by M. D. Cooper
They reached the level’s central lift and stepped inside the car. Somehow, in the closed space, Cal’s breathing in his helmet seemed louder. He kept his gaze fixed on the display panel showing the level numbers as the car rose. His vision blurred slightly and he shook his head. The metallic taste had come back into this mouth.
he told Gala.
She turned her helmet to look at him as they reached the level of the command deck. As the door slid open, he squinted against a change in the light, and put his hand on his pistol out of habit, aware they were moving into an unknown area.
The heavy chug of a machine gun followed the opening doors, and three holes opened up in the front of Gala’s EV suit. The force of the rounds threw her against the back wall, arms flung wide. She looked at Cal with wide eyes as she fell.
CHAPTER THIRTY
STELLAR DATE: 10.02.2981 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: Sunny Skies
REGION: Europa, Jupiter, Jovian Combine, OuterSol
The networks broadcasting from Europa were chaotic with messages about the wild fuel prices. Cara didn’t understand why everyone was so upset until one broadcaster finally said they hadn’t seen this kind of volatility in the moon’s history and the activity stank of manipulation. Another commenter blamed the price spikes on Heartbridge, which brought on a wave of opinions against the company, while others tried to defend their decades of humanitarian work in OuterSol, spreading clinics where modern medical treatment hadn’t been available before.
“I would be dead without Heartbridge Medical,” one woman stated, tears in her eyes.
“Heartbridge let my son die,” another man said angrily, waving a fist.
Cara looked at Fran. “Something strange is happening with the ships out there.”
At the pilot’s station, Fran looked up from her console with a mischievous grin. “Your girl Lyssa is wrecking their economy as a distraction for your mom and dad. That’s impressive.”
“Is that what she’s doing? It’s happening so fast.”
“Maybe people were already looking for a reason to hate Heartbridge.”
Cara didn’t want to bother Lyssa by asking her about it, so she turned her attention to the schematic of the Resolute Charity floating in the holodisplay. Four icons marked the positions of her dad, mom, Harl and Petral. They had just passed from outside the ship to the interior and were moving toward the forward section.
Tim was sitting on the floor to her left, close to the wall, legs splayed with Em between his knees. He had been rolling a ball out to Em for the puppy to bring back for at least a half hour. He had been anxious after their mom and dad had gone down to the cargo bay to get into the power armor, so Cara had sat with Tim until she’d convinced him to start playing fetch with Em. Now it looked like the puppy was going to get tired of the game long before Tim did.
As more time passed since Tim had woken up, Cara often found herself wondering if somehow they’d been tricked into taking an impostor. The new Tim was slow, dispassionate, but also capable of focus that he hadn’t demonstrated before. He never seemed to get bored now and could stare at a single thing like Em or the holodisplay as if he was trying to remember everything about it.
He asked Cara strange questions, like how the juice machine knew when their glasses were full, if Fran could see their moods with her eye implants, and why their mom was so sad all the time. Tim used to never seem aware of other people. Now his hyper-observance made Cara feel like she wasn’t paying attention to anything.
“I can hear his heart,” Tim called to Cara, as she realized he had stopped playing fetch and was now pressing his ear against the puppy’s side. Em whined, pawing at the air, but Tim didn’t let him down.
“You’re scaring him, Tim,” Cara said. “Let him down.”
“He’s beeping,” Tim said, looking up at Cara with a lopsided smile. “Like the oven down in the galley. I can hear it.”
“Dog’s don’t beep. You’re making that up.”
Tim’s face grew serious. “I wouldn’t make that up, Cara. Will you come listen?”
The abrupt seriousness in Tim’s voice worried her. Cara pulled off her headset and left it on the console so she could go kneel beside him. He handed Em over and she held the puppy against her chest for a second to calm him, then lifted his side to her ear. Em squirmed but she held on, hearing only the sound of his fur rubbing her ear.
“I don’t hear anything,” she said.
Tim pushed Em back a little so his back leg was even with her ear. For a second Cara thought he was going to play a joke and rub the puppy’s butt in her face. That was something Old Tim would have tried.
He didn’t move Em any farther and urged her to try listening again.
Cara craned her neck slightly, listening. She heard three low tones, followed by a space, then the pattern repeated. Cara pulled her face away in surprise.
“When did you first hear that?”
Tim shrugged. “A little while ago. I thought it was inside my head.”
“Fran,” Cara called. “Can you come here? You need to listen to this.”
When Fran came over and held the anxious puppy against her ear, she did a double-take.
“He’s beeping,” she said.
“That’s what I said,” Tim told them.
“Don’t you remember the tracker we found inside him?” Cara asked. “You were there, and Fran and Fugia said it wasn’t going to hurt him.”
“Granted, it wasn’t making a noise the last time,” Fran said.
Tim scowled, not at Cara but as if he were trying hard to remember something. He shook his head. “It wasn’t a tracker. Fugia said it was a broadcast device. She said it couldn’t get outside the ship though.” He looked at Cara. “I remember. She said it wouldn’t hurt him.”
Em whined as Fran held the puppy up and studied him. One of his ears stood straight then fell over. “I’m calling Fugia up here,” she said.
“Do you think it has something to do with all the stuff Lyssa’s doing?” Cara asked. “We could ask her.” “We shouldn’t bother her,” Fran said.
Cara jumped up and ran over to her console to grab her headset. “I have an idea,” she said. “If he’s giving off a signal, I can read it and see if there’s anything encoded in it, at least. It’s got to have some kind of message, right?”
“That would be the idea,” Fran said. “It doesn’t matter what the message is, just that it’s being sent and somebody knows to look for it.”
Cara slid the headset over her ears and pulled up a spectrum scanner on her console.
“Can I hold him while you do that?” Tim asked. “He looks scared.”
“Give him a treat,” Fran said. “I saw you giving him something earlier.”
Tim got a bashful look. “Dad says I’m not supposed to give him a treat unless he does what he’s supposed to.”
Fran smiled and put her hand on Tim’s shoulder. “So have him do a trick and give him a reward.”
“That’s a good idea,” Tim said.
Cara frowned at the display. There was so much interference from the ship that it was difficult to pick up such a low signal. Her headset gave off more electromagnetic activity than the tone coming from Em.
She searched for spikes that resembled the beeping pattern. It took several experiments until she was finally able to isolate the signal. It was a low carrier wave that strangely did appear to be making it through the ship’s hull. She found the signal with the small antennae in her headset, and then was able to match the pattern with the ship’s main antenna array.
“I found it,” Cara said. “It’s outside the ship, too.”
“Really?” Fran said, raising an eyebrow. “That’s surprising.”
Fugia appeared in the doorway. She was wearing a faded shipsuit and a utility harness much like the one Fran wore all the time. Assorted tools hung from her belt, along with a small holster and pistol.
“So the dog finally st
arted broadcasting, huh?” Fugia said.
“Apparently,” Fran said. “Cara’s got the signal info at her console. You should take a look.” Fran scratched Em behind the ears and stood, stretching. “I need to get back to monitoring the ship’s systems. It looks like the team’s reached the command deck of the Heartbridge ship.”
“I’ve been in contact with Harl,” Fugia said. “I’m disappointed they haven’t used my mines yet. I put a lot of work into those things.”
“I’m sure they’ll get an opportunity,” Fran said, sitting back down in the captain’s seat.
Fugia slid in next to Cara at the communications console. She reached for Cara’s headset, waggling her fingers. “Here, let me see those,” she said. “Now show me this waveform you’re tracking.”
Cara showed Fugia the signal on both the headset’s antenna and then what she had found outside the ship.
Fugia nodded, frowning slightly. “That’s interesting. Such a low carrier signal actually does have a chance of penetrating the ship’s hull. I never would have thought anyone would use that sort of thing. I think this band is used mostly for long range terrestrial underwater communication.”
She looked at Em, now lying with his chin on Tim’s leg. “That dog doesn’t have a big enough antenna in his little butt to broadcast that kind of signal.” She shook her head. “Whatever. It’s happening. The question is, what’s being said. Here, let’s try another trick I know.”
Cara watched Fugia switch the monitoring system to several of the open networks on Europa. She narrowed in on a government relay station that simply received signal traffic and amplified it for a bounce to the Cho, Ganymede and elsewhere.
“There it is,” Fugia said, sounding surprised. “That sneaky thing is bouncing all over the place.”
“But it’s not going anywhere in particular,” Cara said.
“Good point. No, it’s not. And it’s also not going to be easy to triangulate if it’s getting relayed so many times. So it’s not necessarily identifying us. We still need to figure out what’s being said as best we can. What have you got on here for cracking networks?”
“I don’t really do that.” Cara said.
Fugia gave her an appraising look. “Petral told me you did.”
“Well,” Cara said, not sure how much she should admit to. “There’s a bunch of old tools on here that I’ve played with but I’m not very good at it. I don’t try to break into anything on purpose.”
“Of course not. Show me what you’ve got.”
Cara pulled up a set of tools from one of the early operating systems she’d found backed up in the console. Fugia laughed when she saw the scroll of available applications.
“This is good stuff, Cara. I don’t think you realize what you’ve got here. Somebody ran a pirate network off this ship at one time. You’ve got a bunch of oldies but goodies for digging into encryption, even viral storage. Very nice.”
Fugia copied a sample of the carrier signal and fed it into several tools she highlighted on the list of available applications. Menus began opening and closing faster than Fugia was typing and Cara realized she was using her Link to manipulate some of the controls. She wanted the woman to slow down so she could tell exactly what she was doing, but Fugia was obviously focused on her work.
After a minute, two groups of numbers appeared as output from the signal. Fugia nodded to herself, then looked at Cara. “All that from just three little beeps. Interesting, isn’t it?”
“I guess,” Cara said. “What’s it say?”
“Those three beeps are sending telemetry data based on our position, relative to the closest recognizable object. In this case, Europa. I’m not running it real time, but if we pulled a new data set from each transmission, I think we could map our parking orbit.”
Cara swallowed. “So someone could be tracking us.”
“Not could be,” Fugia said. “They are.” She leaned back to look at Em. “It’s a good thing he’s so cute.”
Cara squinted at Fugia. “You don’t seem very mad about this. You said there wasn’t any way this could happen. Both you and Fran said if there was a signal, it couldn’t get outside the ship.”
“I explained a very rare set of circumstances that would lead someone to plant a dog on a ship, because Fran seemed superstitious about the idea of having a dog on a ship. Fran also explained how difficult it would be for a signal to get through the hull. These are all true statements, Cara. Don’t try to act like I was lying to you.”
“I think you’re choosing the truth.”
Fugia smiled. “I like you. You’re so jaded for a thirteen-year-old. Here’s the thing. The information that was missing back when we ran Pooch through the autodoc was an actual signal. Now we have one. And it’s neither good nor bad, it just is.”
“Shouldn’t we stop it?”
The small woman shrugged. “Could be interesting to see what it brings.”
“That could also be incredibly stupid,” Fran said from the captain’s seat.
“I didn’t think you were listening.”
“I’m always listening. The team is taking fire. It looks like parts of the crew managed to get into EV suits. They’re pinned down at the command deck.”
“They’re under attack?” Cara asked, flooded by worry. “Can we help?”
“They should use my mines,” Fugia said.
“We’ll see if they do.” Fran stood and crossed her arms, looking thoughtful. Her eye implants flashed as she stared at the holodisplay.
Fugia chewed her lip as she studied a new set of numbers appearing on the display. “Let me ask you this, Cara, since you’ve been following in Petral’s footsteps. Tell me what we know so far about this mystery signal that’s emanating from our dog.”
Cara frowned. “What you just said. We know what kind of signal it is. We know it’s being relayed in a wide broadcast. We know it’s sending specific location information based on the closest object. We know it’s able to get out of the ship.”
Fugia held up fingers as Cara counted off her list. She held up a fifth finger. “We know Em is cute and we like him, so we’re not going to go digging around in his spine. I think your dad already said that.” She smiled. “That was a joke. You should laugh. What do we know about signals in general, now that we’ve figured this one out?”
Cara watched the numbers change ever two seconds. Without plotting the output, it was difficult to tell how much they were changing exactly, however that would be easy enough to do. As she thought about the numeric output of a visual system, like the holodisplay, she realized what Fugia was suggesting.
“We can replicate the broadcast and fake the data,” she said. “We can trick them into thinking we’re somewhere we aren’t, like the Resolute Charity. We could lead someone else to attack them and distract the crew from Mom and Dad.”
Fugia closed her fingers into a fist. She nodded, giving Cara a pleased grin.
“That sounds like a pretty good idea,” Fugia said. She glanced at Fran, who nodded.
Fugia slid out of the seat she had taken and motioned for Cara to take the console. “Why don’t you do that?” she asked.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
STELLAR DATE: 10.02.2981 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: HMS Resolute Charity
REGION: Europa, Jupiter, Jovian Combine, OuterSol
Andy, Brit and Petral were ten levels below the command deck, nearing the entrance to the forward medical facilities. Around them, bumbling crew members littered the hallways, attacking the empty air, scratching the bulkheads, holding their sides and laughing uncontrollably.
Harl had stayed behind in command to secure the astrogation systems and prevent anyone from changing the ship’s course.
Harl growled.
In a few seconds, Harl answered,
Harl cut out.
They passed through the main entrance to Medical Service Center One from the administrative side. Workstations where in-take specialists could interview refugees or walking wounded lined each side of the corridor. Gurneys were parked along the outside hall, pre-positioned for anyone with more serious conditions. The walls and deck were all the signature Heartbridge white ceramic.
The AI responded immediately but sounded harried as well.
Andy laughed.
