by Brian Smith
“To what end?”
“Martian independence, of course,” Ayers replied. “When you stop and think about it, it’s the only real hope they have of ever winning. A kinetic war between Earth and Mars would last about fifteen minutes: the U.S. Navy alone could glass every habitat and pressure on Mars, to say nothing of the combined efforts of all of Earth’s nations. I mean, even if they stood up a functioning Martian government tomorrow, there’s still no Martian military, no planetary currency, no means of levying taxes yet—nothing. Claiming to be independent is one thing; achieving independence is something else entirely. Nobody’s ever tried it with an entire planet before, either. You have to wonder how far ahead these yahoos are thinking it through.”
Hutton grunted. “I never really thought about it like that. How big a team would you need to have to do something like you’re talking about? How many people and computers and such? Maybe that’s what we should be looking for.”
Ayers laughed bitterly. “It’s hard to say, because it’s damn near impossible to know what has and hasn’t been hacked! Just to throw up all the false trails 4th Fleet and the other government agencies have been running down, . . . you’d need a lot of people, and a lot of AI assistance. A few supercomputers to crack encryptions and other security measures, almost certainly, but you’d also need good intelligence operatives too—I’m talking about some real mind readers. I mean, how the hell is anyone on the other side supposed to guess where we’re going to look? that we’re going to run down leads on esoteric stuff like Pieter Speck’s maternal grandmother?”
“Except she isn’t that, right?” Hutton grinned.
“Right.”
“Actually, that part’s not a stretch,” Hutton replied. “We track fugitives through their families and prior contacts all the time.”
“Okay, I get that—but it’s not just Speck and Rogan. It’s every possible tie or link to the MIM we try to run down: people, equipment, weapons, funding, ideological links. . . . Everything we look at turns into a dead end. One or two dead ends I could buy, or even an entire category of dead ends like, say, the weapons angle. But not everything!”
Hutton shrugged. “We did run down some weapons on 5111 Omega.”
“Our one success story,” Ayers countered. “One we haven’t been able to capitalize on any further, either. If I were a paranoid personality, I might suppose the enemy let us have that one, just to keep us from thinking they’re doing the impossible.”
“Nobody let us have anything, Cheryl,” Hutton assured her. “Occam’s razor applies: I think the simplest explanation is that we’ve got leaks in the organization. I’m sure of it, actually, based on those abandoned habs our people raided while we were on our way back from the asteroid belt. That’s why we’re hitting brick walls. I doubt the MIM has anything like the cyber resources you’re talking about, but we do, so that means there’s a simpler explanation. I’m guessing it runs toward corruption among government employees, in the form of either bribery or extortion. Remember, you don’t necessarily have to hack a computer to get into records and alter them—you just need a human being who already has access and can be bribed, coerced, or extorted. Now, we could try to chase down the source of these leaks, but that takes us off the trail of the assholes we really need to find. If cloud searches, cyber voodoo, and looking top-down isn’t working, maybe we need to hit it from another direction.”
“Which direction is that?”
“From the bottom up,” Hutton replied. “Street level. You said something important a couple minutes ago: the only way you learned records were being altered was through physical verification of information in data streams. Maybe we need to do a little old-fashioned hunting in the real world without telling any computers about it first.”
“We’ve already opened files on everyone we’re looking for,” Ayers said.
Hutton grinned. “Not necessarily everyone. I—” She stopped as one of her colleagues poked his head into the breakroom, flushed with excitement and stress.
“Hey, you two,” he said. “Check out the newsfeeds! All hell is breaking loose!” No sooner had he blurted it out than he was gone, off at a run before either woman could query him further.
Hutton dropped her snoopers while Ayers activated her oculars. As a cyber expert and computer nut, Ayers’s personal oculars were the most expensive money could buy, loaded with features and options that put her navy-issue snoopers to shame. She had enjoyed using them on this temporary assignment for anything not security sensitive in nature.
“Holy shit!” Hutton exclaimed, hardly believing what she was seeing. She glanced over at Ayers; the navy chief warrant officer’s olive complexion had blanched bone-white.
According to the feed, both Yang Liwei and Halsey stations were gone: consumed in enormous explosions, along with any craft within approximately ten kilometers of either station.
“Holy shit!” Hutton repeated. “Cheryl . . . ?”
A myriad of emotions flashed across Ayers’s face in just a few moments: shock, disbelief, unthinkable loss, and the realization that it would have been her except for the reprieve of this TAD assignment—the one she wasn’t sure she’d wanted in the first place. Finally, her expression settled into a stone mask of barely restrained fury.
“Cheryl!” Hutton repeated, trying to get a response from her colleague.
Ayers numbly stood up and dumped her coffee down the deep sink. Her hands were steady and her eyes were calm as she set the mug on the counter and turned to face Hutton. “Well, I guess we didn’t crack the code soon enough, eh? This isn’t a fugitive hunt any more, it’s a goddamn war. The first interplanetary war,” she added matter-of-factly, suddenly looking weary beyond belief. Hutton could see that Ayers was clamping down hard on herself—tens of thousands of their compatriots had just died, and this was just the opening shot. “I guess we’ll just never learn, will we? I need to report back immediately,” Ayers added.
Hutton was at a loss. “Report back to where?”
USS Ranger
5th Fleet Refueling Station, Calypso
“So, it was a totally clean run . . . no jamming, no interference?” asked the staff intelligence officer.
“Just like the logs show,” McClain replied. He and Hess were standing in the ship’s secure intelligence center, going over the sensor imagery they’d taken of Janus Station. The quality was good; they’d overflown the station very casually, slowly, as if they were merely being curious. They’d even broadcast their intentions to Janus Field ahead of time—not far enough in advance to give the field any sort of real warning, but enough to make it believable as a courtesy rather than just showing up unannounced.
Janus Field had requested that they steer clear of the station, but the Marine fighters ignored them. Janus Station was an independent, under no flag, and not subject to any special legal considerations other than those listed in the lunar and Martian treaties. They could only request that a military ship not overfly them—not enforce that request in any way.
“No other reaction from them?”
“None,” McClain confirmed. “They didn’t say anything when we ignored their request. After we were past, they told us, ‘Semper Fi’ and ‘Have a nice day.’ Polite as you could ask.”
The three of them studied the high-resolution mil-grade ISR imagery the ships had brought back. The intel officer squinted at the display, reaching out to enlarge a portion of the still frame they were viewing. He traced his finger along a fine line that extended out from the station to where it terminated in a slightly larger node before branching off in other directions to other nodes.
“Looks like a spider web, doesn’t it?” he remarked.
“It sure does,” Hess replied, sharing a quick grin with McClain—she’d said the exact same thing at the time.
“Well, the station itself is tiny—not much to look at, and the reactor doesn’t look like anything special either. That’s clearly a factory of some kind . . . No idea for what, thou
gh. That web pattern . . . I can’t imagine what that’s for. I’m at a loss. Either of you ever see anything like that before?”
“Negative,” McClain replied. He reached up and pointed to a few spots. “You can see that they’re expanding it, though. New lines have been laid here . . . here . . . and here. The outermost ring of the web shows up more clearly as well—it’s fresher. There are over 540 intersecting points in the web as of right now.”
“Just the two spaceplanes at Janus Field?”
“Affirm,” McClain replied. “Our best guess is that they’re off that corporate-security ship we did the flyby on, Night’s Minnow. Her boat berths were empty, and the spaceplanes are a match for a stock Cyprin-class ship.”
“But Night’s Minnow headed over to Hyperion as per her filed flight plan. Why do you think she left her boats behind?”
“Because she’s probably coming back for them?” Hess suggested, with just a hint of sarcasm in her tone that suggested the intelligence officer was an idiot and starting to annoy her.
The intel officer shook his head. “I think the admiral might have us chasing our tails, here. I just don’t see anything in this imagery that somehow links to the attack on Thuvia. There’s practically nothing there to start with, in terms of infrastructure. Did you two hear that 4th Fleet found the other missing ship? The one from the same company as Thuvia?”
“No!” McClain said, suddenly more interested. “4th Fleet, huh? Where was she?”
“Asteroid belt—they caught her outbound from Juno, apparently—not even all that far from where they lost her. She’s been secured and is headed for Mars now. Scuttlebutt says it was a hijack, not a pirate attack—she was taken from the inside and the hijackers spaced the entire crew. They probably came aboard as paying passengers, right here at Saturn. Fourth Fleet intelligence confirmed that it was a criminal heist—not any sort of corporate warfare, so again no apparent link to the attack on Thuvia. Every other torchship in the Barsoom Traders fleet is running straight and normal. It’s starting to look like the two attacks are unrelated after all.”
“You get all that intel on the freighter straight from 4th Fleet?” McClain asked.
“Sure did. Well, not firsthand. It was in the routine intelligence update that goes between fleets. It popped special for us because Admiral Costello wanted it flagged—anything to do with either ship or that company.”
McClain shrugged. “Fair enough.”
“We done here?” Hess asked, plainly bored.
“I think so,” the intel officer replied, sparing a slightly condescending look at Hess. “If anything else comes up, we’ll give you a holler. Thanks for the work, as always.”
Just then the bosun’s pipe shrilled over the 1MC, followed by an order to set Condition III throughout the ship. It was followed by the acceleration alarm. Less than a minute later, the three of them were able to shut off their magboots as Ranger throttled up to full-g acceleration. The two Marines had dropped their snoopers, as had the intel officer; theirs didn’t say anything other than Set III and report to the ready room. The intel officer looked like he was getting more data.
“What’s the word?” McClain asked.
“You two’d better get moving,” the officer mumbled. He immediately noticed the muscular bulk of McClain stepping into his personal space—just a little too close for comfort. McClain outranked him by one grade and was tired of the navy intel officer’s slightly condescending manner and the way he’d just casually dismissed a superior officer, strike lead, and acting squadron commander. That wasn’t the way one did things.
“Don’t be a geek,” McClain said in a no-nonsense tone.
The intel officer cleared his throat to cover his sudden discomfort. “The Jovian cloud is going apeshit- military and civil channels both. Nimitz Station has dropped off the net. Preliminary report says it’s gone.”
“What do you mean, ‘gone’?” Hess said.
“Gone! Destroyed. Nuked,” the intel officer replied, blanching as he said it. “Jesus Christ, it looks like it’s for real!”
McClain could hardly believe that. Nimitz Station was the 5th Fleet headquarters—the largest spin-ring habitat beyond the orbit of Mars, with a permanent military and civilian population numbering over 50,000. It couldn’t be gone. He told himself that this was some sort of snafu—bad data. Deep down, he felt something cold and sick settle into the pit of his being. He flipped up his olive-tinted snoopers and nudged Hess.
“C’mon, Skate. Let’s move.”
Lucky’s, Lone Star Pressure
Amazonis Mensa Region, Mars
Colin Harper was just down from Gateway on Phobos; as Security Division Chief for Aberdeen Astronautics, he liked to rotate on a regular basis through the major company facilities. His stints at the various company construction docks on Phobos usually lasted anywhere from four to seven days; he’d been up there for a full week this time. He’d ridden a company hopper back down to Nuevo Rio, briefly checked in at the company’s Security Annex, and then headed up the maglev line for home: the Tanbar Annex of New Arizona Habitat. A week in microgravity had him feeling a little tired and sluggish back on the Martian surface. He also knew the fridge at home was empty after his weeklong absence, so he decided to stop in at Lucky’s for a beer, a hot meal, and the sight of a few friendly faces.
Harper sat at the bar, pointedly ignoring the way people would momentarily stare at his eyepatch before looking away guiltily; he’d gotten used to it a long time ago, and to the occasional one-liner about pirates slung his way by overly extroverted personalities or friendly drunks in their cups. He grinned toothily as Donelle Crawford set a large mug of frothy beer in front of him with a smile and a wink.
“There ya go, love!” she said.
“Ta, Dee,” Harper said gratefully. “Where’s Jack?” he added.
“In the back,” she replied. “Are you just back from upstairs? You look tired, love.”
“Yeah, I— Bloody hell, hold on. I’m getting a call. Sorry, Dee.”
“No worries,” she replied, patting Harper’s arm and moving off down the bar to see to another customer. Harper flipped down his snooper visor and answered—the call was tagged “URGENT”; it was one of his security supervisors, calling from Phobos.
“Harper! Where are you? Are you already back Mars-side?”
“Yeah. What’s the matter?”
“Something’s happening up here, something bad! The synths are malfunctioning!”
“The Omnis or the classics? What do you mean by malfunc—?” He was cut off as the sounds of a fight suddenly erupted on the other end of the line. Harper saw the background swing wildly as his associate reacted to a threat Harper couldn’t see. He heard a pair of loud gunshots.
“The new synths! The Omni Systems ones! They’re going crazy! Killing the workfor— Ugh!” The last grunt was a strained, pain-filled outpouring of breath; Harper thought it was the most horrible sound he’d ever heard; in the background was the brief, telltale hum of a particle beam. He saw his associate’s face go slack and the light go from his eyes. The room behind seemed to spin at random as the body obviously tumbled in microgravity.
The circuit cut out a moment later.
Harper was trying to process what he’d just seen and heard, when there was a collective gasp all around him and the barroom went deathly silent. He twisted in his seat as every flatscreen in the place suddenly switched over to the MHN newsfeeds.
The feeds were cycling through imagery from a dozen angles—Phobos, Deimos, nearby ships, and the surface of Mars itself. They were all showing the same thing: optical images of the Martian L1 and L2 points, where, respectively, Yang Liwei and Halsey stations were located. Within moments of each other, both stations vanished in blinding, gargantuan explosions that consumed or wrecked everything in the vicinity of either station. When the light of the detonations themselves faded, all that remained were glowing debris clouds that expanded quickly in every direction, including toward Mars. Wi
thin minutes the Marsnet Emergency System began advising citizens in specific locations and habitats around the planet to seek shelter because large pieces of wreckage were going to hit atmo and burn, coming down like a flaming meteor shower with the kinetic force of small nuclear weapons.
Harper stood up, dumbstruck. He started violently when his dropped beer mug shattered on the floor, soaking his boots and pantlegs.
Spaceplane Banth One
En-route to torchship Thuvia
“What’s on your mind, tovarich? You look like you’ve just seen a ghost. You aren’t feeling queasy, are you?” Mike Ashburn asked.
He was seated at the controls in the cockpit of Banth One, with Kusaka Shiguro riding shotgun in the copilot’s seat. No actual copilot was assigned to this flight; Ashburn was handling the spaceplane himself, and the only other crew member was his loadmaster in the back. The hold was full of cargo, all part of the payload Federov Propulsion was moving to Earth, along with two new Thuvia crew members who were headed up to the ship for the first time. As always, Mars was the stopover point where any “crew churn”—people’s leaving or joining the crew—tended to happen.
“No, Mike-san, I’m not feeling sick,” Kusaka replied. He looked uncomfortable, though, almost embarrassed. Ashburn asked him again what was bothering him, and Kusaka replied by asking Ashburn if he’d begun using the Omni Systems synths as part of his crew. Ashburn replied emphatically that he had not, and what did that have to do with anything, anyway? “Your two new crew members in the back,” Kusaka explained. “The female looks exactly like Ella.”
“Who the hell is ‘Ella’?”
“Ella! The synth that we saw aboard Thuvia the day you were taking delivery of the ship—the last time I rode up with you like this. Remember? We thought she was human, and then she showed us the hard data port in her finger, and then she slapped your boss. . . .”
“That gal in the back isn’t Ella, or any kind of synth,” Ashburn replied. “She’s not even a new hire, just a transfer from Kara Vasa coming back to work after a medical leave of absence. I checked her records myself.”
