Sadie's Mate (11 page)

Chapter Eight

When
she walked onto the command deck Draven bowed his head respectfully. Then he
pointed to where Bracken was bent over, hands braced on a console as he
conferred with two young officers. The officers both had looks of intense
concentration on their faces and were occasionally nodding.

“We’re
entering
Craegin
proper space now,” Draven said when
he stopped by her side. “We’ll be home in under an hour. General Daykin is
keeping his destroyer just outside of range while we’re here. Close enough to
assist, but far enough back they won’t know he’s coming until it’s too late.
The colonel is worried the marshal’s office will try something now that we’re
back. Ever since that incident with the cooling system on the one engine he’s
feeling a bit paranoid. Not that I blame him in the least.”

He
turned away from her slightly to accept a data pad that he pressed his thumb to
before handing it back over. “You can have his chair if you want. I doubt he’ll
be sitting any time over the next while until we’re safely into dock.” Even
then she knew they wouldn’t be completely safe. There would be too many workers
going on and off the ship to keep an eye on them all.
Too
many opportunities for something else to be sabotaged.
This time
something that could prove fatal to them all.

She
knew Bracken had plans to assign guards to all the groups coming on the ship,
and the crew had volunteered to remain aboard until all the work was completed.
Then the workers and
resuppliers
would be shown off
the destroyer, and the ship would be sealed. A full lock down with a skeleton
crew until Bracken returned to it. At which point the crew would cycle out, and
the ship would once more go into lock down. No one was willing to take any
chances, not since the fake
Imarian
attack.

“Thank
you,” she said as she began to look over the data pad in front of her. “Wait.”
She reached out and grabbed Draven’s sleeve. Something she never did. Sadie
didn’t touch anyone if she didn’t have to, so he would understand her worry.
“This.” She pulled up the line of code and looked at him. “I’m afraid you are
going to have to pull Bracken from his discussion, because this isn’t good.” It
was a coding line that was being pinged and piggybacked into the destroyer’s
data banks which was causing the coding to change ever so slightly. “If we
don’t stop, right now, the defense array will think we are
Imarian
ships.” She hoped that Draven understood her fear. She would have gone to
Bracken directly but he looked like he was having a very personal discussion
with the men in question.

“Full stop!”
Draven yelled out.
“Full stop!
All engines
reverse,
get us the fuck back from the defense array now.”

Bracken
whipped around at the shouted orders. He came toward her quickly. “What’s going
on?” he asked quietly. He didn’t counteract Draven’s orders. His trust in his
second had always been apparent. He took the data pad from her but looked to
her for the explanation.

“From
the moment we entered the edges of our
Craegin
space
the coding has been slightly changed. Ever so slightly but it’s been changing
here and there. They have decided if they can’t destroy us all with fake
Imarian
ships, then they’ll change the codes ever so
slightly so they can claim that you had changed your coding to go into
Imarian
space and the array caught it. This is bad,
Bracken. Very few people could do something this sophisticated—and I’m here, so
that leaves maybe three people in all of
Craegin
that
could do it.”

“Son
of a bitch,” he muttered. “Can you change it back?” At her nod he gave her a
squeeze. “Someone still has a way to get into our ships behind our backs. This
needs to fucking stop, Sadie. I need you to plug up every single hole there is.
If anyone attempts to download or upload anything we need to have a way to
know. I don’t want them having any access to us, period.”

She
nodded and took a deep breath. “I can close it all down so the only way they
can come into our ship’s databases is from hard tapping only. The only bad
thing about that is the fact that if we needed to have repairs, we would have
to come in every single time. Is that going to be okay with you? No more repair
packets sent. It isn’t bad for you because you have me, but it could be bad for
the other ships that are with you in this.”

“Can
you create a box for the packets to land in? That way we can get them, check
them over, and then apply them if they are found to be safe. Is that even
possible?” he asked her. He passed the data pad back to her while Draven
handled the crew and getting them out of
Craegin
space.

“Yes,
I should be able to do something like that. Have all of them run through me
first. Have a rotating code as well so the people we send it to know the packet
they are receiving is a good code.
Thoughts?”

“That
works well for me,” he said quietly. Leaning in, he pressed a kiss to her
temple. “Do whatever you need to do. You have full run of the ship and the
crew. Use whatever, and whoever, you need to. But get the friendly codes back
up so we can dock. If we sit out here too long they’ll know something’s up.
Besides, I’d rather see their faces when we sail through the security net and
nothing happens.” He fell silent for a moment before pulling back and turning
her to face him. “Is there any way to narrow down the possibilities of who did
this? Figure out the one person without tipping anyone off?
Because
I’d really like to get my hands on them.”

“Yes.
Everyone leaves a digital signature, so I should be able to easily figure this
out.” She leaned into his touch and nodded. “Thank you for trusting me, for
believing in me.” She rose and kissed his cheek. “I need to get to engineering.
I’ll call out to you when we are safe. It shouldn’t take too long now that I
know the code I’m looking for.”

Bracken
called out to one of the officers. “You stay with her at all times. Whatever
she needs she is to be given access to, full access. No matter what it is, you
give it to her, and you don’t need to bother asking me for it. We clear?” The
young man nodded. “Okay, go, love. Get us secure so we can go in. We need the
supplies otherwise I wouldn’t risk this. Be safe.”

“Always.”
She touched her
fingers to his cheek once more and with a nod was off with the young officer.

****

A half hour later…

“Bracken,
I know who did this coding. We’re safe to move through. Go as you typically
would.” She hesitated,
then
added, “It’s not good.
I’ll meet you on command in a moment. I just wanted you to know now so that you
could get us moving sooner rather than later.”

“Copy
that,” he said. He must have given the command because the engines’ noise level
increased throughout the ship. There was always a low hum of the engines even
when they were drifting, mainly because they never were turned off. All the
power came from the engines, for the lights, the cooling systems, and even the
heat for the water tanks. But there was a definite change in sound when they
were put into drive for
forward,
or reverse push.

Sadie
walked back up to the command deck with the young officer that Bracken had
tasked with watching over her. When she was once more on command she walked to
Bracken and slipped her hand into his. Yes, she knew that wasn’t the
kosher
thing to do, but it was what she
needed to do. She needed his touch desperately. “Miss me?” she asked teasingly.

“I
always do when you’re not close,” he said. Lifting their joined hands, he
pressed a kiss to her knuckles. “Why don’t you grab a seat? I need to stay on
my feet for this part. I don’t trust them to not come up with some accident at
one of the stations and end up firing on us. Buckle in,” he told her.

“Of course.”
She took his seat
and buckled up, reaching out to his outstretched hand once more. She gave him
one last squeeze before releasing him so he could do what he needed to in order
to get them to port safely.

Draven
came by and handed her a bottle of water. “Everything okay?” he asked her with
a lifted brow. At her nod he let out a breath and looked relieved. Bracken
moved across the command deck to speak to a few of the crew, pulling Draven’s
attention from her. “If you need anything else, let me know,” Draven told her
before he headed off across the deck.

“Thank
you, Draven.” Sadie watched the men moving along and doing what they needed to
do in order to get them to their home world safely. She was settled into the
seat and shifted when the ship made a sharp turn. “Wow. What was that about?”
She hadn’t seen anything in the way, so she had no idea what in the world was
wrong.

Draven
was snapping out orders left and right. Bracken moved to the front of the
command deck near the pilots and leaned between them. He was giving orders, she
knew, because they suddenly turned the other direction. Crew held on tight
during the maneuvers,
then
dashed around while the
deck was stable. “Sadie, check the codes again. We’re getting warnings sent to
us from command to stand down and prepare for boarding. Something is not right,
and I’m damn well not letting anyone on this fucking ship.”

She
took the data pad and shook her head. “They’re right.” She followed the last
code back to the source and stood. What she read on the data pad shocked her so
much that she tried to stand but was jerked back by the belt before she undid
it and stood. “Open a channel to command,” she demanded. “Tell them they need
to get Marshal Brody because Sub-Marshal Hernandez has forced her own codes
into the system and is now finding all
Craegin
destroyers as the enemy.” Sub-Marshal Hernandez had been one of the women who
hoped to be able to marry the general, if she recalled correctly.

“You
heard her,” Draven said, moving to stand behind the communications station.

“Uh,
I can’t, sir. They’re jamming all our transmissions.”

“Sadie,
sit your ass down,” Bracken snapped. He shot her a look a moment before the
deck shifted under her feet. Thankfully, Draven was there to catch her before
her face made contact with the deck plating.

Sadie
frowned and looked at Draven. “I need a control panel. Not the data pad. These
bastards don’t know who they are messing with.” She had put practically every
system in on their world and there was no way they were going to jam her. She
was beyond pissed off.

“Get
her in a chair, Draven.”

Righting
her, Draven led her to one of the chairs that
was
bolted to the floor. “Put the belt on so you don’t fall off. We need to keep up
the defensive maneuvers until you get them off our backs.
Quickly,
if you wouldn’t mind.”

“
Gotcha
,” she said,
then
buckled
in. She pulled up the network for the home world and started to key into her
backdoors she built into every program she wrote. She began to laugh and shook
her head as she dove into the world of code. Once that was finished, she turned
to Bracken. “I would appreciate it if you would blow up the satellite at the
coordinates that I’ve sent to the gentlemen at your left side. It’s the one
that’s sending the false signals.”

“Do
it,” he said to the officer that looked from her to him. “One shot, just enough
to destroy it, nothing more.”

“Yes, sir.”
The officer looked
to her again with wide eyes before facing the panel. The signal went dead a
moment later. “Satellite destroyed, sir.”

“Sadie,
are we okay now?” he asked her. He strode across the deck to stop by her chair
and put a hand on her shoulder.

“Yep.”
She looked to the
screen in front of them and saw the marshal there. Once the satellite had been
destroyed the communication was able to be put through. Sadie smiled up at
Bracken,
then
stood at his side.
“Marshal.
Thank you for accepting the call. I apologize about blowing up the satellite
but you will find in the packet of information that I’ve flashed to your data
pad that one of your sub-marshals has been very naughty.”

The
woman on screen glanced to the side with a frown. “Well, this can’t be right.
Why would she do this?” She shook her head and narrowed her eyes. “Are you
telling me she’s the one responsible for the fake
Imarian
attack on one of our destroyers?”

“I’m
telling you that she’s the one responsible for changing the code that the
satellites accept. As for the other, I believe that a full investigation needs
to be done into that. What I know is what she was trying to do. You will find
that her boyfriend of the week is a hacker and the coding that was used to
target this vessel as an
Imarian
vessel, when it
clearly isn’t, is his signature. The idiot even puts his name into the coding
if you look at it the right way.”

The
marshal shot her a hard look before returning her attention to the information
before her. “I will launch an investigation immediately. Well done, Doctor
Monterey. Apparently your time on the colonel’s ship wasn’t a waste of time after
all.
Report to the offices on your arrival for your next
assignment.”