by Marko Kloos
“Then they got two hundred new recruits from this tonight. With thirty minutes of work and a basic AI editing algorithm. Think about how long it takes us to get two hundred new troopers.”
Her troopers looked at her in silence. From the neighboring tables, animated conversation spilled over to theirs.
“You saying we’re losing, Colors?” Corporal Rai asked.
Idina shook her head.
“We don’t lose, Rai. We’re the Pallas Brigade. But we’re not winning either. If we don’t find a way to root those fuckers out, they’ll keep doing this shit. They’ll try to wait us out. And then we’ll be in this place forever.”
Idina dunked her spoon into the stew only to find that most of her appetite had dissipated even though her stomach was still growling.
CHAPTER 15
DUNSTAN
“That one,” Lieutenant Hunter said and pointed at the situational display to pick a ship out of the line of nearby traffic. “Let’s go with her. She’s a Starlink passenger liner. They’ve got way better sensors on them than the merchies.”
“All right. Commence when ready,” Dunstan replied.
They were on the third day of their patrol and a few ten thousand kilometers outside of the Rhodia–Oceana transfer route, gliding along with the flow of traffic toward Oceana. Most of the commercial ships on the route, freighters and passenger vessels alike, chugged down the parabolic at one g as well because it was efficient and provided regular gravity to the ships without requiring the use of expensive and energy-hungry gravmag arrays. The drive plume of a civilian ship burning its fusion rocket at one g made the ship visible on infrared from a long way off, and the IR spectrum of Hecate’s tactical display showed a long line of little flares in the darkness of space, strung out along the transit corridor like bright jewels on a dark velvet cushion.
“Waiting for uplink. Uplink established. Initiating handshake. AI core at three percent load. And there’s our downlink. Firewall penetration took zero point one nine seconds. Like trying to stop the Galloping Tides with a leaky hand bucket.”
Lieutenant Hunter brought up a screen and positioned it in the middle of the ship’s situational display. It cycled through a variety of sensor feeds while she worked her console for a few moments. The spectrum on the viewscreen shifted to the familiar color palette of an infrared sensor.
“All right. We’re going to borrow their array just for a moment, and then we’ll be out of there. They won’t even know unless someone happens to be using the manual array controls right now and wonders why it’s turning left while he’s steering it right.”
She worked the controls, and Dunstan watched as the coordinate readout in the lower left of the screen changed.
“That’s us right now,” she said.
“I don’t see a thing,” Dunstan replied.
“Precisely,” Hunter said and allowed herself a little smile. “They’re running a pretty good commercial-grade IR sensor over there. Not quite as good as military hardware, but ten times better than what your average merchie or pirate has bolted to their hull. And it’s not picking up our drive plume. They would start to see something if we got ten thousand klicks closer or kicked the burn up past one g. But right now we’re not there. And we don’t even have to coast ballistic.”
“That is the most efficient stealth nozzle I have ever seen,” Dunstan said. Hecate’s drive plume was practically nonexistent, even though the drive was accelerating the ship at almost ten meters per second squared. Whatever the engineering division had done with the hydrogen-cooled exhaust nozzle and its geometry, it worked like black magic.
“Well, the efficiency drops off a cliff when we really go hard on the throttle. Past two or three g, we are just as bright as anyone else in a hard burn. But someone would have to have really good palladium-core sensors and be closer than ten thousand klicks if they want to even start to pick us up at one g.”
“And if we’re that close, we can always brute force it and hack their sensor feed.”
“Precisely.” Lieutenant Hunter pulled the screen projection back toward her and disconnected the data link.
“They have their sensor control back. What do you think of this ship so far, sir?”
Dunstan shook his head with a smile.
“Well, to be completely honest with you, she makes me feel like I’m a midshipman again,” he said, and some of the other officers on the operations deck chuckled.
“Everything is upside down and backward from where it was on any other ship I’ve had. I feel like I have to relearn my trade all over again. And I’ve been in the fleet for twenty-seven years.”
“I had the same problem at first,” Lieutenant Armer said from the weapons station. “We all did. On the shakedown cruise, we basically had to write the manual as we went.”
“There’s nothing in the fleet like this ship,” Lieutenant Hunter said. “This crew has been working with her for six months, and we still haven’t figured out her limits.”
Dunstan leaned back in his chair and looked at the situational display. It was scaled out to represent a bubble of space around Hecate that was twenty-five million kilometers across. Every ship with an active Mnemosyne link inside that bubble was represented by an icon and a movement vector. He could tap on any ship’s icon and bring up all its essential data: name, registry, crew list, cargo manifest, current speed, acceleration, heading, remaining fuel capacity, and a hundred other parameters that were readily available even if they were irrelevant from a tactical standpoint. The amount of information at his fingertips was dizzying, and it was easy to get lost in the sheer volume of it. Hecate’s sensors were excellent, by far the most advanced and capable in the fleet as far as he could tell. But to Dunstan, the truly awe-inspiring part was that she didn’t even need her own sensors to keep an eye on eight thousand trillion cubic kilometers of space because she was able to use everyone else’s.
No wonder the admiral told me to keep this ship out of the wrong hands at all costs, he thought. Give me ten of these, and I can control the whole system. The idea unsettled him in a way he couldn’t quite define.
“All right, people,” he said. “We know we can hack every merchie in sight and play with their systems. We can pretend to be anyone. We can sneak everywhere unseen. Now let’s figure out how to do something useful with all those skills.”
He looked around on the operations deck.
“As you said, you’ve been working with this ship and her systems for six months. I’ve only been in command for less than a week. Absent any better input, my plan is to continue this patrol just the way we’ve been doing for the last two days. We shadow the civilian traffic and wait for things to go sideways. That’s a very small pebble to find on a very large beach, but it’s the way my mind is still calibrated. If any of you have an idea that takes into account all the shit I don’t yet know about this ship, speak up now, please. There are no wrong answers.”
There was a moment of silence in the compartment. Then his first officer looked at Lieutenant Robson.
“How do you feel about trying out Cassandra, Robson?”
Lieutenant Robson shrugged.
“I think it’s as ready as it’s going to get. Could be a search for a black cat in a dark cellar. But if it doesn’t work out, we’re no worse off.”
“I agree,” Hunter said. “And if it does work, we’ll blow some minds back at fleet command.”
“Cassandra,” Dunstan repeated. “Want to tell me what that is?”
“It’s an AI routine Robson coded a while back, sir. We haven’t had time to test it yet because it wasn’t done before Commander Stone left. Core-level routines require the commanding officer’s approval to run. It’s not exactly a standard piece of software.”
“And what does that AI routine do, Robson? Explain it in terms a crusty old relic like me can understand.”
Lieutenant Robson took a long breath before she replied.
“Well, in broad terms, sir, it’s a predict
ive pattern analyzer that helps us find the bad guys.”
“If I give you permission to run it, is there a chance it will endanger the ship or the crew?”
“Negative. It’s just a subroutine. I can isolate one core and run it on that. Worst thing that can happen is that it takes up all the utilization on the core and forces us to purge and reset it.”
“All right,” Dunstan said after a moment of consideration. “Do it. You have your CO approval. Impress me.”
“Aye, sir,” Robson replied.
She unbuckled her harness and got out of her chair.
“If I may, Lieutenant Hunter.”
The first officer brought up a screen, moved it off to the side, and authorized access. Then she got up and swapped places with Lieutenant Robson.
“All yours.”
Robson moved the screen to her eye level and started tapping her control panel. The data readouts on the display might as well have been Acheroni spelled backward and upside down for all the sense Dunstan could make of them. She worked with focused intensity for a few minutes.
“Core Three is sandboxed,” she finally said. “Routine is loaded and ready to execute. Executing in three . . . two . . . one.”
She tapped a confirmation field on her panel. For a few moments, nothing happened that Dunstan could see. Then the situational display slowly changed. Colored blotches started to appear on hundreds of locations inside the sphere, popping into existence and then slowly spreading out like paint dropped on a porous surface: green, yellow, orange, and red.
“Core utilization at forty-eight percent,” Robson said. “The core is actually breaking a sweat for a change.”
“That’s a pretty sight,” Dunstan said. “But tell me what I’m looking at here.”
“The AI is querying the data from every ship in real time right now over the Mnemosyne. Origin, destination, tonnage, type and value of cargo, that sort of thing. But also their entire movement history. Where they’ve been in the past, and how often. How much time they usually spend docked on turnaround. Public records of the crew, and their movement history. And the ship’s sensor data. Everything their sensors have seen since they left their last few ports of call. Even the stuff that the crew didn’t notice or log as unusual. All the comms traffic they’ve sent or received or even just overheard on passive.”
Robson highlighted a few of the colored blotches that had sprouted on the situational display.
“Right now the AI core is busy collating all that information and cross-checking it against known pirate patterns and previous attack locations. It’s generating a real-time probability map for future pirate attacks. Green means a prediction for a safe zone segment. Yellow means slight risk. Orange is elevated risk. Red means a high-risk zone. It’s also assigning a risk value to each individual ship based on all those factors. Pirates aren’t interested in bulk ore freighters, for example. But they like smaller ships that ferry high-value goods that are portable.”
She flashed a clipped little smile and shrugged.
“That’s why we named it Cassandra. Like the oracle from mythology. It knows the past, it can see the present, and it predicts the future. At least as far as pirate incursions go.”
“There are a few thousand ships out there right now,” Dunstan said. “Spread out over twenty-five million kilometers. You’re telling me that this ship’s AI just pulled all that data from them and processed it just since you pushed your commit button.”
“It’s still pulling the data, sir,” Lieutenant Robson said. “Processing it and integrating it into the map overlay. Fifteen hundred times per second. It’ll keep doing that until we cancel the subroutine.”
“And that takes half of one-quarter of our processing power.”
“Affirmative, sir.”
Dunstan looked at the display and its overwhelming amount of information. The Alliance navies did the best they could with what they had, but there simply weren’t enough warships around to respond to every merchant distress call and get there in time to protect them. But if they knew where to focus their patrols and commit their limited resources, they wouldn’t have to try to be everywhere at once.
“If we had one of these on station at all times, we could direct the battlespace,” Dunstan said. “Tell the other ships where to lurk, where to patrol, which merchies to shadow. We would be their eyes and ears.”
“Information,” Lieutenant Hunter said. “The biggest gun of them all. We can do the patrol work of a dozen cruisers.”
Dunstan got out of his chair and walked up to the tactical projection. He looked at the many little chains of light that were crossing the void, thousands of individual ships, each with dozens or hundreds of people on them, each unaware of the fact that Hecate was watching them with the knowledge of where they had gone and where they were going.
“All right, Lieutenant Robson. You have managed to impress me.”
Robson smiled at the compliment.
“Now that we have all this information, what do we do with it? How do we start to turn that into a workable tactical doctrine?” Dunstan continued. “Because we’re still just one ship.”
“Well,” Lieutenant Hunter said. “If we know where we’re likely to see trouble, we also know where we don’t need to be.”
Dunstan nodded.
“Filter out all the green-coded low-risk ships, and every ship that’s in or near a green zone regardless of their threat rating. Can you do that?”
“Affirmative,” Robson said and turned her attention back to her console. A moment later, at least a third of all the ship icons on the situational display disappeared.
“Now drop the yellow-coded ships.”
The display changed again, now considerably less cluttered than before.
“Get rid of everything except the orange- and red-colored ships that are either inside or near a red risk zone.”
Most of the remaining ship icons went away, and the few that remained were scattered all over the orb in no particular pattern.
“How many does that leave us?”
“Thirteen ships, sir.”
He looked at the display and chewed on his lower lip in thought.
“We have to start somewhere,” he said. “We can play guard dog and patrol the transfer lane all the way to Oceana and back. We can insert ourselves in the pattern, pretend to be a luxury goods merchie, and hope that we make a tempting enough target.”
“Or,” Lieutenant Hunter said.
Dunstan pointed at the nearest red zone, a small blotch of crimson hanging in space a few million kilometers away.
“Or we can creep right into the middle of that spot, turn off our drive, and see if something interesting happens when those high-value merchies pass through.”
The officers on the operations deck exchanged glances and smiles.
“I can find no particular fault with that plan,” Lieutenant Hunter said. “Worst-case scenario is that we spend a few days twiddling our thumbs as we watch the traffic go past without incident.”
Dunstan returned to his chair and sat down.
“All right. Let’s see how good that algorithm is at predicting the future. Of course, you know the problem with Cassandra’s predictions, Lieutenant Robson.”
“What’s that, sir?”
“Her prophecies were always right. But Apollo cursed her so that nobody ever believed them.”
Robson shrugged.
“I just thought it was a good name for the program,” she said. “It doesn’t have to be prescriptive.”
Dunstan laughed. “No, I suppose it doesn’t. Number One, let’s bring her to the new heading. Keep a low profile, one g.”
“Aye, sir,” Hunter replied. “Helm, come about to 330 over 40, Mark 9.”
The only indication of their changing heading and attitude was the situational display, which rotated to keep itself oriented in relation to the ship’s direction of travel. Dunstan watched the spherical projection gradually turn as the ship’s cold-gas thrus
ters fired to correct their course. He still felt a little dazed by the impact of the technology demonstration he had just received from Lieutenant Robson. With the power of the AI core harnessed by Cassandra, they were all-seeing and all-knowing, an omniscient deity that could slip on whatever face it wanted to show, or glide into the shadows and be nobody at all.
This ship is the most dangerous thing anyone has ever put into space, he thought.
CHAPTER 16
SOLVEIG
“Miss Ragnar?”
Solveig looked up from her compad to see Anja standing at the threshold.
“There’s a visitor for you at the executive reception. Would you like me to greet him for you?”
Solveig checked the time and flinched a little. She’d let the morning get away from her, and now there was no time to prepare herself for lunch with Detective Berg unless she made him wait for her at the reception at the risk of appearing like the upper-class executive snot she tried hard not to be.
“Gods, no,” she said. “Thank you, Anja. I’ll go get him myself. He’s a personal guest.”
She got out of her chair and walked over to the door of her restroom. The outside of the door was a mirror, and she checked herself briefly to make sure she hadn’t spilled her tea onto her suit this morning without noticing. When she looked over at Anja, her assistant had the hint of a smile on her face.
“That will be all, Anja,” Solveig said. “And I’m stepping out for lunch, so hold all comms for an hour unless the building starts to burn down around us and I don’t notice.”
“Yes, Miss Ragnar.” Anja turned and strode off toward her own office.
Solveig walked across the executive floor toward the reception. This was the first time she was meeting Berg in the open, and for a few moments she questioned the wisdom of having invited him to come up to the executive floor right away. Everyone would be able to see them, and there would be no more room for plausible denial. It was against every instinct she had acquired while spending her childhood playing hide-and-seek with her father and his lackeys. But then she saw Berg standing at the reception, casually leaning against the counter with one elbow on the countertop and one leg crossed over the other at the ankles, and it was surprisingly easy to suppress that nagging doubt when she looked at his green eyes and the way his shirt fit him just right.
