"I have," she replied simply. "I never played smackball before."
"We'll teach you," I assured. "How did you make a fake IDent without a licensed scanner?"
"With a medical triage profiler, but any bio-scanner can do it. You run multiple passes, front and back. I need a basket."
"I'll buy you one," I promised. "How long does it take to make scans like that?"
"A couple minutes. Then you have to lace them into a single profile and lock it up with IDent Corporation encryption. Can I get a yellow one? I want a yellow one."
"Anything you want," Barney assured.
"And who, besides the IDent Corporation and their licensed dealers, has patented IDent encryption available?" John put in scornfully.
"We do. It's been cracked for years. The company still hasn't patched it. We have it on the ship. I put it in the database before we started. One of the stores has baskets in its inventory, but not yellow ones. I want a yellow one."
"You'll get a yellow basket if I have to paint it myself," I promised, getting up to leave, my second graino shot still on the table, undisturbed.
I touched my commring and placed a call. Barney and his people were on their feet too, looking worried. Everyone looked worried. (Well, not Stinna.)
"Floy, are you in R&D?"
"Yes, in my office, why?"
"Check with the guards on duty," I said to her, walking out the pub door. "See if I've accessed anything restricted recently."
"See if you've what...?"
But I was running now to catch a tik-tik just pulling up to the curb, and didn't have the breath to reply.
The cab seemed to crawl, though it really didn't. At one point, I jumped out and cut over a walkway, since the tik-tik would have had to go down the next cross street.
Team guards were waiting at the entrance to R&D, but I was out of breath again. All that smackball hadn't done much to get me into shape.
"Is there some concern that your IDent profile has been compromised, sir?" a young woman with the rank of CPS03 stenciled on her shoulders asked, sounding confused. "Because that's not really possible..."
"I have reason...huff-huff...to think otherwise," I supplied, pushing past them unsteadily, but waving her to follow. She did, along with a few others.
Jake was still at work in his office, but had boxes of stuff piled around. He was having to move at last, it seemed. He cursed loudly when I stalked by, but had grown beyond the chasing-me-across-the-Department stage.
Floy and Ghazza were talking together inside, out in the bay, and came over as soon as I appeared.
"Is there trouble?" my...what was she? Girlfriend? Okay. My girlfriend asked.
"An enemy agent aboard the station...hoo man, one sec, huff-huff...has very possibly made a fake IDent profile using my biometrics."
"I'm sorry," the Three interrupted, "but are you really sure of your facts, sir? The IDent system is universally considered impregnable."
"You don't know the people I know, Three. Check what I've accessed in, say, the last ninety minutes."
"I...um, I don't have the clearance, myself, to do that, sir. It would take another officer to look into the movement patterns of a Seven."
"I'm not a Seven," I informed her, irritably.
"Yes...you are, sir," she argued somewhat timidly. "CPM07 Ejoq Dosantos. AdSec. Unrestricted clearance in R&D and elsewhere on station. See?"
She held up a datapad, and there I was -- a regular big shot. And my dear friend Byron Maelbrott hadn't bothered to even shoot me a memo. What a guy!
"Congratulations..." Ghazza offered, but it came out hesitantly, because she saw my face.
"Oh, my God," I mumbled, with rising unease. "Tell me what I've accessed tonight."
"I'm not allowed to look, sir. Let me call..."
"Give me that!" Floyeen snapped, and took the handheld IDent device out of the Three's hand. Unfamiliar with the software, she then had to ask for her help, while flicking through screens. The Three didn't mind doing that much, with protocol being adhered to. In moments Floy had my access history in her palm.
Her face was drawn, and very serious.
"R&D access confirmed. Forty-five minutes ago. A storeroom in the extended reaches."
"Which one?" I asked, sick to my stomach again -- knowing the answer, dreading it.
"Um...number 75J."
"Isn't that...?" I put to Ghazza, who suddenly looked ashen, her dark features showing fear and shock.
She just nodded.
"I thought Team took everything away," I pressed, hoping for luck.
"They didn't do any disassembly, for historical reasons. They're waiting on a specialized transport to take it away intact."
"What are you two talking about?" Floy demanded, sounding nebulously scared under the gravity of our concern.
I turned, and the look on my face must have cemented her fears, because her eyes grew wide.
"Cageless...the first freejump prototype. It's in Storeroom 75J!"
||||||||||
Of course, I was lucky to be alive.
The experts that looked into the incident said it again and again. It had to be true, because they were the experts.
It did, nonetheless, take them a long while to piece together the probable chain of events, based on my later testimony, and computer records garnered from the ship and the pilot. I, myself, didn't learn about most of it for years.
It seems that when I pulled out the cable from my companion's faceless head, his hardware had been handling part of the starjump calculations. The ship, itself, didn't have the kind of Navigation equipment needed for extended travel, but apparently he did. The mid-flight course became corrupted as a result, and the tiny ship tried to compensate, feeding its best guess to the engine. The freejump engine didn't know what to do with that garbled nonsense, so it did what any starship engine tends to do in such a case: whatever the heck it wanted.
Forensic research on the hyper-dimensional physics of misjumps is still fairly primitive, despite what those self-same experts might tell you, with the results often open to interpretation. Different investigators will, more times than not, come to different conclusions. Throw in a new type of starjump engine, and the exact cause could well remain unknowable.
Theories, opinions, guesses, hunches...they were everywhere for a while. In the end, all that really mattered was what happened, not why.
We re-entered the real universe out in deep space, two light-years from the nearest location touched by people. This was an automated mining and manufacturing facility, in a nondescript star system containing a cheap little orange dwarf, some iron-rich asteroids, dusty ice, and icy dust. It had traffic satellites, though, to aid ships picking up refined and unrefined materials from the robotic complex. It was the graviton sensors upon these that picked up the ship's jump wake.
This discharge, as Shady Lady had learned the hard way, was bizarre. It fell into the Unknown category, which usually implied an emergency situation. The satellite network automatically dispatched a small courier jumpdrone to the nearest Fleet Rescue Port, in Murietta System, thirteen light-years away.
Tremendous distances, sure, but in terms of time within the real universe, it was just:
Half-a-second for the graviton wash.
Milliseconds of satellite assessment.
Minutes of drone preparation out at the lonely star system's jump point.
POP (gone).
POP (arrive) at a Fleet base.
Transmission of the bizarre graviton data upon a priority accident channel.
Not even a half-hour would have passed before emergency responders, well over a hundred trillion kilometers away, learned that we had tumbled back into reality in the middle of nowhere, and were in dire need of help.
Murietta is fairly near the border, but over seventy light-years to anti-spinward from where Shady Lady originally prowled into Corporatespace. This misjump, therefore, turned out to have covered almost ninety light-years distance, start to finish, all in one go
. This made it thirty light-years beyond the galactic record at that time for a controlled starjump (though as misjumps went, far worse had happened).
We also arrived in real space a full 5.27 seconds before we left, meaning I was in two places at once for a while. It explained the second vessel that Chris and I had been so puzzled by when Jaybird had been destroyed: there hadn't been two ships at all -- just one, with a fancy new stardrive that had failed spectacularly.
The jumptug brought us back to its home base, where I sat in a brig waiting for things to happen.
Which they did, and quickly, once the Fleeties started filing reports.
||||||||||
twenty-nine
* * *
Floy and I started off immediately, along with the Three. Ghazza made to follow, but I told her to go and call for TacOps to meet us at 75J, and then to stay clear. The urgency in our bearing was argument enough to get her to agree. Jake, having noticed the agitation and raised voices, wandered out into the big space behind us.
"What kind of trouble are you causing now, Dosantos?!" he shouted.
I hooked a thumb over my shoulder as I walked, while looking at the Three.
"Would you please shoot that man?"
"Oh, everyone here would love to..." she confessed, showing a tart smile, and the first signs of humanity beyond bumbling confusion.
Along the way, we stopped at the Team sentries posted by the door to GenDis, which was near the companionway to the the storerooms. There were three of them, but they weren't going to leave their post. Floy stated firmly that there was an intruder; I shouted a lot and waved my arms like a mental patient. The Three in our tow (name of Stafross, I heard her tell Floy as we walked) sort of shrugged at them, looking sheepish.
They called to an unseen supervisor, who, in turn, had just heard that TacOps was being scrambled. The GenDis guards were given the okay for two of them to follow and lend assistance.
"Sir," Three Stafross asked, "are you saying that someone else entered Storeroom 75J?"
"Have you been asleep?" I demanded, but Floy motioned me to shut up.
"An industrial spy," she answered the woman (girl, really -- she couldn't have been more than nineteen).
We jogged down a narrow companionway in the outer reaches of R&D. This was a short-cut, of sorts, over to the vast warehouse section.
"He's trying to steal tech?" one of the other guards threw in.
"What do you think industrial spy means?!" I demanded, slowing to a fast walk; I was winded again. They looked irritated over this, so I pointed ahead. Three Stafross and the other two dashed off.
"Just secure the door!" Floy shouted after them. "Wait for TacOps!"
There were Team and civilian technicians in the companionway, going about their business, but our haste and my yelling was drawing alarmed stares. The name of Tactical Operations was a lightning rod.
Two more soldiers met up with us along the way, barreling out from a side hatch. They'd been dispatched from some interior duty station by their own officer in charge. They were tasked with escorting Floy and me, and seeing to our safety. These guards had slug-thrower rifles with them, in addition to the same stunner sidearms that the others had been carrying. I recognized the rifles as standard issue Panthers. I'd owned a couple of those myself, once. (Stole them, really.) These were newer models, and more advanced; sleeker, lower profile, and bearing some electronic sighting doodads on the top and sides.
When we rounded a corner, the four of us came out onto the main companionway leading to the larger warehouse spaces for R&D. This was more like a very wide avenue -- it had two lanes, for back and forth traffic. You could have driven cargo rollers through here, two abreast, and still had room left over to stand and gawk. It was how they'd been able to move the prototype to its storage space to begin with. The only people on the road now were workers in jumpsuits who looked shocked to see armed guards moving down the road with earnestness.
75J dead-ended the avenue, the largest storeroom in the section. Like a few others I'd seen along the way, it had a huge rollgate-type security door. Outside of its size, it didn't look much different from the others, but I'd been assured that it was as tough as a bunker. The storeroom possessed a smaller personnel door, off to one side. The Three and the other two were waiting there.
From a distance, everything looked secure, but as we approached, I could tell that the security mechanism on the small door was damaged. A plastic IDent pad on the wall was missing its cover, and the mechanism inside looked flash-burned, like a welding torch had kissed it.
"It's broken, it won't unlock," the Three said. "The big gate either."
"How did he get in, then?" Floy wondered aloud.
"He must have done this after he used my IDent to open it up," I said. "Keeps people from following."
"It also keeps him trapped," one of the rifle guards observed with satisfaction. "There are no other exits."
"Then he made a new one," I replied. "This man is smart: he wouldn't box himself in."
Young Stafross called to report what was found, and she received instructions to stand by and wait for reinforcements. I doubted Dieter was going to get himself into a firefight, but I'd learned prudence in my time here, and didn't mind the wait -- which, as it turned out, was only momentary.
Two personnel roller vans came screaming down the avenue behind us, illumined logos flashing. With a skidding of tires, it came to a fast stop; Team TacOps troopers, the like of which I'd seen on the day Branden was shot, jumped out and ran over. They all wore dark, powered armor.
"Back behind the vans!" one of them shouted in an amplified metallic voice, waving us out of the way. "Move, move, move!"
All seven of us -- including Floy and I, who probably out-ranked them -- hopped to obey these people.
At Spoke Plaza I'd been preoccupied, and hadn't had a real chance to study these soldiers. They were big in their armor -- giants, really -- at least two-and-a-quarter meters tall, and a meter wide at the chest. These suits were fully-enclosed exoskelital environments, loaded with sensors and a wide range of augmentations. Covered in advanced polynium/ceramitite protective plates, and articulated by powerful magnetic servos, they made their wearers resistant to, yet fully capable of inflicting, terrific damage.
The entire unit seemed like huge metal shadows, flat black in color, toting slug-thrower pistols as big as the Panthers. One of them carried a different weapon, though -- a stubby cylinder that extended a bit in the soldier's hands as I watched. It was a charpac! A charged particle gun, that could punch or cut through reinforced targets as easily as armor-piercing ordinance. These were usually backpack-style weapons, but apparently the Handshake had been able to miniaturize them.
The soldiers moved lithely, quickly, and with surprising quiescence. They fanned out on both sides of the smaller door, weapons at the ready. I remember thinking that if Dieter was itching for a fight, he was about to have one -- and it was going to be short.
I stumbled back with the others, and squatted on the access ramp at the rear of one of the vans. I was next to Floy, and both of us peeked out.
There was a finger count of 1-2-3 among the giants, then the one nearest the small door grasped the ring handle and attempted to open it. It didn't budge, though there was a squeaking sound. The figure shook it's metallic head, and just moved back. The one with the charpac stepped forward and fired. There was a flash and a clang, and the little door wobbled like it was made of rubber, though it didn't fall off. That was flatly amazing.
The soldier fired again, and then again: Flash/Clang, Flash/Clang, and I had to look away for a moment. Glancing back, I saw that the little door was smoking, warped, and glowing cherry red in the center. Unbelievably, it still stood in its frame. In seeming frustration, the soldier with the big gun rushed forward, and slammed a powerful foot against the hot door. A weakened top hinge gave way, and the barrier finally fell in at an angle. The room beyond looked black.
The heavy weapons
specialist stepped away, while the first one, doubtlessly a squad leader, moved back in place next to the door. From the side of the figure's helmet, he or she extracted a thin, wire-like camera filament, carefully feeding it through the open doorway. The figure just stood there, as the fully articulated, semi-robotic camera line extended into the storeroom like a snake. Inside, it would have been moving up and down, back and forth, in and out of nooks and crannies, while relaying a live feed to the soldier, all of his or her colleagues, and the commanding officers across the station. Such cameras were typically multi-spectrum capable, and could provide a fairly comprehensive look at hostile close-quarter environments.
It went on for a long time, this study and assessment, with not one of the giant shadows moving so much as a centimeter, or making a single sound that I could hear. Eventually, the lead figure stepped back from the door, having retracted the camera as quickly and quietly as it had been deployed. They must have seen something in there, because they visibly readied themselves for action.
The doorway was only big enough for one to pass through at a time, and even then they'd have to hunch, and step carefully. This represented a choke-point should anything bad happen, and blasting down the door had robbed them of surprise. Half-crouching, they gripped weapons tightly, watching for the go-signal.
As a group, they looked like a networked weapon system all their own. In a way, I guess they were. More than the fact that each was a walking tank, the thing that made them so formidable was that they didn't take unnecessary chances. Corporate TacOps was renowned throughout settled space. Watching them up close like this, I could see why.
With another silent finger count, they dashed in, alternating sides one after the other, their movements synchronized like a dance routine. There were ten of them, and they were in the storeroom in seconds -- choke-points and low clearance be hanged -- ready to fight, apprehend, or kill any hostiles inside.
Risk Analysis (Draft 04 -- Reading Script) Page 43
