair. “I’ve felt from the start that there was something off about him.”
“I have a plan to sidetrack him, but I’ll need your help.”
“You’ve got it,” said Holchuk. “Just tell me which airlock you want me to shove him through.”
“Gavin!” Teri snatched up his empty cup and made as though to hit him with it.
Townsend put out a hand to stop her. “It’s not that kind of plan,” he assured her. “Tell me, Teri, on a scale of one to ten, how hooked is Karlov on U-Town?”
“At least an eight, probably higher.”
“Definitely higher,” Holchuk confirmed. “Seems like it’s all he can talk about.”
Ignoring the interruption, Teri continued, “He’s already been adopted into a fictional family and has identified which roles he wants to play when he interacts with other family members. He’s involved with my family as well. When the trial verdict came back not guilty, Max let out a whoop and sent his avatar racing across the courtroom to give Brock a bear hug. I think U-Town feels very real to him.”
“That’s putting it mildly,” declared Holchuk with disgust. “He talks about these characters as though they’re living on the station. Now that Angela’s pregnant, it wouldn’t surprise me if he started knitting little things.”
The Relativity Bomb Page 20