by M. D. Cooper
“She always does.” Chase straightened his shoulders. “Now we just have to figure out what the right thing is for us.”
Kelly walked past with one of the Nietzscheans—the five-star admiral, Chase realized—flung over her shoulder. “Isn’t ‘just fly in and kill all the Niets’ an option?” she asked.
“That’s why you’re not in charge of fleet strategy,” Heather replied. “Damn, why’s he all bloody?”
Stripes chuckled as he came out of the shuttle, Keli trailing behind with a woman over her shoulder. “Looks like a little bit of theatre Rika played. Unless you really paid attention, you’d think these two had been shot in the head. I guess that’s part of how Rika got the Niets to play along.”
“By ‘killing’ their commanders?” Heather asked. “I can’t wait to hear this story from her.”
Chase cocked an eyebrow. “It’ll be a doozy.”
“A ‘doozy’? What does that even mean? Sounds like you doze off.”
“It comes from the name of a starship company that made a luxury model called the Dusenberg,” Chase explained.
Potter interjected.
“Seems like a solid strategy to me,” Heather said with a shrug. “Maybe even a doozy.”
Chase groaned softly. “OK, but if they don’t all get here in the next twelve hours, I say we leave them a beacon and jump in. The Lance can rescue Rika on her own.”
“Provided she doesn’t make too big a mess,” Carson added.
Heather groaned and pressed her palm against her forehead. “I cannot believe you just said that.”
A SURPRISING DIVERSION
STELLAR DATE: 10.23.8949 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: Farthing Station
REGION: Epsilon, Old Genevia, Nietzschean Empire
Rika didn’t hesitate to wrap her hand around Noah’s throat, and whisper in his ear, “I can tell if you send a message over the Link. You call out for help, and I snap your neck.”
“OK…” the man in Rika’s grasp whispered hoarsely. “I need to tell Ellya that we’re sealed up.”
“Do it.” Rika loosened her grasp a centimeter.
“We’re good back here!” Noah called out, his voice raspy and hoarse.
“You OK, Noah?” Ellya called back
“Yeah, just got a bug in my mouth when I ran in. I guess we still have that fruit fly infestation.” Noah gave a convincing cough that sounded loudly in the enclosed space.
“Seriously?” Ellya yelled out as the shuttle began to rise. “I hope none of them got on the ship. I have my lunch up front, and I managed to snag bananas for the first time in months.”
“Let’s hope not,” Noah replied.
“What do you normally do once you take off?” Rika asked quietly.
He pointed past the stacks of cargo. “I make sure nothing’s shifting as we fly out, and then I go to the cockpit.”
Rika took her hand off the man’s throat. “Then do it, but I’ll be right behind you.”
“What do you want,” he whispered while looking over his shoulder, eyes wide. He reached out and his hand collided with her chest. “Ow!”
“You OK?” Ellya called back.
“Uh, yeah…just jammed my finger on something.”
Ellya laughed. “You’re such a putz. Hurry up! It’s thirty minutes to Mistlea Station. We can catch Private Huzzah’s latest cast—I hear he does a great impression of Grand Admiral Prudence.”
“On my way,” Noah called back while grimacing in Rika’s direction. “Sorry.”
“Just stay calm, and when you get to Mistlea, I’ll be gone as soon as the ramp lowers. No one will know I was aboard.”
Rika leant against a stack of crates, waiting for Noah to finish his inspection.
Niki asked, her mental voice toneless.
The AI didn’t reply for a few moments, then she finally said,
Rika watched Noah complete his inspection and walk to the cockpit.
Niki said with a note of apology in her voice.
The AI made a sound of disbelief in Rika’s mind.
Rika whispered the word, trying to gather the courage to get the words out.
Niki let out a long sigh.
Rika mused.
Niki chuckled softly.
Rika nodded her head. It was a strange way to think of things, as a balance in nature that applied to all human interactions, it made sense. Though she was glad that her problems were a lot smaller than Tanis’s.
she scoffed half-heartedly.
Rika’s lips twisted at the thought.
Rika let that sink in, pausing to wonder a bit about her AI. Most of the time she was blunt and focused on the task at hand, but every now and then, she’d wax philosophical and it became hard to argue with her reasoning.
Niki snorted.
The AI fell silent for so long that Rika wondered if the conversation was over.
Rika thought back to that moment, to the vision that Tanis had shown her.
Rika chuckled.
Rika only passed Niki a smile before walking forward to the cockpit. When she arrived, Rika saw that the pilot was scowling at her console.
“Shit,” Ellya muttered, glancing at Noah. “We’re being denied an approach to Mistlea Station; looks like we didn’t get out in time. They’re making us divert to a holding orbit around Delta Moon.
“Dammit,” Noah muttered. “We could be there for hours.”
She saw a nervous expression pass across Noah’s face.
He didn’t reply, but gave Ellya a sidelong glance and sighed before giving a slight nod.
Rika chuckled, continually amused by the AI-written stories. They gave an interesting insight into how AIs saw humans, and usually lightened her mood while she tried to search for the hidden messages.
* * * * *
It took two hours for the shuttle to divert toward Delta Moon, shuffling through all the traffic that had been jammed up from the lockdown.
Rika wasn’t quite finished with the book Niki had given her to read, but she paused long enough to look down at the dull red orb that was growing ever closer to the shuttle. She saw several domed habitats on its surface, all broken now, their insides exposed to vacuum—likely for centuries, at this point.
As the shuttle passed over the moon, she saw one dome that was still intact, the buildings beneath it illuminated by EM bleeding off into space.
Rika pulled up the shuttle’s optical scanners, and looked over the dome. Having fought in half the Genevian star systems and several Nietzschean ones, Rika had a pretty good idea of what sorts of architecture they favored. The dome and the buildings within didn’t reflect any designs she’d seen in either empire.
Curious to know more, Rika skipped over the comm channel that the shuttle had open to the moon—where the nearspace STC ran—and found herself in the Nietzschean traffic control network.
Now…how to get out of this and find out more about this place? she wondered.
She thought back to how she’d seen Niki work her way through systems in the past, and decided to find her way to the STC’s NSAI. The Niets weren’t a terribly inventive people, and their comm NSAIs were nearly all the same.
She pinged a few ports, and found that—like Niki had mentioned earlier—none of the codes and encryption keys they’d taken from the ships at Pyra worked anymore.
Ready to try another approach, Rika turned to tracing the power systems for the comm NSAI, looking for a back door in, when a strange, malformed data packet came back from one of the ports she’d attempted to connect to previously.
Thinking it was a buffer overrun, and potentially a way in, she sent the same dataset to the port, only to get a different malformed packet back the second time.
Curious, she thought. Rika repeated the process four more times, each time getting a new packet. On the fifth send, nothing happened.
She tried sending a fresh request to the data port, but still received nothing back.
With no more responses coming, Rika wondered if she’d triggered a port flood-lockdown, and decided to examine the data packets she’d received.
Wait a second…. She looked over the data, realizing that the information was in an uncommon, twelve-bit, binary configuration. She wasn’t familiar with such a construct, and was tempted to ask Niki for help, but decided that trying to sort through the response could be a fun way to pass the time.
Her first thought was that the five malformed packets were a single segmented datastream, but that didn’t seem to be the case. No matter which order she put the packets in, they wouldn’t pass parity checks, and only came out as gibberish.
Rika thought back to some of the conversations she’d had with David the PCOG during their brief time on Iapetus, pausing to wonder if the ships had retrieved him and the other mechs from that world yet and brought them to Silva and Barne. I’ll have to check on that.
One of the things David had talked about was how he’d discerned that the messages from Septhia were really from a Nietzschean agent, way back before the first assault on Pyra.
He’d mentioned how it had been necessary to interleave the data using a variety of algorithms until he found one that worked. Rika didn’t have the tools he’d used, but Angela had provided Niki with a series of similar algorithms that the AI had placed in a shared datastore. Without hesitation, Rika access
ed them, running the data packets through each.
They cycled quickly in a sandboxed processing environment that she had created within one of her auxiliary processing mods. On the seventeen thousand and twenty first iteration, the data packets slipped into an ordered form.
Well I’ll be…
When she examined the result, she found a private encryption key, along with a salt and passphrase.
OK, there’s no way an NSAI would have sent this information from random requests. This was planted…
Rika made a root access connection to the NSAI, and passed the generated token.
It accepted the request, and she was in.
She navigated the NSAI back to the network backbone within the Nietzschean facility, and found a high-bandwidth datapipe connected to a tightband wireless transceiver, and another pipe that ran to a curious system—not Nietzschean or Genevian in the connection protocols it used—which bore the name ‘RMS’.
Rika made a connection request, mimicking an inbound request made by the comm NSAI. The data socket linked up, and the connection was accepted.
Immediate understanding dawned on her. The system she’d connected to was one of the AIs who had been here since time immemorial, managing the klemperer rosette of moons that orbited Epsilon.
Rika realized that she’d not clued Niki into what she had been doing.
The voice had a male tone, but Rika had always considered ‘Piper’ to be a female name—not that it mattered with an AI. They only assumed gender to ease relationships with humans.
