Tritium Gambit

by Erik Hyrkas

  Chapter 5. Miranda

  When I closed the door on the boys, I immediately took out my com link, which doubles as a computer, and logged into the Intergalactic Secret Service servers. The blue three-dimensional holographic display and interface appeared in the air before me. I pulled up the assignment briefing.

  The ping was triggered when a fishing guide and two of his clients went missing the same day that a tachyon ripple was detected in the region. The tachyon signature resembled that of a Delta class ship. The briefing had a second attachment, a report from the Stellar Command stating that a Phoenix 5000, a Delta class ship, had been stolen from a repair dock four months prior.

  As I was reading the Stellar Command report, the hologram flickered and turned into a blank blue slate and then reloaded. The report was gone. Now the briefing showed that the ping was merely a suspicious disappearance of a fishing guide and two of his clients. I refreshed the report and the information about the Phoenix was still missing. I did a search across the Stellar Command newsfeed and found nothing.

  Confused, I swished my hand through the air, changing the com link interface to communication mode and called Wendy.

  “Hello, Miranda,” she said.

  “Wendy, I’m so glad you are there this late. I was just reading the mission brief, and it changed.”

  “Let me look.” There was a moment of silence. “The briefing has no history of change.”

  “I was just looking at it, and believe me, it changed.”

  “The document has an origination timestamp of earlier today, and there are no modifications listed. There’s no reason to believe it has changed.”

  “There was a report of a missing Phoenix 5000 as part of the ping, information about a tachyon radiation signature. If that information is gone and the new briefing isn’t listed as modified, whoever did this has sufficient system access to cover their tracks.”

  “You might be right,” she said. “I’ll contact security and we’ll investigate. You’ll have to make do with the information you have for now.”

  “As mission coordinator, don’t you remember the briefing from earlier today?” I asked.

  “The Texas assignment was more critical. The low priority nature of your assignment did not warrant that level of my attention,” she said. “I will look into it. Good night.”

  I hadn’t slept in forty hours, I told myself, and so it was possible I had imagined the report. But I didn’t think so, if for no other reason than Wendy’s reaction. She was too defensive.

  The com link’s projection of Wendy disappeared, replaced by the holographic computer interface.

  I touched intangible buttons in the air and started searching the Internet for details on the area. Humans wouldn’t have picked up on tachyon radiation, but maybe they would have seen the bright lights of a ship coming in for a landing. I was new to being an agent, but I was sure the report of some missing fishermen wouldn’t, by itself, be enough to create a ping at the Service. We were only sent on missions where extraterrestrial activity was detected.

  I found a blog post by a person who lived nearby. He claimed he saw a falling star that night, a coincidence maybe. The local paper had three different small postings of owners looking for lost dogs that went missing the same day. More coincidence perhaps.

  I hooked into the Service servers again and started looking for more events reported on that day. The servers recorded virtually all news from around the world in every locale, and an artificial intelligence correlated the data to identify anomalies, which the Service called a ping. However, the server had nothing for the Ely region on that day other than the missing fishing guide and his clients. The sheer lack of data made me suspicious. I looked at other regions across the state on the same day and found random bits of news that didn’t flag a ping. It was simply information.

  “Computer, why is there no data for August 26th in Ely, Minnesota?” I asked.

  “Agent Miranda, my name is Jasmine, not ‘Computer.’ There is data for August 26th in Ely, Minnesota.” The hologram showed the article for the missing fishermen.

  “Okay, Jasmine, but why isn’t there any other data?”

  “No other data is available.”

  I wanted to pull my hair out. “Yes, but why?”

  “Agent Miranda, I do not understand your query. The data is not present because it is not there.”

  “Was it removed?” I asked.

  The computer was silent for a moment. “There are no records of data being removed.”

  “Has anybody accessed the brief for my assignment in the last hour?” I asked.

  “Only you and Agent Wendy.”

  “Besides the two of us, I mean.”

  “No other access has been recorded within the last hour,” Jasmine said.

  “Thank you, Jasmine.”

  I swiped off my com link and tucked it into my backpack. There was apparently a tremendously skilled hacker in the system with access to highly classified data, somebody who didn’t want information about the stolen Phoenix to be available. I could only hope Wendy would uncover the culprit.

  I was exhausted and needed sleep, but before I could even try, I needed to relax. I pulled out a thin mat from my bag and set it on the floor. I put my earbuds in and selected my acoustic Beatles playlist. I started my Yoga with the bird of paradise pose and let the stretch and the music relax me.

  When I finally climbed into bed, I had forgotten all about the troubles of the day and fell quickly to sleep.

  I woke up when I heard the gentle click of a cabin’s front door shutting. I jumped out of bed and slowly opened my door to peek into the den area. Max was sprawled across the entire hideaway bed with no covers on. He was wearing a white T-shirt and shorts. Tyler was standing at the door with a plain brown paper grocery bag. He looked like he was sneaking in.

  I opened my door further and stepped out. Tyler smiled at me.

  “I brought breakfast,” he said. He started unpacking the bag. He had a few eggs, a pack of bacon, a loaf of bread, and a carton of orange juice.

  “That’s so sweet. Where did you get it?”

  He hesitated. “There’s a place down the road. I’m still adjusting to Earth time and couldn’t sleep, and so I decided to go for a little run.”

  “I’m surprised they sell single eggs.”

  He shrugged. “Yeah, it is surprising, isn’t it?” He smiled and pulled out a frying pan. “How would you like your surprising eggs?”

  “Sunnyside up,” I said.

  He chuckled. “Sorry, I can only do scrambled.”

  I smirked. “Scrambled then.”

  I sat down at the small kitchen table and watched as he found a cast-iron fry pan, poured in some oil, then added the eggs after he beat them with a fork in a glass bowl. He then put bread in the toaster and poured two glasses of orange juice. He put one of the glasses in front of me. I took a small sip.

  “Have you read the mission brief?” I asked.

  “I glanced at it yesterday,” he said.

  “Did you see anything about a Phoenix 5000 that went missing?”

  He glanced up at me. “A what now?”

  “A Delta class Stellar Command craft that I think went missing.”

  He pulled out his com link and brought up the holographic display of the brief. He scanned through it. “Sorry, but I don’t see anything in the brief about that. Maybe you were looking at some old news?”

  “You won’t find it on the computer system,” I said. “I think somebody deleted it last night. I was looking at it one moment and the next it was gone.”

  “Curious. Did you report it?” he asked.

  “I talked to Wendy last night, and she said she’d look into it.”

  He nodded. “It was probably a glitch. The AIs build the briefs and find the correlations. It’s likely they had associated data incorrectly and simply corrected it.”

  He served up the eggs and bacon and brought them over to me.

  “What’s
that smell?” I asked.

  “Crap!” He rushed over to the toaster and popped it. “They’re burnt to a crisp.”

  I took a bite of eggs. “No worries.”