The problem was the composition of that sphere.
It wasn’t a real-time image of a Scrapheap. It wasn’t even a replica of an existing Scrapheap.
Instead, the sphere was an amalgam of different pieces of information, cobbled together from data files so old that half of them were corrupted, new data that had streamed in after going through a dozen (or more) different communications channels, and her best guess.
Ironically enough, the guess wasn’t what worried her. The guess was, in some ways, the only thing she was certain about. She knew what she had based her guess on.
The rest of it was as ephemeral, as speculative as an actual ghost.
She ran her hands through her short-cropped black hair, then made herself stop. Her hair was thinning—age, mostly, although her doctor told her that stress contributed as well. They could boost the hair follicles using some nano-genetic something or other which would stop the hair loss, but she had to take two days off for the procedure, and she hadn’t had two days off in a row in more than a year.
Of course, she probably couldn’t ask for time right at the moment, because she was the only one who understood the new data that had come her way, although understood was a large overstatement.
She glanced at the dozens of smaller holograms of the Scrapheaps floating around her. Those holograms were multicolored and sparkly. The dark bluish-black of their sectors of space shone through all of the area around the ships contained inside the Scrapheaps. Outside of the Scrapheaps, pinpricks of light winked at her or slashes of white cut across the edges of the image, promising galaxies beyond what she could already see.
The force fields around those Scrapheaps all sparkled just a little, showing anyone who came too close that something weblike and powerful would prevent entry.
And then beyond the force fields, bits of ships stored in the Scrapheap. Those ships appeared mostly as shadows or negative images, black and silver and gray, against the gleaming backdrop.
Even when there was a problem at a Scrapheap, she found the hologram reassuring. It reminded her of the Scrapheap’s size and history, its place in the universe, the way that it was more than a single problem or a single incident.
She usually loved looking at the Scrapheaps, feeling as if they were bits of reassurance, resources that the Fleet had and almost never used. Sometimes she thought of them as a cascade of bubbles, the kind the children made with their breath and a bubble wand full of nontoxic soap in the rec area of one of the school ships.
But this…
First of all, the gigantic sphere wasn’t multicolored. It was gray and white and black, with just an occasional flash of sepia or yellow or brown. Those flashes weren’t something coming across the image. They were corrupted data, information she would never be able to retrieve.
Second, it made no difference if she was looking at the images in two-dimensions or three. The missing information still slashed across the data stream like someone had wiped a finger across condensation on the surface of a glass.
Every time she focused on those slashes, her stomach twisted—and she thought again of her options.
Option one: she could ignore this, pretend she hadn’t understood what she was looking at. That wasn’t too far off the truth. She was afraid she was interpolating what she was looking at according to her own biases, although she had just spent the better part of an hour arguing with herself over that. She wasn’t exactly sure what her biases would be, in this instance.
Option two: call in someone else to help her make a decision. But that would mean getting them up to speed, which might mean infecting them with her biases again, and it would prevent option one from ever being implemented.
Option three: follow protocol.
Protocol, though, was what was making her queasy. Protocol, in this instance, would risk several hundred lives.
And over what? Something that didn’t matter anymore?
Or did it?
She started to reach for her hair again, and then stopped. Instead, she stood up, her shoulders penetrating some of the nearby holograms. She commanded them to float above her so that she wouldn’t become part of the images, then she walked around the gigantic sphere, not to see more information, but to consider it all.
Four days ago, data had bounced off a relay that still existed in Sector Base V, even though that base had been closed for at least a thousand years. Because that relay worked, the data found its way to the Fleet.
At first, the data was considered insignificant, something that was a glitch in the system. Until another stream of data arrived at the same time the next day, and then again yesterday.
Someone glanced at the data stream, saw that it related to a Scrapheap, and forwarded that data to Gāo’s department. No one in the department understood what they were seeing, so they had called her in.
She had seen ancient data streams before, as a cadet when she was training in Scrapheap maintenance, but she had never seen data streams like this.
This one had clearly gone through several communications nodes, and not all of them clean nodes. Plus, this data wasn’t in any kind of form, the way that data from a Scrapheap should have been.
Scrapheaps had maintained their own logs for as long as there had been Scrapheaps. And the data she should have received from a Scrapheap should have been in the form of a log. Or of some kind of incident report.
This one was not a log and did not have an incident report. These data streams that had come through seemed the same, although closer examination showed that they weren’t.
At the beginning of each data stream, there was a request, in the same words and with the same signature. It was a request for repair and maintenance, so that the Scrapheap could create logs.
Scrapheaps had redundant systems, so if something ceased working, some other part of the system would take over. The reports and logs were the only way the oldest Scrapheaps could communicate with the Fleet itself, so they were designed to continue, even as other parts of the Scrapheap fell apart.
It took her half the morning to synthesize the data, and to realize that what she was looking at was unsorted images and technobabble from a Scrapheap’s buffer. The Scrapheap, unable to create logs, was sending everything it had so that the information wouldn’t be lost.
Gāo didn’t even know a Scrapheap could do that. She had no idea anything had been built into the Scrapheaps’ systems that would allow a buffer transfer, although it made sense if every other method of reporting broke down.
Still, she did a cursory search of Scrapheap reporting history and never saw anything about buffers or backing up information with the Fleet itself.
She did not look at the control core specs. She had never built a Scrapheap herself, although she had authorized two of them. She did not know if a data stream spew from buffers was the last resort of a modern Scrapheap that couldn’t report or if that was an old system that got removed over the millennia.
She suspected the system had gotten removed, because if all of the Scrapheaps did that when there was a log problem, the Fleet would drown in data.
In three days, she had already received more information than she wanted, enough to cause her to isolate an entire computer system so that she could synthesize everything.
At some point, she would have to bring in other techs. But she didn’t trust them yet.
Not because of the buffer information or the data overload, but because of the Scrapheap’s identification number.
She had never seen it before.
It wasn’t in the records.
But it fell into the numbering system that the Fleet maintained—at the beginning of that numbering system.
Which sent a little shudder through her every single time she thought about it.
She had believed that the first Scrapheap had been built four thousand years ago. The records went back that far.
But this suggested that the records were off by at least two thousand years. Scrapheaps had existed for
six thousand years, not four thousand years.
And if that was the case, then this wasn’t the only Scrapheap somehow dropped from the records.
There were others as well, meaning that there were ships out there, lost ships collected in forgotten Scrapheaps, and a small wealth of problems that fact created.
Which made option one seem like the best option. No one knew these old Scrapheaps existed. So they were no longer the Fleet’s problem.
Although they could be.
Because what she thought she was understanding from the bits of data she gleaned out of the corrupted wealth of data that had come her way was that ancient DV-Class vessels, vessels the Fleet once called Dignity Vessels, with functioning anacapa drives, were being stolen from that forgotten Scrapheap.
And if that was true, that meant whoever had stolen those vessels could repair them, maybe even reverse engineer them, or simply use them—and the anacapa drives—to whatever purpose they divined.
The robbers could even threaten the Fleet itself.
Although that seemed like a silly proposition. All of this occurred so far away that the Fleet had no clear records of the sector. Even with an anacapa drive, it would take months, maybe a year, for the thieves to catch up to the Fleet.
And why would anyone attack a Fleet as vast as this one, when there were sectors filled with planets and wealth and territories also long forgotten by the Fleet, in between the Fleet and these thieves?
But that wasn’t the only problem. There were dozens of other potential problems, including raids continuing on every single Scrapheap between here and there, taking ships the Fleet had decommissioned, and using them again.
Worse, someone might find the Ready Vessels, and use those as well to make war, to bring destruction, to take over entire worlds or sectors. Ready Vessels were specially designed warships, hidden inside each Scrapheap. The ships were large and state-of-the-art—whatever art existed at the time of the Scrapheap’s creation.
Most of the Ready Vessels were larger than a DV-Class ship, and had so much weaponry and specialized defensive capability that the Fleet needed to protect those ships. The Fleet didn’t want Ready Vessels traveling with the main body of the Fleet, partly because Command was afraid that the warships would make the locals in any sector think the Fleet was arriving prepared for war.
The Fleet was prepared for war, if it had to fight, but it usually used DV-Class ships, which were powerful enough to handle most challenges the Fleet faced.
But sometimes the fighting escalated, and the Fleet needed something bigger and even more powerful.
That’s where the bulk of the Ready Vessels came in.
The Fleet wasn’t supposed to look backwards, but sometimes it had to. Sometimes, it had to make choices to protect itself.
What to do about this situation was not a decision she could make on her own. Because the data would keep coming, unless she blocked it. And then it would stream somewhere else, searching for a way to reach the Fleet, sending information the Fleet wanted to keep private to places or peoples unknown.
She had not trained for this issue. She wasn’t even sure she knew what real options she had.
She had to enlist help.
And she had to do it fast.
The Správa
In all of her decades in service to the Fleet, Gāo had never gone into a meeting with her superior officers as woefully unprepared as she was for this meeting.
At her request, the officers had come to the Správa, specifically to the conference room she preferred, just off her research room. At first, officers had asked why she couldn’t hold a joint conference holographically, in some private space, but that was an argument she had been prepared for.
She didn’t want any of this information to leak any more than it already had. As secure as holographic meetings were throughout the ships composing Command Operations, she wasn’t sure the holographic meetings were secure enough for this.
Besides, she didn’t want to send the data stream information to her superior officers via any link between the ships. She wanted to show them the problems she was having and hoped that maybe she would get some suggestions for onsite filtering.
She had linked the three days of data-streamed information to this conference room along with the holographic projection she had made from all of it. She had lowered the long conference table and its chairs into the floor, so the officers would have to stand as they looked at the hologram she created.
She had left the sideboards up, though, and covered them with food, so the officers wouldn’t feel too uncomfortable.
And, she felt, that was all she could do.
The officers had arrived early, and had come to the room, clustering near the food, as if she were throwing a party. Everyone glanced at the gigantic hologram in the exact center of the room, but no one examined it closely. It didn’t look like anything they had seen before, so they all knew that she would have to explain it to them.
Technically, four of the five officers who had arrived weren’t her actual superiors. They were all vice admirals too, just like she was, with somewhat different focuses.
But she asked them here because they had either worked with Scrapheaps in the past or they had more seniority than she did.
Two of the vice admirals brought security details, which Gāo thought of as overkill. Apparently neither of the vice admirals traveled to any ship without security, even other command vessels.
Gāo managed not to shake her head in disgust as she asked the security details to remain in the corridor outside the conference room.
The only real superior officer in the room was Admiral Shannon Hallock. She had arrived last, and unlike those two vice admirals, did not bring a security detail with her.
Hallock had arrived alone and had slipped into the room about five minutes before the scheduled start of the meeting.
Admiral Hallock made Gāo nervous. Hallock had promoted Gāo fifteen years ago, and had praised her work on that day, but hadn’t done so since. Hallock wasn’t someone who said much more than she needed to, and usually what she needed to say was some kind of criticism.
She didn’t look unpleasant, though, like so many people who spent their lives criticizing others. She had a square face with a firm jawline, skin a shade darker than Gāo’s, and thick brown curls that made Gāo self-conscious about her own thinning hair.
Hallock was the only one who stared at the hologram in the center of the room, hands behind her back, and grey eyes sharp and questioning. She was probably the only person invited who actually understood what she saw—or didn’t see—since she had spent more than a decade doing Gāo’s job.
Gāo’s gaze met Hallock’s. Even though this was Gāo’s meeting, Hallock had to start it, because she was the most senior officer in the room.
“This is an interesting hologram,” Hallock said, almost as if Gāo had cued her. “I assume it’s why we’re here.”
“Yes, Admiral, it is.” Gāo moved closer to the hologram, but still maintained eye contact with Hallock.
The vice admirals all moved so that they could see Gāo, as well. She launched into an explanation of what the hologram was, and how it got created.
As Gāo spoke, she watched their faces, so she could slow down or explain more if it looked like they didn’t understand. She had a hunch Hallock would be the only one who would ask if she didn’t understand something.
The other vice admirals probably didn’t want to look stupid in front of a superior officer. Gāo had yet to meet another vice admiral who was secure enough to admit they didn’t understand something about the Fleet.
Scrapheaps were particularly mysterious. Some ranking officers in the Fleet had never even seen one.
Gāo had to assume that everyone in this room had, judging by the way they nodded as she talked about typical behavior of Scrapheaps.
Only Vice Admiral Nabil Calixte seemed a little confused. He stood nearest the sandwiches, leaning against the counter, a
rms crossed. He was tall and very thin. He always made her think of old-fashioned images she had seen of scholars, with intelligent eyes in faces that were on the border between gaunt and starved.
Maybe she thought of him as a scholar because he handled the school ships, maintaining their personnel, re-evaluating their missions, and determining if the number of students indicated the need for another ship.
He had a well-rounded background in all of the disciplines, but none of his knowledge was deep—deliberately so. He needed to understand a lot of things, and trusted his underlings to help him should an additional layer of complexity be involved.
As Gāo gave them the background, Jiu Rwizi had paced around the gigantic hologram, peering into it as if she could find out more information just by looking at it.
Rwizi was the closest Gāo had to a good friend among the vice admirals. They had trained together as young women, although Rwizi had been promoted much faster than Gāo. Rwizi also had a specific and rare specialty. Anacapa drives. She was a wizard at working them, understood them better than almost anyone, and got her promotions by training some of the best anacapa engineers in the Fleet.
Like Calixte, Rwizi was tall and thin, but she didn’t look like a scholar. She looked like someone specially engineered to handle narrow passageways throughout the Fleet vessels. She wasn’t genetically engineered—no one was—but sometimes the right person seemed perfectly designed to handle their job.
That was Rwizi. One reason Gāo wanted her here was because she could accurately assess the risks that Gāo was proposing.
So far, no one had called up their own screens or asked for the raw data. Gāo expected that would happen, but apparently they wanted to hear what she had to say first.
The only person who seemed at all nervous was Vice Admiral Zaida d’Anano. She was one of the two who had arrived with a security detail. She wore perfectly pressed slacks and a crisp white blouse, looking like she had just dressed for the day. Her auburn hair looked pressed as well, plastered against her skull with some kind of product that made it seem as fake as her clothing.
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