Some of the team were able to come immediately on their own; some needed another team member to call them for a “special duty.” When the team was assembled, Gul laid out the mission objective. This time, he wouldn't participating in the planning or the operation. With the captain ashore, the ship was his first responsibility.
The team took what he'd given them and went to work gathering intel and making a plan. They had always came up with a workable plan, which was part of why they were “Team Alpha.” Today was no exception. When they were ready, Gul came in and the team briefed him on their plan. He approved it.
Sanja asked to include their new prospect on the mission. The team had already decided he was ready for his final test, and the difficulty and location of this target was ideal as a final proof of the prospective team member. While he was being trained, each team member had taken some opportunity to talk with him or work with him, sometimes without him knowing they were part of the team. He had also successfully participated on several less difficult missions at foreign ports during this cruise. So, there were no objections to Sanja's proposal. Tonight, his test would begin.
Chapter 43: The Blue Swamp
The two airships came in together, with the rest of the fighter escort covering them. About half of the guests immediately went out hunting or sightseeing. The rest pursued various entertainments aboard the main airship. Annalise invited Anailu to listen to a lecture about historical tactics, suggesting Anailu would find it interesting. It was given by one of the low-ranked staff officers. It turned out that Annalise was correct, since the talk was about the tactics and employment of small, maneuverable warships during the early Consolidation Wars of the Empire. Anailu had never been particularly interested in history, but she was very interested in small maneuverable ships, since that was her specialty in StellaTactics.
Though the talk was interesting, Anailu was a little on edge, knowing that the fate of the Queen might be on the line, and there was nothing she could do about it.. She was going to make an early night of it, but Velvet and Diamond both wanted to see the impressive night time display of bioluminescence that the Blue Swamp was famous for. Since shabti weren't supposed to be interested in sight-seeing, Anailu had to be the one to request an aircar and ride along with them. Once they were out in the darkness with Velvet flying, Anailu forgot about her worries for that little hour or so as they flew among the glowing plants.
Chapter 44: The Decoys Are Not Decoys
Taizu Ondrasek was lying on his rack awake when he heard the knock at the door. He hopped up, and grabbed his special tools. As he'd expected, Major Kolos was standing outside. “Private Ondrasek, let's go.”
With a “Yes, sir” he stepped out the door, closed it, and followed the major down the passageway. The head of the Yeoman department on the Stoneforge, she was average height, fit, attractive – and a major, which made all the rest irrelevant for him.
Taizu was a tall, skinny geek who'd joined the Navy straight out of school, wanting to work on electronics for the good of the Empire. He was now a Private First Class on his second cruise, and even the Navy didn't know the most important work he did for them.
Taizu had been a law abiding, patriotic Imperial citizen even as a kid. He'd always been interested in electronics and computers, even going to a technical school as a teen. That schooling made it easy for him to get into the Navy's Technician program.
Then the Navy taught him to break the law.
All technician students took a familiarization course in cracking systems, so they would know at least the basics of how to defend against it. When Taizu took it, he discovered a passion and genius he'd never expected, and the Navy was only too happy to divert him into the advanced intrusion/counter-intrusion course.
The first two thirds of the course covered openly available tools and techniques. It was fun, and he was acing it. The last part of the course would be about the secret tools and techniques being used by the Navy. Taizu had one last exam before starting that part of the course. In the class, it was referred to as 'the point of no return' because from that point on, you would know valuable secrets of the Empire, and you would no longer be free to travel outside the Core Worlds without permission.
The evening before the big exam, he had a surprise visit from one of the course instructors, Tech Santos. He was shocked when the instructor told him that 'the point of no return' was worse than the Empire admitted – how the government had become paranoid about its own intrusion specialists. How he'd not only have to work in a secure vault but that he'd have to live there almost all the time, a virtual prisoner. He would only be allowed to leave under constant guard, and he wouldn't even be permitted to leave the Navy of his own free will.
Taizu didn't like that at all.
Then Tech Santos told him there was another option. The Navy needed people as talented as him, out on ships in the fleet. Officially, it wasn't allowed, but if Taizu could wash out of training. Santos would see to it that he would get to the fleet, to serve a captain that needed his talents.
Taizu had done very well in his training, so far. To lower his score enough to wash out, he would have to complete every part of the exam, and fail everything. Also, intentional failure of training was a court-martial offense. Santos claimed that wouldn't happen to him.
Taizu made his choice.
After he failed out of tech school, he went out to the fleet as a Technician (Unspecialized), the lowest Technician qualification. He was posted to the Stoneforge, though, a much better posting than a Technician school washout would normally get.
Shortly he arrived at the ship, it departed on a patrol cruise. When he discovered the terminal in his work area was breached, he was too curious to report it without at least doing a little digging of his own. When he tracked down the files the intruder had left behind, he found something he didn't expect: homework assignments.
The assignments continued his training for Intrusion and Counter-Intrusion, and included practical exercises, starting with assembling a toolkit of hardware and software. By the end of the patrol, he'd reached the final assignment – to identify his instructor. When he found proof pointing at Major Kolos, the officer in charge of the Stoneforge's Yeoman Department, he couldn't believe it at first, but he'd eliminated any other possibilities. When he worked up the nerve to approach her, he discovered he'd been right – and she started him to work on learning more advanced tools and techniques. At the end of the cruise, Taizu was promoted to Technician (Unspecialized) Private First Class.
The next cruise took the Stoneforge out of the Empire, visiting foreign ports. He was surprised when she started him to work penetrating actual systems – first commercial systems, then the local military and government systems. By the time they returned to the Empire, it was still exciting every time, but he knew what to expect when he was part of a mission.
He knew there were other people involved, doing the hands-on parts of the tasks, but he didn't have much contact with them, since he wasn't a full member of the team. Mostly, he worked with the major, who also continued teaching him. At first, it was weird, working directly with an officer while he was just a Private, but the major didn't put up with him being embarrassed. She demanded results, so he had to get over it. She also made sure that he knew that the rest of the team knew what he'd done, and that the captain knew about and appreciated his work, even if he'd never met her.
So earlier today, when his boss told him that he was free for the day and would be working the midnight watch, he knew what was really up. It was no surprise when he arrived at his berth to find a message from his boss that he wouldn't be needed that night after all, but to take the rest of the day off anyway. He'd finally gotten a few hours of sleep in during the afternoon, but as usual, it was hard because he had known an exciting night was coming. All his previous missions had been in foreign ports. This time, the Stoneforge was sitting on an Imperial Navy landing pad, at an Imperial government starport, on an Imperial world, in the middle
of some big government facility called “Project Anchor,” but as far as he could tell, it was just a bunch of buildings around a big hole in the ground. Laying on his rack waiting, he couldn't help wondering what sort of target they might be going after here.
The major led him off the ship on a roundabout path that took them through several repair and supply facilities, until they arrived at a newly completed office building. There was no one inside, and containers of furniture were stacked in the unused rooms, waiting to be assembled. The major led him to a communications room which opened to the passkey she held, while the lock display continued to indicate the door was closed and secured.
Once they were inside with the door closed, the major gestured at the equipment panels. “Get connected.”
He nodded and started to work opening a panel without disturbing the seals. After checking her comm's display, the major continued. “We can talk here, but this is your show unless you get stuck or get into trouble. I expect to just be piggybacking today. Our first goal is to identify the location of what should be some crates that we're after. The second goal will be to check the contents of the crates. Our last goal today hide those crates so nobody else disturbs them. Our final objective is to extract the crates, or at least their contents, but we're waiting until tomorrow for that. You let me know if you come up with some really amazing way to get them out undetected tonight – but you will get my approval before you attempt it. Any questions?”
He was now sitting cross-legged on the floor. He had already accessed the building network and going to work on the general base network. “Nope, just waiting for that target data.”
The major nodded, connected her tablet to his, and sent him a series of coordinates and images of six unspectacular, unmarked crates. “I'll let you know if they move, but they've been static since we started tracking them. The warehouse they're in is set up for low-priority goods assessment and temporary storage. That might mean nobody's looked in our crates yet.”
Taizu was having trouble getting directly to the target system through the base network, partially because it had been built so quickly that it hadn't been brought up to Imperial standards yet. In desperation, he looked at where he could go, and discovered a research network he could get to.
That was good times. Scientists could always be counted on to want things open for collaboration or quick access, and at a project like this, where they had priority, they got what they wanted. Today, it meant he got what he wanted, too, because one of the researchers had gotten access to query the supply systems, which he was able to use as his way in.
The base supply system was more automated than most, probably because the managers wanted to keep personnel to a minimum for security purposes. The warehouse was pretty secure too, at least physically, and the automated system was good against outside intruders, but not so good at blocking you out if it trusted you even a bit. Starting from the researcher's access, Taizu took it over and made it sing for him.
Once he had control, he found the target crates by cross-referencing the target coordinates to the building plans and the warehouse system's tracking database. There were six crates, two standard size and four double sized. They were still under ICS seal and had not been checked by an Imperial assessor yet. That was good news.
Once he had disabled system logging and reporting, he moved each of the crates in turn to an automated auditing station. There, robotic arms opened each crate, removed the contents, checked them, and repacked them in the same positions they'd been in. As they got the data on each part, the major checked them against a list she had not shared with Taizu. As far as he could tell, the smaller crates seemed to contain a lot of smaller ship components that had been packed carefully. Each of the big crates held one identical, large, mostly cylindrical piece of equipment, but he couldn't tell what they were for.
When the last crate had been checked, the major said, “Good, that's everything on the list. Go ahead with your next step.”
The major had told him they needed to bring out the parts under the guise of being a different part with a specific model and part number. He found a number of crates in the warehouse containing that model and part number. When he checked their details, he saw that this part was a target decoy.
That struck him as funny. “So we're going to use target decoys as decoys?”
“No, we're not! We're going to smuggle out our crates under the pretense of them being decoys. It's a totally different thing.”
The decoys had been seized from the same source as their target crates, but some of the decoy crates had already been assessed and accepted. They just hadn't been moved out of the warehouse yet.
So, Taizu identified six crates of decoys that had been already been itemized and evaluated. Then he modified the database to swap the system identifiers of the target crates with the crates that contained actual decoys. Eventually, some assessor would find six extra crates of decoys, but that was OK. They didn't have inventories of the crates that hadn't been assessed yet.
He figured the crate swap was probably good enough, but he wanted to impress the major, so he decided to show her what else he could do. First, he convinced the system that for now, the crates didn't exist at all. Until he changed that, the only way someone would find them would be to physically search and inventory the building. With an automated secure warehouse, that was unlikely to happen. Then he modified the storage system algorithm so the warehouse system would not be able to put a crate into the places he'd told it were empty.
When he was done, he looked over at the major, who asked him to, “Explain to me why didn't you just stop with altering the database.”
“I'm protecting us against the off chance there's a sudden run on decoys today.”
The corner of her mouth twitched up for a moment, but then she was serious again. “That's creative, but if they do a security audit of the system software today, they'll see your modifications.”
“I can undo it now.”
“No, it can wait until we come back in tonight. There won't be any security audits or system updates today. We've made sure of that. Go ahead and close out for tonight.”
Taizu nodded, then proceeded to back out of the system, cleaning up after himself, leaving only his modifications to the warehouse system and its database. Once he'd disconnected from the network and resealed the panel, he stood up.
The major was already standing by the door. “When we get back to the ship, you should study up on the systems of the Empress Tana, just in case I need assistance tomorrow night.”
He gulped. It was crazy enough to be breaking into Imperial facilities, but now a Navy ship?
His worries must have shown, because Major Kolos, waiting by the door, stepped back over to face him. She spoke quietly, in a friendlier tone than usual. “I know this is odd for you, but I will never ask you to something like this unless it's for the good of the Empire. Remember that not knowing the purpose of our mission is often as good for you as it is for everyone else involved.”
He nodded, but she saw the lingering doubt on his face. She sighed. “Since you already saw what we're targeting, I'll make an exception this time. Those crates shouldn't have been seized by the ICS in the first place. They are mission critical equipment for an undercover Imperial operation. The agents could get them back the official route, but that would cost time and probably blow their cover. You understand now? We're just correcting a mistake. And don't worry about using the Empress Tana for our false trail. We picked her because the captain is a real piece of shit.”
Taizu was boggled. Senior officers didn't talk bad about other officers!
Major Kolos wasn't done, either. “I mean it. I went to academy with that bitch Kaycee Pharan. She was bad news then, and she's destroyed a lot of good officers on her way up. I'd bet that her crew would be glad to see her take a fall. OK?”
Taizu nodded. It was still odd, but he felt he could handle it now. “I got it.”
She smiled. “The bad
news is, we're professional. As much as I'd like to take her down a notch, it's not our mission right now. So you make sure nobody can even track us as far as our false trail, right?”
“Always, boss.”
Major Kolos was satisfied. “I've requested you for valet duty tomorrow, so you'll do your research in my cabin. It should also keep your co-workers from wondering why you're off work two days in a row. Tomorrow will be a big night, so make sure you're rested up.”
“I'll be ready.” He tried not to blush. Senior personnel could hire one or more junior personnel as valets. It was a good way for the lower ranks to make some extra money during a cruise. Theoretically, it was an extra duty, only to be done when it didn't conflict with your primary job, but in reality, a valet's official work schedule was usually adjusted to accommodate their valet duties.
It was also the way for an officer to discreetly have a personal relationship with lower ranking personnel. As long as it didn't involve a direct chain of command, and you kept it behind closed doors, the Navy didn't care.
Major Kolos had hired Private Taizu Ondrasek as her valet at the beginning of the cruise, but in his case, it was to provide a cover for his contact with her for their covert work and instruction.
Since Major Kolos didn't have a husband or publicly acknowledged lover, his crewmates all assumed she'd chosen Taizu for that reason. Major Kolos was widely acknowledged by the male enlisted personnel as the most attractive female officer on Stoneforge, so the rumor did improve with other guys. Unfortunately, it also meant a lot of the female enlisted crew steered clear of him, since they didn't want to piss off a major.
Taizu did find the major attractive, especially since she knew so much about cracking systems, but she was always tough and totally professional around him. That made it easier to avoid staring at her when she was looking his way, but when she had her back to him, he would catch himself watching her excellent ass – like now, as they left the comm room and walked through the office building. He tried to focus on examining the furniture boxes and reminding himself that a major was impossible for a private.
The Sculpted Ship Page 28