Anyon code, p.22
Anyon Code, page 22
And that, Daelia did not want to talk about. Especially not in front of Argo, who was now clearly pretending very hard that he was very engrossed in the Envoy’s speech transcript. “Why was she there? At Aaru? All locked up like she was?”
“I don’t know. I’m hoping there’ll be an answer to that in the data that you pulled, but so far, Pallas hasn’t found anything.”
Daelia rubbed a hand over her face. “I found the word, Dad. ‘Anyon.’ I found it.”
“What do you mean?”
“I thought maybe it was something that Ribi just made up, but then I realized it’s got the same naming conventions as a lot of those weird little theoretical physics particles.”
“And?”
Daelia wasn’t sure why she’d brought this up. Anything to get away from the subject of Mom. “It’s a thing that was suggested for quantum computing. Some type of, what do they call it, qubit, or circuit, or I don’t know. It doesn’t make a lot of sense.”
“Have you been reading June’s old college notes or something?”
“She was looking into quantum communication when she lost her funding and got kicked out of her postdoc position at Rice, right?” Daelia pressed. “It involves entangled particles and shit like that, which have to be produced together. The anyon network requires that the emergents be in contact with each other.”
“Daelia…”
“What if they found a way to tap into this quantum shit somehow to—”
“Do not go down that road. It ruins everyone who touches it.”
“Maybe that’s because there’s some truth there!”
Her dad glared at her. “I don’t give a fuck about the truth right now, Daelia. I care about keeping you safe. You.” He jabbed a finger at her. “Just you.”
“What about Unity, Dad?” she sighed.
“Right now, that’s everyone’s problem. Let’s see what kinds of answers we can dig up today.”
37
“So, our new MQ-13 out there. You see her this morning?”
Rover tapped a pen on his desk, staring back at the Wing commander, who’d just sat himself down at his desk. He had to fight the urge to push back in his chair, create space between them. “Yes, sir. Nirriti. She’s an interesting one.”
“You see the email from SecDEF?”
Shit. Rover felt a sinking sensation in his gut. “Yeah, I saw that,” he said. Glanced back at his computer. “I was just going through it.”
“It’s a general stand-down order to all US forces.”
“Yeah, the Unity shit last night was—”
“What the fuck, Ty?” Cactus asked, low and quiet, leaning in.
“Sir?”
“Don’t start that shit with me,” Cactus said. “I heard about last night. I heard about what happened on a motherfucking container ship out in the Gulf. How dare you authorize something like that without talking to your chain of command first.”
Rover stared at him, trying to figure out what the angle was here, what Cactus was going to say next. “I don’t—”
“Do not,” Cactus warned. “Do not lie to me right now. Nirriti looks like she just went through a firefight with the damn CCP, and what’s more, she talked to me about it. So do not lie to me. What did you do last night?”
He considered lying. Just for a moment. A very brief moment. Cactus was staring at him. Rover stared back. Just how fucked was he right now? Arrest, confinement? “Sir, this wasn’t personal. It was—”
“I am this base, Rover. Do you understand that? I own this base and everything that happens on it.”
“This didn’t happen on the base,” Rover pointed out.
Cactus turned an alarming shade of red at that, moving back now with his hand out, no doubt ready to slam the door shut and really escalate the situation, when Sausage appeared there. Nonchalant, relaxed. Eating an apple.
“What’s going on?” he asked, strolling in. He kicked the door shut behind him.
Cactus turned his full attention on the Group commander. “Rover here ran a little black op last night.”
“Yeah,” Sausage said. “I just said hi to Nirriti, too. She’ll be a nice addition to the flock, once she and Emily figure out the pecking order.”
“Sausage,” Cactus said, “this is off topic. Rover—”
“Took part in a joint black op last night, yeah, I know.”
Cactus’s back was still to him, so Rover spread his hands, mouthing a “what” at his old friend. Sausage ignored him.
“You knew?”
“Of course I knew. Rover talked to me about it yesterday afternoon. Fucking SOCOM put this thing together, asked everybody to keep silent on it. Damn near tore Rover up to not be able to communicate up his chain about it, but you knowing would have obligated you to potentially pass it along, and right now, we don’t know where the leaks in the system are.”
“What leaks?”
“Who’s talking to Unity, or how Unity is accessing our comms. Which had to have happened, judging from the way everything went tits-up last night,” Sausage said. He took another bite of apple, chewing this one thoroughly before continuing. “Command put him in a tough spot, sir. And then fucking Heliana showed up to keep tabs on everybody here. She’s dug in like a tick right now. Go easy on him.”
“Senator Heliana’s involved in this?”
“She authorized it, sir.” Sausage looked at Rover. Nodded. “I hear she’s staying down at Tamm’s hangar, down by the Scrap House.”
“Why? Why were we attacking Unity?” Cactus said.
Sausage gestured at Rover, who felt the full disapproval of the Wing King land on him once more. He sighed. Time for some honesty. “Unity’s a front. Best guess right now is that the entire thing’s being orchestrated by some element inside Omphalos, possibly the Galatea moderation team. Or Galatea herself. We’re not sure.”
Cactus didn’t say anything for several seconds. “You have proof?”
“You can talk to Daelia Hall. She’ll give you the whole story.”
“Daelia…” Cactus trailed off. “Why?”
“Daelia put herself in the middle of it. You how she is, always—”
“I meant, why is… Shit. I can’t even say it.”
“Why did Galatea do all of this? Unknown at this time,” Sausage said, taking another bite out of his apple. “Last night was supposed to be recon only. In order to get those answers. Shit went sideways. The shooting wasn’t planned, or I would have had both 2Shy and Emily on station from the start.”
Cactus, evidently mollified, looked between them. “Anything else going on that I need to be aware of?”
Sausage shrugged. “Rover?”
Dammit, he thought, but nodded. “A few things. If you’d like to go out to the Repose with me this morning, we can review some of that.”
“The Repose? Where we have the families camped out?”
“Yes, sir. That.”
Sausage smiled at him and opened the door. “Give us a couple of minutes, Cactus, then we can all head over together. I’d like to get eyes-on again, too.”
“Is there coffee anywhere in this building this morning?”
“Scurvy’s probably brewing up a pot, if you want to go find him,” Rover replied.
“I’ll do that.” And with that, Cactus was gone.
Sausage went to close the door again while Rover slid down in his seat, staring up at the ceiling. “Fuck, I thought I was screwed there.”
“You are fucking lucky our new girl out there doesn’t know how to keep her mouth shut. At least she talked to me, too, and not just Cactus,” Sausage snapped, pacing over to the window, looking through the blinds. “Look at that. Emily’s chewing her out.”
Rover half stood, enough to see out his office window. Emily had indeed taxied over to Nirriti’s location. In AR, the scene didn’t look great. The two-headed dragon-form was coiled to strike, scales bristling as she faced down the smaller, younger emergent. Hardly seemed fair. Nirriti hadn’t even picked a form yet.
“It got a little tense between them last night,” Rover said.
“Why the fuck didn’t you tell me about this?”
“I was ordered not to.”
“Was the order ‘don’t tell your chain’? Or was it ‘keep this to people we can trust’?” Sausage asked, voice taking on a hard edge.
“Rick…”
“Don’t get all chummy with me now, Colonel Marsden,” Sausage shot back, emphasizing the last two words. “I know what you think of me and I fucking know what you think of Cactus, but this wasn’t the way to handle it.”
“We really don’t know how Galatea infiltrated mission communications last night. Could be somebody’s working for her, could be that she hacked our encryption, could be a problem with SATCOM. The fewer people who know, the better.”
“This is not the kind of secret you keep from me.”
Rover nodded. “Point taken. Where do we go from here?”
“We’ve got until Cactus finds himself a coffee for you to get me up to speed on what’s going on,” Sausage said. “And then I want to see exactly what’s going on out at the Repose.”
“Fair enough.”
“And Ty, there’s something you should know,” Sausage said. “I made a couple of calls, after Nirriti and I had our little chat.”
“Oh?”
“Admiral Thibideaux’s been dead since the 15th. Killed in some hit-and-run outside the base. The report I got said it looked planned.”
Rover considered the enormity of that. “Can you trust that report?”
“I better be able to. Got it off a friend out there.”
“So if Thibideaux’s dead…”
“… who really approved last night’s little operation?” Sausage finished, and took another bite of his apple.
38
“I want to know what happened last night.”
The military, from what Daelia knew, was fond of these things called hot washes. After-action briefings. Figuring out what went wrong and how to fix it. Rover had apparently called for one this morning, which to Daelia seemed unnecessary.
Everybody had already been at the AWACS.
Everyone was trying to make sense of the complete clusterfuck that had been Heliana’s recon mission. Having Rover show up with Cactus and Sausage only made the whole thing feel even more like a punishment.
The Wing commander hadn’t acknowledged any of them at first. He’d walked the central aisle through Ribi’s operation floor, gone up to the cockpit, talked to him for a few minutes. Now he was back, though, and it looked like he wanted to murder something with his bare hands.
Nobody answered him.
“Let me rephrase that,” Cactus said. “You’re all going to tell me your part of the story. Who wants to start?”
“Nirriti fucked us, sir,” Ho said.
“Really?” Daelia demanded. “Really? You want to blame her for this?”
Ho waved a hand. “Who else should we blame? She fired that Hellfire into the bridge.”
“She thought she was saving the VBSS team,” Argo said quietly.
“She did it without authorization!” Ho spluttered.
Daelia opened her mouth to protest, but Dad waved it away before she could. “Honestly, it’s understandable that something like this happened. Fielding a newborn emergent like that was a recipe for disaster.”
“Why didn’t you say anything?” Sausage asked.
“I wasn’t asked for my opinion.”
“That’s never stopped you before, Lee.”
“Let me put it blunter then. I didn’t know until well after she launched,” he said. He didn’t cast a glance Daelia’s way, but she was already burning with shame. Should she have told him about it yesterday? Why hadn’t she? Was it leftover anger from the weekend? Seemed petty, downright stupid now.
“Lee, nobody’s blaming you for this,” Cactus said, and lifted his head a little. “That goes for everybody here. This isn’t about deciding who gets fucked next. It’s about figuring out what we need to do from here.”
Sausage nodded. “Whose idea was it anyway, fielding an abiota with that kind of trauma so soon after eclosing? I know it wasn’t anybody at this wing, coming up with something that dumb.”
“Trauma?” Argo asked quietly, leaning over toward Dad.
“They feel it,” Dad said. “Not the same way we do, but they still feel it.”
“It was the senator who insisted on that,” Rover said. “Said she thought Emily could be compromised.”
Not, the abiota protested. Her small AR form was wrapped around a small kugu, something borrowed from Bellona Robotics. Ribi hadn’t shown himself yet. Me fine.
“We know that. Now,” Rover said.
Never should listen to Heliana, Emily said. Take care this ourselves.
“That was never an option, Emily. We got our target, we did as ordered,” Rover told her.
“Yeah, walked right into one big-ass trap,” Ho muttered.
Daelia had been thinking about this all the way back from Galveston. “Galatea had to have known we would come after her. That we’d figure it out eventually and come after her. So she presented us with a target to hit…”
“In an effort to take us out?” Argo finished.
“Took out almost everyone else,” Rover said, flat, and turned his attention to Cactus. “Of the twenty-three teams that went out, sir, only three made it back to base alive.”
“Confirmed?” Cactus said, worry on his face now.
“Near as can be. We lost contact with all of them through the mission network, and with big areas of the country out again, it’s impossible to confirm.”
“What about SOCOM? I thought they were involved,” Cactus said.
“Radio silence since the end of the op,” Rover told him.
Cactus nodded, looking oddly relieved. “I’ll make a few calls. I might be able to get some different answers.”
“I don’t know,” Daelia said. “After everything we’ve been through, there’s no telling who, or what, you might be talking to.”
Everyone was quiet for a little while after that.
“All this trouble Unity, Galatea, has gone to to kill a few people here. So why not go further?” Cactus mused, breaking the silence again. “Why not hit us here, now? Galatea knows where we are.”
“She did turn off the power,” Rover said.
“Maybe she doesn’t have the reach,” Daelia said, a thought coming to her. “Maybe she can’t get to us.”
“What do you mean?”
“I don’t know, this isn’t… It’s all wrong somehow,” Daelia said. “It always has been. Specialized kugus and energy weapons that the military doesn’t have yet, the bullshit up on Aethera and the attempts to control people through their NULIs, but it’s all so ad hoc and slipshod.”
“Daelia’s right. That freighter had what, two Russian-made antiaircraft guns on it?” Argo asked. “That’s shit you can buy off the black market in Northern Vietnam. But the explosion was just fuel, right?”
“That’s the way it looked from the imagery,” JP said.
“What if we’ve been thinking about this all wrong?” Daelia said. “What if, instead of being way over-resourced and omniscient here, Galatea is struggling, barely holding the whole thing together? She doesn’t have what she needs to actually take us out.”
“No, but Heliana did,” Argo replied.
Daelia turned to him, open-mouthed, not really believing what she had just heard. But before Argo could warm up to his theory any more, Rover shut it all down with a wave of his hand.
“We are not going to go down that road. We are not accusing a sitting US senator of, I don’t know, treason”—and he jabbed his hand at Argo again before he could speak—“without some kind of proof. What we do have proof for is that SATCOM is still compromised. It’s entirely possible that Galatea was listening along to the whole thing. That she was able to set this thing up specifically to provoke that response out of Nirriti.”
“We can’t afford to overestimate her here,” Lee said.
“Underestimation is worse right now,” Rover snapped back. “What’s that you always say? Can’t be too careful with abiota and computer systems? Emily! Your opinion?”
Brick Nirriti.
“No,” Rover said.
Only way be sure.
“Moving on.” Rover pinched the bridge of his nose. “What did Chalk say about the SATCOM situation?”
“She and I had a long talk on the way back from the Gulf, thanks to Emily,” Norris said.
“And?”
“Like Rover said, SATCOM appears to be fucked. Still. Sir.”
“That the technical term for it, Senior Norris?” Cactus asked.
“No, not really. Do you want me to get into it?”
“Might be important.”
“As you know, SATCOM is bot-encrypted, end to end. One pair of linked bots for each transmission or receiver site. It runs on a principle of modulation and…” Norris trailed off, catching Rover’s expression. “Anyway, we do it that way because not even emergents can break those keys. So we can’t be talking about a compromise to the encryption. The erroneous data is getting injected into the system directly.”
“At the satellites or Space Command’s central processing station on Aethera,” Cactus said flatly, nodding.
“Yes sir,” Norris said, and looked at Rover. “The team up on Aethera thought they had corrected the issue at that central processing station. But considering Nirriti was getting modified radio chatter after they thought they’d cleared the line, I would guess that the problem isn’t there.”
Cactus shook his head. “Wait. Aethera? We have people in orbit?”
“Highlander and Tech Sergeant Garcia, as well as an emergent hacker that Pallas approved for the deployment,” Rover confirmed.
“So how did this happen?” the Wing commander pressed. “If the problem’s not at Aethera? Are you saying it’s at the satellite?”
Norris shrugged. “It’s not my area of expertise, but I think you would need to either swap out or add a pair of encryption bots to both a satellite and a transmission site. That could give you back-door access to the network, from which you could disseminate your false data and have it all look legit."
