Deadland Drifter: A Scifi Thriller

by J. N. Chaney

  Sara blinked at him. “But how?”

  17

  The Bean Counter, Space Port Romeo 9, Dobulla UX8, Union Space

  They needed more information before acting. There was a possibility they could pick up new leads on Zanpus, but it was also possible that those trails had long gone cold and that they would have just wasted their time traveling there.

  Burner reminded Sara that they had one more potential source of information they had not had time to fully inspect: the video footage they had taken from the gun store. Two more weeks’ worth of footage sat in Burner’s storage, ready to be reviewed. It wasn’t the most exciting task in front of them, and neither of them felt great about sitting around, safe in their hotel room, while this group of terrorists was making plans to blow up a crowded space station, but it would have been irresponsible for them to run off and chase intangible leads without first exhausting what they had in front of them.

  As they prepared to dig into the second week of video data, Burner went to the restroom to turn off the tap. With any luck, the terrorists would not yet realize that the bug had already been discovered and were just considering the interruption of their feed a normal and expected glitch. These tiny bugs were notorious for their blackout periods, not surprising when you consider the size of the transmitter they have to work with and the distance those signals have to travel. Just going into a tunnel can cause the signal to be blocked for hours. If Burner let the bug hear them for small bursts of time, they might still be able to turn it to their advantage later.

  Sara and Burner continued to work on the next hour of footage while keeping their conversations restricted to either misinformation or casual flirting. The flirting had seemed to bother the terrorist, so he thought it might get under his skin if they kept doing it. They discussed fake plans to disappear into the Deadlands, to place themselves in the protection of the Union, or to stay right here and force the terrorists to come to them. Burner hoped they were wasting the terrorists time by forcing them to prepare for all those possibilities.

  They were nearing the end of the last week of data and were losing hope when Burner saw something that caught his interest. He nodded to Sara, who got up and headed into the bathroom to pick up the bug, then gently wrapped it in a towel and returned it to the bathroom. She then rejoined Burner, the two huddling together so they could speak quietly enough for the bug not to pick them up.

  “I still think it would be safer if we just smashed that thing.” Sara’s gaze was still on the bathroom door. “Or, at least, keep it behind running water. We’re taking a big risk. If they happen to overhear something we don’t want them to—”

  Burner shook his head. “It’s worth the risk. We’re able to feed them whatever false information we want now. And if we had left it disabled for too long, they would have realized something was up.”

  She gave him a teasing smile. “Are you sure you weren’t just worried about wasting water?”

  He didn’t deny it. “Anyway, look what I found. Right at the last day of our footage.”

  The feed he showed her was of several suspicious looking individuals all gathering together outside the store. Like the man who had carried in the bag, they wore long brimmed hats and knew how to position themselves to keep the cameras from revealing their faces. But they were definitely gathering, one arriving after the other. Most likely a prearranged meeting.

  None of them went into the store, though they did gesture to it a lot. If this was the group of terrorists that Burner was looking for, this might have been part of their planning phase, when they were discussing how to best strongarm the shopkeeper to do their dirty work. They kept together for fifteen minutes before dispersing into separate directions.

  Burner rewound the feed to when the first of the group arrived and began watching it again. “Wish we could hear what they are saying.”

  Sara narrowed her eyes at the small screen. “You wouldn’t hear anything. They’re not talking at all.”

  “Huh?” Burner took a closer look at the mouths in the recorded gathering and realized that Sara was right. Their lips hardly moved, certainly not enough to hold a full conversation. He had missed it the first time due to his focus on the tips of their hats while waiting for a single millisecond of slip when a face might be revealed. “Well, that’s strange. What’s the point showing up for a meeting like that if no one is going to say anything?

  “Maybe they’re communicating in some other way?” Sara pointed at their hands. “Sign language?”

  Their hands were moving rapidly, though it was tough with the quality of the videos to make out what they were doing. Burner managed to catch one clear flash of a comm and knew that must have been the key to how they were communicating.

  Sara tapped her fingers together after Burner shared this information. “I guess that makes sense. I mean, you’re going to meet in a public space during broad daylight to discuss an extensive terrorist conspiracy. You’re going to want to make sure no one is able to overhear you.”

  That was one mystery solved, but unfortunately it didn’t get them any closer to identifying the terrorists or what they were talking about. Burner watched in frustration as once again the group split.

  What they needed was a way to access that message history. If he could identify the network they were connected to, he might be able to convince or bribe the overseers of that network into letting him dig through the access logs until he narrowed it down to connections at the same time as the video showed. But Dobulla was a connected and technologically integrated planet with countless numbers of networks, including local, global, and even system-wide scale. He could spend weeks tracking down every network that could have provided connectivity in front of that gun store and still be nowhere.

  Sara was scanning her own copies of the files to see if there were any other camera angles that might have had a better view of the gathering. Watching her skip through the files reminded Burner of all the extraneous signals that his download had captured. Comms, handhelds, AI assistant protocols, the scanning program had caught them all. And that might include the signals that the gathering had been using.

  After sharing this with Sara, the two began to rapidly sift through the mass of signals for anything that might be useful. First, they eliminated any signals that were clearly background noise, easily distinguishable by the static in the data. Next, they disqualified signals that were consistent before and after the time frame of the meeting since they had been unaffected by the targets’ activities. Their field narrowed significantly but they still had a mountain of data. They decided to focus just on the most sporadic of the signals during the target timeframe.

  When working with this much more limited data set, they were able to identify three signals with above average levels of security. One was communicating in the evening hours with a corporate mainframe, indicative of an employee working remotely. They eliminated it.

  The other two sent data in shorter bursts, minutes at a time. Sometimes the data was sent in almost indefinably small chunks, suggestive of text messages. It was highly likely they were the ones used by the terrorists.

  Now that they had identified the signals, they could dig into the network protocols that they had used and do a trace of other activity those device addresses had carried out. Burner left that task to Sara, who seemed to be more up to date and faster with the technological stuff than he was. One of the costs of being retired.

  He watched over her shoulder as she worked. “Are any of these signals routed off planet?”

  She nodded without looking away from her screen. “Yeah, some of them are.”

  Burner did a quick calculation in his head to determine the exact time he had been abducted. He gave Sara the time. “Can you check if any of the signals were going off planet at that moment?”

  Sara tapped a few times on the screen, adding filters to the data in front of her to narrow it down to his parameters. “One going off planet. Communication was connected for rough
ly eight minutes.”

  He smiled victoriously. “That’s our terrorist.” It was always satisfying when a theory panned out. “Can we decrypt what they were saying?”

  She gave him a sarcastic smile. “Maybe with several weeks and a crack team of cryptographers.”

  So much for getting the play-by-play of the meeting in front of the gun shop. But maybe there were other ways they could use this discovery. “Can we track where else they communicated?”

  Her eyes gazed off into the distance for a moment. “That one would be a bit easier. But once a signal is routed off-world, we have no way of knowing where it’s going.”

  “Then we do this the old-fashioned way.” He pointed in a grandiose way to himself. “Good old police work.”

  She cocked her head at him. “How long were you an investigator, again?”

  “Long enough.” He leaned in conspiratorially so he could speak with emphasis without being loud enough to be picked up by the bug. “We need to run down each signal to the node it’s communicated with and sift through the communications that have run through that node. Contact chaining. It’ll be a lot, not going to lie, but not an impossible amount of data. And it just might yield a clue about who is communicating with the terrorist hub.”

  Her eyes perked up as he spoke. “So you’re thinking they will be less careful about encryption and security when they’re not communicating with each other?”

  “I’m counting on it.”

  In Intelligence, there was a unit whose specific function was sifting through technical data and providing analysis reports in ways that could be comprehended by the less tech-savvy. It was not a glamorous job. Nor was it one that received attention by the media when they portrayed the workings of the Intelligence apparatus. Whenever the tech side of the industry was represented, the focus was always on the hackers (who, Burner had learned, were actually much fewer in number and spent less time in front of screens in dark rooms than their fictional counterparts).

  And yet every operative knew to stay on the good side of those working in Technical Analysis. Their work was tedious, time consuming, and absolutely essential.

  Burner wished he had access to them right now. For hours he and Sara worked in silence, painstakingly tracking every signal. At some point they replaced the bug on the counter nearby so it could listen in while they worked, though the work they claimed to be doing was browsing the local dark webs in a futile effort to track down the origin of the sniper rifle.

  They frequently checked the news feeds for anything about Pharbis. It was nerve-wracking, trying to focus on such tedious work while worrying that at any moment they might learn that they were too late and the terrorists had made good on their threats. Sara was not able to check in with the Union about what was happening at the space station because protocol dictated special precautions when she was out on an operation. Plus, they didn’t know how else the terrorists might be monitoring her. If she assumed the signals from her devices were compromised by now, then she was stuck until she either got somewhere she could physically check in or until she could pick up a new comm device. She and Burner had discussed grabbing a cheap disposable at the space port when they were finally ready to depart.

  The biggest difference, in Burner’s opinion, between a rookie agent and a seasoned one wasn’t the ability to make deductions, to win a gunfight, or tell a lie without blinking. It was the ability to sit still. When you’re new, you think the solution to saving the world is to always be on the move, to always be grappling face-to-face with the enemy. One of the hardest lessons an agent learns is that sometimes more is accomplished by taking the time to work through all the information available, even when the clock was ticking.

  That’s why Sara and Burner, despite both being anxious about not actively trying to track down the bomb, were able to set their nerves aside and do the work in front of them. They were both seasoned professionals.

  They kept a datapad between them on the bed to compile everything they had found. Sara looked up as Burner added another piece of data to the pad. “Why don’t we take a look at what we have so far?” he suggested.

  Their first deduction based on the compiled list was that there were four terrorists who had communicated with the gun store. Likely the three in the video and one more, perhaps the one who had deposited the sniper bag. There could be more of them on the planet, or in this cell, but they could be sure of at least four.

  Their targets were smart enough not to use any names, even in their communications outside the group, so Burner and Sara were forced to come up with codenames for each of them to tell them apart. There was Mr. Two-Pizzas, a guy who ordered two pizzas every couple of days. Then there was Blabbermouth, the one who sent by far the most (and largest) text messages. The Clock sent a check-in message every day at exactly the same time. And last but not least, Horndog seemed to be quite the fan of adult entertainment, at least according to the bill on a hotel room they had tracked him to.

  Unfortunately, all four trails ended up in dead ends. Shortly after the gun store meetup, all four of them became ghosts.

  Sara pointed out that their data was out of date. “It only goes up to the moment you pulled it. If we go back, we could pick up more recent information. Maybe the terrorists have been back since.”

  Burner shook his head. “It would take us time we don’t have to travel all the way back across town. And it would be wasted effort. We’ve agreed that at least some of these guys must be military, right? Well, they’re going to be following military-like protocols. Once the assassination was in play, they were never going to return to the gun store. They’ll have been following a protocol of complete silence in the hours leading up the assassination as well. There’s very little chance of us gaining more useful data.”

  Sara scanned through the rest of the list, which included purchases, message timestamps, and hotel stays. They were all potential leads but were more likely time wasters. Their targets had already proved their ability to avoid having their faces seen on cameras, and that wouldn’t change for hotel cameras.

  But as she scanned, one purchase stood out to her. “Someone purchased a ticket on a passenger transport ship to someplace called Demeter.”

  He gave her a dubious look. “You’d think that people like this would have their own ship, don’t you?”

  The quirky smile returned to her lips. “You don’t.”

  Burner shrugged. “Maybe I’m just a man of the people and enjoy public transport. Anyway, this says there was only one ticket purchased, and we’re looking for at least four guys.”

  Her smile faded. “Maybe the others were smarter with how they purchased their tickets? If they purchased them in person, it wouldn’t show up in the data dump.”

  He raised his hands defensively. “Could be. But maybe it’s just an anomaly. Someone else that used that node. The kid in the upstairs apartment buying a ticket to go visit his grandma.”

  She gave him a look that was dead serious. “Or maybe it’s our only lead.”

  Burner smiled. He had only been playing devil’s advocate, pushing back against her lead to steer her into talking herself into following this course with him. Her eyes narrowed as she came to that realization, and she sighed and shook her head.

  Sara began typing on the data pad. “Guess we’re off to Demeter, then. Let’s see just how far it is.”

  The answer, it turned out, was very far. Demeter was a colony planet deep within the Deadlands. Complicating matters, there was only one passenger transport ship that made the trip out there every other day.

  “Risky for a terrorist getaway,” Sara muttered as she read a list of travel warnings on the official Union record of the planet.

  Burner thought about that for a moment. “Or very smart. It’s not a place that can be easily tracked. They’re also unlikely to run into any Union out there. If they’re smart enough to keep on the good side of the local Ravagers and crime lords, they could operate in anonymity for years and the U
nion would never think to look for them there.”

  “Guess we’ll find out when we get there.” Sara tapped a few more times on the screen. “But first, we need a ship to get ourselves there.”

  18

  The Bean Counter, Space Port Romeo 9, Dobulla UX8, Union Space

  They ate a quick room service dinner while packing up the few meager possessions that would be safe for them to bring with them. Hank’s bag could be trusted to be clean (or if there was a bug, it was a Union one, which was slightly preferable) so they loaded it with their weapons and gear. They discarded their old outfits and changed into the new ones Hank had provided. The quick acting hair dye allowed them to subtly change the tone of their hair colors without looking fake. Sara applied make-up to make herself look older, while Burner used a bit of powder to lighten the skin around his nose and eyes.

  The effect was a subtle transformation, not enough to withstand point-blank scrutiny but plenty to not be picked out of a crowd. That was the trick to quick disguises: subtly. Sure, when you have months of preparation and a team of artists behind you, an identity could be crafted that looked so different from you that your own mother wouldn’t recognize you. But with a quick disguise, attempting to make major modifications risks creating something that looks off, a flaw that draws unwanted attention to you and unneeded scrutiny to the masquerade.

  Finally packed and donning their new looks, they had just one thing left to do: decide what they were going to do with the transmitter, currently hidden in the bathroom.

  They discussed the pros and cons of taking it with them. Burner liked the idea of continuing to feed the enemy false information, anything that would throw them off of how close Sara and he were getting. Also, it had been in his tooth, and he had gone through great pains, literally, to get it. Sara was concerned that the device might have a location tag. They could feed the terrorists false information all day, and it wouldn’t matter if the location data didn’t match up with what they were saying. It also risked helping the enemies prepare an ambush for them.