by GARY DARBY
Jadar blanched at the mention of those two bloodbaths. He let out a deep breath while saying, “When you spend most of your time in noncolonized space, you sometimes forget the horrible things the Gadions have done inside the Imperium proper.”
Teng nodded and continued. “SOG has attempted, of course, to prevent those occurrences. For years, we operated under the assumption that the Faction was a small criminal group, something like a drug cartel, but didn’t pose a credible threat to the Imperium itself.”
He frowned while saying, “Recent events have changed that viewpoint. Our conclusion now is that the Faction is going to challenge the Imperium along a broad front—including Star Scout Command.
“Due to some fortunate circumstances we’ve managed to break a portion of the Faction’s very advanced syntax encoding technique that they use to transmit their n-space and ordinary messages.
“It’s given us an inside look at the Faction that we’ve never had before. In simple terms, their technology allows them to bury or piggyback their messages within what appears to the outside observer to be commercial or private signals.
“In other words, they can hide their communications in plain sight.”
He rubbed the back of his neck. “How do they do it? In all honesty, we don’t know. To understand how complex their technology is, let me use an analogy to explain.
“You’re familiar with Gaylon’s bi-cube?” he asked.
“Sure,” Jadar replied. “We use it to train scouts on visual observation, memory retention, that sort of thing. It’s a holo-image of two cubes, twelve total sides of different colors.
“The cubes rotate and change colors. You get a ten-second snapshot of the cubes, then a nine-second snapshot, eight, and so on until the final one-second shot.
“After the last image disappears two blank cubes appear. Within sixty seconds, you have to display the cubes in the exact orientation and colors for each snapshot.”
Teng nodded. “And do you know how many possible permutations there are in Gaylon’s bi-cube?”
Jadar scratched at his head before saying, “If I did, I’ve forgotten.”
“Understandable,” Teng replied. “It’s something on the order of one followed by eighteen zeros.”
“That’s a lot of zeros,” Jadar murmured.
“Indeed,” Rhee answered. “But the permutations in the Faction’s syntax technology are akin to viewing one hundred Gaylon cubes at the same time in the sequence you just described.”
With raised eyebrows, Jadar glanced at Shar. “Whew.”
“Whew is right,” Shar responded.
Teng continued. “One of our statisticians extrapolated that if you stood on Saturn’s moon Prometheus with a slingshot, you would have a better chance of hitting one particular pebble in Saturn’s rings than to break the whole Faction code.
Teng rubbed at his temple and grimaced. “Difficult, even for GERTRUDE.”
“Gertrude?” Jadar asked with a puzzled expression.
“Sorry,” Teng replied. “Shop talk for SOG’s premier computer. Stands for Gigahertz, Encrypting, Receiving, Transmitting, Researching, Underground, Decrypting, Encyclopedic SY 9000 Omega computer.”
He smiled thinly. “Does about everything but burp the baby.”
“Thanks, I think,” Jadar replied. “But what you’ve described is way above my pay grade. And it almost seems like you’re talking about an organization whose technology goes beyond state of the art.”
Almost in a sigh, Teng replied, “Your assessment is correct.”
He shifted from one foot to the other, his voice displaying a hint of frustration. “We've tried to find out who's selling them the expertise, but it appears—nobody. They may be developing and manufacturing it themselves.
“That means high-tech labs and computers, sophisticated encoders, top-grade electronic shops, access to logistics and supplies, the works. And hidden away so well that—”
“You can’t find them,” Jadar stated bluntly, “even with all of your advanced intelligence collection abilities.”
“Whoa, Jadar,” Shar started, “That's a little harsh—”
Teng held up a hand and worked his mouth like he'd bitten into a sour Alderan Sosi-grape. “It’s okay. Colonel Marrel has a right to his opinion. And to be honest, he's not that far off. The reality is that their skill matches, even exceeds Imperium capabilities in some cases.”
“This is all very educational,” Jadar observed, “but just where does Star Scout Command fit in all of this?”
“Fair question,” Teng answered. “As I explained, the Faction embeds their code in what appears to be innocuous-looking private or commercial messages.
“That means we have to intercept tens of millions of messages daily just to see if there is an underlying message.
“When we do find a concealed code string, GERTRUDE can only decipher a word here, a few words there at the most. Not much to go on.
“But thanks to some very intelligent analysts, we’ve started to uncover, well, as the general said, some very disturbing information.”
Using a handheld compu device, Teng displayed a holographic image of an immense gaseous cloud with glowing wing like gas strands streaked in purple. Inside the cloud were numerous yellow suns of varying luminosities.
“Recognize that?” he asked.
“Sure,” Jadar replied. “That’s the Diamond Head Cluster, Sadie’s Twins, remnants of Virgo’s supernova.” He shrugged. “The Eagle Nebula, Sector Ten.”
“Impressive,” Shar quipped. “Gold star.”
Teng let a courteous smile play across his face at the jibe before he asked, “Know anything unusual about the nebula?”
Jadar laughed out loud. “What’s not unusual about Out There, Mr. Rhee? Ask me something I can answer. Besides,” he commented with a little shrug, “been there—scouted that.”
Teng nodded as he replied, “I’m sure that you know quite a few things about the nebula, but allow me to share a few things that you might not know.”
He gestured toward the image and continued. “When your scouts first broached the nebula, they found a veritable mother lode of Earthlike planets deep inside. Abundant animal life, minerals, water, and all with oxygen-rich atmospheres.
“You’ve explored more Class M planets in the nebula alone than all the other sectors combined in the last decade."
Teng turned to Jadar. “Great discoveries sometimes require great sacrifices. Your organization has paid a high price for exploring this ‘prime piece of real estate,’ as they say. You’ve lost large numbers of scouts, several times the rate of your normal star side operations.”
He again gestured toward the nebula. “Red indicates planet ops where you’ve lost scouts.”
Jadar examined the display which now had dozens of glowing red spots, almost like large freckles. His taut face and sad eyes marked the fact that he knew some of those places; he’d either had to identify the body or brought the body back to base camp.
Jadar glanced at Teng and replied in a thoughtful tone, “Yes, we’ve lost scouts. But the High Council ordered us to go in at full throttle. When you run campaigns at an increased tempo, you sometimes get a high casualty rate.”
He glanced at the red dots. “Mr. Teng, each of us knew what she or he was getting into when we signed up. You can take all the measurements you want with skysats, bots, micro drones and the lot but ultimately somebody’s got to go down and take a good look around.”
The scout, a veteran with several hundred missions pinned to his gold Arrow of Light knew better than most what it meant to “go down and take a good look.”
The scars, both physically and mentally bore that out so when he said, “That’s just the nature of the beast,” he wasn’t being trite.
“Under most circumstances, I would agree,” Teng replied. “The greater the frequency and duration, yes, those factors lead to more injuries, more fatalities. But there may be more at work here than just the results of a high o
ps tempo.”
Jadar straightened, and his jaw muscles tightened. “You’re referring to the general’s comment about the Faction.”
“Yes,” Teng answered. “At the time the Star Scouts increased activity in the nebula, we noticed a sharp rise in private communications coming from the same area.”
Teng brought up another image. This time a multitude of emerald-colored dots of various sizes overlay the first picture.
Rhee explained. “Those represent our communication intercepts of civilian traffic in the sector. The larger the oval, the more activity from that particular site.
“At first we thought the comms came from corporate star side teams sneaking into the area before the Imperium released it to commercial development. It wouldn’t be the first time interstellar corporations jumped the gun.”
Studying the picture, Jadar could see that the emerald-like spots and red specks clustered in the same general area. “You thought?” he questioned.
Teng nodded and motioned with one hand toward the image. “Corporate code talk, coupled with location, frequency, and other signatures matched the typical profile of corporate stellar teams.”
Jason frowned. “We don’t call them stellar, we call them ‘stealer’ teams.”
The corner of Teng’s lips flicked up in a thin smile. “Appropriate,” he answered and then motioned to the hologram. “But to SOG, they walked like a duck, quacked like a duck, so they were ducks.”
He then spoke in a more guarded tone. “But when GERTRUDE analyzed those intercepts, the ‘duck’ started quacking like something other than a duck.”
The SOG operative nodded toward the hanging star field. “As they say, a picture is worth a thousand words. Orange is for transmissions embedded with Faction code.”
A new image sprang up, and Jadar’s mouth gaped open. A full two-thirds of the green-colored dots now glowed orange.
Jadar took several steps toward the image, and his face became dark with anger. This picture did speak, of hurt and dead Star Scouts, and of ruthless and uncaring killers who had wrought their savagery upon innocents who did not deserve their unjust fate.
He clenched a fist at his side and muttered to Shar, “Just when you thought you’d seen and heard it all.”
Shar nodded grimly while saying, “I know. And the sad part? It gets worse, much worse.”
Chapter Nine
Star Date 2433.056
Star Scout Command Cheyenne Mountain, Terra
Jadar stood statue-still at Shar’s ominous words. “Worse than Gadions murdering Star Scouts?”
“Colonel,” Teng began, “I may have led you to a conclusion that, in its entirety, may not be valid. I am not sure the Faction is there just to kill your comrades.”
Jadar gave Teng a sharp look. “But you—”
“I said lost scouts," Teng replied.
Shar spoke up. “Jadar, of our casualties in the nebula, quite a few are actual missing scouts, no bodies, no remains, no evidence of what happened to them.”
“Are you saying,” Jadar asked, “that the Faction is into kidnapping scouts?”
Teng shrugged. “There are any number of possibilities of what happened to those scouts, including kidnapping. Exactly what transpired? We don’t know, and neither does your organization.
“However, the intelligence is too substantial to ignore. I believe there’s a direct link between your increased casualty rate and Gadion activity.
“In my opinion, you’re going to have to deal with the hard fact that the Faction is playing in your sandbox, and kicking sand in your face.”
Jadar stared at the holo-image. “At the academy, one of my instructors once said, ‘When you join Star Scouts you will see, hear, and experience many strange things, only five percent of which doesn’t come from headquarters.’”
He grunted and remarked, “I never understood what he meant until now.”
Shar gave a little nod in agreement while saying, “Ain’t that the truth.”
He went to his console, started to slide his hand over its surface but stopped. “Jadar, I mentioned that it gets worse, well, this is the part where it does.
“What we’re about to discuss with you is so incredible and sensitive, that if it winds up in the wrong hands, it could mean chaos within the Imperium. Please remember that.”
Jadar gave a nervous little laugh. “Okay, but this sounds like someone just blew the trump of doom.”
Shar’s grim voice matched his expression. “And very loud, too.”
He slid his hand over the console and a yellowish star, almost the identical twin of Earth’s sun, appeared. “That,” Shar began, “was Alpha Ryujin about a year ago.”
Jadar turned his head away from the star image to Shar. “Was?”
“Was,” Shar returned. “A G-type star way out on the very periphery of Sector Eleven with one exoplanet, a gas giant.
“The SciCorps Deep Space Survey Ship Galileo, in transit to a neighboring binary star system, slipped out of hyperspace—why we’re not sure, and quite close to Alpha Ryujin. They recorded what you’re about to see.”
He stopped and directed Jadar’s attention to the image. “Watch the video stream.”
Jadar fixed his stare on the star image. With a blinding burst of red and orange plasma that caused Jadar to shade his eyes, the star exploded.
In mere seconds, the roiling energy wave loomed, heading straight at the viewers. It grew larger and larger until the image went dark.
“The SciCorps station on Hadon Three received this video signal, but no audio,” Shar commented.
Jadar asked in a low voice, “The Galileo?”
Shar shook his head. “A Nav Prowler, the INS Kidd searched, but they didn’t find anything. The official explanation is that the Galileo disintegrated in the energy blast with the loss of all hands.”
Jadar ran a hand through his short hair. “G-type stars don’t nova or supernova, for that matter. They fuse hydrogen for ten billion years or so, burn up their gaseous material, expand into a red giant, and then cool to a white dwarf and fade over a billion years or so.
“Or, that’s what I thought they did.”
“You’re right,” Shar agreed, “at least according to all the science we know about star lives. But there’s the evidence that one did explode—and maybe not as a natural event.”
Jadar’s head jerked up. “Say that again?”
“Yes, and let me explain,” Teng interjected.
He nodded at Shar, who caused the sun to reappear pre-explosion and magnified the image until two small objects appeared mid-center. Teng motioned for Jadar to come nearer. “What do you see?”
Jadar stood closer to study the image. He reached out and turned the image on edge and then back again. “At first glance, maybe two large asteroids or very small planetoids.”
“That’s what the Hadon Three SciCorps commander thought too,” Teng answered. “After a preliminary analysis, the station leader put the transmission under the highest security classification and sent it to the head of SciCorps. One look and she sent it straight to us.
“Yes, those are rather large asteroids and they’re headed into Alpha Ryujin.”
“Hold on,” Jadar said. “Unless I’m misreading this image, those two appear inside the star’s corona, maybe even deeper. How does one, let alone two asteroids get that close to a G-star without burning up?”
Teng nodded in appreciation of Jadar’s insightful question. “Excellent question. There are a few anomalies about these particular asteroids that are, well, extraordinary.
“First, they’re traveling just under light speed. How did they reach that velocity? Gravitational pull alone wouldn’t do it. That raises the possibility of a propulsion system.
“Second, as you said, they’re well into the star’s corona and still intact after surviving millions of degrees of heat.”
He frowned while saying, “How? Our best guess is a powerful energy field is surrounding the asteroids and protect
ing them from vaporizing.
“Third, the star’s goes nova at the exact time that they would be at the star's center, assuming that one or both survived the star's superheated interior.
“And Alpha Ryujin is 50 light-years from an area in Sector Ten where we recorded the highest Gadion Faction communications activity ever. And it occurred just before this star exploded.”
Teng stopped speaking and then asked Jadar. “After a star goes supernova, what’s left behind?”
“A dense core of matter,” Jadar instantly replied.
Teng nodded toward a new image that Shar had brought up. “What do you see?”
Jadar turned and narrowed his eyes at the new holo-image. “Nothing,” he replied.
“Exactly,” Teng replied. “When the Navy’s search team arrived on-station, they expected to pass through the shock wave and then find the star’s remnants.”
He drew in a deep breath. “Instead they found blank space. Except for the shock wave, the gasses and plasma asssociated with it, there was nothing left of Alpha Ryujin.”
Turning to Jadar, he murmured. “Nothing, just empty space.”
No one moved, no one spoke. Jadar found it hard to breathe as he grappled with Teng’s revelations.
He chose his next words after careful deliberation. “You’re suggesting that the Faction sent a weapon into a star’s core; a weapon of such magnitude that it caused a star to explode and left nothing behind?”
Jadar’s statement brought continued silence from both Teng and Shar, a sign of tacit assent.
Shocked by the thought that anyone, let alone the Faction, could destroy a star, Jadar’s mind tried to wrap itself around the enormous implications that such a threat meant for all humankind.
He contended in an incredulous voice, “If that’s true, the Faction could blackmail the Imperium into capitulating on whatever terms they demanded, it would mean—”
“The end of everything as we know it,” Teng declared. “They would become the virtual masters of every star system, planet, and person in the Imperium.”
Teng wrung his hands together while saying, “The ramifications are almost incomprehensible. If there is a silver lining, it’s that since this happened, the Imperium has not received any demands linked to a threat of this scale, and we’re not aware of a repeat in Imperium space.
