by Mark Wandrey
“You’re expecting trouble, ma’am?”
“What have we had the last few months, except trouble?” She cut the connection and sighed. Transferring the new personnel list to her master, she added it to the message update going to Home that afternoon via courier and turned back to other matters. Just in time to get called again.
“What,” she grumbled over her pinlink.
“It’s Long,” her chief engineer said. The Jeha was blunt, as usual.
“Go ahead, chief.”
“We finished the reactor survey. Transmitting results.” She sent the new file to her slate and examined it. More bad news. “As you can see, nine of the 70 containment buffers have been damaged. They still work, or we would possibly have lost containment, but I don’t know how two of them are. In addition, the main pressure vessel is compromised.”
“How long for repairs?” she asked.
“Without assistance from the reactor specialists here, forever. I can replace some of the buffers, but I’d have to open up the engineering section to get at all of them. I can’t fix the pressure vessel. It might be possible to do it here, or back in the yard at Home, but not by myself. It’s a one-piece woven carbon/nanobond. That missile detonation screwed up the release mechanisms for the buffers, and severely stressed the pressure vessel. Another few feet inboard, and it would have punched right into the reactor, and you’d have had a 40-foot-wide hole in the side of the ship where Reactor Two used to be. The Karma specialist companies keep saying they’ll be available in another week.”
“They’ve been saying that for more than two weeks already,” Alexis grumbled. “Okay,” she said, “replace the buffers you can get to.”
“Why bother?” he asked, the clicks audible over the translation. “The two buffers I can’t fix are working through an act of deity alone.”
“Because we don’t have a choice. Is the pressure vessel intact?”
“It leaks,” he said, and Alexis flinched. A leaking pressure vessel meant loose plasma. “On standby, just a trace amount. Under power, who knows? It might be a trickle; it might be a geyser! Shit, the vessel could just rupture under power and—”
“Yeah, I know,” Alexis interrupted, “that same 40-foot hole you mentioned earlier. Still, a questionable reactor is better than a collection of strapped-down parts. Get to it.”
“Yes, Captain.” Once more, she went back to work, and just like before, she was interrupted after only a few minutes.
“Captain?” It was Paka, onboard the Pegasus.
“Go,” she said impatiently.
“A Bakulu scout just arrived in-system.”
She sat up as her XO sent the data feed. The Bakulu had plenty of ships around the galaxy; however, as she reviewed the sensor logs Paka sent, what caught her attention was quickly evident. The ship wasn’t approaching the planet, the station, or heading for the stargate to move on. It was hovering near the emergence point. Damn, Alexis thought; that’s not good.
“Call the senior staff together tomorrow morning,” she said. “I want a meeting to discuss our options for departing Karma in the next 72 hours. Maybe as soon as 48.”
She began to work out a detailed plan, but after a few minutes she gave up and decided to go for a drink. She needed to get out of the office for a few hours. She called Paka and a shuttle arrived with a few marine guards and Paka herself. Several hours later, she was riding back to the ship, chewing over further developments.
She’d met the new commander of Cartwright’s Cavaliers, just returned from an assault contract. Jim Cartwright was barely 19 years old. She’d met him years ago when he was a young boy accompanying his charismatic father, Thaddeus, on a contract. The Cavaliers had taken heavy losses, including their older model ship, captained by Reginald Winslow. Winslow was well known in the space-based merc community. She’d tried to pry him away from Cartwright’s a decade ago and failed; that was unfortunate. It wasn’t the losses, in particular, that interested her, but rather what they’d encountered on the contract.
“A Canavar,” she thought. Monsters of legend no one had seen in thousands of years. And the Cavaliers had managed to acquire a couple of working Raknar, the giant robots used against the Canavars in that cataclysmic war of destruction which gave birth to the Union eons ago. They’d been the only weapons known to be effective against Canavars…besides orbital nuclear bombardment, of course. And somehow, that 19-year-old kid had figured out what no one had been able to do in thousands of years—he’d used a Raknar in combat, and won.
Alexis had sent Jim Cartwright and the other Horsemen a message weeks ago, before the whole incident with the Peacemaker, warning them that something strange was going on. An outpost she’d encountered in a contract had been destroyed, despite seriously reinforced defenses. The damage was too convenient, too extensive. None of them had apparently gotten the message. Her suspicions were even greater now.
She’d sold Jim Cartwright the Bucephalus back at twice what the Hussars paid for it, 10 credits. What need did she have for an Akaga-class cruiser stripped of most of its offensive capabilities anyway? Canavar, Raknar, conveniently-timed contracts, mounting losses; they were all pieces of a puzzle.
She considered sending yet another message to the Horde and Asbaran, then decided against it. The first message never reached the other Horsemen. Someone is intercepting our communications—it was the only reason possible.
When a message was sent, it often took a dozen different paths to get to its destination. Lacking direct faster-than-light communications, messages were given to a number of ships heading in the same direction. When one finally reached the destination, the computers that handled those messages noted its arrival, and all other versions were deleted as they arrived. Otherwise, you’d get the same message a dozen times as ships arrived at different times, having taken different routes. News and GalNet updates propagated in similar ways. All of this was handled by the Information Guild.
Many never gave the Information Guild a second thought. They were as ubiquitous as the old Post Office of Earth. Drop a letter in the slot and forget about it. Their charter from the Union kept messages and data flowing in an uninterruptable form across the galaxy. Even when regional conflicts broke out, messages would still reach their destinations, often carried by the combatants. You could blockade ship traffic in a system, but not data.
Ships arriving in a system instantly transmitted data packets to the stargate which then relayed them onwards to outbound ships and through every GalNet node installed on the system’s worlds. The Information Guild saw to that, and the Cartography Guild did its part. The fine print of passage through a stargate included your consent to move data packets. Data packets which were massively encrypted and said to contain gigabytes of false data as well. Yet despite all of this, her messages had somehow never reached their destinations.
She’d typed up an inquiry to send to the Information Guild and had almost sent it when she stopped. How could a message like hers have been stopped? Only one entity could interfere with messages, but their charter with the Union stated they were never do that. Ever.
If the Information Guild was stopping that communication, it must mean there is something in it they don’t want to go out. And that means they’re reading them, she thought. And if they’ve read that message, they’ve read them all. The algorithms used by the Information Guild were the standard encryption key used on messages. Sure, the Hussars had their own encryptions, but any encryption can be broken, with enough computing cycles. And who had more computing cycles than the Information Guild? They had the proverbial keys to the kingdom, and apparently were using them. That’s a hell of a risk they’re taking, she continued thinking; if word ever got out that the Information Guild was intercepting and decrypting messages from the Mercenary Guild, the shit would hit the fan in a most spectacular manner.
Would the Union revoke a guild’s charter? She wondered if that had ever happened and didn’t know the answer. What was the Union, exc
ept the guilds? Seven powerful guilds held the balance of power within the Union, none more powerful than the other, at least on paper. Sure, the mercenary guild had armies at its beck and call, but the Cartography Guild could just deny them the use of the stargates. Or the Information Guild could refuse to move messages. The Trade Guild could refuse to move your goods, and the Merchant Guild might not allow you to manufacture those goods. It went on and on, a mutually-assured cooperation pact. Mutually-assured, she thought. One guild wouldn’t do something that could bring about retribution from another guild unless they were in agreement.
Her mind kept circling back to that undelivered message. Months had passed. Months that should have taken that message from one end of the galaxy and back again more than once. Months that meant whoever had gotten her messages knew everything that was happening within the Hussars, from their organization to contracts.
Alexis came to a decision. She didn’t know what was going on, but something was. Something dire enough for one or more guilds to conspire against her. If they’d intercepted her messages, they could do much, much worse. Maybe send killers to get her. Or to get her people. Task Force Two.
She didn’t immediately share any of this with Paka. After the XO returned to Pegasus, Alexis went to her office and accessed the desk’s built-in, standalone computer. Using that, she prepared a message that would appear as nothing more than routine comms traffic to anyone other than a captain in the Winged Hussars or above. Once it was prepared, she saved it as a draft on her personal slate, and deleted the original. It wasn’t time to send that message, yet. She wasn’t sure just how far down the rabbit hole this plot went, or if it was all in her imagination. For now, she needed to concentrate on getting them out of Karma as soon as possible.
* * * * *
Interlude
27 Years Ago
Winged Hussars Prime Base
New Warsaw System
“Second born, second place!” Alex growled as she fought to make the shuttle do what she wanted it to, despite all the safety interlocks designed to stop her.
The path through the debris field was chaotic, making it an ideal place for the twins to do insane things where none of their teachers could see.
“You’re going too fast,” Alex yelled over the radio to Kat.
“Scared?” Kat replied. Alex was terrified. They’d played these games many times, but always at relatively low speeds. A mistake with the shuttles at slow speeds and the shields would protect the ship, but they were going more than 5,000 feet per second relative to the debris now. That gave them very little time to plot a course and make the maneuvers required to avoid it. It also meant a solid hit on a sizeable chunk of space garbage would turn them into more space garbage. On her tracking screen the other shuttle pulled a little further ahead. Alex growled and increased her speed another hundred feet per second. “That’s more like it, little sister!” A second later, Kat clipped a large chunk of debris.
Alex saw the flash of discharged energy from the shuttle’s shields on her screens. It would have been intense enough to be visible with the naked eye, if the shuttles had possessed windows. The flattened bullet-shaped shuttles had retractable wings and were made for efficient movement of freight and personnel in the New Warsaw system. Also, because of the nature of their private star system, they had shields to protect against all the junk.
The other ship skewed and bounced off a second hunk of garbage, spinning wildly.
“Kat!” Alex screamed. All that came back was wild laughing. The other girl fired her engines, skewed her movement at the last instant, and bounced off a third piece of trash. While it put her back on course, the delay let Alex catch up and pass her.
“Not going to stop and help your older sister?” Kat’s mocking voice came over the radio.
“Fuck you,” Alex snarled.
Kat pushed her shuttle, but the impacts had damaged the craft, as well as severely depleted the shields. She wasn’t crazy enough to pass that invisible line. Alex soared through the huge hole in the middle of a hulking dreadnought a full second before her sister. The two pulled up and out of the debris field.
“Impressive, little sister.”
“You are crazy,” Alex snapped, “you almost died!”
“Almost only counts for nuclear missiles and EMPs.”
“Echo One, Echo Two, report!” barked an authoritative voice over the radio.
“Good job,” Kat said, “you got us in trouble again!”
“You bitch!”
“Cut the chatter,” the instructor said. “I cut you two loose for 10 minutes of free flight and you go screw around in a debris field? You’re grounded! Report back to base immediately.”
An hour later they were standing in front of the flight academy director for the Winged Hussars. Both stared straight ahead without showing any emotion. They’d had plenty of practice at this.
“Explain yourself,” the director ordered. Despite only being a little over two feet tall, and a lizard, he could be frightening.
“We got carried away,” Kat said.
“You know how it is,” Alex agreed.
“Jivool-shit!” the director chirped, slapping a hand on his desk. Both girls jumped a little. He pointed at Alex. “Your shuttle has impact damage!”
“That was my shuttle,” Kat said. The director looked flustered and changed colors several times in his rage. The twins were hard enough to tell apart by Humans; to most aliens they might as well be the same person. It had given their instructors fits. Both girls giggled.
“Enough!” he yelled. “You two think because your mom owns the place, I won’t flunk you?” Both girls thought about saying yeah, that was right, but Alex thought better of it before her sister pushed the reptile too far.
“No sir,” Alex said. “Besides, you wouldn’t do that, because we’re the best pilots you’ve ever taught!” The director’s eyes focused on both at the same time, a disconcerting thing for most Humans. “Would you?”
“I could ground you for a year; how would that sit? Send you back to the planet. Your mother would be thrilled to see you’d gotten thrown out of school again.” Both girls flushed and looked down. They were incredibly light-skinned, and their white hair made it worse. That little mutation was rare in Humans in space, and it set the girls out instantly as space-born. “But I won’t, because you’re right. You are both gifted beyond reason. Thirteen-year-old Humans have no business being better pilots than their Bakulu instructors. Still, rule-breaking cannot be tolerated.” They’d both started to smile. His last statement wiped the grins from their faces.
Later that night, they were mopping the floor of an abandoned hallway in the base. Prime Base was miles on a side, slowly rotating at a LaGrange point between Home and the stargate. Thousands of the Hussars’ personnel and family lived there, and there was room for a thousand times more. The girls had spent years exploring the far reaches of the ancient station. Their collective knowledge of Prime Base was more extensive than anyone in the Hussars. Compared to Pegasus, it was a planet unto itself.
Mopping empty hallways was a common punishment for them. After the first few times escaping their punishment to explore, the teachers had assigned robots to watch over them. The girls had reprogrammed the computers to do the cleaning and had disappeared anyway. Now a senior student oversaw them. The academy only had two hundred students from among the Hussars and their dependents; the older boy was not happy to be watching the Anarchy Twins.
“How did you pull that off?” Alex asked when she was sure the senior was watching his slate and not them.
“What?”
“That maneuver, the ricochet off the piece of junk?” Her sister looked at her with a mischievous grin. “Tell me, damn it.” Kat tapped her head. “Trying to say you’re smarter than me? You’re not.” They both knew Alex tested slightly higher on mental tests, while Kat was slightly stronger and had faster reflexes.
“No, stupid.” The senior glanced at them, and they
shut up. He was huge compared to them, and like most of the other students, jealous as hell of the boss lady’s two child prodigies. At 13, most kids weren’t old enough to join the academy for another two years. He looked back at his slate and Kat brushed her hair back away from her ear and touched her pinlink.
“What did you do?” Alex asked.
“I hacked the autodoc when we got our last upgrades!”
“You didn’t?” Kat grinned hugely. The girl had been absolutely fascinated with pinplants since they were little. When they’d gotten planted two years ago, it was the happiest day of her life. Alex had been ambivalent about the brain-implanted sensor leads, and she had only been excited about it because it meant they could start their flight training. Frankly, Alex was more excited about her growing bust line, and the attention it was getting her from older boys. Kat must have done it when they got their motor cortex mods a couple weeks ago. “What did you get?”
“I got a full co-processor and 100 exabytes of storage,” Kat said with a proud grin. Alex was both impressed and appalled. That level of modification was restricted for medical reasons. Doing it to a child was unethical and dangerous. The locations for the implants were inside the cranium, and movement as the cranial sutures closed could cause major complications.
“Why did you do that?”
“You saw me out there,” Kat bragged, “and that’s just the beginning. I’ve been dating a boy in medical. I’m going to eventually get his access code to the implanting autodoc and do even more!”
Alex didn’t know what was worse, her fooling around with some older boy in the medical section, or doing it just to trick him and then have an unauthorized medical procedure done on herself. Her conscious told her which was worse.
“I’m going to tell mom,” Alex said. Kat’s head snapped around, her eyes flashing dangerously.
“You wouldn’t dare,” she hissed.
