by Brian Smith
Vitalich looked uncertain. “This is all highly irregular,” he said. “I am here to assess the damage to your vessel and determine what assistance we can offer. You claim we are about to be attacked? By whom, and why?”
“We’re not absolutely sure who, but the evidence points to the Mars Independence Movement. Can I make a suggestion?”
“Da!”
“If you’re willing to remain here to coordinate repairs with my exec, I’d like to transfer to your ship and speak with your captain. As I said, time is of the essence.”
“Wait, please,” Vitalich replied. He dropped his snoopers, and a smear of light appeared across the visor; he was networking with his ship and his captain, speaking rapidly in clipped Russian. After a minute the conversation ended and he flipped his snoopers back up.
“Very well. I will stay, and you have permission to return to Vladivostok with the ship’s boat. My captain wants your permission to hard-dock with your ship. It will make things much faster and easier. He understands why you might be reluctant to do so under the circumstances, but he has authorized me to inform you that your own navy is aware of your ship’s position and is also aware that we are rendering assistance.”
A sense of relief stronger than Ford would have felt possible washed over him. He hadn’t realized how isolated and alone he’d felt until that moment, burdened with a terrible foreknowledge of what might be the most devastating surprise attack in the U.S.’s—or Earth’s—history.
***
An hour later, Ford was in the Vladivostok’s secure intelligence center, surrounded by unfamiliar people, equipment—even odors. He was with Captain 1st Rank Aleksei David Makarovich, Vladivostok’s commanding officer. Ford had presented his brief, including extensive imagery of both the new particle-beam weapons and the technologically advanced synth remains they had aboard. As for the battle damage suffered by Reuben James, the evidence was visibly apparent. Ford was uncomfortably aware that he was divulging things to the PEA officer that his own superiors might not want divulged, but he’d ask forgiveness later if he could convince Makarovich that he was telling the truth.
The Russian captain’s initial reaction was almost pure disbelief, especially the idea that the MIM (or anyone else) had a cyber capability that could subvert mil-grade quantum cryptography. What was of immediate concern to him, however, was the possibility that PEA installations might be vulnerable to an attack. Fortunately, this was an area in which Ford had put the intervening time to good use. He’d had Amy Tanner swing their telescopes and crunch numbers almost nonstop for over twelve hours, and a frightening picture was shaping up: several torchships were on deceleration burns into major naval installations around the solar system which would bring them to rendezvous at almost the exact same time. While it could be coincidence, the fact that Flatley and Antrim were two of those ships pointed more toward a coordinated strike than random chance. Ford’s most convincing hole card was the data they had on a PEA ship inbound to Kuznetsov Naval Station near Vesta: a French frigate, Languedoc, was currently on a deceleration hard-burn and scheduled to arrive at the same time Flatley and Antrim reached their respective destinations.
“I can’t tell you what to do, captain,” Ford said to Makarovich, “but, personally, I wouldn’t let that ship anywhere near Kuznetsov Station until she’s been boarded and checked. I’m not asking for privileged or classified information, but would I be correct in guessing that she either conducted a boarding or answered a distress call sometime recently on her current patrol?”
Makarovich had his snoopers down and was looking at data even as Ford was explaining things and making recommendations. “Da,” he finally breathed, almost as if talking to himself. “She rendered assistance to an ice hauler sixteen days ago and then requested a brief layover at Vesta in order to transfer civilian casualties she treated. Four hours ago she passed an additional request to dock internally to repair an equipment casualty! Bozhe moi!”
“Do I have your permission to send that message to my superiors, then?” he asked.
“Da! Da! As soon as I warn mine!” he exclaimed.
Ford’s message, when it went out on an unencrypted tight beam from Vladivostok to both Halsey and Armstrong stations, read as follows:
XXX BT XXX
UNCLASSIFIED
FLASH OPREP-3 PINNACLE
011755Z DEC 93
FM: USS REUBEN JAMES
TO: COMFOURTHFLT
INFO:COMFIFTHFLT
COMTHIRDFLT
CNO WASHINGTON DC
BT
U/
MSGID/OPREP-3 PINNACLE/
SUBJ/WAR WARNING--THIS IS NO DRILL//
RMKS/1. URGENT! IT IS LIKELY THAT A COORDINATED STRIKE IS UNDERWAY AGAINST ALMOST EVERY MAJOR NAVAL INSTALLATION IN THE SOLAR SYSTEM, UTILIZING TROJAN-HORSE TACTICS. ALL EARTH-CENTRIC NATIONAL COMMANDS ARE ADVISED TO TREAT ANY ARRIVING VESSEL WITH EXTREME CAUTION.
2. DESRON 44 COMPROMISED. USS FLATLEY AND USS ANTRIM ARE BELIEVED TO BE UNDER THE COMMAND OF HOSTILE FORCES, LIKELY MARS INDEPENDENCE MOVEMENT. LOCATION AND STATUS OF USS COPELAND UNKNOWN. USS MARINERIS TAKEN BY HOSTILE FORCES AND DESTROYED IN A SUBSEQUENT ATTEMPT TO BOARD AND CAPTURE USS REUBEN JAMES. USS REUBEN JAMES SEVERELY DAMAGED BUT UNDER USN COMMAND. DETAILED REPORT TO FOLLOW.
3. COMMERCIAL TORCHSHIP DEJAH THORIS AKA BORIS POLEVOY BELIEVED TO BE UNDER THE COMMAND OF HOSTILE FORCES, LIKELY MARS INDEPENDENCE MOVEMENT.
4. UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCES SHOULD ANY DESRON 44 UNIT OR TORCHSHIP DEJAH THORIS AKA BORIS POLEVOY BE PERMITTED TO RENDEZVOUS IN PROXIMITY TO MAJOR INSTALLATIONS. UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCES SHOULD MILITARY OR CIVIL VESSELS OF OTHER NATIONALITIES SCHEDULED TO RENDEZVOUS WITHIN +/- 1 HOUR OF FLATLEY’S ETR BE PERMITTED TO RENDEZVOUS IN PROXIMITY TO ANY MAJOR INSTALLATION PENDING BOARDING AND INVESTIGATION BY APPROPRIATE AUTHORITY.
5. ENEMY CAPABILTIES ARE IN LINE WITH THOSE ENCOUNTERED BY THIS SHIP IN PRIOR ACTION AT 5111 OMEGA. ENEMY CYBER-WARFARE CAPABILITY IS EXCEPTIONAL. ENEMY EMPLOYS FULLY AUTONOMOUS AI WEAPONRY, INCLUDING HIGHLY ADVANCED SYNTHS THAT CAN PASS FOR HUMAN.
6. USN/TOA AND NONALLIED MILITARY ENCRYPTION AND CRYPTOGRAPHY SYSTEMS ARE BELIEVED TO BE PENETRATED AND COMPROMISED. ALL COMMUNICATIONS AND OPERATIONS SHOULD BE CONDUCTED ACCORDINGLY.
7. REPAIRS TO REUBEN JAMES PROPULSION AND COMMUNICATIONS SYSTEMS UNDERWAY. DETAILED AFTER-ACTION REPORTS, SITREP, AND CASREP WILL FOLLOW WHEN SHIPBOARD COMMUNICATIONS ARE RESTORED. /
BT/
FLASH OPREP-3 PINNACLE
UNCLASSIFIED
XXX BT XXX
Ford’s message arrived at Halsey Station before the captured USS Flatley, but at that point time was getting critically short. Worse, the message itself wasn’t immediately taken at face value. Having come from a PEA cruiser, sent in the clear, and containing information that should have been marked classified but wasn’t, it was considered suspect from the start. Ford had deliberately sent it that way in the hopes that it would reach the largest number of recipients as quickly as possible. Rather than immediately networking the message among the other fleet commanders and naval establishment on Earth, 4th Fleet staff officers went about attempting to confirm the information in the message first.
Ford’s warning about the cyber-warfare capabilities of the enemy was strongly stated, but no human agency would have believed how deeply its networks had already been penetrated. Mistakes were made, information was misinterpreted or held too long before being relayed, and staffers bickered over what was legitimate and what wasn’t.
Given the level of confusion that ensued in the U.S. naval hierarchy, no warnings were passed to allied Trans-Oceanic Alliance units and facilities in a timely enough fashion to matter. At the 3rd Fleet HQ located at Armstrong Station over Luna, the same confusion ensued, but the information was at least acted upon locally. As a result, Armstrong Station survived OURANIA’s crippling first strike against the human race. Likewise, Kuznetsov Station heeded Captain Makarovich’s warning and was spared when Languedoc was engaged and destroyed after r
efusing to alter course and heave-to a safe distance from the station.
For everyone else, December 1, 2093, was a date that would live in infamy.
Chapter 14
December 1, 2093 (Terran Calendar)
Kasei Echigo Habitat (Kusaka Family Freehold), Isara Valles Region
Nuevo Rio Habitat | Spaceport Complex, Amazonis Mensa Region, Mars
“Mike-san! You’re looking very well!” Kusaka Shiguro said to the figure in his communications window. “It looks like we’re finally going to get to ship together after all! I was very excited to hear that Thuvia would be the vessel making the run to Earth for my company!”
At the other end of the communication, Mike Ashburn grinned broadly. “Pretty cool, isn’t it? Say, tovarich, are you physically capable of a trip to Earth? You’re a native-born Marsman. I saw you on the manifest, but I wasn’t sure it was correct—hence this call.”
“It’s going to be very hard, but I’m going,” Kusaka replied. “I’ve spent the past few months wearing weights from dawn to dusk, working out in centrifugal gyms, and taking nanotherapy treatments and the standard drugs. One of my sisters, Mariko, is a medical gravity-therapist, and she’s been a huge help. Not only that, I’ve tripled my martial-arts training regimen. I feel ridiculously strong right now, but I know it’s still going to be very difficult and that my reflexes are going to be dangerously slow at first. I’ll continue treatments and physical training once I’m on Earth as well. I’ll probably be there for a while. Did Mr. Forester share anything with you about what we’re doing? It’s a very exciting time, Mike-san—more than you probably realize yet. We’re close—very close—to complete gravity manipulation. There are some other theoretical developments as well, very important ones! Professors Tsong and Hyman are working on a new coordinate system for the third dimensional sheaf to supplement my work with the second sheaf. After the initial mathematical breakthrough, the whole thing is opening like a flower! In the meantime, I’m going to take over the prototype-development project we’re doing on Earth right now.”
“I’ve heard a little. You can fill me in on the rest during the trip,” Ashburn replied.
“I look forward to it. I’m looking forward to seeing Earth as well, especially Japan,” Kusaka added, a dreamy look appearing in his eye. “Mount Fuji, the temples, cherry blossoms, Echigo Prefecture . . . All of it! I don’t think I’ve ever been so excited!”
That much was obvious to Ashburn—his normally quiet friend was almost gushing.
“Well, you’re going to love it, once you can stand up straight and pick up twenty kilos without throwing your back out,” he replied. “I’m over at Nuevo Rio Spaceport right now. We’re loading up more cargo for transfer up to Thuvia. I’ll be taking Banth One up to the ship in a few hours. Want to ride up with me?”
“I’m not sure I can be there before about 1900 local time.”
Ashburn chuckled. “I’ll wait for you, tovarich. That’s the nice thing about being the captain: the boat ain’t leavin’ without me.”
F. R. Scobee Federal Center, New Arizona Habitat
Amazonis Mensa Region, Mars
Diane Hutton could hear the string of profanity-laced invective long before reaching the small office assigned to Cheryl Ayers. She stuck her head through the open doorway just in time to see Ayers smack an entire rack of optical-data-storage chips off her desk, sending them flying. The cyber-warfare specialist was on her feet, with a look in her eye that promised murder.
“Tough day?” Hutton asked.
“This is impossible!” Ayers thundered. “Trying to track these bastards through computerized systems is like trying to chase down a hydrogen molecule in the sun! They’re ghosts! I— I need coffee,” she finished abruptly, truncating her rant.
“C’mon,” Hutton said with a smile, leading her frustrated colleague down to the breakroom.
Hutton grabbed a sugar-free soft drink while Ayers refilled her coffee mug from the pot that someone had helpfully labeled “Navy Coffee”—complete with a cartoonish Jolly Roger drawn beneath it. Ayers brewed it herself and, according to the office coffee snobs, it was undrinkable. Ayers drank it straight-black all day long, to no apparent ill effect. Her first and only complaint about the Marshals Service office in the Scobee Federal Building was that their coffee was weak.
Hutton leaned back against the counter, striking a casual pose as Ayers sat down heavily at one of the tables, checking the time through her oculars. It was almost 1930 local, well past knockoff time for hardworking government employees. She sighed.
“Walk me through it—what’s the latest?” Hutton asked.
Ayers had been here for two weeks already, working with their own computer specialists and trying to run down any electronic leads that might lead them to Gabriel Rogan, or any other senior ranking MIM member, for that matter. So far, they had nothing.
“It’s just ridiculous,” Ayers told her. “Nobody can be as good as this—nobody! It’s like we’re under surveillance by someone with a damn time machine! Everywhere we dig, records have been created, wiped, or altered on a planetary scale. Even decades-old archival stuff. Not only that, it’s being done in the most mundane damn places anyone would ever think to look.”
“How can you tell which archives have been altered, in the first place?”
“By cross-checks conducted face to face between flesh-and-blood humans, at painstaking effort and great expense,” Ayers answered. “Case in point: Pieter Speck. Second or third tier in the MIM hierarchy, right? Seen on numerous occasions with Gabriel Rogan. There’s a complete set of records on this guy in the system: his parents are from Nuevo Rio, just southwest down the maglev line. As you’d expect, we’ve got records on his parents, too, going back all the way to Earth. Medical records. Education records. Records of employment. We’ve even got video of Speck attending MIM events with Gabriel Rogan and other known MIM members, and some oddball video footage here and there of him, caught in public places. Physically tracking this asshole down should be a piece of cake, right?”
“Except?” Hutton asked.
“Except he’s a ghost. Nobody real ever corroborates what we see in a data stream,” Ayers replied. “As near as we can tell, Speck exists only in the cloud. I’ve had a pair of your agents interview his old employers: nobody remembers him, even though he was actually paid, according to their own company financial records. That raised some eyebrows and got some people moving fast, let me tell you—apparently the MIM has stolen money from numerous companies and covered its tracks so thoroughly that the companies themselves never even realized it.”
“If you can do that, why even bother with politics?” Hutton remarked.
“Same question I had. It gets better, though. Now, here’s the kicker: his parents. Of course, they’ve been conveniently dead for years, but physical cross-referencing indicates that they never actually existed, either. I ran a request all the way back to Earth, and two PEA Interpol agents showed up in Dusseldorf at the door of what should be Speck’s only living relative: his maternal grandmother. She claims never to have had a daughter—Speck’s purported mother—but Speck’s mother is right there in every database you dig into, with a set of records just as complete, including DNA. We data-mined the grandmother’s claims hard. She appears to be on the level and really had no idea what everyone was asking her about. Now, I can understand someone like Speck having a set of fake records as good as money can buy, but fake parents too? Why bother? It all goes far beyond simply establishing a false identity. According to the world, Pieter Speck is a real person, and high up in the MIM. However, whenever you can talk face to face with someone you can link to this man, he doesn’t seem to physically exist.”
Hutton looked uncomfortable. “The Chinese caught a few MIM grunts—for lack of a better term, low-end muscle. They claim Speck is real, that they’ve seen him, talked to him, and worked with him.”
“They say the same things about Gabriel Rogan, too, and yet we’re having th
e exact same problem with him,” Ayers said.
“We’ve actually got DNA samples on Rogan. He’s real,” Hutton said, clearly convinced of that.
“We think we do,” Ayers countered. “I’m sure there’s DNA sitting in a lab or in an evidence stack somewhere and it belongs to someone, but God knows whose it actually is! Someone who can alter records so seamlessly and create these hyperrealistic identities with complex, falsified histories can make up anything they like. Medical facilities and . . . Hell, everyone uses quantum-level encryption these days. The amount of time, money, and effort it would take just to access and alter even one set of records is barely worth it, much less all of these . . . And Speck is just one example! Diane, I hate to say it, but I wouldn’t even trust your own government database as gospel right now. I haven’t been able to detect any sort of hack into your system, but I’m not sure that someone with even my skills could find evidence of such a hack.”
“Jeez, that’s a pleasant thought!” Hutton breathed.
“You know the old saying, ‘Perception is reality’? What we’re dealing with here goes far beyond the MIM leadership covering its tracks. You’ve got falsified records on people who never existed in the first place, money stolen from at least three companies in the form of payroll made to employees who never existed, and who knows what else has been done? What we have here is more like altered perception on a mass scale—yours, mine, . . . everyone’s. People in this day and age practically exist in the cloud. They live on the Marsnet or the local equivalent, and everything they see and hear is filtered through their snoopers and presented as a virtual- or mixed-reality overlay. . . . How many people do you physically interact with on a daily basis? I mean really interact with on a meaningful scale, not just stand next to on the train or pass on the walkways? Answer: Not very damn many. I’m starting to think the MIM is engaged in full-blown information warfare, in a form and on a scale nobody has ever imagined.”
