Mission Pack 3: Missions 9-12 (Black Ocean Mission Pack)

by J. S. Morin

  “In fairness,” Archie said. “We did have a rather detailed itinerary. It wasn’t as if we’d just guessed and hoped. The Bradbury has simply deviated from their planned course.”

  “Well, we need them to deviate again. This time, it’s going to be to a course we pick for them. No more of this trusting to chance. We need them to go someplace we want them, and we’re going to do it on our timetable.”

  The cargo bay grew quiet. Crewmembers shifted and shot glances at one another as each waited for someone else to speak up and either offer a plan or tell Carl where to shove one. He put his hands into the pockets of his jacket. “Hey, don’t everyone all speak up at once.”

  Rai Kub raised a tentative hand. Carl gave the stuunji a nod, and he proceeded. “What if we sent a distress call?”

  Not bad, for an uptight newcomer. Harmony Bay’s corporate mantra, “Healing a Sick Galaxy,” made them the perfect target for a false distress signal. It would have been like shouting, “Is there a doctor on board?” in a crowded transport ship. Any doctor within earshot was duty-bound to speak up, if for no other reason than someone might recognize him and call him out on it if he didn’t. Harmony Bay couldn’t risk the bad public relations for ignoring a distressed vessel. But there was a catch.

  “No one is supposed to know they’re out here,” Carl countered. “They might be willing to let a crew freeze to death in a dead ship rather than expose their presence.”

  “Also, someone else could answer the call first,” Amy said. “Not only would we catch the wrong fish, but it would let the Bradbury off the hook. Plus, you know… then we’ve gotta explain why we’re not adrift.”

  Roddy snorted. “Mort could fix that problem in a jiffy.”

  Carl paced in front of the group. There was something here, if only he could bite in and hold on long enough to make it into a plan. Even a bad plan would get the engines heating up on this heist. “What if we set up our distressed ship where we can be sure the Bradbury is the closest? What if we can find a bait their captain can’t resist? Ideas?”

  Archie stroked his chin. “What I know about Captain Dominguez might hold some promise. She served eight years in Earth Navy before retiring to the private sector. She never married, but has a younger brother who runs a small freight service. There’s—”

  “Zammos,” Shoni cut in. Everyone turned their attention to the pale-furred laaku scientist. “The corporate rivalry trickles down to the personal level in both organizations. Forget getting them to answer a distress call for altruistic reasons. Let them respond so that Zammos can’t.”

  Carl rocked from his heels to the balls of his feet and back again. “So how do we make them think Zammos wants to answer a distress call?”

  Mort snapped his fingers and leapt to his feet. “Tell them there’s a heaping load of science on board, and if they don’t skedaddle on over, it’s all going to fall apart into protons and neutrinos.”

  Roddy slurped a beer in the awkward silence that followed. “I give him credit for naming two subatomic particles. But the core idea’s there. Make up some shit that Zammos might want, and put out a distress call claiming it’s in danger of falling into the wrong hands. Harmony Bay can grab the stuff, and some pirates can take the blame.”

  “What’s to stop actual pirates from partaking in the looting?” Archie asked. “One might never anticipate the interest generated by our falsified wares.”

  Carl leaned against the stair railing. His job was all but finished. As much as everyone claimed to hate his plans, he hadn’t brewed one of his own since the Silde Slims job. The crew would hash this out, he’d put his thumbprint in the box, and they’d blame him for any parts of it that weren’t ironed out. In return, he’d take any credit for the parts that went right.

  “Directed transmission,” Shoni said offhandedly. “We can control who gets the message.”

  “They’d know a point-to-point comm if they saw one,” Amy countered. “Harmony Bay isn’t a bunch of idiots.”

  Shoni shook her head. “Conical burst. From their perspective, it’ll just look like a blanket broadcast.”

  A beer snapped free from Roddy’s six-pack and floated to Mort. The wizard popped the top manually. “So… what do these science peddlers want? They can’t be daft enough to take an unbaited hook.”

  “Why hooks?” Rai Kub asked, scratching the side of his nose.

  “Ancient human fish-catching ritual,” Roddy replied. “Don’t sweat it, ya big herbivore. He just means we’re looking to lure them into a trap.”

  “Then why not just say so?” Rai Kub asked.

  “Well, metaphor speech is a common way to—”

  “No!” the stuunji snapped. “Why not tell them there was a trap. Their rival was caught in it and needs help. A kindly man offers help, but an unkindly one will take advantage.”

  Click. The final tumbler had fallen into place. Carl grinned. “Yeah. Not Zammos directly, but someone working for them. After all, Zammos can’t admit to being out here any more than Harmony Bay can. But if the Bradbury catches photons about a Zammos supplier getting jacked out here, they might sneak over to investigate. Let’s get to work!”

  The crew dispersed, breaking into small groups to chat. Rai Kub levered himself upright and stood there. “Work on what?”

  “We’ve got a ship to hijack… so we can hijack a bigger one.”

  # # #

  Of course, the easiest way to hijack a ship was to already own it. Since it was going to get turned into a blasted-out hulk soon enough anyway, Carl wasn’t inclined to be picky. Of course, since he was just the beer-buying side of broke, Carl didn’t intend to pay for the vessel in the traditional sense.

  “How much for the courier?” Carl asked. The man who accompanied him through the yard of derelicts and repossession victims was portly, heavy-bearded, and ambled along with a limp and the aid of a cane. Janus Epsilon was out of the way, but there wasn’t a populated part of the galaxy that didn’t cause little depots like this to pop up here and there. Ships wore out. They got damaged beyond a captain’s financial wherewithal. Sometimes they got stolen and sold off. Those were the ships that ended up at places like Casper’s Fleet Supply.

  “Hunnerd twunny.”

  What language the man spoke natively was beyond Carl’s ability to guess. But that price was insulting even as a starter bid for bargaining.

  “It’s got no star-drive.”

  “Hunnerd ten.”

  “I’m going to have to tow it into orbit.”

  “Hunnerd flet. Is nice sheep. You feex; you like. Promeese.” He clapped Carl amiably on the shoulder, then doubled over in a coughing fit that concluded with spitting a wad of brownish phlegm onto the dirt.

  “Tell ya what,” Carl said, taking a casual step away from the possibly infectious junk dealer. “The ship’s not worth eighty, but I’ll give you the hundred large if you promise to get to a med scanner before this atmo does you in.” The Mobius had registered Janus Epsilon as one hundred percent safe for human habitation, but that didn’t mean local conditions in the junkyard were sanitary.

  “Deal.” The junker stuck out a hand for Carl to shake.

  Carl kept his distance and pointed to the junker with a wink. “Lemme go get your money.” Terras could make a man overlook a social slight. Carl was going to run his jacket through the clothes processor the minute he was free of the junker, and he didn’t want to shower in ammonia to get the man’s various viral and bacterial passengers off his skin.

  Five minutes later, the junker was out of his life, and Roddy was working with Archie to hook up towlines and repulsors to get the piece of garbage off the planet’s surface. Carl watched panels of the outer hull buckle just from the strain of the cables and noticed several patches that weren’t even environmentally sealed. At best, the courier ship could have resold for five of six thousand terras in parts value, maybe ten if there was anything worthwhile in the computers. He would have felt bad paying twenty for it, let alone the hundred t
housand he’d handed over.

  But since he still had over two million in counterfeit terras left, Carl was willing to let it slide.

  # # #

  Yomin’s cover was a blast of deja vu from six years in her past. Most civilians assumed that data warfare was a glamorous job with flashing red displays, countdown timers, and stylized maps of hostile computer systems’ security. But most of it revolved around running scripted algorithms, then switching over to writing new ones while the first one worked in the background. Whatever became of an algorithm’s attempt to breach, log in, sift, mine, copy, overload, delete, or mimic a target system, Yomin or another specialist like her would analyze the results and try to correct any shortcomings.

  Every system had a weakness, because every system had an access point. Social hackers took the easy way around and got to the human element: find someone with legitimate access and blackmail, bribe, or coerce him into passing that access along. Yomin’s style was slower but didn’t rely in weaknesses or inherent requirements to know someone in the target’s organization. Earth Navy didn’t care about breaking into the shuttle service registry and clearing a few violations off a pilot’s record. They wanted to break into computers owned by the Eyndar, the Zheen, and occasionally even the Laaku and Tesud races.

  It was fascinating work. Yomin knew it wasn’t for everyone. It required an abstraction of thinking into the digital domain. With the proper flexibility of mental pathways, that domain was just as real as the macro world. The data existed. In the literal sense, it was a coded series of subatomic spins, but Yomin didn’t conceive of it on that level. She saw the intermediary, the code of computer language that bridged the gap between particle physics and user interface. The data had rules. Programmers of a given species or culture had their quirks and habits. Yomin understood this at a gut level.

  Most holovids showed undercover work as a stressful countdown to being discovered and exposed as a fraud. Yomin was on track for a promotion.

  “Dranoel, status on decrypting last night’s comm traffic?” Lieutenant Ingram asked. In actuality, it had been an order to report in, but she imagined the polite raising of the voice at the end of his sentence to turn it into a request. She didn’t go so far as to add a “please” onto the end, lest she spoil the illusion.

  “Eighteen of thirty-four messages decoded. The rest are percolating through the algorithm. I expect two of them to fail, but the other fourteen should be available in the next half hour.” She didn’t look up from her terminal.

  “I want all thirty-four,” Ingram insisted. “The hardest encryption yields the best intel.” Yomin had heard that bromide so many times in her career she wanted to throttle the man. Ingram was the worst kind of officer. He didn’t understand what his underlings did or how they did it. All he cared about was that they make him look good in doing it. Any pushback, reality check, or delay was a sign of conspiracy to discredit him. Ironically, that very attitude made Yomin consider getting him fired. If there was one faction on board a starship you didn’t piss off if you valued your career, it was the wizards. If there was a second one, it was data warfare. Harmony Bay might have renamed their department Cryptographic Sciences, but it was still made up of free-thinking, computer-savvy geniuses whose inherent lack of respect for official boundaries was a job requirement.

  “Two of them are using Earth Navy’s Babel-V protocol. We’re probably picking up covert comm reports from black ops. Both were scraped from an astral depth that most civilian antennae can’t monitor.”

  “No excuses,” Ingram said. “I want those two military comms decrypted within the hour.”

  None of the other specialists spoke up. No naval ship would have put up with such ignorance from an officer in charge of a tech unit. But Yomin’s coworkers were a bunch of payday grinders, just leveling up to the next promotion, raise, or transfer. None of them gave a shit about the work the Bradbury was doing. If Yomin got reprimanded for a bullshit offense, that was just one fewer deck on the lift to the top. She hadn’t earned enough friends for someone to rally to her defense on personal grounds.

  Of course, of the two unbreakably encoded messages, one was ripe for the picking. As soon as Ingram left the room, Yomin glanced around to make sure none of the other specialists were watching and entered the decryption key. While it was true that the Bradbury lacked the technical resources to crack the Babel-V protocol, that didn’t stop anyone who had the key. Yomin had left her equipment aboard the Mobius and had set it to broadcast using an encryption key she knew by heart. If there was ever a flaw or a backdoor in the Babel-V protocol, it was that anyone running the decryptor using its default settings would have it try decryption keys in a set order. Yomin’s class at Annapolis had all learned the first and last key in the sequence for an exam final. She couldn’t forget it now if she tried.

  Once decoded, the message came through in plain text, not even beating around the bush.

  HEY, HOW’S IT GOING OVER THERE?

  WE’VE FINALLY GOT THINGS WORKED OUT. WILL DIVERT SHIP WITH DISTRESS CALL TO TARGET LOCATION. FROM TIME OF RESPONSE, THE SOONER THE BETTER. TICK, TOCK, TICK.

  Yomin swallowed. She’d settled into such a routine aboard the Bradbury that it seemed like the day was never going to come. Carl and the rest would just write her and Esper off, and everyone would move on. She and Esper were legitimately qualified for their cover jobs, and they could either work for Harmony Bay or move on to other careers. But Carl had finally come through, or at least had a plan to come through. There was no hint of how long she would have to wait, but just knowing the triggering event should suffice.

  Carl’s parting line held an annoyance. It was his favorite sign/countersign code: a nonsense line from one of his ancient songs. The response wasn’t just spoken; it was sung. As a cryptographer, the shift in expected mediums appealed to her from a security standpoint. Even knowing the correct response wasn’t enough. The contact had to know the method of delivery. But it had also gotten the damn song stuck in her head.

  The door to Cryptographic Sciences slid open, and Lieutenant Ingram strode in. He headed straight for Yomin’s workstation. With the incriminating message still displayed on her terminal, Yomin panicked. Jumping up with a start, she knocked her chair over. Deftly sidestepping, Ingram leaned past the wreck of chair and data specialist and plucked his coffee from the workstation.

  “Jesus, Dranoel. Put some headphones on and listen to music if you’re this jumpy. You’re no good to me on psych leave.”

  Ingram walked the long way around Yomin as she righted her chair, and she muttered something inane in reply. Carl’s message was out in plain sight, and everyone in the room was watching her. As soon as she was alone, she deleted the decryption key and the message from the Mobius. Maybe it was good that her time on the Bradbury was almost up.

  # # #

  Rai Kub sat by the cargo ramp, arms crossed atop his knees, chin resting on his forearms. If not for the windy, rhythmic breathing, Roddy could have mistaken him for a statue. Not that anyone would make a moping statue of a stuunji. There was no metaphor, no insight into the sentient condition. That there was just a sad stuunji.

  Roddy wobbled down the stairs under an awkward load. In one carrying hand, he held a twelve-pack of Sommeil de Choix. Tucked under the opposite arm was a 5-liter keg of Kanalwasser. Both beers were a step up from Earth’s Preferred, which meant they qualified for use on special occasions. When he’d made his way to the stuunji’s side, he deposited the keg in front of Rai Kub.

  “You OK, buddy?” Roddy hopped onto an empty crate and cracked open a Sommeil.

  Rai Kub huffed out a barnyard wind, heavy on the wet hay. “Have I made an error?”

  Roddy shrugged as he drank. “That’s how most of us ended up here. Don’t take it personal.”

  “Not me. I chose this. I sought Carl and begged him to take me on.” Roddy noted that Rai Kub had appended the messianic title to Carl’s name. “I felt I owed him a great debt for a great deed. N
ow I wonder what he wanted to do instead of saving us.”

  Roddy could have answered that. But telling Rai Kub that Esper had twisted his arm into giving up the Gologlex payday wasn’t going to help anyone, least of all Rai Kub. “Listen here, big guy. Carl’s a fuck-up, same as the rest of us. He’s got his good days and his bad, same as anyone. But some bastards don’t have it in ‘em to do for anyone but themselves. Only reason you’re here today instead of sitting in a glass cage is because Carl’s not one of them.”

  “All his actions seem to tell otherwise.”

  Roddy caught Rai Kub eyeing the keg. “Go ahead, drink up.”

  Rai Kub shook his head. “I’m prone to intemperance.”

  A snort turned into a giggle, and Roddy couldn’t resist. “You know, for a guy who just picked up English, you’ve got a helluva vocabulary.”

  Rai Kub tilted his head. “The priests on the Nineveh—”

  “Stop right there. That’s your problem. Priests are nice and all. Swell guys, most of ‘em. But you can’t be listening to everything they say if you want to live a life outside a cloister. If your day is all praying and menial chores, sure, those rules are easy to follow. But some of us on the outside need a good stiff drink to put things into perspective.”

  “We do?”

  Roddy reached over from his perch and clapped a hand on the stuunji’s shoulder. “Of course we do. Guys like you and me, we don’t have easy, simple lives. But lemme tell you: life looks a lot simpler once you’ve seen the bottom of a can of beer.”

  Rai Kub wrapped an enormous hand around the keg and peered underneath.

  “No, from the inside.”

  Rai Kub set down the keg. “You’re jesting at my expense.”

  “Nope. I might have had a little fun with you when you came aboard, but come on, man. If you’re going to be one of us, you need to relax a little.”

  “I think that’s my problem. I don’t know if I’m made of the stuff you are.”

  “No shit, Copernicus. You’re practically hydraulic and wrapped in kevlex.”

  “I mean inside. My heart isn’t in this work.”