Whispers of Earth: Pirates of Clew Book Two (The Pirates of Clew 2)

by Taylor Smith

  Haley watched him closely. During her stint in the Alliance boarding homes, and then during her time in the Academy, she’d never seen the man show much emotion at all. After he was forced to retire, and Haley was drummed out of the Fleet, she’d seen him lose his temper more often than not. It wasn’t becoming.

  “Tell me why you’ve returned then,” Jonas ground out with a little more self-control.

  Haley took a deep breath and gestured to the chip. “There’s more detailed information in my report. But, I believe my target for obtaining the information I needed was a highly trained intelligence operative for an unknown faction. My observations led me to believe that there is sufficient reason to label this faction a threat to the Alliance.”

  Jonas was quiet for a long moment before he took a single step forward and said, “You aren’t trained to think, Miss Marks. You were trained to execute a mission successfully or die trying. You were assigned a task. You haven’t completed that task.”

  Haley nodded once. “Not yet, Sir. My target is dead. I’ve brought her body as well as a sample of her equipment back for analysis. As soon as my ship is ready, I’ll be launching for my secondary intelligence target.”

  Jonas seemed to calm down dramatically at that news. “Jerry’s dead? How?”

  “I believe,” Haley started slowly, “that her implant self-destructed when I initiated a low-grade interrogation halo in attempt to find the location of Clew, and to learn how to access her comms array. I should add, Sir, that her equipment was one hundred percent impervious to even our more robust hacking systems.”

  Jonas nodded in thought and said, “All right. I’ll have our science division take a look at the sample and Jerry’s implant. Where’s your secondary intel target?”

  “The Krit System, Sir.”

  “That was supposed to be your primary target,” Jonas said with a hint of annoyance.

  “Yes, Sir,” she said, feeling smaller by the minute. The intelligence they’d gathered marked Krit as being a major hub of activity for the Clew Pirates. Since Stormcall was no longer an option, the theory was that all their trading had been moved to that system as well. Haley thought her prior experience with Jerry gave her a better shot of getting the intel they wanted, though, and she’d pushed Jonas to allow her to track the woman down instead of going to Krit.

  “Fine,” Jonas said and stepped passed her. “Barring unforeseen difficulty, Strix-9 should be ready by oh-four-hundred tomorrow morning. Be ready.”

  “Yes, Sir,” she repeated. Jonas was obviously pissed, but the fact that she was still breathing told her that he still needed her. “There is one other reason I returned, Sir.”

  Jonas stopped and turned. The tired look on his face was an indication that he was almost out of patience with her.

  “I believe that Mallian Neese is dead,” she said simply.

  He immediately took several steps back toward her, his eyes widened with each step. “You’re sure?”

  His sudden interest surprised her. Sure, it was good intel, but he almost looked worried. “No, but the events that played out just before my departure, indicate that there’s a high probability of it. If he’s not dead, something truly devastating has happened at Clew.”

  Jonas opened his hand and gazed at Haley’s data chip. “I’ll read your report on it.” He gripped the chip once again and said, “You were right to return, Haley. I shouldn’t have doubted you.”

  Haley was taken aback at the sudden praise, and fought with herself not to outwardly show it. Perhaps there was more here than she knew. Of course there was; she wasn’t an idiot. There’s always more to a situation than a grunt knows. That’s how it’s always been. She nodded and said, “Thank you, Sir.”

  “You’re not going to Krit,” Jonas said as he turned around to leave.

  “Sir?” she asked, now confused.

  “Get a good night’s rest, Miss Marks,” he replied and left level nine.

  Her mouth worked a reply, but nothing came out as she stared after him.

  ***

  The next morning, Haley had been lounging in her absurdly large couch, sipping a fresh cup of gourmet coffee when the call came. Her eyes had widened at the message that ordered her to science level C. Only a split second after she’d read the message, the door opened. This wasn’t any door, either. This was the door that only opened for Jonas.

  She felt a slight trepidation at the idea of venturing out of her apartment, but at the same time there was some excitement, too.

  She abandoned her coffee and rushed to her bedroom. After a quick refresher, she donned a clean jumpsuit and left her apartment behind. The moment she crossed the doors’ threshold, they shut behind her and the lift began to ascend. She began to wonder how many people really worked on the station. A twinge of fear suddenly spiked in her. If someone recognized her, it was over.

  Her trial had been very, very public. It was the most horrible month of her life, even worse than Strix Agent training. Her face and name had been plastered across the Alliance as the screw-up who’d helped pirates infiltrate every warship in the Alliance. Someone was bound to recognize her, and she suddenly wished to be back in her apartment.

  The lift stopped and the doors opened to a bright hallway, which was blissfully empty. The markings near the lift read “Science Level-C.” She exited the lift and simply walked. She had no directions other than to come to this level, so she decided to have a look around.

  “It will only be for a few weeks, a month tops,” came the familiar voice of Harold Jonas as she turned the corner. He was speaking with a man in a white lab coat, whose back was turned to her.

  “It better be worth it,” replied the man in the lab coat. “Six months is a long time to be stuck in a rock.”

  “Sir,” she said as she approached.

  Jonas turned and smiled. “Welcome to C-Deck,” he said and gestured to the man beside him. “This is Doctor Lance Mazz.”

  Dr. Mazz turned. His expression turned from sour to shock the moment he saw Haley. “Holy shit,” he said quickly.

  Haley drew herself up to full height as he recognized her, and glanced to Jonas. “My cover?”

  “Secure, I promise you,” he replied with raised hands. “We’ve evacuated everyone on this level without the necessary clearance, and even shunted the security feeds over to the Strix Control Group for the time being. Dr. Mazz here, however, does not have the necessary clearance to know of your existence, but he’s signed all the documents and has been oriented. If he were to ever utter your name in public or private setting again, he’d be shot before he could finish your last name.”

  The color in the scientist’s face withdrew.

  “Plus, we need him for what we’re doing here,” Jonas finished.

  She turned her attention back to the still-shocked doctor and held out her hand. “It’s a pleasure to meet you, Doctor.”

  He shook her hand, but his face remained the same. “You too, Miss Marks. You weren’t this pretty on the vids.” His jaw dropped at what he’d just said. “I mean… you look better. Good. You look fine. Great, actually. Wow.”

  Haley watched him stumble over his words with narrowed eyes. “Thanks,” she said slowly.

  “Sorry,” he said and whipped the small bead of sweat from his forehead. “You’re kind of a legend.” At the tilt of her head he went on to say, “I mean come on! You hacked the Allied Fleet! I’m sure every computer geek in the galaxy has your picture hanging above their main terminal.” He turned back to Jonas with a huge smile and said, “So worth it.”

  Haley turned back to Jonas with a scowl.

  Jonas ignored her and motioned them to follow. “Let’s get started, shall we?”

  The three made their way through the now-empty science level, and into a large lab filled with a multitude of equipment and tables. One such table near the middle of the room held the human form of Jerry beneath a white sheet. Monitors hung from the ceiling above the table and displayed various information an
d scan results.

  Dr. Mazz led them directly to that table, and pointed up at a particular screen. “The implant is fried,” he began, seemly over his shock at meeting Haley. “There’s really not much left but fused bits of metal and plastic, but there’s enough detail left for certain assumptions to be solidified based upon best-guess virtual reconstruction.”

  Haley glanced up at the screen. She didn’t understand most of the data she was looking at, but the wireframe representation of Jerry’s brain was clear enough. She could also pick out a darker object, embedded in the back of her head, close to the base of the skull. She wasn’t sure what an intact implant looked like, though, so she simply listened to what Mazz had to say and took it for granted.

  “Our speculation matches Miss Mark’s assumptions about the interrogation incident. The implant must have realized some form of external interrogation stimulus was being applied, so it destroyed itself, and its host, to prevent further questioning.”

  “Tell Miss Marks what you told me about the implant’s architecture,” Jonas said.

  “That’s the weird part,” Mazz said, and waved his hand over a panel to the side of the examination table. A holo-screen materialized in front of him, and he manipulated the screen to zoom in on the implant. “We’ve been able to virtually reconstruct what the implant looked like... to a degree. We hypothesized that if we had some idea of the basic construction of the unit itself, we might be able to determine who manufactured it.”

  Haley watched as the dark, blotchy patchwork on the screen slowly changed. Obvious right-angles appeared, as well as fine lines that indicated separate components of the implant. “Did you learn anything?”

  Mazz grinned at her, “Yes and no. Unfortunately there are more questions than answers, but those questions are what make this so interesting. Simply being able to question something can have a profound impact on your understanding of it. It’s like when –“.

  “Focus, Doctor. Bullet points, if you please,” Jonas interrupted.

  “Right,” he said, and recovered from his excitement enough to take a deep breath. “It’s old tech.”

  Haley looked quizzically from the screen to Dr. Mazz. “Old? I don’t buy that,” she said with a shake of her head. “You said you agreed with me about the presumption of the implant’s reason for self-destructing, so you must have access to my report. She was able to jam multi-frequency surveillance devices from at least one hundred yards away. She even hacked and deactivated timers on some of my units. The thing ‘knew’ we were trying to interrogate her. That’s more advanced than any implant I’ve ever heard of.”

  Mazz waved his hands in surrender and said, “right, sorry. When I say old, I’m speaking in terms relative to the current standard of technology in the Alliance as it is today. I don’t mean old, as in decrepit or obsolete. I mean... What I mean is…” He looked to Jonas for help.

  “It helped earlier when you were describing the computer components that Haley had brought to us,” Jonas said in an attempt to dig the doctor out.

  “Yes!” he shouted, and brought another image up on the screen. “This is the main-board you brought back from Yanna.”

  Haley nodded as she recognized the piece of equipment. It was about six inches squared, flat, with numerous components of all shapes and sizes attached to the top.

  “You were brilliant in your deducing the reason why your hacking suite couldn’t infiltrate this system,” he began. “The infrastructure of this board simply wasn’t expected. There are thousands of systems that you’re expecting to have to subvert. Computers, doors, vehicles, but just as technology changes, your tools have to change with them.”

  “Right,” she said, happy to have validation that her tools weren’t up to that particular job, and it wasn’t just her. “So you’re saying that this board is old, too?”

  Mazz thought about it for a moment and then said, “The word ‘old’ is being taken out of context. You’re a Fleet-head, right? I mean, you follow history about ships, weapons, computers…” he paused until she produced a noncommittal nod. “Do you remember the last ship class to be phased out? Any of them, actually. Throw one out there.”

  Haley nodded. “Ok. The Inferno-Class cruisers were phased out to be replaced by the Victory-Class cruisers four years ago.”

  “Perfect,” he said with a wide smile. “Why did they move to a whole new class of cruiser?” Before she could answer, he continued with another question. “What was so special about the new Victory-Class that they couldn’t simply modify the design, and upgrade or retrofit the Inferno-Class ships already on-hand?”

  Haley opened her mouth to begin reciting tactical and armament statistics, but she paused as she thought more about the question.

  Mazz took that as his queue to continue. “The Inferno, like most ship types, had been through many design changes over the years, and they never changed the class name. No major design-flaws and no change in tonnage. There was only one reason to change the –“.

  “Manufacturer,” Haley interrupted. “There were upgrades in the new class but nothing that couldn’t have been included in the original design. The Victory-Class was designed by SDI, not Firestar Corp.”

  “Bingo!” Mazz shouted excitedly. “The competition is what drives many changes in our technology, but mostly just new model numbers. In some cases, updates are so profound that a manufacturer would change the entire class or make of a product because of it, but more often it’s because they’ve either been one-upped by their rivals, or they’re trying to invent ‘The New Big Thing’ to compete with something their competitor has released. They wouldn’t make the systems cross-compatible with their competitor’s products, so they make proprietary changes at the architectural level.”

  “And, honestly,” Mazz continued. “We haven’t had a technological revolution since the Divinity Wars. You can take the basic principle of most products and upgrade the same design for hundreds of years before something so fundamental comes along that you are ‘forced’ to make changes at that low of a level.”

  Haley looked back to the screen, and then down the table in front of her. “So wherever Jerry is from, they never fundamentally changed their technology. They just continued to improve on it.”

  “Exactly. Their science isn’t driven by competition, at least not in the case of this board, or the implant. There’s no ‘Next Big Thing’, just the next big upgrade or component. It’s a unified and probably military-oriented society.”

  Haley took a breath. “Ok. So now that we’ve established what ‘old’ is, how old is this technology?”

  Mazz looked back up to the screen and said, “About seven hundred years old. Highly upgraded, of course.”

  “What?” Haley asked loudly. “How can this still be viable?”

  Mazz shrugged. “Pretty simple, really. They just never changed the class. No new class normally means the same fundamentals continue to apply throughout the course of many years. In this case, around seven hundred. With that said, even though it’s using an older architecture, it’s far more efficient than our systems.”

  Jonas took a step forward and said, “Whoever these people are, we think they left the colonies before, or just after, the Divinity Wars broke out. They were probably trying to escape the carnage that the war brought to all of the colonies.”

  Haley’s skin seemed to suddenly crawl with anxiety. “So this is Earth-tech?”

  The scientist stared at her for a moment, before nodding slowly. “This is, if it were still functional, the holy grail of technology. We lost everything after the Divinity Wars when they destroyed the libraries on Earth. We’ve reverse-engineered every last piece of tech just to end up with what we have today… which is… regrettably… woefully insufficient when compared to what we’re seeing here.”

  Haley glanced once again to the wireframe of the implant. When the colonies rose up against Earth and won, the human race had taken a giant leap backward as far as technology went. The overthrown governm
ent made sure all their secrets died with them. The colonies had plenty of technology, but the manufacturing process was regulated by Earth. Certain things such as core processors, intelligence algorithms, and the more intricate components were dubbed classified so Earth could control the monopoly over much of its military-based tech. If they could discover where Jerry was from, it could be beneficial to the entire Alliance. “So how did Clew become friends with these people?” Haley asked.

  “That’s what you need to find out,” Jonas said, then turned to Dr. Mazz. “Thank you, Doctor. That’ll be all.”

  Lance Mazz looked almost hurt that he was being kicked out of his own laboratory, but he left quickly with a parting smile to Haley.

  Once the doctor was gone, Jonas turned back to Haley. “If Mallian Neese is indeed dead, we have an opportunity to get what we need. Very soon, we’ll both be able to put some demons to rest.”

  Haley nodded to her superior. She was anxious to resume her mission now more than ever. She couldn’t help but remember her inability to kill Cade on Yanna, and it bothered her at first. But then she realized it was human nature to pause at such an event. She’d loved him once, and seeing him for the first time in three years had sent a shock through her system. Now that the initial surprise was behind her, she resolved not to hesitate again.

  Chapter 9

  “So what’s the deal with you and Criss?” Saundi asked from across the table.

  Cade paused for only a moment before taking another bite of his hamburger. It wasn’t his parents’ recipe, but Crane had made a valiant effort in cooking it for him. “I don’t know,” he said. “It’s not really the time to be worrying about that, though. Is it?”

  The Reaper had dropped out of subspace on the edge of the Bonnell System two days ago. The very nature of their trip had cast a gloom about the entire ship. Within only a few hours, they would take Mallian to the old colony site where he would be buried alongside his predecessors.

  Bonnell was considered taboo after the Deshi had nearly wiped the colony out. That was three hundred years ago, but even with the Deshi defeated and scattered, no one would fully commit to a large-scale colonization of the system. Cade thought that to be very sad. The G-Type star forced the fourth planet to be habitable, but due to its orbit, the seasons were long and extreme. Summers and winters each lasted a full Earth year with temperatures from one hundred and eighty degrees Fahrenheit down to negative two hundred. That was a cake-walk compared to planets such as Eden and Yanna.