Seth popped the seal on the cargo container, extended his hand and said, “Welcome to the Argus Mr. Mason.”
Mason blinked in the harsh light of the cargo hold. He grabbed his backpack and said, “I’m going to have a few words with my travel agent.”
Shawn grinned and said, “Sorry about that. The Ministry of Justice had layers of surveillance all around you. We had to make sure that we could get you out.”
Mason stretched and said, “I still don’t get it. What made me so important?”
Seth said, “You were one of the very first illegals that wasn’t afraid to fight a system that brands people like cattle for the simple reason that they were born different than the breeders. You frightened a lot of people who are deeply invested in that system: the corporations that profit from it, the religious fanatics that make a living fear-mongering and calling for death to the abominations and, most of all John Q. Public who gets irate whenever the news interrupts his re-runs on holovision.”
A new face entered the cargo hold. He was a very fit middle aged man wearing what appeared to be a gray uniform with no insignia. “Yes indeed, Mr. Mason. You made quite a nuisance of yourself pointing out a serious social injustice in a society that prides itself on being egalitarian and doesn’t care for much soul searching. I’m Colonel Sebastian Beck, mission commander.”
Mason took Beck’s hand and shook it. “How can I help you, Colonel?”
Beck gave Mason an appraising look and said, “We need your voice Mr. Mason.”
Shawn said, “Let’s get you some breakfast and settled into some quarters. Then we’ll talk.”
* * *
Danny looked at his status display. All eight of the big fleet carriers’ telescopes displayed ready, standby but stubbornly refused to cooperate.
The fleet carriers each carried a very powerful, sophisticated telescope. The telescopes were a brilliant merging of old and new technologies. Catadioptric telescopes had been around since the 1800s. The telescopes carried aboard the capital ships were big with a focal length of 1.2 meters. Advanced adaptive optics and a hyper-sensitive charged coupled device to translate the starlight to a digital image made the telescopes many times more powerful than their predecessors.
The Charged Couple Device (CCD) is a silicon sensor that captures the light focused by the telescope. The super-conducting material used to capture the light and convert it into a digital image could see in wavelengths from the near infrared, visible light and well into the ultraviolet.
Originally developed to improve the performance of ground based telescopes, adaptive optics offered a number of image quality improvements. It could smooth out a ragged image and eliminate “noise”. The advantage that Danny was most interested in was the ability to network the telescopes together to form an exponentially more powerful instrument.
Sokolsky looked at the macro code on his screen and said, “OK. I’m going to try to link all eight of the scopes again and order them to take a look at the five targets that we have scripted. Is everything ready?”
Mai Saito said, “We’re good to go.”
Danny hit the execute key and the program began and crashed again.
Mai said, “It’s just not going to work until we get all of the scopes up to the same firmware revision.”
He watched the program trace as the macro started. Sure enough, as soon as it tried to access the telescope on their sister-ship the Essex, the program crashed hard. The firmware governed how the telescopes interfaced. Saratoga and her newer sisters had revision level 4.22.10. Essex and her older sisters had version 3.67.32.
Danny said, “A firmware upgrade isn’t a simple matter like a software upgrade. We’re going to have to flash a new chip set and replace it by hand.”
Mai said, “It gets better. There is no way to do it without going outside.”
“Are there any other ships that have the same hardware with the right firmware that we can link with?”
Saito said, “Give me a minute.”
She opened a new window on the workstation and logged into the engineering systems network. As she worked, she said, “Engineers have a lot of information to keep track of: schematics, diagrams, where we keep spare parts and so forth. We keep a fleet-wide database called FASE for Fleet Automated Support, Engineering. It keeps a library of how all of our ships are equipped in detail. It helps when we’re doing damage control and need to exchange parts to repair battle damage.”
“The Mark VII telescopes are only deployed on cruiser sized ships or larger and the winners are…”
A short list of ships scrolled onto the screen.
Danny said, “That figures. It’s the battle cruisers: the newest ships out of the yard.”
Mai said, “Now it’s just a simple matter of sending an access request to the ships of the 2nd Battle Cruiser Division.” She hit the enter key and got an immediate automated response. “We’re ready to go.”
It took Danny about five minutes to modify the macro program. Once the code to add the Tirpitz, Scharnhorst, Fearless and Hood to the array of telescopes was ready, he started the program.
As he and Saito watched, one by one the indicators turned green: the carriers Saratoga, Yorktown, Enterprise, Lexington and the battle cruisers Tirpitz, Scharnhorst, Fearless and Hood.
Danny said, “OK, we’re linked. I’m going to start the sample target sequence.”
It took a moment to process each image but one by one crisp, clear images of various astronomical objects were recorded and displayed on the video screens in the labs. The sample cycled by: ultra-high resolution images of two different globular clusters, a planetary nebula and several relatively nearby stars.
Mai said, “One problem down, only a few hundred more to go.”
Danny said, “Cheer up Mai. We’re making progress.”
* * *
The Aramus Depot orbited the third planet of the Irulan 350 star system. Like so many Alliance military facilities, it was an abandoned commercial concern. The big space station was originally a refinery and trans-shipment point for the minerals mined locally and in the surrounding star systems. When the mines were no longer commercially viable, the company had abandoned it. The Alliance Fleet took over the station when the war broke out. Now it was the graveyard of hundreds of obsolete ships that had been replaced by the new construction.
Lt. Com. Nick Pace, senior officer of the facility, had a mixed staff of forty fleet personnel and civilian contractors. Their job was to maintain the ships but they were hopelessly outmanned in that department. There were over a hundred obsolete destroyers alone. Many of the ships had sustained significant battle damage before they were decommissioned.
Their real job was to make sure that those ships didn’t end up in the wrong hands. That was accomplished by removing the ships core security key. When ships were consigned to the depot, it was the first thing removed and stored in a safe deep inside the space station.
Each Alliance ship had to have a core security key. They looked innocent enough: they were a 10 centimeter long stainless steel rectangle with a special interface connector on one end. Each was engraved with the hull number of the ship that it was associated with. The core key was actually a very sophisticated device that had to be in place before an Alliance ships computer core would boot. It had a considerable amount of static memory inside that contained the ships primary access and transponder codes and root encryption keys to Alliance codes. Once installed, it could not be removed until the computer core was completely shut down. Its fabrication was a closely guarded secret.
Commander Pace was inspecting an old light cruiser that had just been added to their tattered collection. The St. Louis had served with distinction through the first few years of the war. She had taken an enemy missile escorting a convoy to Omicron Ceti and been sent core-ward for repairs. Instead of repairing her, she had simply been retired. The damage was extensive but it wasn’t the worst that he had seen. Much of the port side from frame 30 to the bow was gutted but it wasn’t anything that a few months in dry-dock couldn’t fix.
He was entering her salvage potential in his computer pad when his comm link buzzed.
“This is Pace.”
Ensign Ortez’s voice came through his headset: “Commander, we just got a priority message from the Marine Annex on Parliament.”
Who sends a priority communication to the boneyard? “Send it to my Pad.”
The message scrolled across the screen:
TO: Lt. Com. Pace, Aramus Depot
FROM: Brigadier General Geiger, Marine Training Command
RE: MAV Corregidor
Prepare the Marine Assault Vessel Corregidor for reactivation as a cadet ship.
We need her ready for pick up within the week to take advantage of dockyard scheduling.
Your resupply ship will be carrying an officer and skeleton crew to transport her to the Griffin Shipyards in the Ostland system for refit.
MarTranCom
Ends
Pace knew that this was time sensitive. The shipyards were at maximum capacity and any yard time was at a premium. He said, “Alert the team. We need to fuel and prep the Corregidor for pickup by the time our resupply arrives.”
Well, at least we get to do something useful for a change.
* * *
As he followed Sean and Seth to his quarters, Mason discovered that the Argus was a much larger ship than he had first thought. He followed the twins up three decks from the ships four pressurized and climate controlled cargo holds that ran along her centerline.
Mason asked, “What kind of a ship is this?”
Sean said, “Argus is a Gdansk class transport. She’s twelve thousand five hundred tons unloaded with four pressurized internal cargo bays and staterooms for twenty passengers.”
“I thought that the Alliance had most of the shipping tied up with the war.”
Seth opened a hatch and said, “Not this old girl. She doesn’t have the legs for it.”
Sean said, “There is a shortage of transports in the core systems. Argus is classified as a training ship for the Merchant Marine. We have all been working aboard her to earn our certificates. There are hundreds of short routes that need attention. Custom freight, routine supply runs, even personnel transfers so we have our choice of routes.”
Mason followed Sean through the hatch from the cargo handling areas and into a long corridor. He said, “You have your pick of the five state rooms from here to the stairwell. One deck up is the galley that we are using.”
“Get settled in and join us when you are ready. Don’t do anything on the net until you’ve talked to Beck.”
As the twins went up the stairwell, Mason entered the stateroom right off the stairwell. It was by no means luxurious but it was roomy and comfortable. There was a desk with a terminal, a bed and a bathroom. He stuck his head in to see that it was small but there was a real shower.
He put his back pack down on the desk and sat down in the desk chair. He felt like taking a shower but he had no clothes but the ones on his back. The only possessions that he really cared about were loaded in his computer.
Mason had to fight the urge to log onto the Alliance Network and see what was going on. He was sure that his disappearance from Evergreen University had landed him on the Ministry of Justice most wanted list. It wouldn’t be in the press of course. The Alliance was one big, happy democratic monolith that didn’t care to admit that it had a huge human rights problem. As the living personification of that problem, Jeff was one of the most inconvenient men in the Alliance. Now that he was a fugitive, he had no doubt that Ministry agents would happily kill him.
He entered the bathroom and found that there were a few courtesy amenities. He washed his face, shaved and combed his hair. Although he wanted a shower, he didn’t have anything to change into.
His nerves were frayed and he felt a knot tightening in his stomach. Who were these people? Could he trust them? Did he really have a choice? He did his best to steel his nerves, stepped out of his cabin and took the stairwell to the galley.
* * *
Special Agent Eric Fields walked through Jeff Mason’s abandoned apartment. It was modest but neat for a college student. The only thing out of place was an empty pizza box and empty beer bottles on the breakfast table. Whatever happened, it had happened fast. Mason’s clothes were still hanging in in his closet.
Fields asked his partner, “Hey Max. Remind me again why we’re interested in a routine probation jumper?”
Max Jarvis answered, “Parliament has him on the terrorist watch list. Mason was supposed to have been a junior-league terrorist a few years ago on Mars. They stuck him here on tight probation. According to his parole officer; he has kept his nose clean since he vanished last night.”
“Nothing on his tracker bugs?”
“No. They went dark last night but that’s not unusual. All sorts of things can interfere with them. After they didn’t show up the next morning, the parole officer made a visit to his apartment and discovered that Mason was gone.”
“You talked to his PO. What did he tell you about Mason?”
Max took off his gloves and bagged them. “Not much. He said Mason was pretty settled at the Uni. He was some kind of genius. He was studying Environmental Engineering at the University and was carrying one of the highest averages on campus.”
“Do you see any signs that he planned this Max?”
“No. I talked to a few of his neighbors. He had plans. His parole officer said that he got permission to go to a chess tournament in Savannah in a few weeks.”
Fields pulled up the files he had on Mason on his computer pad. To his experienced eye, the kid didn’t look like much. During his lengthy career with the Ministry, Fields had seen every imaginable sort of scum bag: terrorists, pirates, gun runners, drug smugglers, religious nuts, serial killers, and depraved stuff that he wished that he could forget.
He had to wonder why the Director’s Office had such an interest in this kid as a potential terrorist. It was his eyes. Mason wasn’t a killer. He didn’t have the malice or insanity in his eyes that he had seen in the psychos and religious fanatics that he had encountered. To Fields, Mason looked more like a lost puppy.
Fields said, “I don’t know Max. Did this kid jump probation or was he abducted?”
“That’s a good question. There’s something else that you should see in the bedroom.”
Fields followed Jarvis into the bed room.
Fields wisecracked, “That’s bound to be a sign of something flakey. Ever seen a college guy outside of a military academy whose bed is made up?”
Max said, “I didn’t notice this at first.” He pulled the blanket off the sheet underneath. There was a small amount of dried blood on the sheets and a few pieces of surgical debris.
Fields pulled a small flashlight out of his pocket and looked under the bed. He pulled on a glove and reached under the bed to retrieve an ampule from under the bed and dropped it in an evidence bag.
Jarvis looked at the ampule and said, “It’s Ketanol: it’s used by surgeons as an anesthetic.”
Fields opened the nightstand and saw what he was looking for. He picked up the remains of Mason’s tracker bug and dropped it in another evidence bag. “What do you want to bet that the second tracker bug was destroyed by a focused acoustic overload?”
Jarvis raised an eyebrow and said, “I don’t like it Eric. There is a level of sophistication at work here that suggests that there is a lot more to this than a simple probation jumping. The information about the tracker bugs and their vulnerabilities is highly classified.”
Fields said, “Agreed. The implanted tracker bug in the forearm is between the radius and the ulna. Unless you know what you are doing, you could make a serious mess out of someone removing it. Look — it’s going to take a while for the forensics team to finish here but Parliament is expecting answers.”
Jarvis looked troubled and said, “The guys on Parliament can be pretty thick sometimes; too much exposure to politicians and their hot air. Give it to them simple and in one syllable words: Mason is gone. It may or may not have been his idea. He had help from an unknown entity that is technically and operationally sophisticated.”
* * *
When Mason opened the door to the galley, he could tell that something wonderful was cooking. The rich aroma of garlic and onions made his mouth water and triggered fond memories of Marion’s cooking.
Sean and Seth were already eating as were a number of other crew members. Mason immediately recognized them as the pairs of genetically engineered twins. Each individual pair was identical to each other but unique. Another thing that he noticed: even though they were designed to be soldiers, they were all just guys: laughing, joking and fooling around.
As he scanned the room he spotted Beck sitting at a table. The Colonel was busy working on his computer pad, the remains of his lunch sitting beside him on a tray. He looked up and motioned for Mason to come over. Jeff sat in a chair across from Beck and waited a moment for him to finish what he was doing.
Beck looked up and said, “Jeff, you are going to have to hit the ground running. We are running an op that starts in less than twenty-four hours.”
“What do you need for me to do?”
The Colonel handed him a data crystal and a small bundle. “Memorize this. It’s your cover identity. We’ve been building it for months.”
Jeff opened the bundle and pulled out an Alliance ID card with his picture on it and the name David Sutter. There was a bank card and several other identity documents.
Beck said, “Your part is going to be easy. Your partner will brief you.”
Mason said, “Who is my partner going to be?” Jeff noticed that a very familiar large orange tabby cat was rubbing his ankle. He reached down and stroked the animal’s fur.
A lunch tray appeared beside him and he looked up to see Marion.
She grinned and said, “Who do you think silly boy?”
* * *
Danny was about to call it a night when he noticed his personal assistant artificial intelligence had left him a message: preliminary findings ready.
He opened a channel between his pad computer and the lab network, activated the voice interface and said, “What have you got Albert?”
“I have completed my study of the data available on the five planets. All of the planets were surveyed by the KTC survey between 120 and 128 years ago. Two of the planets were named and settled: Pacifica and Stonegarden. The other three were uninhabited. Four of the planets fit a tight profile while Stonegarden is an anomaly.”
Danny said, “Stop. Tell me more about the KTC survey.”
The computers synthetic voice said, “The KTC survey took place between one hundred twenty years to one hundred twenty-five years ago. It surveyed a large part of the Cygnus Arm. It was named after the missions three chief scientists Kaufman, Taylor and Chung. A total of five thousands seven hundred systems were mapped and cataloged…”
Danny said, “OK Albert — thanks for the background. Continue.”
“The mineral wealth of Stonegarden was legendary. It was one of the primary reasons the Cygnus Rim area grew so fast. Stonegarden started out as a massive terrestrial planet. At some point in the evolution of the star system, it was hit by a moon sized asteroid that destroyed the planets crust. What was left was a ringed planet that was essentially a cold planetary core and it was a mineralogists’ treasure trove. It derived its name from the huge crystals that had grown on the surface. Everything in the book could be mined there including stuff that wasn’t in anybody’s book. There were at least three dozen minerals unique to the planet.
Danny said, “It doesn’t take an AI to see that they took Stonegarden for the resources. What about the profile of the other four.”
“The other four are a close match on size, gravity, composition and atmosphere. None of the four has a mineral survey rating of less than 7.7 on the Jamison scale. All four are geologically active and have active magnetic fields. All of the four were graded B+ or better as terraforming candidates. Data follows:
Size: .92 to 1.2 Earth Standard
Gravity: .96 to 1.25 Earth Standard
Density: 1.01 to 1.2 Earth Standard
Atmosphere: Nitrogen, Carbon Dioxide, Oxygen, Water, trace
Magnetic Field Strength: .92 to 1.41 Earth standard”
As Danny looked at the data on the four planets he got a sick feeling in the pit his stomach. Whoever the machines took these planets for… they are a lot like us.
Danny said, “Prepare a properly formatted report and send it to me. Thank you Albert.”
Albert quickly said, “There is more information flagged top priority.”
Danny sighed. Sometimes Albert could be a little too gung-ho late at night. “What have you been up to?”
Albert said, “The fleet database is massive and badly disorganized. I cloned myself and reorganized the data into a new file system. Then I cloned myself again to study different aspects of the enemy: primarily its behavior and technology.”
Now we’re getting somewhere. “What have you discovered?”
Albert said, “I believe that I’ve made two important discoveries about the enemy. First, I’ve identified its learning algorithm.”
Danny was walking while he was talking. “Albert I’m on my way to the lab. Tell me about it.”
“From the enemy’s recorded behavior, I have deduced that the enemy is a massive neural net. The more processors attached, the smarter it becomes. The learning algorithm that it is using is very simple and learns through binary reasoning.”
Danny got in the elevator, punched the button for C deck and said, “It’s learning by trial and error?”
Albert said, “There is a pattern. It engages our ships and learns. Roughly two months later new designs emerge based on what it has learned. The successful designs are retained and improved. Less successful designs are abandoned.”
As Danny entered the Labs, he asked, “You said that you had made two significant discoveries. What is the second one?”
Albert said, “I believe that I’ve solved the mystery of how the enemy communicates.”
Danny sat down at his terminal and said, “I’m logging into the network now. Tell me about it.”
“Two years ago a new generation of warships arrived with better sensors. The Callahan class destroyers and the London class light cruisers. When you look at the sensor logs of either one, you don’t see it. When you overlay the two, the pattern emerges: a graviton pulse and modulated carrier wave at 220 mega-hertz.”
Danny looked at the data. The sensors on the destroyer and the light cruiser were similar but different in significant ways. The destroyer could not detect graviton waves and light cruiser sensors weren’t too good at signal processing at that part of the radio spectra.
“What’s our confidence on this?”
Albert said, “100%. Newer ships have even better sensors. It’s all in the sensor logs.”
Danny said, “Can we read these signals?”
“I have a clone of myself working on it.”
“Keep it up Albert. I’m going to wake up the Captain.