"They won"t be able to ID this ship, at least not unless the scout ship is back in-system. It might have scanners advanced enough to get a good look. But those ships are expensive, there"s only a few of them, and one of them already spent its time here. They"d only send it back when Joe gives his report, and it probably isn"t here yet."
"Where should we go?" Telisa asked. She realized that she was still very new at this smuggler stuff, and now she was in way over her head.
"Let"s just stay in s.p.a.ce for a while," Magnus suggested. "I want to know what we"ve got in Shiny. I also need to scan the ship carefully, in case the UNSF managed to mark us somehow. Why don"t you talk to Shiny, see if he"s a willing pa.s.senger, for starters."
Telisa loved that idea. She could forget about the UNSF for a while and study the alien and the artifacts.
"That sounds great! I need to scan the artifacts, and I"ll try to talk with Shiny some more while I"m at it."
"I"ll concentrate on getting us out of here. Remember what I said, be ready to run for a shock pod."
"What"ll Shiny do? We don"t have any pods for aliens."
Magnus grimaced. "We"ll try our best. Maybe we won"t have to go for the pods."
"Okay, maybe I could show him one."
"I wouldn"t. If he went in there, he"d probably panic."
"A human would, if they didn"t know what was going on. But I think he"s pretty smart. He knows we don"t mean him any harm."
"Your call. Just make sure you get in a pod if I say so."
"Okay." Telisa turned and headed for a cargo bay where she could catalog her h.o.a.rd of artifacts. She used her link to ask the computer where the scanning equipment rested and got an odd notification.
"There"s something wrong with my link. It"s not working right," Telisa said, turning back towards Magnus. "And the ship"s computer is complaining about it too. It says I"m hogging storage."
That got Magnus"s attention.
"Hogging storage? Have you been recording a lot?"
"Hardly anything," she said.
Magnus remained quiet for a moment. Then he cursed.
"d.a.m.n!"
"What"s wrong?"
"Something"s up with your link," Magnus said, his eyes still closed. "It"s been compromised somehow."
"What?"
"Give me a minute. I have to fire off some comp tasks and then I can talk more."
Telisa waited. Now she felt more tense. Something wrong with her link? Was it the complex? Trilisk tampering? Or had Shiny somehow damaged it?
At last Magnus opened his eyes. He looked at Telisa for a moment in a way that scared her.
"What? What"s going on?"
"I"ve discovered a UNSF snoop program running on your link."
"What! You mean they"ve tapped me? Those fua""
"It must have run out of s.p.a.ce in your local cache. We spent all that time in the complex, and you didn"t link to anything. Usually the spy program gathers information and downloads it at public links. But we"ve been isolated from public links for a long time now."
"So everything we know, who we are, and what we"ve found..."
"Including Shiny, will be downloaded next time you connect to a public link," Magnus finished for her. "We have to clear this out before we enter any port. It may even be sophisticated enough to detect public ports in range and download all by itself."
Telisa bit back a scream of rage. The UNSF... the ones who had taken her father from her, the ones who tried to control everyone"s lives, had been recording her life from a secret program placed into the link hardware at the base of her skull.
"Those b.a.s.t.a.r.ds," Telisa lamented. "They recorded everything. Probably down to every request for the local time. Now wait a minute, that means they know about my employment with you, Thomas, and Jack! If they know it all, why"d they let us leave?"
Magnus shook his head. "No, you had a sleeper. It wasn"t active when we hired you, believe me, we checked."
"You checked? You scanned my link? How could you?"
"We had to. It wouldn"t be safe not to. Look, we didn"t record anything of yours. We just checked to make sure you were clean. That"s all. I promise."
Telisa took a deep breath. What Magnus said made sense. They would have to check things like that to keep from getting caught in a society in which people could be unknowing spies for their government.
"That isn"t the only unusual thing going on with the links," Magnus said. "Since Shiny came on board, he"s been trying to emulate our link"s handshake codes to connect to the ship"s computer."
"Really? He"s trying to break in?"
Magnus shrugged. "From his point of view, it"s probably not so much trying to break in as just trying to communicate. Obviously he"s detected the data we transfer on the link frequency, and he"s trying to speak the same language. But our ship"s computer is rejecting him."
"You should give him an account. We need to learn to talk with him somehow."
"Okay. But I want to restrict his access. He seems to be on our side, but he is an alien, after all. Until we understand him better, I"ll keep an eye on it."
"And my problem?"
"We can work on that once we"re out of the system," Magnus said. "Link up with me and we"ll poke around through Thomas"s programs and see if we can find something to clean up your link."
Once on the vessel, Kirizzo turned his resources towards learning to communicate with his hosts.
Kirizzo worked for several subcycles on the problem. He had been recording and cataloging their movements for some time now but had not had the chance to a.n.a.lyze the data in depth. He began this a.n.a.lysis once it became obvious that he would have a lot of time available.
He realized that the movements the creatures made were too simple. They could not encode enough information for a meaningful dialog. He pondered the meaning of this new discovery.
Either the aliens were much more modularized than his race and could function with very little interaction, or else they were using other means to augment the transfer of information.
The first idea did not fit what he had observed of the creatures. When the time came to break off the alliance with the third one, the original two had quickly organized a plan and acted in a coordinated way to leave the other behind. That implied that they had exchanged a plan. A slight chance existed that the two had done this kind of thing many times and didn"t have to communicate much to select a plan, but that seemed unlikely.
Kirizzo decided to examine the second possibility in more detail. How could they be exchanging information?
He scanned the radiative emanations of the environment and picked up several frequencies being used for information transfer. This examination revealed that the humans had artificial means of communication much like himself, via small devices embedded in their bodies. He monitored these frequencies and started a group of experiments to try and inject his own transmissions into the system to learn more.
Once again the bandwidth proved to be low. Hardly any information pa.s.sed at the frequencies where he detected activity. But it might be that their devices just weren"t exchanging anything right now.
When he jumped in on the channel and sent some transmissions of his own, he followed the protocol but lacked the one-time link codes that the others used. They worked on a principle of using pa.s.scodes to connect, but each pa.s.scode was good for only one use. He didn"t have enough samples to try and crack the pattern. For now it seemed all he could do was eavesdrop on the coded messages.
Still, this system was a more modern veneer added onto their original state in nature. Kirizzo wondered if effective communication was required before any civilization could become advanced. It would have taken a long time for the race to become coordinated with an extremely limited mode of communication. He doubted his race would have been as successful without their original communication system based on limb movement.
That meant that they might be able to exchange information using senses that Kirizzo lacked. They could have been using media that escaped Kirizzo"s attention the whole time. The idea that their primitive base language used movement exclusively as his race did was probably a bad a.s.sumption on his part.
In order to make further progress, Kirizzo would have to learn about the senses utilized by the creatures. These natural "primitive" capabilities would be what they used in their simplest forms of transferring ideas.
Kirizzo moved through the large chamber to which he had been directed. The walls were monotonously regular, almost perfect in their boring rectangular theme. He found this style to be gratingly dull, but he had expected as much after seeing their simulated environment in the alien installation.
Artificial radiation streamed down from above. The obvious deduction here was that the creatures could sense this light as Kirizzo could. He worked his way further around the many storage containers that littered the area. The wall had an embedded device in it, shielded by a metal grille. He scanned this area and a.n.a.lyzed the function of the site.
The system placed in the wall converted electronic impulses into movement with a network of wires and magnets. The resulting vibrations could conceivably range into frequencies beyond the ability of his ma.s.s sense to detect. A possibility occurred to him. An experiment was in order.
Kirizzo couldn"t move his legs fast enough to emulate the vibrations the device produced, but he could reproduce them with one of his defense modules. The defense module was capable of extremely quick interception, and its drive could cause the module to vibrate rapidly if he told it to change directions back and forth very fast. He instructed the device to drop into contact with the floor and utilize its movement system to buzz at high frequency.
Kirizzo experimented with the setup, starting at a low frequency that he could sense with his ma.s.s detection. As he increased the speed of movement, the disturbance quickly left his range. He instructed the module to continue in ascending frequencies up to its limit. When he sensed a larger ma.s.s approaching, he became distracted from the experiment.
One of the aliens burst into the room. Kirizzo saw that it was the smaller one, brandishing a primitive weapon. He immediately stopped creating the vibrations, concerned that perhaps he had broken some taboo of their culture. The alien seemed to calm, lowering its device. Had he alarmed it?
Kirizzo repeated the experiment and watched the alien. It showed obvious alarm as the module vibrated again, raising its weapon and stepping back. It sensed the movement of his module.
It appeared that these creatures used an even more sophisticated movement sensor than Kirizzo was naturally capable of. This revelation shocked him a little since he had thought the creatures devoid of nonvisual motion sense altogether. But the evidence here suggested that they could detect movements at a much higher frequency than Kirizzo could, a rate of millions of vibrations per subcycle.
Did it detect the movement of the sphere or the ship"s deck? Or the resulting movement of the molecules of the atmosphere? It could even be the high-frequency impact of the shock waves on its outer integument, Kirizzo realized. Either way it was a fascinating method of information transfer.
The breakthrough gave Kirizzo the tools he needed to begin a.n.a.lyzing the alien language. Unfortunately it meant that they might not be able to communicate without artificial help. Still, being able to understand the creatures would aid in achieving his next goal.
Chapter Eighteen.
Magnus closed his eyes and linked into his virtual c.o.c.kpit. Display screens and controls came into being all around him.
He turned to a display on his left and reviewed the status of his launch decoys. The Iridar had dropped five of them as it descended over the continent. Each drone now awaited his command in distant parts of the land ma.s.s. The devices would simulate a takeoff of his ship and hopefully distract any waiting UNSF trap to the wrong vector.
Magnus activated the drones and sent them off. At the same time, he brought the Iridar"s engines to full power and prepared for his own takeoff. He routed power to temporary storage pools for more drones, the EM warfare pod, and weapons.
The core of the Iridar held its greatest miracle: the gravity spinner. Although the spinner took most of the energy consumed by the ship, it was well worth it. The spinner allowed generation of the artificial gravity during the voyages as well as faster than light travel. Magnus started the spinner last. He locked down the ship and brought the Iridar up from the planet by using the spinner to cause it to "fall" upward. The ship"s thrusters kicked in, adding to the speed. He couldn"t fully engage the spinner so close to the planet without causing vast destruction.
As an afterthought, Magnus turned to a new virtual panel and created a new account on the ship"s system. He left a pointer to the flight information console. If Shiny found his way in, he could monitor their progress through that. Magnus thought it might help to keep the alien calm during their escape.
He watched on several displays as they made their way up through the atmosphere. Several ghost images of the Iridar climbed up from the planet. Magnus saw the ones generated from his launch drones as well as several other electromagnetic fakes thrown up by the EM module. The module scrambled many useful frequencies to confuse things for the enemy as well as watching and interpreting the planetscape for signs of other ships and facilities.
Magnus looked at a control on one of the virtual boards before him. It activated at his thought. One of the launch drones exploded. The screens lit up with the EM pulse of its destruction, playing havoc with Magnus"s readings. He launched two other EM bombs to add to the noise. He wanted to blind as many satellites as possible to cover their escape route.
The Iridar left the atmospheric envelope of the planet. Magnus cut the thrusters to preserve fuel and let the spinner accelerate them. He dropped off some missiles in their path. In a few minutes they"d activate and move to kill a group of satellites over a different part of the planet. It would look like they were trying to blind another part of the network. The ship operated very stealthily, but it never hurt to overlap the protection. Magnus wrapped their escape in deception after deception. If someone could figure out their route, he hoped it would be many days from now.
He relaxed a notch and watched the displays for a while. As he"d hoped, they hadn"t had to use any of the crash pods. They were a last resort for when a spinner failed. The UNSF had weapons that would disable a spinner, and the resulting g forces could smash a crew around inside their vessel.
Magnus wondered about Shiny. He checked the alien on a surveillance viewer to make sure things looked normal. The creature seemed quiescent.
The mercenary looked over the screens as the Iridar moved farther out. The planet behind him remained noisy. He selected a frequency from the comm display and packaged a message. His equipment would make the transmission look like noise; only someone searching for the agreed-upon pattern would be able to recognize and descramble it.
"Hawk, I"m leaving the target system. I"m golden. We"ll get back to you in a few weeks," Magnus sent.
"This is Hawk. I read you. Noisy, though. Hah, your noise coder must be workin" too well."
"I"m surprised to get a realtime link with you, Hawk," Magnus said.
"h.e.l.lo to you too, Vulture," Henman replied. "Yeah, well, my ship"s been dispatched towards target system. Something about some smugglers. You wouldn"t happen to know anything about that, would you?"
"We"re out now. But A and B are dead. As you know, we blew the approach so it"s noisy on the way out."
"s.h.i.t, sorry to hear that. You guys had a rough ride. The Unies want you bad, though, whatever you did. They"re throwing a lot of hardware your way."
"Well, we"re a little more golden that I can express. I"ll have to lay low for a while. We"ll figure out a way to get you your cut, just like always. Hey, they may have gotten a few traces of us back there. If you can snoop around and make some of it go away, it would help."
"Sorry, no way. Not on this one. If they got anything on you, it"ll be impossible for me to make it disappear. Not without giving myself away. It"s one thing to clean logs that no one looks at anyway or to make a random security pic go away, but this is different."
"I understand, Hawk."
"So have you s.p.a.ced your VIP yet?"
"No, not this one. VIP"s the real deal, very capable. I think there"s a lot of potential."
Henman laughed. "What, you"ve fallen in love with your pa.s.senger, have you now? C"mon, Vulture, keep your head for G.o.d"s sake. She"s just some spoiled brat who you"re hot for."
Magnus frowned. Henman was being a little too specific. Even though he believed no one could listen in, he preferred being more nebulous while in the thick of it.
"Seriously, VIP"s working out well. Held it together after we lost A and B. Don"t worry... there"s only a few of us to split the load with."
"I suppose. I really hope this one doesn"t bite you, though. You"re so d.a.m.n trusting. I"ve tried to set you straight a hundred times. You"re gonna get us screwed if you"re not careful. And I don"t mean by that eye candy you hired, either."
"Don"t worry. I"ll be in touch."
Magnus cut the connection. He felt anger rising in him at the way that Henman a.s.sumed things about his judgement. He changed course to avoid any chance that their conversation would give away his escape vector.