by Nic Plume
"The relays. You’re talking about the relay satellites?"
"Yes, sir."
"Can you check them?"
"Yes, sir."
"Then do," Robert instructed with a nod.
Torrents jumped to it, his fingers flying over the virtual keyboard before he had settled into his seat. Robert picked up the still-flashing comm.
"You overrode the sound but not the visual?" He acknowledged the alert to shut it down.
"So I don’t forget to answer it," Torrents answered without apology.
Robert wondered if he had forgotten or ignored the fact that tinkering with a comm was against regulations and considered a breach in security.
"You do realize it had a ‘Highest Priority’?"
"Yes, sir," Torrents answered while keeping his attention on his screen. "I figured Commander Richards was looking for answers, so I wanted to have them before I commed."
"And you knew what answers he was looking for?"
"Well, it was obvious from what happened." Torrents slowed as he realized his mistake. His fingers stopped moving for a moment, then he drew a resigned breath and continued, "I watched the live feed." He added a "Sir" with the slightest pause, as if hoping it might buy him leniency.
"From here?"
"Well, yeah, it’s not like I’m authorized in the BCC."
Robert said nothing, merely watched as Torrents’ fingers continued to fly over his keyboard, bringing up screen over screen, sending out commands and responding to results. While keyboards weren’t quite obsolete, most people accessed the screen directly or used voice controls. Not Torrents, he preferred to use the virtual keyboard. Even with this, what many people would consider a major handicap, he worked faster than anybody Robert had watched before, and with better results. Now, if he could stay within regulations and stop accessing data he wasn’t authorized for, he could fly through his service time with his pick of assignments and duty stations or be set for life in any civilian market.
"I can show you a replay," Torrents ventured, "so you can see it firsthand."
"You recorded it?" Another security breach.
"Well, yeah, so we can study it in detail to figure out what happened."
"We could study the official recording."
"But then we’d have to go through all the bureaucratic stuff and ask for access. This way, the unedited raw footage is all here, ready to go whenever the commander wants it."
"And that’s why you did it."
"Of course," he replied without missing a beat. "Mission first, whatever it takes."
"Right."
Another screen appeared above the ones Torrents was working on, and angled to optimize Robert’s view. It showed the Infiltrator craft leaving the three frigates and then jumped ahead to right before the attack. As he watched the replay, Robert considered that some would see this as an attempt on Torrents’ part to mitigate negative consequences by making Robert an accomplice to his breach. Thankfully, Torrents wasn’t that conniving yet, which was why he kept getting caught and flagged. But, if his deceptiveness ever caught up to his computer abilities, he would have to be watched. That would be somebody else’s issue, though. I do need to check and tighten the security setting on my personal logs and data.
"Well, this is interesting." Torrents mumbled beside him.
Taylor wasn’t sure how long they had been in the transport. He remembered hearing distant gunshots and then a loud explosion before feeling the floorboard vibrate with stomping feet as the mercenaries boarded, kicking and stepping on their prisoners without regard. The transport had rumbled to life and Taylor had been jostled around with every bump and hole in the ground. Every time he had moved, he had received another kick or punch until a barked command had brought him some respite, at least until the transport stopped and the mercs had piled out, again leaving their boot prints all over him. Then the transport had fallen quiet, the only sound coming from his teammates’ ragged breathing and his feeble attempts to get oxygen into his lungs. He had finally found a rhythm of shallow breaths that let him stay conscious without too much light-headedness when he felt a presence behind him.
At first it was tentative, as if somebody tried to sneak up on him without knowing how to go about it. Then, fingers ever so softly touched his neck in search of a pulse, then the rope. After a short and unsuccessful struggle, he heard the scrape of a blade coming from its sheath and then felt its cold metal gingerly push under the rope and twist. He hoped the blade was single-edged, or at least, not too sharp. A jerk, and suddenly air and precious oxygen flooded his lungs. He breathed deeply, and immediately coughed.
"Shhhh. No, don’t. You have to be quiet or they’ll find us."
Taylor barely heard the young, Tinareean-speaking voice over his coughing fit. Hands struggled to turn him over and remove the cloth over his head, but even if he had any mind to follow the softly spoken instructions, his body wanted no part of it as it tried to purge the carbon dioxide from its cells while taking in as much oxygen as possible.
The boy—at least that’s the impression Taylor had of the person beside him—finally got the hood above Taylor’s mouth, which increased the amount of air Taylor could take in but did nothing to quiet him. Voices sounded from the outside. The boy turned, as if looking over his shoulder, then pulled the hood back over Taylor’s face.
"I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I’ll come back. I promise."
And he was gone.
Taylor, finally able to control his coughing fits, heard metal scraping on metal. A compartment door?
Somebody rushed up the ramp, pulled him onto his back, and slammed a large meaty hand on his mouth.
"Shut up, asshole."
Hot breath, carrying an aroma of sharp spices and meat he couldn’t identify, assailed Taylor’s nostrils.
A second hand latched on to the back of his neck, as if readying to snap it, while a shin landed across his midriff. With his hands still tied above his head, Taylor lay pinned to the floor.
The voices faded away, but his assailant didn’t move. Eighty-three heartbeats later, steps sounded on the ramp. Taylor’s assailant turned, shifting his weight across Taylor’s chest, then pushed himself up and walked out. No words were exchanged.
Silence fell over the transport, bringing his teammates’ breathing into the foreground. Three sets, slow and regular. It should’ve been four, because the person who had come up the ramp hadn’t left. Taylor could sense his eyes studying him. He was sure it was Juvak, though he didn’t know why. He didn’t move, simply sat there, watching. Taylor forced his body to relax. Tense muscles now would only cause problems later.
"What’s interesting?" Robert looked from the battle replaying on the screen in front of him to Torrents.
"A camera on a telecom sat." Torrents answered without looking up.
"Come again?"
"Civilian telecom sats don’t have cameras." Torrents explained as if stating the obvious. "I wish they did. I could have so much fun." His eyes defocused. "All the things I could do with them, and they’re so easy to get into." He pulled himself back to the present. "But governments are stingy and unwilling to pay for stuff that isn’t necessary." His words tumbled out faster as he went on. "Now, GPS and mapping sats, they need them, and military sats use them, too." He rocked his head from side to side. "Of course, the military puts cameras on everything, so that’s kind of a no-brainer." He shrugged. "But civilian teecees don’t need them, and since they’re paid for by the government, which always goes with the lowest bidder, they don’t have them." He paused. "But this one does." His fingers continued to fly over his keyboard. "And it’s not the only one."
"Okay, stop." Teak held out his hand to slow Torrents down. "Start from the top. Why are you looking at civilian telecom sats?"
Torrents drew a deep breath and exhaled slowly as he regarded Robert.
"All right. The defensive satellites never activated. The orbital defense platforms are still pointed outward, away from the planet
. So, once the SILCs made it past them, they were out of the game." His speech sped up again. "Of course, there’re still the defensive satellites in lower orbit and the ground-side emplacements, plus the fighters that can be scrambled. But, none of them made so much as a byte of noise. So," he drew out the word, "for all purposes, it looked like the SILCs made it past the defensive net undetected. But then, they all got shot down." He extended his fingers explosively in front of his face and then wiggled them as he lowered his hand. "We don’t have much data. Some of the visual files we received show incoming missiles that the pilot-view cameras picked up. So, where did they come from? And why didn’t any of our other passive sensors pick them up?"
"Stealth tech?" Robert put in.
"On missiles?" Torrents frowned. "I guess it’s plausible, but damn expensive. Why would they go through that effort?"
Robert felt like he was tracking an erratic ball bouncing inside a spherical polyhedron—and he’d now given it a new direction to explore.
"No." Torrents said after a few moments of consideration and shook his head. "I think they dumbed them down."
"Dumbed down high tech?"
"Actually, it’s not all high tech." Torrents turned back to his terminal. "I mean, yeah, the armor and the CCS are high tech to prevent the scanners from picking us up, but we also use low tech like gliding in without propulsion and running silent with everything shut off."
"So, the sensors are shut off, too? That would explain why the missiles weren’t detected."
"The active sensors are. The passive sensors don’t have emissions, so they’re up and running."
"Passive sensors?"
"Yeah, like audio and visual sensors that pick up EM waves that are already out there. They don’t send anything out, so there’s nothing to give them away. I think that’s what they did with the missiles."
"But our passive sensors should’ve picked up their propulsion system."
"Not if they didn’t use one. They could’ve pushed the missiles in the direction they wanted them to go and then let them glide in, like our SILCs did. Then, when they came within visual range, they linked up to an operator who fired up the propulsion system and guided them in remotely."
"Running silent until they made contact would explain why the SILCs didn’t pick them up," Robert agreed. "But how did they locate the SILCs in the first place?"
"With cameras on civilian telecom satellites."
The visual of the space battle on Robert’s screen changed to a view of clouds in a sky. The screen split in half and another view of sky came to life, this one without clouds.
"What am I looking at?"
"The camera feeds from two civilian teecees," Torrents explained. The right view zoomed in on a cloud formation. "I found a total of forty-eight civilian satellites with cameras they shouldn’t have or need. All of them seem to be looking at clouds or empty air." Torrents looked up from his screens. "Every so often, a camera zooms in on an atmospheric disturbance. When it does, comm traffic kicks in. They’re speaking Tinareean, but I’ve run a translation on most of them. Here’s a sampling."
The screen changed to a single visual feed overlaid with audio of two male voices.
"Control, potential target. Sending visual feed," the first voice said.
"Received feed. Evaluating visual." The second speaker paused while the camera view zoomed in on a moving cloud formation. "Negative. Natural phenomenon."
Torrents played three more clips with similar conversations identifying sightings of possible targets.
"I’ve run a location comparison," Torrents said after the last clip finished. "Every one of those non-standard cameras was monitoring a space of atmosphere that covers, or is close to the flight path of, one of our SILCs." He paused. "So far I found thirty comm exchanges where Control positively identified a sighting as a possible target."
Robert looked at him in shock. "They located the SILCs through atmospheric disturbances?"
Torrents bobbed his head up and down. "They’ve out-dumbed our stealth tech."
"They what?"
"They used low tech to beat our high tech," he explained, sounding impressed. "We use the CCS to—" He broke off at Robert’s questioning expression. "The Chameleon Camouflage System," he clarified slowly. "We use it to spoof visual scanners, and the stealth system to bring our emissions to zero. In effect, scanners will have nothing to pick up, which is a giveaway because the SILCs leave a hole, an anomaly of nothingness. Computers and AIs usually accept those anomalies as part of the scanners’ failure rate. That is, if the amount or size of the anomalies doesn’t set off the established alert protocol, the anomalies are ignored. That’s why you send only a minimum number of SILCs spaced as widely as possible across a target zone. While the machines ignore the anomalies, they do record them, so if presented with other evidence, like a CCS ghosting, the AI or human controller can go back and use the recorded anomaly to validate a presence."
"What is a CCS ghosting, and how do you know all of this?"
"My parents are Combat Developers in Intergal’s Research and Development section. Discussions on the latest technological advancements, or non-classified details of whatever program they’re working on, are commonplace fare at the dinner table and beyond." Torrents shrugged. "Aural osmosis at its best," he grinned. "At least, if you like tech. I did. My sister, not so much." His smile turned rueful and then sobered. "Ghosting is a known problem of the Chameleon Camouflage System. While we can spoof sensors and eyes into not seeing the SILC itself, there is nothing we can do to prevent the physical effect the mass of a SILC has on the atmosphere it touches. The ship will move dust particles, and even water and air molecules. While they don’t leave contrails, they will disturb clouds or any other visible particles in the air. But, the chance of someone looking at the right spot at the right time, with enough attention and knowledge to recognize what they’re seeing, is a statistical improbability so small that it hasn’t been considered an issue.
"For them to have found one SILC, much less all nine of them, means they knew when and where to look, with enough warning to repurpose civilian sats and hire and train enough monitoring personnel to do so." Torrents left the words hanging in the air.
"They knew we were coming."
"Not only that," Torrents’ voice grew serious, "they knew when, where, and how we were coming." His voice softened as he looked at the commander. "They knew everything."
5
Aftermath
Taylor woke to the rumble of the moving transport. Damn. He knew better than to let himself fall asleep like that. Now he had no idea how long they’d been on the move this time. Not that it made a difference since he had no way of telling which direction they were heading or how fast. But he also didn’t know if his teammates were still with him, or if the boy was still on board. Something, maybe a leg, touched his side. So, at least one of them was still here. He thought it was Salayla. He had heard her groan when the mercs had dumped her next to him at the crash site. Or had that been outside, after they’d been dragged from their ship? He couldn’t remember. Events blended together. Lack of oxygen sucked.
The transport stopped. Somebody unlocked his wrist bindings from the floor and pulled him to his feet. A few minutes later, he stood in a room with a large desk taking up about a third of it. A couple of uncomfortable-looking chairs sat about four steps from where he and his teammates were lined up. He had looked around when his hood was pulled off, but a rod slapping his back had stopped the motion. He had glimpsed five men spread out behind his team, but not been able to tell if they were mercs or belonged to the grossly out-of-shape man sitting in the overstuffed chair behind the desk.
On the desk lay a small pile of hard currency—local, from the looks of it. Beside that lay four large metal rings. Juvak, who had just finished shaking the weighty man’s hand, reached for one of the rings as Weighty pulled out a remote and pushed a few buttons. The ring in Juvak’s hand sprang open, revealing a hinge and electronic
lock. Small electrodes lined its inner edge.
Juvak approached him.
The lock re-engaged with a resounding click.
Juvak pulled Taylor close. "Let’s see if you can live up to your promise, kid." He released his grip.
The edges of the metal dug into his collarbone as the ring settled around Taylor’s neck.
Juvak stepped back, eyes still on Taylor.
"Let’s make sure we understand each other." The fat man smiled. His Trade was broken, obviously not a language he spoke regularly. They were the first words he’d spoken that Taylor understood.
"We," he pointed at himself and the people behind Taylor and his team, "say what to do. You," he pointed at the team, "do it." He paused. "If not…" He raised the remote and pushed a button.
Sharp agony coursed through Taylor. It jumped from the electrodes into his body, surging along nerves, blood vessels, and bones, touching and smoldering every piece of him. His body was on fire, burning from the inside out.
And then, it was gone.
He was on his knees, catching his breath, willing his heart to stop skipping every third beat. He didn’t remember screaming, but his sore throat said otherwise. Slowly, the sounds around him overtook the ringing in his ears.
A struggle. Tonee cursing. Salayla, trying to calm him down. And Kaydeen, calling his name—his name.
"Taylor."
Juvak still stood a few steps away, observing him, not with malice or glee, but curiosity, as if studying him, watching his reactions and testing him. Taylor sucked in his breath, pushed off the floor, and stood. Juvak smiled ever so slightly in approval. Taylor twisted around, his fingers moving as fast as his bindings allowed.