InterstellarNet- Enigma

by Edward M. Lerner

  For all that, Strauss hadn’t had to share the news of Corinne’s safe arrival. He was only in her office because the station chief expected a favor in return. “What is it you want to know?”

  “Snakes.”

  “Kind of broad, Helena.”

  “I’ve never met one.”

  “Picture a bipedal puma, scaly rather than furry. It’s whippet-thin. It masses just twenty-five kilos or so, and most of that is muscle. The claws come out anytime it gets edgy. Add an upward-pointing third eye. Give it a big chip on its—to you, waist-level—shoulder. Now imagine that, with all three eyes, it’s always sizing you up, searching for any weakness or momentary lapse. They call themselves Hunters. Spend ten seconds around one and you’ll know no other name could be more apt.”

  “Charming,” Helena said. “And you’re in a hurry to go back? Anyway, here’s what I know. The Foremost is doing her best to cast you in a bad light. Does she want to be permanently rid of you?”

  Of course Glithwah wanted to be rid of him. Year after year Carl’s deputies came and went, a posting on Ariel being a handy entry in any agent’s personnel file. Few—certainly not the latest careerist drone—monitored the Snakes with the diligence he had. None had Carl’s experience, or his skeptical eye. And now Bruce was, aside from sources and snitches among the civvie human workforce, the lone UPIA asset on Ariel. A scary thought.

  “She wants me gone for the best of reasons,” Carl said. “I do my job.”

  Helena’s vague, overhead gesture encompassed Earth. “That’s the general consensus.”

  “If you don’t mind me asking, how do current affairs on Ariel have anything to do with you?”

  “You wouldn’t expect them to, would you?” She grinned. “If you want to get ahead in the Agency—not, say, spend your career on a snowball on the outer fringes of nowhere—you volunteer for stuff. Even for the unexciting stuff. Lucky you, I volunteered for your board of inquest. Then you chose to wait things out on the Moon.”

  He shrugged.

  “Your former deputy has been vague and less than supportive. Maybe that’s opportunism. And maybe not, bringing me to the other reason I asked you here. Check this out.”

  Carl’s implant pinged: a file upload. Recent status updates from Ariel. Purchase orders. Ship arrivals and departures. News gleaned from Ariel’s public net. A few ordinary-seeming back-and-forth message exchanges.

  “What am I looking for?” he asked.

  “You tell me.”

  “Most of it’s in Bruce Wycliffe’s style.” Carl had plodded through enough stilted, self-important weekly reports to recognize his newly promoted deputy’s prose. “Pretty routine.”

  “And?”

  “No embedded duress codes. But you can see that, too.”

  “So all is well on Ariel?”

  “So it would appear.” Carl closed his eyes, considering. “I can’t tell you why, but these reports feel wrong. What does statistical analysis indicate?”

  “The Agency has a more than ample collection of comm with you to do such analyses. Not enough pre-handoff samples by Wycliffe.”

  “It feels wrong,” Carl repeated. And lesson learned. If he returned to Ariel, every so often he would delegate his communications with HQ.

  His implant held old reports from Bruce, for no better reason than he hadn’t taken the time to clear them. He netted copies to Helena. “Have your stats gurus compare the new messages with these.”

  “Thanks.”

  Send me back, he almost told her. Because he would bet his pension that Glithwah was up to something. Something he might ferret out but that Bruce never would.

  Almost. The Interveners worried him more than the Snakes ever had.

  “Keep an eye on them,” Carl said.

  Because he would rather the Agency watch the Snakes than watch him.

  • • • •

  “They must have archives somewhere,” Joshua said. Why lurk, if not to observe and collect data? “Carl and I searched the hidden facility for computers without finding any. I mean apart from the little pocket model I mentioned, and it wasn’t connected to anything. It didn’t even have a network interface.”

  “So what did the pocket comp tell you?” his grandmother asked. She perched, birdlike, on the edge of his sofa. He had dragged it back into the front room of his apartment for her.

  “Tell me? Nothing.” He grimaced. “Not that I’d know more if we hadn’t had to leave it behind. Or if I’d had geologic time to work at it. Sorry.”

  “Don’t be. You’re good at other things, Josh, or no one would have known to look. Encrypted?”

  “Yeah. Carl brought back a memory image. He’ll have another crack at it when he has time.”

  “I wish I’d been there.”

  He patted Grandma’s arm. “If a UPIA spook couldn’t break the encryption, I don’t suppose you would have.”

  “Don’t patronize me, Josh. Your friend may be a spook, but that doesn’t make him a computer whiz. I am.”

  I’m sure you were, Joshua thought. But Grandma had retired long ago, and anyway, she had been a manager for most of her career. More computer-savvy than him, sure, but that was a low hurdle. Kind of like stepping over a stripe of paint.

  “You wouldn’t have much cared for the hike in,” he told her. “To minimize boot prints from the railway, we hiked over some pretty rough terrain.”

  “There, you’ve got me.” She rocked on the edge of the sofa, head canted, brow furrowed, twisting a hanky. “So what did you find?”

  He had already shown her on his camera the coffinlike things and the ultra-compact fusion reactor. Now he scrolled to the beginning of the camera’s memory for images of the living area. The manual controls seemed archaic, but without shielding he did not dare zap the files to her implant. And to regroup somewhere shielded, or to shield his apartment, risked inviting scrutiny.

  Joshua said, “In the front rooms, not a thing you can’t find a million places on the Moon. Apart from the location, it’d be without interest.”

  “And elsewhere?”

  “Maybe this.” He prodded camera controls to retrieve an image of a nameless, shallow, little crater. Carl’s ground-penetrating radar showed that near the Intervener base the lava tube ran, on average, twenty-five meters beneath ground level. Whatever impact had blasted out this dimple had lacked the force to collapse the tube beneath. “See anything interesting?”

  “I see a crater. I wouldn’t call it interesting.”

  “Look again.”

  “Round. Rim walls. Central peak.” She took the camera from him and enlarged the holo. “It still looks like a crater.”

  “Check the scale.”

  “A little crater, then. So?”

  Joshua reclaimed his camera. “That’s the problem, or so Carl informs me. Craters this small”—this one measured a scant fifty meters across—“don’t form central peaks.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Meaning, he supposes, that if we could get an up-close look without leaving telltale boot prints, we’d find antennas, maybe telescopes, disguised within a false peak.”

  “Clever, if so. After living awhile on this rock, you no more notice the craters than on Earth you would notice the air you breathe.” Grandma stood and stretched. “What about ground-penetrating radar? Did it show anything within the peak?”

  “Not the portable unit we’d brought. We’re going to go back with better gear.”

  She looked … wistful.

  “Forget it. You couldn’t handle the hike.”

  “I suppose not.” She shuffle-glided into the apartment’s tiny kitchenette for a glass of ice water. “Hidden instruments. Ordinary living quarters. A pocket comp that might tell Carl something. The hall with those coffin things like the one that almost got him killed on Ariel. Interesting, to say the least.”

  Joshua realized he had omitted something from his narration. He cycled through several dozen still images. “Then there’s this.”

&n
bsp; Grandma made a noise: mixed “Huh!” and snort and choking on water gone down the wrong way.

  “Are you okay?”

  “Fine,” she managed. She waved off his concern, and slowly her coughing subsided. “You don’t recognize these?”

  “No. Neither did Carl. Intervener super science, we supposed.”

  “Except not so super,” she said. “More like beads on strings.”

  “What?”

  “Simple. Primitive.” She topped off her water glass. “You didn’t recognize these as computers because you’ve never seen anything like them. It’s amazing enough that I have. You can thank the Snakes.”

  “How so? These are hardly Snake biochips.”

  “Could it have been more than eighty years?” Retaking her spot on the sofa’s edge, Grandma seemed to be talking to herself. She straightened, and her voice firmed. “The Snake Subterfuge, people call it.”

  “I was going to write an official ICU history, you might remember.” Before the Interveners abducted me, disgraced me, and got me fired.

  “I remember, Josh,” she said. “History doesn’t always make it into the official files.”

  “I know this story,” he said, stubbornly. “Trapdoors buried deep in the genome of Snake biochip tech. Pashwah”—the Snake’s longtime AI agent in the Solar System—“tried to extort the ICU. You and Great-Uncle Kevin talked her out of the attempt.”

  “Not so much me.” Grandma pursed her lips, choosing her words with care. “The thing is, the Snake tech had checked out. It had worked flawlessly through years in quarantine before the first biochips were allowed out of the lab.”

  And into every nook and cranny of the human infosphere, including the neural implants in their brains.

  “By the time Pashwah revealed she could hack any biochip she chose, we—not just on Earth, but across the Solar System—were utterly dependent. Kevin didn’t talk Pashwah out of anything. He extorted her right back. The ICU beamed a warning about the Snakes’ deceit to our AI rep in every InterstellarNet system. Not all members had adopted biochips yet. Heck, some still haven’t.

  “Absent regular coded messages, Kevin explained to Pashwah, Earth’s distant agents would release that warning. Throughout the InterstellarNet community, Snakes would never again have sold anything to anyone. Whatever they hoped to coerce from the ICU would’ve been peanuts by comparison.”

  Clever, Joshua thought. If Pashwah hadn’t backed off, Earth’s links to InterstellarNet would have crashed. End of coded messages to desist. Warnings released. It surprised him a bit that even so long ago agents had that much flexibility and abstract reasoning. Except—

  “Back up, Grandma. The computers were all compromised. How did you encrypt and send the coded messages without Pashwah seeing and blocking them? It had to have been monitoring.”

  “That’s my point. We reverted to museum pieces, pre-biochip.” She gestured at the holo still projecting from Joshua’s camera. “Electronic, a lot like those.”

  “The Interveners have interstellar travel, super-compact fusion reactors, and a civilization we know dates back at least a half billion years. And you imagine they have computers like museum pieces from, no offense, your youth?”

  “So it appears, Josh. So it appears.”

  CHAPTER 31

  Discovery mission: humanity’s most ambitious exploratory endeavor.

  The starship Discovery (see related article), now nearing completion, is the second interstellar-class vessel to be constructed by the United Planets. Like New Beginnings, now en route to Alpha Centauri, Discovery builds upon the design of the derelict Centaur starship Harmony (or, as it was renamed by its Hunter hijackers, Victorious).

  Where New Beginnings is repatriating Harmony’s surviving original crew—conveniently, the Centaurs are humanity’s closest interstellar neighbors—the Discovery mission has more ambitious goals. Vigorous debate over the most suitable destination continued throughout the ship’s construction phase.

  Advocates of a scientific mission agreed upon Epsilon Indi as their joint recommendation. Epsilon Indi (see related article), about twelve light-years from Earth, observable in the constellation Indus (the Indian), is a K-class star as old as or older than the Sun. Biologists wanted, in particular, to visit Epsilon Indi III. Although III orbits in the middle of Epsilon Indi’s Goldilocks zone, the planet shows no indications of life. Climatologists, pointing to III’s exceptionally high albedo, asked to explore a world apparently locked in an ice age. Astronomers sought a close look at Epsilon Indi’s dim companions, two of the brown dwarf stars nearest to the Solar System.

  The prevailing opinion, however, emphasized strengthening relationships with fellow InterstellarNet species. Discovery’s maiden mission will therefore be to Tau Ceti (see related article), at a similar distance, although in another direction, and visible in the constellation Cetus (the Whale). Tau Ceti IV is the home world of the hive-mind species commonly referred to as Whales or Mobies.

  With departure preparations peaking, the mission office relocated from Earth to Saturn’s moon Prometheus, from which project managers can best oversee Discovery’s final outfitting, fueling, and crew transfer.

  —Internetopedia

  • • • •

  With a sigh, Corinne ground to a halt outside the dorm room she and Grace had been assigned for their stay—detention being, it would seem, too forthright of a description. Odyssey’s tiny cabins would have been more spacious. Jailed for contempt, long ago, for protecting a source, Corinne had had a bigger cell.

  To be fair, she did get to roam around much of Prometheus base—just not any of the interesting parts. She was not permitted inside the Discovery mission training area, though by wandering the halls and camping out in the mess hall she had managed to waylay some people. A few naval types, mostly low-ranking, all bitter at being stuck here on humdrum patrol duty. To the man and woman they envied colleagues across the Solar System investigating the rash of ship disappearances. (Suspected pirates? Really?) The scientific contingent, the elitist of the elite, pleading they were too busy, never had much to offer. Among the Augmented, a third or more of mission staff, few deigned to interact beyond the minimum requirements of civility. Some encounters had not risen to that level.

  The antimatter factory was off-limits, too, as was the local naval command center. Stealthy warships guarded factory and starship. Just how many troops and military vessels were details the authorities would not divulge—no matter that the Snake colony was far away.

  Not that anyone had asked Corinne, but a light-year would not have been far enough.

  Last night it had been the God’s-eye-view nightmare again that brought her shuddering awake: the UP’s original antimatter plant blown to atoms. An entire world, the Jovian moon Himalia, shattered. A civilian population of thousands, slaughtered. Victorious escaping with humanity’s top scientists and engineers—

  And, incidentally, with one utterly terrified reporter.

  By day, no matter the nightmares, Corinne found it harder and harder to be fair. Taxpayers across the Solar System had invested a fortune in this expedition. She had urgent matters to attend to on Earth. And she was bored out of her skull, reduced to following local news. On Titan, that meant priority production of antiviral nanites for some flu outbreak, possibly gengineered. On Rhea, the big stories were a high-society wedding and the uptick in a provincial deficit. People on Mimas were agog at their university making it to the final four in the All Saturn System zero-gee polo play-offs.

  Sighing again, she reached for the cabin-door latch. She had an hour until the mess hall reopened. Maybe, before dinner, she’d record another vid mail to Denise. Apart from the minutiae of her latest unproductive day, this message would not differ in its essentials from all the others. I love you. I miss you. I should be there. I’m an idiot.

  And like all those previous vids, the project office would refuse to send this one. She’d still record it. The only thing that Corinne hated more than her
regrets and apologies going undelivered was when they went unsaid.

  With a final, deeper sigh, she let herself into the cabin.

  Grace, stretched out on her cot, opened her eyes. “Melodramatic sound effects aside, you appear to have a silver tongue.”

  Uh-huh. And a gold-digging uncle back on Earth. Also, Corinne had once been told, big brass cojones. “How is that?”

  “While you roamed the hallways, Donald With The Ridiculous Sideburns stopped by. He says that, with an escort, you can tour Discovery and meet there with some of the crew.”

  That would be Donald Schnabel: earnest, self-important bureaucrat. Assistant to the deputy to the project manager. Schnabel found no lack of reasons to drop by. Since their arrival, he had invited Grace to dinner at least daily.

  “Why the change of heart?”

  Because the last Corinne had heard, she would be lucky to avoid formal charges for disregarding traffic control, reckless endangerment, trespassing, loitering, littering, general hooliganism, and aggravated mopery. Maybe someone, remembering that she had arrived in a long-range ship she personally owned (no matter that Odyssey was thirty years old), had finally taken her hints about the baying pack of lawyers she could unleash.

  “Silver tongue, I tell you.” Grace sat up. “Though it might have helped that I agreed to dinner with Donald tonight—aboard Discovery.”

  So much for silver tongues. Well, whatever worked. “I guess you’ll be joining us.”

  “I can be your cameraman.” Grace waved off the obvious rejoinder: Corinne had one of the still-exotic A/V-recording implant upgrades to record anything she saw and heard. “If anyone has second thoughts, let ’em have something to confiscate.”

  A damned good idea. “I suppose we can buy or borrow a camera.”

  “Or I can fetch mine.” Grace batted her eyes. “If I ask nicely, I think Donald will clear me to go aboard Odyssey”—impounded as long as their party-crashing continued under review—“for a few minutes to dig a camera out of my locker.”