Trident's Forge (20 page)

“No,” Kexx stopped him. “I don't want an apology, I want to understand why. Mei trusts you, I trust Mei. So I trust that you didn't suddenly lose your mind and decide to point your gun at our elder. You had a reason. What was it?”

“That's a… complicated question, Kexx. But it comes down to the fact I didn't understand the differences between us. Humans have one child at a time, sometimes two, but very rarely any more than that, and it takes many, many years to raise them into adults. For the last two hundred years, there have been so few of us left that every child is precious. Deliberately harming a child, well, there is no greater crime among our people. It's an abomination.”

Kexx nodded along, encouraging Benson to continue.

“So when I saw your elder killing the babies, I… I thought something horrible was happening.”

“Because you saw them as you would see human babies,” Kexx said.

“Yes.”

“Even though they were not of your kind.”

“Yes.”

“And you wanted to protect them.”

Tears welled up in Benson's eyes. “Yes.”

Kexx put a hand on Benson's shoulder. “Then there is nothing to apologize for, Benson. You fought to protect our people in both our temples yesterday. I see now why Mei trusts you so completely. You are unafraid of doing what's right, even if you're not always right about what that is.” Then, the truth-digger stood back up. “Come, we've chased our shadows long enough out here.”

“Yes,” Benson rubbed his eyes clear. “Of course. Where to next?”

Kexx shrugged and fluttered his markings. “I'm open to suggestions.”

“Maybe back to the village and see what's come in on the signal towers?”

“Could do.”

“It might help to be up high anyway, get a better perspective on everything. Too bad I don't have any remote cameras to put on one of your birds, make my own little jerryrigged drone.”

“One of our birds?” Kexx said. “What do you mean?”

“You know, trained birds, like the ones Kuul sent after our aerial drone when we were walking in.”

Kexx stepped in front of Benson and glared down at him. “Why didn't you mention this before?”

Benson, unsettled by the sudden intensity coming from the normally calm alien, put up his hands defensively. “Because I assumed you knew. I figured they were hunting birds.”

“
We
don't use trained birds to hunt,” Kexx said evenly.

“You don't?” Benson asked, before the full implications finally caught up with him. “Oh.
You
don't.”

Kexx nodded. “Now you see. Take me there. Now.”

T
heresa glanced
at the plant clock in the periphery of her field of vision. 1547. The demonstrations had been going on for four hours already and showed no signs of letting up anytime soon. She tried to blink away the exhaustion eating away at her sleep-deprived focus, but it was a lost cause. An entire pot of English breakfast tea hadn't made a dent yet.

In contrast to the sporadic, booze-fueled disturbances from the night before, the group picketing outside the Beehive was both larger and more organized. Theresa guesstimated it had grown to almost a thousand people over the last hour broken into splinter groups of Valmassoi's supporters, isolationists, and Returners taking advantage of the opportunity for free publicity. It would probably swell again once the day shift let out. Valmassoi's death had sparked far more passion, and revealed far deeper political divisions than she'd ever guessed existed in the population.

There had been some trouble early when a handful of demonstrators tired of throwing slogans and started throwing rocks. However, a judicious application of stun-sticks to the offenders and a firm explanation of protesting decorum put a swift end to the budding violence for the time being.

Theresa had already tagged the leaders' IDs into her plant for later review, and a locator analysis would be able to identify everyone else. She had no doubt that the majority of them were here of their own accord, at the gentle nudging of their friends, or on the advice of the talking bobble-heads that passed for journalists on this rock, all of which were on hand at the “Rally for Justice” to cover what was undoubtedly the biggest story to come down the wire since Landing.

Ostensibly, this was all to protest the assassination of Administrator Valmassoi by parties yet unknown. A noble enough cause, Theresa thought, but suspicious in the face of the fact she couldn't remember Valmassoi being nearly so popular prior to his untimely death. She tried to come up with a list of people who would've taken a bullet for the late Administrator (outside of his security detail, naturally) and couldn't use up all the fingers on one hand. Still, for all his faults, he'd had all the appearance of cruising towards victory in next year's elections. His death threw that calculation into chaos, forcing a special election to fill the vacancy and bringing old rivalries and new grievances boiling back up to the surface.

Korolev, animated by some unholy magic, stood on the opposite side of the platform, arms crossed over the assault rifle hanging menacingly on his chest from a sling. He'd been holding it in a relaxed ready position, but Theresa had said his aggressive stance was antagonizing the crowd. Somehow, this new arrangement wasn't any better.

Unwanted images flooded Theresa's mind. She tried to block them with limited success.

Theresa smirked at the cleverly worded response. Four hours, the bare minimum required by regulation between shifts. And while she was sure they were all spent in bed, she was equally sure based on the coy, blushing look she'd caught from the young bartender Korolev had walked home that they weren't all spent in a restful slumber.

Korolev sent a mental shrug. this
is supposed to look like, ma'am. But I do know we had to disperse crowds bigger than this after Zero matches back home.>

cared
about Zero, Pavel. That's my point. Something's off.>

Theresa looked over the crowd, forcing herself to really look at the hastily constructed protest signs for the first time. They were of a kind with the sort of placards people used to make for Zero rivalry matches, but without any of the good-natured comradery that went along with it. There were crudely drawn cartoons of cuttlefish and frequent references to calamari, all of which left Theresa feeling more than a little queasy.

she said.

Korolev said.

Theresa shook her head.

T
heresa spent
another three hours at her post before the crowds finally thinned out enough for her to stand down and hand off her watch to another constable. What she saw once she opened her front door did nothing to improve her mood. Reclining in perfect comfort on her couch, wrapped up in her Afghan, sipping her sweet tea, Chao Feng smiled radiantly.

“What the hell are you doing in my house, Feng?”

“I let myself in. I hope you don't mind.”

“I do mind, actually. I've been on my feet all day, I've gotten very little sleep, and all I want to do is get out of this sweaty uniform, take a hot shower, and then lie on that couch and watch something mindless until I fall asleep. And how did you ‘let yourself in,' anyway?”

Feng stretched like a cat, the first of which to exist in more than two centuries had just been decanted a few months earlier and was now acting as a surrogate pet for everyone still living in Avalon module.

“Captain Mahama may have neglected to repeal a few of my command permissions from my time as first officer.”

“Which are of course completely illegal for a private citizen to have, so of course you'll be reminding her to disable them as soon as possible,” Theresa said.

“Oh, naturally. First thing tomorrow.”

“Uh huh. I'm going to go take a shower. If you're not off my couch by the time I finish, you're getting the stun-stick.”

“For a nonviolent B&E suspect? You wouldn't.”

“I've already used it today. That always seems to raise my appetite for police brutality a few notches.”

“Fine, but you may change your tune once you hear what I have to say.” Feng sat up and set his glass on her coffee table.

“Coaster,” Theresa chided. Feng obliged. “All right then, let's hear it.”

“Last night, you asked me to get a list of queries on the satellite gap.”

“You have it?”

“I do, it's printed out on flimsies on your kitchen table. Never went over the network or through my plant, so you can do your cross check without raising any red flags. But, I've gone one better.”

Theresa cocked her head curiously. “Go on.”

“Those disabled satellites? They weren't disabled. They were commandeered.”

“What?” Theresa nearly shouted.

Feng nodded. “I couldn't believe it either, but it's true.”

“How? How could that happen?”

“Embarrassingly easily,” he said. “We're still trying to reconstruct exactly what happened, but it looks like someone broke into the sats' OS and triggered a series of fake hardware error messages over the course of a few weeks, leading up to a cascading failure that looked to the handlers on the Ark like a complete system crash. We tried a hard restart and reboot, but when that failed, we wrote the sats off.”

“Why didn't anyone try to repair them?”

“Because we're phasing out the original Pathfinder sat network anyway. They're all over two hundred years old, remember. They've been in storage the majority of that time, but even in space, components deteriorate over time. It wasn't worth repairing them when we already had their replacements in the manufacturing queue.”

Theresa waved her hand. “OK, fine, but two sats going down in the same way at the same time? Didn't that raise any eyebrows?”

“Might have, except the hacks took place three months apart and mirrored two other actual sat failures that we saw previously. We just assumed it was a repeat.”

“OK,” Theresa said. “How'd they get such deep access to the OS and other software?”

“That's the embarrassing part,” Feng said sheepishly. “They weren't encrypted or firewalled. All the hackers needed to do was fake their network address to look like an authorized user and they were in.”

“They weren't even password protected? Are you fucking kidding me?”

Feng shrugged. “The people who built and programed them didn't think to put a jail on the Ark, remember? Besides, why would someone want to steal a GPS satellite? What good would it do?”

“Well that's the question, isn't it?” She rubbed the raw spot on her shoulder where her rifle sling had dug in. “Any fingerprints?”

Feng shook his head. “Our techs are still looking into it, but whoever it was seemed to cover their tracks very effectively. People outside of the crew don't seem to understand just how juryrigged the Ark's OS is at this point. It's a two century-old quilt of updates, patches, and workarounds. A digital archeologist would probably have a field day uncovering all of the firewall holes and backdoors in the code. It's like the ship. We couldn't ever afford to shut anything down or risk a crash, so we just fixed problems on the fly.”

“I still can't believe there wasn't
some
security, especially after what happened with Kimura. The crew should have hardened everything.”

“Those were chaotic times, I don't have to tell you. All of that takes time and manpower. We landed a few weeks later, everyone was swamped with setting up Shambhala and it fell off the priority list. It's being fixed now, believe me. There won't be a repeat.”

“Thank goodness for small favors. So, you have the sats back now? They won't be able to exploit the gap anymore?”

Feng sighed. “About that. Our ping triggered some buried command and the sats emptied their station-keeping thrusters into decaying orbits and burned up in the atmosphere.”

“How thorough,” she said bitterly.

“Quite, but at least they're not under control of whoever hijacked them anymore. What do you suppose they were up to?”

“No idea, but whatever it is, I'm sure I don't like it. Any other hardware that just happened to go missing in the last year or so?”

Feng frowned. “What do you mean?”

“I don't know. Drones, rovers, suborbital relay balloons. Those sats were multi-functional GPS and com platforms, they could have set up their own shadow network with ground assets for all we know.”

“God, I should've thought of that,” Feng admitted. “I'll run an inventory search and make a list of everything else that's gone offline in the last year.”

“Go back to Landing, just to be sure.” Theresa plopped down in what was normally Benson's chair and put her feet up. “I don't like the smell of this. It's beginning to feel just like the Laraby case.” Remembering who was sitting on her couch, she quickly amended to, “Edmond's case. Sorry, Chao.”

Feng waved her off. “It's fine. Besides, I played no small part in that. To be honest, I'm still surprised you're trusting me with this now.”

“Devil you know, I suppose.”

“Touché.”

Theresa glanced up to see a surprisingly warm smile cross Feng's face. He hadn't had it easy these last few years, she knew. While you wouldn't know it from looking around his house, Feng's personal fortunes were much reduced. He still grieved for his late wife, and felt the shame of deceiving her for so long. And while his position as the gofer between the Ark and the provisional Shambhala civilian government gave him considerable influence, he was basically an outsider, not fully trusted by either.

It was his fault, but that didn't prevent Theresa from sympathizing. She was about to say something comforting when a call came in on her plant. She growled and checked the ID: Acting Administrator Merick.

“Well this should be good,” she said just above a whisper and connected the call.

he asked.

Theresa and Feng's eyes met across the room. she said, trying to keep the sudden alarm bells going off in her head from reaching her plant voice.

The connection dropped. She stood and motioned for Feng to do the same. “C'mon, we're wanted at the Beehive.”

“What for?”

She shrugged. “Only one way to find out.”

“They know we've been speaking,” Feng said once they were a few blocks away from her house.

“They know we've been in the same room together a couple times. That's all. And at this point, we don't know who ‘they' even are.”

“What should we do?”

“Keep working the angles and try to stay out in public. The more visible we are, the riskier it'll be for someone to take a shot at one of us.”

“Metaphorically speaking, of course,” Feng hastened to add.

“I'm not so sure,” Theresa said weightily. “I'll try to make sure one of my boys keeps an eye on your son until this blows over.”

Feng straightened his shoulders. “I appreciate that.”

“Don't mention it.”

They reached the Beehive steps a couple of minutes later. The demonstrations were still going on, but had lost steam around dinner time. Korolev, who Theresa could have sworn had been relieved at the same time she was, noticed their approach and opened a link.