Impact Event (Dargo Pearce Chronicles #1)

by David N. Frank

  “We all have our secrets, Miss Rivis.”

  “Of for fuck’s sake, call me Jula already,” she said disarmingly as she turned back to her work. He realized that he had already been referring internally to her that way for quite some time.

  “OK. Jula. So, is there really a way we could use the flash drive QCOM without blowing ourselves up?”

  “Yes.”

  Silence. She continued to work, seemingly lost in thought. Pearce was about to speak up again when she shouted triumphantly. She seemed to redouble her efforts, typing and swiping with practiced competency. Finally, she unplugged the wires from the circuit board and held it up high in the air like a trophy.

  “One fully functional 3D printer coming right up.”

  “That’s it? Sixty seconds to reprogram a vidplayer into a printer?”

  “This one is actually from a cleaning bot. But it is just the bios that gets programmed into it. All of the custom software is still perfectly fine on the soft matter storage. None of that was affected by the surge.”

  Pearce mouthed a suitably impressed “Oh” as Jula inserted the card into the innards of the machine and then closed the access door to it. She pressed the power button and stepped back as the printer began its startup sequence successfully. The pride was writ on her face as the input display flashed “System Ready”.

  Pearce stepped forward and gave her a high five and a bright smile, sharing in her joy for a moment. As their palms parted and fell back towards their sides, Pearce was acutely aware of their physical proximity. They had breached the personal space demarcation, and any usual awkwardness was notably absent.

  Jula cocked her head fractionally and took a half-step back, leaning slightly against the printer with her elbows, back arched slightly. Some lizard-brain vestigial instinct interpreted the move as lordosis in nature, and stirred up a dose of hormones as efficiently as his chem-synthesizer.

  He tried to casually return to his own spot leaning against the door frame, but it took three full steps backwards to do so. He clasped his hands in front of his body and averted his eyes from below the neckline, focusing instead on her left ear tattoo. Even there, he found no respite in the slowly undulating colors. If Jula noticed any of his reactions, she gave no sign of it. He was simultaneously relieved and disappointed when she began to speak again.

  “So, the QCOM in the flash-drive is just like any other. Single quantum-entangled pair for every drive ever produced, with the sisters all sitting in an ultra-secure GTS Hypercom facility along with all of the PAN Array pair-ends. Just like the civilian Hypernet, except in a bunker underneath a thousand meters of rock and protected by an entire battalion of soldiers. It’s completely isolated from any external network contact and just in case someone decides to dig a tunnel is also completely enclosed by the galaxy’s largest faraday cage. The entire system runs on a proprietary protocol coded in a custom design language, both of which are only known by a few hundred people alive.”

  Pearce pointed a finger pistol at Jula and clicked his tongue, eliciting a nod in return.

  “Part of my job is keeping track of all of those people, which is one reason I was so skeptical of the theory that the PAN was hacked in some manner. Anyway, on the shipboard side you can’t isolate the systems in such a secure manner, so as you know GTS instituted a zero tolerance tampering policy. If any part of the closed system acts in any irregular or unauthorized manner, explosives blow out the drive and your ship isn’t going anywhere.”

  “You know, there are rumors that is all just a big lie.”

  “It’s only happened three times in over a hundred years. Two times warships took battle damage to components of the system which were interpreted as violations. One way back during the Coffee Wars and the other at Galedon Prime. The third was a group of smugglers that tried to disconnect the system only a few years after it was put into service, way out in interstellar space. They thought if they were out of range of any of the PAN stations that they could get away with it. But these geniuses didn’t even have a QCOM onboard to call for help, and so it took several years for their conventional distress signal to reach anyone. When help finally arrived they found a derelict with a bunch of bodies and several million credits worth of contraband.”

  “Rough way to go. So if we can’t touch anything to do with the flash drive how do we use its QCOM to get a message out?”

  Jula stood straight and crossed her arms over her chest. “We use the safety overrides themselves to send a message, in binary.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “We’re inside the outer perimeter, so any attempt to engage the drive will trigger a remote shutdown, but very importantly will not trigger the self-destruct or any of the other safeguards that could harm the ship. If I created a program to initiate the drive rapidly at a fixed set of intervals, I can essentially send a simple message in binary. 1s for each attempt, 0s for each shutdown.”

  “Won’t that set off all sorts of alarms with the local PAN?”

  “Absolutely, but there isn’t really a security force in the system to swing by and reprimand us, is there? And the PAN won’t launch active countermeasures at a ship simply for trying to engage within the restricted zone, no matter how many times we attempt it.”

  “OK, but how do we send that message to someone? Other than to an underground GTS bunker?”

  Jula flashed a smile. “Perimeter activations are an extremely rare event. Even one of them would set all sorts of alarms off at GTS. A couple hundred spaced out in a clearly organized manner should get the entire company on highest alert. It won’t take long for them to figure out that there is a message hidden within the data.”

  Pearce mulled over the idea. It was technically brilliant, and Pearce was incredibly impressed at Jula’s outside-the-box thinking. It wouldn’t be secure by any means; whatever they transmitted was sure to leak throughout the Hypernet in minutes. But as a last resort, it had tremendous value.

  “Jula, this is once again fantastic work. I’ll draft up a message for you to code. Work with Pilosni to load it up, but don’t send anything for now. We don’t want to broadcast these developments quite so openly unless we have no other choice.”

  Jula beamed, and Pearce excused himself before he had chance to further entangle himself.

  ***

  They were halfway to the perimeter hours later when the situation dramatically changed. Pearce was back on the bridge, dozing in the chair he had come to call his own. He’d instituted a rotating sleeping schedule once the main comm system had been repaired and the 3D printer had started spewing out parts for the QCOM. He awoke instantly to a shrill alarm, cobwebs obliterated from his mind as if by flamethrower.

  “New contact just flashed-in!” the young Dewey shouted excitedly. “Arrival corridor Alpha. She’s squawking a transponder…CNS-626 Tropicana.”

  The Captain exchanged a glance with Pearce. “I thought she wasn’t due for another three days?”

  “She’s not,” Pearce replied, moving over to stand near Dewey. “Bring her up on the main optical scope. What’s the time lag here?”

  “Almost four hours,” Dewey replied.

  Pearce rubbed at two days’ worth of beard stubble on his chin as he thought about the time frames in question, his VIA automatically performing the calculations. “So they arrived in system four hours ago, at a distance of four light hours, and we’ve been running dark for just over eight hours, which means they arrived just after the point in time where they could have seen us carry out that burn.”

  Dewey nodded. “Yes, we should be relatively safe if they don’t pick us up on other sensors or an optical scan. Especially with all this wreckage expanding throughout the system.”

  Time lag was a complicated aspect of any spacefaring Navy, and Pearce wasn’t used to thinking with such scales as a ground-pounder. When dealing with solar-system spanning distances you had to tactically understand that what you were “seeing” had happened at some point in the past, until yo
u reached relatively close ranges.

  “Should we hail them and send over the FLASH traffic, Captain?” Pilot Pilosni inquired. Pearce had helped the crew create a standard ConFed FLASH priority message with a military-style update of the developments at New Shanghai, including data files with all of the sensor readings and the comically short video showing the Scorpio’s destruction. They had instructions to deliver it in any way they possibly could. They even had a copy loaded into one of the Emergency Escape Vehicles triggered to jettison at a moment’s notice if they came under a similar attack. A similar but less verbose message was loaded into the autonav if they needed to utilize Jula’s methodology.

  The Nightingale’s Captain looked at Pearce with deference.

  “Not quite yet, Miss Pilosni,” Pearce replied. “Let’s see what she does.”

  “What she does, Sir? It’s a Confederation Navy ship,” the pilot responded incredulously.

  “A ship that arrived days earlier than expected, and right after a massive attack wiped out every ship in the system. Trust, but verify. We’re not going anywhere for another eight hours, so let’s keep our emissions silent for a few more minutes.”

  “Got her on the scope now. We’re way past effective range and it’s a little jumpy though,” Dewey announced as the main viewscreen switched from displaying a tactical map to a view of the Tropicana. The image of the ship was dark, grainy, and tiny on the picture, and appeared to be jumping all over the place. The reality was that they were far past the range of optical zoom and so were using advanced digital zooming and ultra-deep field techniques to create a hybrid image. The fact that both ships were moving through space meant that the optiscope had to constantly adjust its aim to keep the ship in sight, and with the distances involved there was no way to do so smoothly; hence the jumping.

  “What are we waiting for, exactly?” Pilosni asked.

  “A reaction,” Pearce replied, intently watching viewscreen.

  “They arrived past the point where they could have witnessed the attack, though,” Dewey noted.

  “Standard operating procedure upon entering a system with friendly forces is to initiate Hypernet contact with the ranking officer and either ask for orders or, in this case, inform such officer of the assumption of command by a higher ranking officer. The response would be instantaneous and the Tropicana should know something is wrong already by not receiving a reply.”

  “But they still wouldn’t know what was wrong for several hours at that range,” Pilosni argued.

  “Correct, so the next logical steps would be…” Pearce trailed off with a leading question.

  “System-wide hail and a deep scan,” Dewey answered enthusiastically.

  “That’s right, hence we wait and see.”

  Minutes ticked by with no noticeable actions from the Tropicana. It hadn’t even begun a solar insertion burn. It just floated there passively, no active emissions, just like the Nightingale. After ten minutes of inaction Pearce had made up his mind; something was amiss, and he couldn’t be sure of the Tropicana’s loyalties. It was time for some drastic action.

  He made his way over to an open auxiliary console and found his way into the comm system. His VIA linked into the messaging application and uploaded an incredibly advanced zero day exploit, which he attached to an Omega-supplied FLASH OVERRIDE message. This level of message precedence indicated command authority traffic at the highest levels.

  The message would be received by the Tropicana’s ASI and the exploit would instantly create a backdoor for Pearce to gain root access over the ship, hopefully without a human on board even knowing they had received a transmission. It would be burning an irreplaceable and priceless asset if detected, but it was worth the risk.

  Next he attached a simple virus designed to propagate throughout the ships data banks and gather anything that could possibly be linked to this situation. The virus had a limited AI that was smart enough to know where and what to look for, having specifically flagged FTL, gravimetrics, advanced weapons, and several other relevant criteria. He instructed the virus to send everything it gathered back via directional lasercom just prior to reaching the GTS perimeter.

  His VIA provided the mathematical code for the virus to compute the optimal time to send such a transmission regardless of the Tropicana’s position. With the calculated round-trip transmission times and a buffer for the virus to carry out its search there should be just enough time to receive the transmission before they reached the GTS perimeter.

  Finally, he programmed the message to delete itself and all records of its existence immediately after being received and executed, and the virus to self-destruct in five hours.

  “I’m sending a coded directional transmission to the Tropicana now. We’ll get a response right before we reach the perimeter. Depending on that response, we’ll either flash-out of the system or stick around and start talking openly. We’ll maintain silent running conditions until that time.”

  With that, he transmitted the message and an invisible narrow-band laser shot across space towards the location where the Tropicana would be in just about four hours, if they didn’t change course or adjust speed at all. He didn’t have to worry about being too precise…at nearly 40 AUs the laser beam would diffuse over an area ten times the size of the ship itself.

  Now they went back to waiting.

  ***

  Pearce was discussing their eventual destination with the captain a few hours later when the detection alarm announced the arrival of yet another ship.

  “New contact on visual! It’s a…uh…” Dewey trailed off as he quickly interacting with the controls of the sensor terminal. Pearce’s eyes focused on the main viewscreen, which now displayed two tiny ships on the jittery image.

  “Spit it out, Dewey,” Lillywhite ordered as he walked over towards the young navigator with Pearce, sipping on a cup of coffee.

  “She just appeared, sir. No flash-in…I ran back the scope feed to be sure. One second, nothing. The next, the ship is just there. And I can’t get any verification on the identity or even the ship type. Nightingale just comes back with ‘unknown’.”

  Pearce watched the scene for a moment, already knowing what the outcome would be. The fact that the ship appeared at all and hadn’t simply launched another stealth assault screamed collusion with the Tropicana, and therefore the Confederation. Suddenly the Scorpio’s orders coming directly from the Directorate and bypassing the chain of command made a lot of sense, although Pearce doubted the Directorate members themselves were involved. More likely was that another secretive group within the Confederation was using black budget funds and Omega-style access levels to carry out a nefarious plot. That they would kill tens of millions of people just to foment war in a ploy for more political power was unconscionable. He had to get word back to the Director.

  With a thought his VIA displayed the time remaining until they cleared the outer perimeter; just under one hour at their current speed.

  “Collect as much data as you can, but be prepared for emergency evasive maneuvering at any moment,” Pearce ordered. “We have no idea how fast that ship can travel at FTL, so it could be upon us at literally any moment.” He looked over at the Captain as he continued. “Let’s go ahead and prep the main engines and spin up the Flash Drive for immediate usage.”

  The Captain quickly gave the orders, finally energized to be taking some proactive action once again. “We can be at the perimeter in thirty seconds, and flash out another thirty after that.”

  Pearce shook his head. “Set the ship to immediately do so if we detect anything even remotely near us. But we need to wait for that return message from the Trop’ now more than ever, and if we alter course or speed we’ll miss the return signal.”

  Pilosni, ever the contrarian, chimed in from her station. “What makes you so certain that they will decide to even respond?”

  To which Pearce coolly replied, “Who ever said that I was asking them to?”

  TWELVE

>   Interstellar Space

  CS Nightingale

  Pearce leaned back on his crash bunk and rested his shoulders on the cold bare bulkhead it abutted, letting out a tired sigh. Closing his eyes, he continued flipping through the many pages of data that his little virus had been able to extract and transmit.

  The Nightingale had received the transmission as intended right before they reached the outer perimeter at Shenzen and escaped using the A-Drive, without any incident or further developments. They were now making best speed for the nearest Confederation military base, nearly five days away.

  Pearce had finally retired from the bridge, grabbed a bite to eat, and had spent the last hour in his cabin, using his VIA to dig through the Tropicana data dump. Nearly thirty-six hours without real sleep was beginning to take a toll on him, however, not to mention the high levels of stress. He had yet to find anything relevant in the data and was considering catching some sleep when he received a knock from Jula, who was standing outside of the door to his cabin.

  He nodded needlessly and the door slid open to reveal Jula Rivis in a stained Nightingale jumpsuit, the upper half of which was rolled down and tied around her waist. She wore a sleeveless top and both it and the majority of her exposed skin was covered in grime. It was the first time Pearce really had a chance to take in the totality of the woman at a distance, and he found himself liking what he saw. She was more than a head shorter than Pearce, with a body more akin to a soldier or athlete than a model or debutante. And smart as an AI. All of his prerequisites met.