by A. K. DuBoff
She kept her expression neutral. “Tell me what you need.”
“We’re expecting an important shipment. Rather, Duronis is. Two freighters are arriving tonight, and we need to secure them.”
Her heart skipped a beat. “How?”
“A team from another office will be leading that portion of it. The reason I called you here, though, is we need to prepare messaging to the citizens of the world, to deploy once our task is complete. You’ve had great ideas in our recent strategy sessions, so I thought you would be perfect for leading that communication effort.”
It was a lame assignment, and she would have been offended if she’d actually cared; a simple copy-paste from previous materials would get the job done in short order. “That sounds great. What should this communication say?” Her pulse pounded in her ears with fear that Oren would detect her disingenuous intentions.
“It should focus on how Duronis has achieved its independence and now we have the chance to lead the charge for other planets in the sector and beyond. We will be the hub of something new and great.”
Shite! What are they doing to make that happen? Lexi was having difficulty keeping her rising panic in check. She had an awful feeling that a lot of people were about to die, and she couldn’t stand by and do nothing while that happened. If ever there was a time to risk reading Oren’s mind again, it was now. She reached out telepathically to see what she could glean on the surface.
The first impression was a thirst for power and control. It didn’t map over clearly to a plan, only a strong emotional charge. Oren felt it so strongly it was like they had already carried out the act; an independent Duronis, at the hub of a new, rising power. He fancied himself a lord in this future scenario, reaping the benefits from years of hard work and sacrifice.
Lexi pushed deeper. How does Oren think that future will come to pass? The two cargo freighters were fixtures in his mind. They were filled with supplies on a massive scale—enough to let the entire planet get by without any off-world contact for at least a month.
Why would that matter? She had to risk rooting around. As carefully as she could, she peeled back the layers of his subconscious mind, praying to the stars he didn’t notice the intrusion. There was something about preventing outsiders from interfering. Just a little more—
“Lexi, are you all right?” Oren’s voice brought her back to the present.
She quickly withdrew from his mind and realized that she must have appeared to be staring off into space. The delve had only been a few seconds, but any length of time was awkward for someone to be sitting there expressionless in the middle of a conversation.
“Yes, just contemplating all the wasted time and wishing I’d come to you sooner,” she said.
She hadn’t gotten enough. She needed to go deeper, in spite of the danger. If I could distract him with something while I dig…
Before she could think of a good question to prime his mind, footsteps sounded behind her, followed by a knock on the door frame.
“Sorry to interrupt,” Josh said. “There’s been a change in the timeline. Operation Nova needs to commence right now.”
“That’s two days early!”
“I’m only passing on what I’ve been told. They expedited processing.”
“Shite.” Oren shoved his chair back from his desk abruptly and stood up. “Do you have what you need?”
Josh held up a sealed case in his hand, which Lexi recognized from their contentious pickup with Niko a couple weeks prior. “I’ll manage.”
What is Josh’s part in this? Lexi could only catch the briefest gleaning of a command console from his mind. Some kind of logistics coordinator?
“Get in position. I’ll make the other arrangements,” Oren instructed. “Lexi, we need that communication plan ASAP. Don’t let me down.”
“I won’t.” She was reluctant to leave his office with so many unanswered questions, but she wasn’t in a position to protest.
Josh rushed toward the door leading to the storage tunnel.
Could that be where the control room is? If he was involved in the logistics, he might have as good of a sense of what was going on as Oren. “Hey, anything I can do to help?” she called after him.
“Your part,” was his only reply.
During the brief interaction, she caught a mental flash of the space surrounding Duronis.
All of these pieces, but how do they fit together? She needed to go somewhere she could think. And to get as much other information as she could.
Stars, I swore I wouldn’t do this! Telepathy was the only thing that could give her an edge right now. She couldn’t bear the thought of more lives being lost if there was anything she could have done to prevent it.
Lexi jogged upstairs. At the top, she slowed her pace and sent out a low-level telepathic probe to search for relevant thoughts on the surface of the minds nearby. She wasn’t particularly practiced with the technique, so a flurry of images and sounds came back as a jumbled mess. She winced at the sudden din. That’s not going to work.
Her only other option was to skim the thoughts of everyone she could find, one by one. Dangerous if they caught her, but she was desperate.
She kept her gaze down and opened her Gifted senses she had ignored for so long. It was like finally being able to take a full, deep breath again after wearing a too-tight shirt—allowing her to pick up on details in her surroundings that she’d missed after months of staring at the same walls. Background mechanical sounds, distant conversations, scents of cleaning supplies and body odors. Even the colors seemed more vibrant.
The most striking aspect of the sensory expansion, though, was the atmosphere in the place. Her subconscious had picked up on part of it, when the mood was particularly happy or serious. Now, she caught the nuances to it. People were charged up. The focus toward a common goal, and there was a noticeable energy to those unified thoughts. A buzz in the air. As she assessed the feeling, she realized that some individuals had a sort of glow to them. After coming across a few people with that distinctive aura, she realized that all of them were at the meeting where Magdalena had spoken. They’re the ones who are in on the plan!
That narrowed down her efforts considerably. She began tracing the energy fields throughout the office, searching for those buzzing with excitement.
There weren’t as many as she would have liked to collect a broad sampling of information, but anything was better than nothing. The gleaned snippets didn’t make much sense on their own. The cargo ships—those came up a lot. A nav beacon. Weapons. A shuttle. Riots. How everything fit together, though, was elusive.
As she walked through the halls and common rooms, Lexi tried to keep her gaze away from the person she was targeting. Even so, telepathy had the potential to give people the feeling that they were being watched, especially when delving deeper than surface gleaning. Some were more sensitive to it than others, likely due to their own genetic potential for abilities as a dormant Generation. So far, everyone had seemed perfectly oblivious. It emboldened her to dig deeper with the hope of finding information to tie all the threads together.
One woman had a bright aura around her, and Lexi zeroed in. The blonde woman was in front of her, facing away, making it an ideal setup to dive deeper without detection. Lexi started to peel back the layers, picking up thoughts about the cargo ships and snapshots of a plan for an armed group to secure the dock.
The woman whipped around stared directly at Lexi. “What are you doing?”
Lexi pulled back her mental probe and instinctively snapped up a telepathic wall around her own mind. Shite! The woman was more sensitive than most, apparently. Way too much so.
There wasn’t anything she could offer as an explanation. Lexi spotted a table nearby and decided that a physical distraction was her best play. She intentionally hooked her right foot on one of the legs as she passed by, knocking her off-balance.
She went down hard on her left shoulder, pinning her arm at a funny angle. Radiating pain shot from h
er elbow down to her wrist and up to her back. That wasn’t part of the plan. Fok!
“Stars! Are you okay?” the woman exclaimed.
Lexi rolled to her side and used the table to help herself up. “Only hurt my pride.” She did her best to hide the pain of the injury; any indication of actual harm and she might be forced to see a medic, and she couldn’t afford any delay. Besides, her medical nanites would mend the injury almost as quickly as any other care.
“I can—”
“I’m fine,” Lexi assured her. “Just need to pay closer attention to where I’m going.”
The woman nodded, looking over Lexi with concern, the observation of Lexi’s suspicious behavior seemingly forgotten. She turned back around and left with the person she had been talking to.
Not exactly the way I wanted to handle that. Lexi gingerly opened and closed her hand and rotated her joints. It didn’t feel like anything was broken, but at least a slight sprain was likely. I also need to learn to fake-fall better.
The other people continued to disperse. By the time Lexi circled back to the workshop, she was alone in the room. It was as good a place as any to work on the ‘messaging’ project Oren had assigned her, so it would also serve as a suitable place to sort through the information she had learned.
She laid out the disparate pieces in her mind and started looking for connections.
The two cargo ships had been the most common thought. They were clearly central to the plan in some way—probably carrying valuable materials the Alliance was hoping to claim for itself. Or, she realized, the Coalition as a whole. She couldn’t forget that important tidbit she’d gotten from Oren about the Alliance being a unit within the larger Coalition that Magdalena helped run.
The freighters were massive targets. Despite the resources on board, though, it was an odd choice to seize them. Taking over was one thing, but holding them was quite another. The arrival of a single Guard destroyer would change the equation in a big way.
Unless backup couldn’t arrive, she realized. Except, no backup would mean taking out the nav beacon to make the planet challenging to access via subspace. Shite!
She considered the other snippets of information. There was a shuttle… Small, difficult to detect. A craft like that could get close to a target without drawing too much attention.
Like a nav beacon floating out in space.
She started piecing together the plan. Destroying the nav beacon would temporarily cut the world off from any vessel that wasn’t equipped with an independent jump drive. Of course, one of those ships could bring a new nav beacon to install, but that would take time to initialize. The question was, what was the Alliance planning to do in the interim? It was too large and complex a distraction to pull off for their mission to not be something significant.
What am I missing? She pored over the observations, trying to see the connections between the seemingly disparate pieces. Why would they take out a nav beacon?
Stars, it’s a temporary distraction! It came to her in a sudden moment of clarity. They’re going to hack into the planetary defense network.
It was the only thing that made sense. With control of those orbital weapons, they could take out any ships that were approaching the planet during the moment they were most vulnerable leaving subspace. The best of the military vessels could weather the attack, surely, but how many would it take to overwhelm the defense grid and bring it down? Certainly more than either the TSS or Guard could spare with everything else going on. It wouldn’t be worth the time or effort.
Duronis would be on its own—free to serve as a base of operations for the Alliance and the larger Coalition. Given how well everything else was planned out, the members of the organization almost certainly had access to contraband independent jump drives of their own, so the lack of the nav beacon wouldn’t impact their own transit abilities.
Fok! What can I do? She needed to find out who was supposed to hack into the satellite network. If she could stop them from gaining control there, the rest of the plan would fall apart.
It could be anyone, and they might not even be part of this office. If the plan was going down now, she wouldn’t have time to vet potential suspects.
Except… She had seen a control room in Josh’s mind. That seemed like the kind of place where someone might hack into a defense network. If it wasn’t Josh himself, he might know the person who would lead the act. A flimsy lead, but it was all she had.
Unfortunately, following up on that lead would mean abandoning the work that Oren expected. Or maybe not. She had a lot of material from the previous rallies. A little bit of reworking and embellishment, and there would be a decent narrative to present. Really it was a consolation assignment—the sort of thing given to someone not trusted with important work.
She brought up an assortment of old messaging materials on the workstation and began hurriedly knitting some of them together into a smooth narrative. With some word-vomit embellishments based on the instructions Oren had given her about what this particular piece should communicate, it was a sufficient rough draft. She’d go back to add more polish if there was time. But for now, it would serve its purpose to make it look like she’d done the work.
The question then became how to find the control room. Most likely, it was accessible via the underground tunnel network, since that’s where Josh had been heading. She couldn’t very well walk into the room unexpectedly, though. And how do I stop them from taking over the defense grid?
She wasn’t a programmer or even that great with technology beyond the level of a proficient user. So, any option necessitating countermeasures from a tech standpoint was off the table.
Mind-control wasn’t reliable and also had a high probability of her getting caught. While she could take on one person and manipulate their thoughts to not carry out a particular action, it was unlikely she would find the hacker alone.
The only viable option was to render the entire control center inoperable, if there was such a place, as indicated in Josh’s mind. A disruption so significant that it would throw the whole plan off.
There are weapons in the storage tunnel. The major problem was that each was carefully cataloged and inventoried. Granted, she had done those logs herself and could doctor them, but that would take time and add another layer of risk. There was a much more straightforward solution, though risky in a different way: she could take out the control room with telekinesis.
It had been years since she’d done anything significant with her abilities, and her training had been spotty, at best. Trying to do anything on the fly might fail. But it was the most sensible option, given the alternatives.
If I can even find the bomaxed control room. That was Step One.
Lexi closed out from her writing on the workstation and thought about the best way to get down to the tunnel without anyone asking questions. To hedge her bets, she put a note on her workstation that she was going out to field test some messaging before writing a final draft; weak cover, but again, better than nothing. That was rapidly becoming her motto.
She knew that the tunnel entrance was potentially unlocked with people on the move for the big operation, so getting down there might not be too difficult; she could reset the bolts with telekinesis if it came down to it. That left the significant problem of locating the control room.
It would need to be easily accessible to people in this office. And it would use a lot of power.
She shook her head and let out a long breath. There was too much riding on her set of cobbled-together assumptions. Still, her gut told her this was the right thing to do.
A power-consumption-heavy location would give off a distinct energy signature. In the underground tunnels made of stone with minimal other wiring, there was a good chance she would be able to trace the electromagnetic signature all of the way to the control room. Such a feat would be easy for a trained TSS Agent, but an out-of-practice street rat like her…
Bad people are going to take over this plane
t if you sit on your hands and leave the problem-solving to other people. You got yourself into this mess, so you need to do something about it. She gripped the edge of the desk. Do it for Melisa.
Her mind made up, Lexi placed her handheld offline so her location couldn’t be geo-tracked, in case anyone got too curious about her whereabouts. With the note on her workstation about leaving the office, she instead headed downstairs.
As a precaution, she generated a low-level electrical field around herself to disrupt the footage of any security camera that might be watching her movements within the office. While it would draw suspicion if anyone reviewed it, at least it would be an extra layer of protection to keep the events from tracing back to her.
On the lower administrative level, the office doors, including Oren’s, were thankfully closed, so she had a clear shot to the tunnel entrance; everyone was already in their designated places.
She tried the door handle. Locked. Bomax.
Well, at least it would be a good opportunity to refresh her telekinesis skills. She opened her senses again, assessing the lock with her mind. She identified the location and position of the physical bolts holding it in place. Carefully, she tugged at the mechanism. It clanged to the side—much harder than she’d anticipated.
Shite. The entire mechanism was busted, but at least it was now broken in the open position. She was immensely thankful for her foresight to disrupt the camera feed.
She slipped through the doorway and closed it as best as she could behind her with the broken lock. The dim stairwell leading down to the tunnel now seemed even darker and more ominous than normal.
Toward the bottom of the stairs, she slowed her pace and listened for any sign of voices or movement. Not hearing or feeling anything, she continued forward.
A careful visual inspection confirmed that the tunnel was clear.
How can everyone disappear like this? Nothing about the Alliance’s operations made any sense.
She walked to the center of the tunnel and closed her eyes, focusing her extrasensory perception on the energy fields in the corridor. The first thing to jump out at her was the wiring running in the ceiling to the lights. She noted how it felt and then let it fade into the background, trying to sense something more powerful in the distance.
