InterstellarNet- Enigma

by Edward M. Lerner

“With which you’ll want my help,” Carl snapped back. Hermes was two light-minutes from Saturn, decelerating furiously, and that made real-time conversation—barely—possible. “I’ll venture to guess you won’t find another Snake expert within a billion klicks of here.”

  Joshua, in the other seat, leaned to his right, just out of camera view. Matsushita preferred vid to a VR link, and Carl wasn’t ready to explain having uncleared, unauthorized passengers aboard the UPIA courier.

  Matsushita said, “I fought the Snakes in the last war.”

  Two decades earlier. The admiral looked to be about fifty. That would have made him a junior officer back then.

  “And I spent most of the past twenty years on Ariel.”

  “Why, exactly, are you here?” Matsushita countered. “Agnelli”—that would be Richard Lewis Agnelli, the long-time director of the UPIA—“said you were on your way back to Ariel.”

  In the opposite direction, in other words. Far, far away.

  “Be glad I suspected the Snakes might be up to something.” However disingenuous that statement, it was more credible, not to mention simpler, than the truth. Circumstances had retroactively converted Carl’s misappropriation of the courier from theft to brilliant insight. Call that the atom-thin silver lining to this fiasco. As for the implication to be drawn from his subterfuge that he suspected a mole within the Agency, it was true enough—if not in the way Matsushita would take it. “It’s why I’m most of the way to you.”

  “Lucky us,” Matsushita said.

  “Over the years, the Foremost and I played a lot of b’tok. You’re familiar with b’tok?”

  “A strategy game. The Snake equivalent to chess.”

  Close enough. “My point, Admiral, is that I have an understanding of how Glithwah thinks.”

  “And how often did you win at b’tok?”

  “That’s not the point.” Which meant never, and Matsushita, from his smirk, knew it. “This recent piracy? Pure Glithwah. Scatter the opposition and assemble a free navy in one operation.”

  “What with you being the expert, why didn’t you see this attack coming?”

  The gibe came of frustration, at least in part, and Carl didn’t react. “And the drone swarms? The robot soldiers? You know them?”

  “All too well.”

  “By now, your engineers must have examined some. The bots and drones use Boater technology, don’t they?”

  “We’ve studied a few,” Tanaka said, “all shot to pieces. Barring a lucky hit, they self-destruct to avoid capture. So far, about all the experts have agreed on is that this isn’t any familiar tech. I’ll give you that one.”

  “That problem I saw coming,” Carl exaggerated.

  Because without establishing credibility, he wouldn’t be allowed to do anything. Military types didn’t think much of his kind, considered spies loose cannons. They would keep him close. To pick his brain, they’d say, when their true goal would be to stop him from meddling.

  And there were things, important things, he must get done.

  He had suspected Ariel colony of money laundering for illegal and untraceable tech purchases over InterstellarNet. But to buy what? He’d never been quite certain. Glithwah’s repeated requests that she be allowed to import advanced robotics might have been misdirection.

  But in hindsight? With twenty thousand Snakes, children and ancients included, facing off against humanity’s billions? Of course Glithwah had wanted war bots. And if she was to be reliant on bots, they would outclass anything she expected them to encounter. That meant Boater robotics—a technology that human authorities continued to ban.

  “All right, expert,” Matsushita said. “What’s your advice?”

  “That I meet with Glithwah. Determine what she wants.”

  “She wants Discovery—and she’s grabbed it. Apart from that, she wants a clean getaway.”

  “Let me share how Glithwah thinks,” Carl began, channeling his many defeats. “She plays b’tok by indirection. It’s a rare maneuver that advances just one of her objectives. It’s a rarer maneuver, until the mid-game, that poses any obvious threat. By the time a pattern emerges, by the time the purpose of her maneuvering becomes clear, it’s almost always too late to react. In the unusual event that something takes her by surprise, she adapts quickly.”

  “Uh-huh.” Matsushita looked less than impressed. “Once you arrive, rendezvous with the flagship. When I have time, we’ll talk.”

  “Wait.” Because Carl couldn’t permit himself to be sidelined. He needed to earn the admiral’s trust—fast. It was well and good to say he understood Glithwah …

  “What the Foremost wants is to get away with Discovery. Without pursuit, because she’s brought along the entire clan. Without further engagement, further loss of life, on either side.”

  “As I’ve already said. And as Glithwah’s pet spokeswoman has told the worlds.”

  “Bear with me,” Carl said.

  Defending Corinne—once more a Snake prisoner?—would not further his case. It was time for his many games of b’tok, all those hours spent one-on-one with Glithwah, to pay off.

  The Snakes’ original foray into the Solar System had ended in disaster all around. Thousands of humans killed. Hundreds of Snakes, including the then Foremost. For the clan’s survivors, internment on bleak little Ariel.

  What would this Foremost do differently?

  “Glithwah wants your assets neutralized, Admiral. She wants the rest of the navy kept spread all over. If she allows the UP to concentrate its resources, she’s done. The Snakes would be outnumbered hundreds to one.

  “I’ll make a few predictions. Most hostages aren’t aboard Discovery, where they’d justify a pursuit; they’re elsewhere. Still on Prometheus, I’ll guess. So Glithwah is streaming real-time vid, not expecting you to take her word for things.”

  Matsushita scowled. “Most mission staff are being held in the base mess hall, in view of public-safety cams the Snakes have left up and broadcasting. There’s no audio, and bits of the video are being blurred to prevent lip reading. Due to the severe crowding, we haven’t gotten an accurate headcount or made a lot of facial matches. Senior mission leadership and two captured marines are being held in another room. Current thinking is they’ve been separated lest they try to organize resistance.” The scowl deepened. “As it is, a few of the hostages, braver than smart, attempted to take on a bot. It tore them to pieces.”

  Ugh. “And how many hostages aboard Discovery itself?”

  “Just the reporter, as far as we know. Crew and workers were relocated to Prometheus. If Elman is being held against her will, she hasn’t said. She may just think she’s chasing another Pulitzer.”

  Corinne did not have to say: Carl had seen the fear in her eyes. She had almost died as a Snake prisoner, aboard their last hijacked starship.

  “She owns a ship, right?” Carl asked, trying to sounded casual. “What about her pilot?”

  “Grace DiMeara. We saw her escorted from the mess hall. We don’t know why or to where.”

  Carl said, “I predict the hostages will remain on Prometheus, under robotic guard, till Discovery is far away. And lest you contemplate pursuing the clan anyway, Glithwah will reveal—maybe she already has—more robots and drones positioned to threaten the antimatter plant. If your ships make a move toward Prometheus or the starship, she promises the drones will blow the factory.” And with it, the hostages. When Snakes destabilized the antimatter factory on Himalia, that blast shattered the whole frigging world. “How am I doing?”

  The next four minutes would be interminable. Within one minute, Carl’s mind resumed its churning. Everything he had heard about the Snake incursion, every ploy he had extrapolated, seemed like Glithwah. Sort of. Brilliant, to be sure. Flawlessly executed. But not sufficiently … overwhelming. Another shoe still waited to drop.

  “Another prediction,” Carl radioed into the lengthening silence. “Having dispersed the UP navy across the Solar System, Glithwah will have a pl
an to keep those ships far from Discovery.” He rubbed his chin, pondering. Glithwah was not one to leave clan mates behind. “It’ll be drones pre-positioned to threaten soft targets elsewhere.”

  And something else, some yet deeper ploy, because Glithwah never relied on a single line of attack. What more she might undertake refused to make itself clear.

  Only virtual reality could accommodate the complexities of b’tok, and their last few encounters remained stored in Carl’s neural implant. At many times actual speed, he replayed games in his mind, studied her attacks. They were indirect, multipronged, subtle.

  But there was something else about her game play. Some other attribute. Her actions were precise. They let nothing go to waste. They were very … what was the word …?

  Surgical.

  “Admiral,” Carl radioed. “I assume most vessels captured earlier by the Snakes had crews. My bet is most are still alive. The reinforcements on which you’re counting will no sooner set out for Saturn than the SOS calls will begin. Survivors abandoned far and wide across the Solar System, their robotic captors just departed. Desperate men and women, without resources, in urgent need of rescue.”

  Minutes later, mid disdainful dismissal of Carl’s earliest predictions as patently obvious, Matsushita blinked. “Two such contacts have come in so far today,” he said. “Listen.”

  “Mayday, Mayday,” the message began. “This is Lyle Logan, captain of the Betty. My ship was one among many captured by Snakes. Fourteen of us are marooned on a Kuiper Belt object. Apart from eyeballs, we have no instruments to ascertain our location. Our Snake guards and their robots evacuated awhile ago, but until today this transmitter I’m using was inaccessible, in a vault secured by a time lock. We have remaining maybe two weeks of oh-two, less food, and …”

  Matsushita killed the playback. “They left their message looping as a homing beacon. The other message sounds as dire.”

  Carl waited.

  “Okay,” Matsushita added. “I’m authorizing you to open a channel with the Snakes. If they’ll talk with you, go for it. Learn what you can—but don’t commit to anything before clearing it first with me.”

  “And if the Foremost agrees to meet face to face?”

  “If you go in, you may not come out.”

  “Risk is always part of the job,” Carl said.

  The next pause extended long past what mere light-speed delay could explain, and for much of the wait Matsushita’s mic was muted and his camera frozen. Until—

  Matsushita said, “If you get the go-ahead, we’ll allow Hermes through our perimeter.”

  CHAPTER 41

  Glithwah responded within ten minutes to Carl’s hail.

  No checking in with or second-guessing by remote authorities here. No stalling. Instead, he supposed, although the Foremost’s body language gave no sign of it, there was curiosity.

  “I had imagined myself rid of you, Warden,” Glithwah said after their first, formal exchange of greetings. Her fluent English rendered his former title ironic. “Yet here you are, almost in time for your presence to matter.”

  “I’m a better strategist than I let on,” he lied. That his plans had converged with Glithwah’s was coincidence. That or, as he was coming to believe, his subconscious was the strategist.

  “And yet you lacked the confidence in your deductions to have alerted authorities here.”

  Their conversation was in the clear, and the navy would be listening. Matsushita had already commented on Carl’s nonwarning. “We have serious matters to discuss, Foremost.”

  “There is only one secure way,” she said.

  Her technicians would have recovered crypto software from computers both on Prometheus and aboard Discovery. Whatever UP algorithm he agreed to use she must assume contained a backdoor. If he had stolen any clan encryption algorithm back on Ariel, she knew he wouldn’t admit it—and that the UP navy would already be eavesdropping with it.

  “Agreed. I’ll need a few minutes to prepare.” He broke the link.

  “Prepare?” Joshua asked.

  “To be boarded.” With a few keystrokes, Carl set free a highly specific Trojan from its quarantine in Hermes’ main computer. “First I must destroy all the Agency crypto software aboard.”

  The same Trojan would introduce a backdoor into Discovery’s computers, if the Snakes were careless enough. Carl did not foresee that happening.

  “The Foremost will come aboard to talk? It’ll be snug.”

  Carl shook his head.

  Joshua sighed. “And here I supposed things were already interesting.”

  • • • •

  The midsized shuttle dispatched from the starship was clearly of human design. On the shuttle’s final approach, Carl read its tail number. A listing in his implant confirmed this was among the disappeared ships—it already seemed like something out of a bygone era—that the UPIA had struggled so long and ineffectually to locate. With a few precise puffs of compressed gas from its forward attitude jets, the shuttle came to a smooth stop, nose to nose with Hermes and separated by perhaps two meters. Pilot and copilot, visible through the cockpit canopy, were Snakes, and good at their jobs.

  Carl studied the dance of distant sun glints—constellation upon constellation of armed drones, patrolling around the starship—while, slowly, a docking tunnel reached out from the shuttle. With a thump, the mating collar met Hermes’ hull. Lights blinked on his console as the tube sealed around his air lock.

  “And if this goes badly?” Joshua asked.

  “Your grandmother knows all we do about the Xool.” And what a crushing burden that would be, were he and Joshua not to return. “Let’s see to it that this doesn’t go badly.”

  A warrior soon came floating from Hermes’ air lock, steeped in the stench of Snake ecosystems. Rotten eggs, just-lit matches, and other sulfurous odors to which Carl had never put a name, gave him an instant headache. He found sealed packets of nostril filters in the bridge first-aid kit and handed one set to Joshua. “These will help.”

  What else had he overlooked?

  The Snake, meanwhile, scarcely blinked at encountering an undeclared passenger. Carl knew her: Firh Koban, a young cousin of Glithwah’s. Back on Ariel, Koban had piloted the settlement’s first scoop ship—reported lost with all hands.

  From a pocket of her uniform she removed a hypo spray.

  Carl nodded, and she gave him the injection. “Neural suppressor,” he explained to Joshua. It was meant to preclude wireless conspiring or eavesdropping, here or on the starship.

  Joshua submitted, flinching as the spray stung his neck.

  “Onto the other ship,” Koban ordered Joshua. Her marginal English retained the implicit-verb flavor of clan speak. “No baggage,” she added as he grabbed the handle of the portable server by his feet.

  “It’s not baggage, it’s an AI,” Carl explained, “and I’ll need it.” Because if they were to leave the server unattended, Snake technicians would poke around in it. And then Carl’s hastily modified Trojan, retargeted to erase Xool files, would wipe a big chunk of Tacitus’ memories.

  Just for an instant, Koban’s eyes glazed. Mind to mind, she would be consulting with her superiors. “A moment.”

  Not until Carl yanked the network-interface biochip and double-wrapped the server box in metal-mesh sheets was Joshua permitted to bring Tacitus. The AI, if it took offence, kept its speaker shut.

  As Koban inspected the bridge, engine room, and tiny shower/toilet/galley for bombs, Carl watched through external cameras as two pressure-suited and tethered Snakes examined Hermes from the outside. The scrutiny unfolded in silence, coordinated, he presumed, through neural implants.

  Satisfied at last, Koban sat, looking, in the human-sized passenger chair, like a particularly lethal doll. As soon as the exterior inspection finished and the shuttle had retracted its docking tube, she gestured at the bridge console. “To hangar bay three.”

  A traffic controller aboard Discovery directed Carl’s appro
ach. Saturn’s light gave the huge vessel a jaundiced cast. The starship appeared unharmed by its seizure and any initial skirmishing.

  Discovery was in freefall; Carl flicked on magnetic coupling to pin the tiny courier to the hangar deck. A shuttle, presumably carrying Joshua, swooped in seconds later. The great exterior hangar doors closed behind them. Through the cockpit canopy, Carl heard the whoosh of air refilling the hangar bay.

  “What now?” he asked.

  “Out,” Koban directed.

  “Okay.” Carl slipped magnetic slippers over his boots, popped his seat harness, and exited his ship. Surrounded by Snakes, still clutching Tacitus’ server, Joshua was emerging from the shuttle. He also wore a pair of magnetic slippers.

  A dozen or more thick metal plates had been welded to the deck, the overhead, and the nearest bulkhead. Pitting and ripples—melted metal, recongealed?—were all around. Scorches surrounded the air lock that led into the ship proper. Walking closer, his slippers clanking, eying hasty welds, Carl wondered why the entire air lock had been hastily replaced.

  “What the hell happened here?” Joshua asked, joining Carl.

  The shuttle crew, all armed, fell in around them.

  “That’s not clear,” Carl said.

  Something had gone wrong: battle damage, by the looks of it. Why disclose that?

  As the lesser of two risks, he decided. So that if he had smuggled a bomb aboard, a possibility Glithwah could not dismiss, the blast would spare a second hangar bay.

  “Inside,” Koban directed.

  “And what then?” Joshua asked.

  “A long walk.”

  Beyond the air lock, they gained two additional escorts. Carl could imagine either bot dismembering any mere human. They walked, then rode a cargo elevator forward five decks, then walked a bit farther. Some corridors were empty. More were lined with pallets and crates secured to the deck with ropes and nets. Yet other corridors teemed, the armed warriors outnumbered by weary, shuffling families of Snake refugees clutching their few belongings.

  The starship was huge; it could not have been a coincidence when Corinne emerged from a side corridor. Her face was drawn and her clothes were rumpled. Though she had aged in the few months since Carl had last seen her, she appeared unharmed.