by Jay Posey
Prakoso looked over at Thumper, then back to Lincoln, then down at his own hands again. Lincoln leaned forward and put his hand on the man’s shoulder.
“Help us stop it.”
“I would like to go home,” Prakoso said. “I would like only to go home. Whatever comes after, it would be worth it to see my home.”
“Then help us,” Lincoln said. “Help us, and we’ll get you home.”
“You will not,” Prakoso said, looking up. There were tears in his eyes, but he did not heed them. “You can not. Your people would never allow it.”
“I can’t help it if you escape,” Lincoln said. “And a man with your skill set… I bet once we lost track of you, we’d never be able to find you again.”
“You found me once.”
“We found Apsis,” Lincoln said. “Their fault, not yours.”
Lincoln could see the struggle in Prakoso’s eyes.
“I’m going to make that happen,” Lincoln said. “When you’re done helping us, I’m going to get you home. I give you my word on that.”
“I just wanted to solve interesting problems.”
They were so close, Lincoln could feel it. But he was at a loss for which direction to go. What further promise he could make, or what appeal would resonate, and tip Prakoso over to the right side.
“Captain,” Thumper said, from close behind him. “You mind if I talk with Yayan alone for a few?”
Lincoln looked at her over his shoulder. She was standing right behind him now, her fingertips resting lightly on the back of his chair. This wasn’t part of the plan, but something in her look compelled him to let her take over. He nodded and stood.
“All right, sure.” For a moment, he thought about adding a mild threat, making some comment about hoping she could get Prakoso to understand before NID came to take him away, but he caught himself, decided to take it a different direction. Lighten the mood, treat the moment as though Prakoso had already acquiesced. “And is there anything else you want me to do for you two?”
“You could get us some coffee,” Thumper said, and then to Prakoso added, “His coffee’s better than you’d think.”
Lincoln didn’t know what that was supposed to mean exactly, but he didn’t want to press it.
“You drink coffee, Yayan?” he asked.
The man shrugged his shoulders.
“I’ll see what I can scrounge up on this tub,” he said, and left the compartment. Directly across the passageway was the other compartment they’d been given for their use, and the crew had been kind enough to leave behind a personal coffee brewer. Sahil and Wright were nowhere to be found, but Mike was racked out on one of the bunks. He raised his head when Lincoln entered.
“Hey, cap,” he said. “Pop him yet?”
“Not sure,” Lincoln answered, as he walked over to the coffee supplies. “Close, I think. Thumper’s trying to close the deal right now.”
“And you’re doing what?”
Lincoln held up one of the disposable coffee cups.
“Sure, I’d love some,” Mike said with a smile, and dropped his head back to his pillow.
Lincoln took his time, not sure exactly how long Thumper needed to do whatever it was she had in mind. Ten minutes, maybe. When he was done, he handed a cup off to Mike and crossed back over to the other compartment.
Upon entering the compartment, Lincoln knew immediately that something had changed. Outwardly the difference in Prakoso was slight; his shoulders slumped less, his eyes weren’t as quick to avoid contact. But the atmosphere in the room had shifted, as if Lincoln had walked in and interrupted them sharing gossip about him. Thumper had moved her chair around even closer to Prakoso, at a ninety-degree angle to his; neither directly next to him, nor across from him. A position of mediation, or of counsel. She was leaning forward with her arms resting on her knees, but she sat back in her chair when Lincoln came in.
“You two aren’t up to something in here, are you?” Lincoln asked.
Prakoso looked up at Lincoln with a neutral expression.
“Common interests,” Thumper said with a shrug and a smile. Prakoso returned his eyes to his hands when she said it, but one corner of his mouth turned upward.
Lincoln handed Thumper her coffee, and then held the other cup out in front of Prakoso.
“So what’d I miss?”
“Just talking shop,” Thumper said. “Nice to get a chance to chat with someone who speaks the language.”
Prakoso took the coffee. “Thank you.”
He took a sip, and after a moment his eyebrows went up, as if in surprise.
“Pretty good, isn’t it?” Thumper said. Prakoso nodded.
“It’s just coffee,” Lincoln said. “It’s not like I do anything special to it.”
“It’s probably the love that makes it good,” Thumper replied. “’Koso here was just telling me a little bit about his recent work. It’s pretty cool stuff.”
“Yeah?” Lincoln said, trying not to react too strongly to the fact that she’d just called Prakoso by a nickname. “Care to share?”
Prakoso gave him the highlights, and Lincoln found himself gaining a new appreciation for Thumper’s knack for explaining technical things, which previously he’d considered unnecessarily detailed; most of what Prakoso told him sounded just shy of gibberish, but Prakoso was so enthusiastic about it, Lincoln didn’t dare interrupt.
“Which is all to say, the handshake protocol he developed… the one that interfaced with YN-773,” Thumper interpreted. “It’s mutable, self-modifying. Introduce it to a different codebase, and it can penetrate and inject new functionality, or override existing ones.”
“That doesn’t sound like something you’d use just once,” Lincoln said.
“No, it doesn’t,” Thumper said.
“And I helped them secure their relay,” Prakoso added. “A counter to prevent prediction attacks.”
“That’s impressive,” Thumper said.
“I didn’t develop the technique,” Prakoso responded. “Only the implementation.”
“Only,” Thumper said. And she smiled at him like he was a teen pop star. He seemed genuinely embarrassed by the look.
“The relay,” Lincoln said. “Is that something we can intercept?”
“There’s nothing to intercept,” Thumper explained. “It uses quantum simulation, same as our stuff.”
Lincoln gave her what he hoped was his most patient face, waiting for her to actually answer the question.
“Buddy, you don’t want me to get into that. But for all intents and purposes, you can basically pretend the thing here happens simultaneously as the thing over there, with nothing in between.”
“Oh, so magic,” Lincoln said. “You don’t have to make it sound so fancy.”
“It’s not magic, it’s math. And science,” Thumper said, a little defensively. “Anyway, the point is, that’s why we can talk across the solar system in real time. Once an encrypted system’s set up, outside of a really well-executed prediction attack, which our man ’Koso here apparently secured them against, the only way to listen in is to have an ear on one of the actual boxes.”
“Or to spoof one of your own,” Prakoso said. “But to do that, you would need to have physical access first.”
“If we got hold of one, could you crack it?” Lincoln asked. Prakoso shook his head.
“Really?” Thumper asked. “You didn’t leave anything behind for yourself? A back door? Just in case?”
“No,” Prakoso said.
“Are you sure? Because that seems like something I’d do. All that work, not knowing what it was going to be used for. It’d be easy. Why not?”
“Because I am not a fool,” Prakoso said. “I work very hard not to be a loose end.”
“We don’t necessarily need to know what’s in the message, though,” Lincoln said. “We know there’s a bad guy. We know he’s got someone delivering his mail. We don’t have to read the letters if we can just follow the mailman. Is that
something we can do?”
Prakoso furrowed his brow in thought.
“The network has a unique ID obviously, but every box in it has a specific signature,” Thumper said, and she went into that look that meant she was thinking out loud, not necessarily trying to communicate anything meaningful. “If we tap one, we still probably won’t be able to do much with the messages getting sent around. We can maybe figure out what kind of traffic they’re sending, from the pops and clicks. Commo, navigational data, that sort of thing. But you’re right, depending on what we find, we might be able to track some of the return addresses. Figure out how many boxes are out there, maybe where they’re stationed. If we get lucky and they’re sloppy, we might even be able to pull something out of their access connections…”
“Theoretically, yes,” Prakoso said, and his eyes brightened, as he picked up the thread and his mind went to work on the problem. He and Thumper were two peas in a pod.
“If we could just find one… Was there one back at the safehouse?” Thumper asked. “Where Apsis was holding you?”
“No,” Prakoso answered. “But I know the seed for the one I secured.”
“I thought you said you weren’t a loose end.,” Lincoln said.
“I said I try,” Prakoso said. “I didn’t memorize it on purpose. It’s just the kind of the thing that sticks in my brain.”
Thumper was looking at him with barely veiled wonder.
“That’s like five hundred and twelve characters long, at least,” she said.
“Yes,” Prakoso said, a little sheepishly. “But only eight blocks of sixty-four. Anyone can do sixty-four.”
“And how can we use that?” Lincoln asked.
“We might be able to localize its signature, the next time they use it,” Prakoso said. “Might. It would be very complicated. And you would need some very special equipment. Very hard to get.”
Lincoln nodded. “Make me a list.”
* * *
THUMPER AND PRAKOSO went to work, and there was little Lincoln could do to help besides keeping them full of coffee and expensive gear. In the meantime, he spent a lot of time in the Curry’s weight room, and running drills in a hangar with the rest of the team. After a few days, Prakoso and Thumper emerged from their cave with exhausted smiles and some targeting data. Garlington Outpost 15-436. Flashtown.
“If we get access to this one,” Thumper said, “it’ll be a good starting point. Give us some idea of what we’re dealing with.”
Mike let out a low whistle and Sahil shook his head.
“I don’t see there’s any way to do that clean,” Sahil said.
“So we do it the way we have to,” Lincoln said. “And make sure someone else gets the credit.”
“We’re really gonna do this?” Mike said.
“Looks like,” Lincoln said. “I think it’s probably time for me to put that suit through its paces anyway.”
SIXTEEN
DESPITE THE FACT that they’d been given the green light to deploy, Lincoln and his teammates had been standing around waiting for almost an hour and a half for their insertion vehicle to arrive. It happened every time, and it still surprised him, every time. Usually, the last thing Lincoln would want to do in these situations was review the plan again. There was such a thing as over-rehearsal. But in this case, the target site presented enough of a challenge that he felt like one more look wouldn’t hurt anybody. In the down time, he had gathered his team around and activated the holo, projecting a 3D image that only they could see.
Garlington Outpost 15-436 was conveniently positioned about midway between Earth and Mars, and it wasn’t exactly a sanctioned station. In fact, it could barely be considered a station at all. 15-436 had originally been intended as a staging area, more of a supply hold than anything else, for the now-defunct mining corporation. Looking at the scan data, Lincoln could still see hints of Garlington’s design and infrastructure poking out here and there from under all the graftwork. Unfortunately, the company had been one of many to overextend itself in the early, mad rush to fill space and had gone bankrupt before 15-436 had been completed. Technically, Garlington was responsible for ensuring the property was sold off or destroyed. Instead, the outpost had been abandoned. At least by Garlington.
Lincoln didn’t know the full history of the station, but at some point between the origin and now, a few enterprising individuals had claimed the half-completed structure and taken it upon themselves to make it operational. And they’d succeeded, after a fashion. Salvage rights weren’t clear on the topic, and no one on either planet seemed to have all that much interest in enforcing any laws all the way out there anyway. These days, the outpost looked less like it had been constructed and more like it had accreted from man-made space debris.
The floating mass was more popularly known as Flashtown.
Flashtown was run by a woman who called herself Mayor Jon, and everything about the place had the feel of a gangster who wanted desperately to be seen as a legitimate businessperson. They were incorporated, after all; at least according to Mayor Jon’s convoluted interpretation of interplanetary law. Predictably, Mayor Jon’s outpost had attracted a particular demographic, and as a result 15-436 had earned a reputation; they didn’t ask a lot of questions, but they did take security very seriously.
It wouldn’t be fair to call it a pirates’ haven. Flashtown was equally open and welcoming to any entrepreneurial criminal. Lincoln had never had cause to visit the station himself, and going over the schematics with the team one last time, he found himself wishing he could have kept that streak going.
“I don’t think that’s up to code,” Mike said, pointing at the 3D image and at what appeared to be half of a transport’s hull, welded into place to form a passageway.
“This is the best scan we’ve got?” Lincoln asked.
“It’s fresh as of twelve hours ago,” Thumper answered. “Whiskers went out and got as much as they could, filled in a bunch of holes.”
Lincoln pointed at all the dark patches in the projection. “Missed a few.”
“Yeah, well, the place is dense and doesn’t exactly have the nicest floorplan,” Thumper said. “Still think this is a good idea?”
“I never thought it was a good idea,” Lincoln answered. “But if you’re sure what we need is in there, there’s no reason not to go get it.”
He looked over at her.
“You are sure, right?”
“Sure,” she said.
“Sled’s up,” Wright said, pointing further down the hangar. A gunship was finally being positioned for release. The team’s low-signature delivery vehicle was tethered below.
“Two hours late,” Mike said. “Right on time.”
Lincoln shut the map down.
“This is going to be fun,” he said. “I feel good about this.”
“Are you being sarcastic right now?” Thumper said. “I can’t tell with you.”
“I can’t either,” Lincoln said with a smile. “Let’s load it up.”
* * *
FOR MOST OF the trip out, Lincoln left his teammates to their own devices. Like any other team, everyone had their own way of preparing for a hit. Lincoln liked to do a slow check of all his equipment, which was completely unnecessary since he’d triple-checked everything already before they’d left the Curry. Still, there was something meditative about the process, something reassuring about the close contact with the tools of his trade. Wright seemed to have a similar ritual. Sahil was dead asleep.
Eventually the pilot’s voice came over the ship’s internal communication system.
“Rise and shine, kids,” she said. “Sixty mikes out from separation.”
The crew chief went to work and helped Lincoln and his teammates don their suits and run through the systems check on each. Once they’d confirmed all systems green, they transferred into the delivery vehicle attached to the gunship. Technically, the delivery vehicle was called a Lamprey, but everyone in the teams had a different name for i
t: the Coffin. The vehicle was designed for medium-range insertion into non-permissive environments, which was milspeak for sneaking into places people weren’t supposed to go. It was a complete ship on its own, with its own thrusters and guidance systems, but being in one felt less like flying a craft and more like being packed inside a missile and fired off towards some distant target. And there was some truth to that perception: apart from navigation, other systems were streamlined to keep the ship’s signature as low as possible. That meant a bare minimum for essentials like life-support functions, and no weapon systems at all. Which was all fine, as long as no one saw them coming.
The Coffin’s aspirations of virtual undetectability included its physical profile and the vessel was therefore necessarily slender by design. As a result, the interior was so narrow passengers had to sit facing each other down the length of the ship, typically with a knee in between the legs of the occupants across from them when the craft was full. Fortunately, it had capacity for eight; the team spread out as much as they could. The pilot’s seat was up front, distinguished from the others only by its proximity to a console on its left side. Wright sat there to assume command of the ship, while Lincoln went to the rear. The others took up the seats in between.
Once they were loaded in and secure, the gunship pilot kept them informed with a countdown every few minutes until the critical moment.
“Reach 32, you are go for separation,” she said.
“Roger that, Pagan 1,” Wright replied. She looked down the line to Lincoln; he gave her an OK sign. “Reach 32 is go for separation.”
“Here we go,” the pilot answered. “Five, four, three, two, one, and… release. Reach 32 has full separation, trajectory looks good.”
“Copy, Pagan 1,” Wright said. “Reach 32 confirms good release and is systems green.”
“Copy that, Reach 32. Pagan 1 is RTB. Good luck and Godspeed, friends. Pagan 1 out.”
“Thanks for the ride, Pagan 1,” said Wright. “Reach 32 out.”
