The Pandora Paradox Page 6

  "Kage, stand down! We're not being held prisoner!"

  "You sure?" Kage asked over the channel. "How do I know that you're not saying that under duress?"

  "Because if I was under duress, I wouldn't be able to think of all the ways I'm going to hurt you when I get back aboard," Jason said.

  "Good enough for me. Standing down. Tell them no hard feelings," Kage said before the channel closed with a chirp. Jason just smiled and shrugged as Tulden gave him a hard stare.

  "Hey," Jason said, "he means well. He's just a little high-spirited."

  "Did it occur to him that he was firing on the ship you were being held prisoner in?" Tulden asked.

  "He was just having a little fun," Jason said. "He scuffed up your paint but didn't do any real damage. Those little missiles he fired were little custom jobs we carry called Pixies. They're good for making a point, not so much for actually destroying anything. If I were you, I'd be more pissed that your point defense and sensor operators were caught flat-footed."

  "Here," the agent said, pressing a data card into Jason's hand. "Have your trigger-happy code slicer use these decryption codes and the slip-com address listed. I'll be in touch. Now, get out of here. I can't keep you aboard any longer after that little scene."

  "Got it," Jason said, palming the card.

  They were escorted back to the airlock by regular troops wearing shipboard armor and carrying stun weapons. Tulden disappeared, and Jason understood the entire operation to bring them aboard for a face to face talk had been incredibly risky. While he was a full agent and wielded incredible power and autonomy, he was also subject to the whims of his superiors, and there was no shortage of people wanting to take a shot at his back to bring him down a peg. There were likely operatives aboard the trawler loyal to other agents who would report back on Tulden's operations and anything unusual would be flagged and scrutinized.

  What had been interesting about the entire episode was that Jason got the distinct feeling the battle-scarred agent had been right on the verge of agreeing to help their rebellion. That was a hell of a bridge to cross for someone who had been trained and indoctrinated within the ConFed's intelligence service to be completely loyal. Full agents had the authority to burn down entire cities, kill citizens without provocation or explanation, and generally violate the sovereignty of any member world as they pleased, but they always did these things out of a twisted sense of loyalty to the ConFed. They'd snuff out an entire planet of innocents for the greater good if that planet posed any significant threat to the stability of the government they'd sworn allegiance to.

  Tulden, however, seemed different. He wasn't a zealot, or at least he didn't appear to be. His loyalty was still to the ConFed, but it wasn't such blind loyalty that he couldn’t see what was happening and how something strange had taken hold on Miressa Prime. Jason generally held agents in the same regard as he did for venereal diseases, but he was willing to at least cautiously see if a two-way exchange with this Tulden could be exploited.

  "Disable our little surprise, Twingo, and we'll get out of here," Jason said as he climbed up into the pilot seat. His engineer opened one of the deck panels and reached in to disable the failsafe they'd rigged up in case the encounter had turned hostile. In the panel was the tablet computer Jason had carried on him hardwired into the engine management system, programmed to go off if tampered with or if the two hour timer elapsed. When triggered, it would command the SX-5's slip-drive to engage at full power. The ship would probably mesh-out, but it would also take most of the starboard flank of the trawler with it when the slip-space fields ripped the side of the ship apart. Since the little ship didn't have any missiles loaded into the launchers or mines in the drop ports yet, it was the best they could do on short notice.

  "Trap circuits disengaged," Twingo called out. "You're clear to maneuver."

  Jason wasted no time in decoupling from the ConFed ship and flying the short distance to the Devil's Fortune. The small striker was much easier to guide into the corvette's hangar bay than the Phoenix had been, clearing the sides by at least fifteen meters on each wing. He dropped the gear and settled it to the deck, engaging the brakes and mag-locks before shutting down on the flight systems. "Kage, we're in. Close her up and get us the hell out of here!"

  "Already moving away now, Captain," Kage said. As the trio walked down the ramp of the SX-5 the enormous hangar bay doors boomed closed, and the mechanical locks engaged. Jason hadn't even made it to the lifts before a brief sense of vertigo told him they'd meshed-out of the system.

  7

  "Nice work with the Pixies," Jason said to Kage as he walked onto the bridge. "They really thought they were under attack."

  "I told you it was a sound tactic," Kage said, turning in his chair. "If you thump the hull of a ship hard enough to ring it like a bell, people tend to trust their gut that tells them they're in danger rather than the instruments telling them it wasn't a hard enough hit to scratch the finish."

  "Did you really just buy a ship that looks like a shrunken version of the Phoenix?" Doc asked, looking at the security feed of the hangar.

  "It's similar, but not the same," Jason said defensively. "Kage, get down to the hangar with Twingo and get all the damn trackers off that ship. ConFed Intel tracked us halfway across the sector once we'd left the brokerage."

  "They were also waiting for us before you bought that ship," Doc pointed out.

  "Not to mention they knew what ship we were flying in the first place," Crusher said. "That we're flying this ship isn't well-known yet."

  "Damnit," Jason muttered, rubbing his forehead. "You're right…they might have gotten a tracker on the new ship, but they'd been following us before that."

  "Let's not get too inside out over this," Twingo said from the hatchway. "We were just in a fleet of ships that ConFed Intel is going to want to track. It's possible with all that excitement around the Terran cruiser that they managed to tag all the ships in our formation. We'll let the automated systems do a sweep of each ship, and then we'll do a manual sweep. There are only so many places a tracker with slip-com capability can hide."

  "Get to it," Jason said. "Pull Lucky in if you have to. We need to be flying clean before we hit that rendezvous."

  "What are you going to be doing in all this?" Kage asked.

  "Besides supervising you lazy idiots and making sure you do what I asked?"

  "Yeah, besides that."

  "I've got to get the warning out to the rest of the group we were parked with that we may have been compromised," Jason said. "I'll tell Mok first and let him decide how he wants to handle it."

  "Have fun," Kage said as Jason slid into the plush seat of the bridge's dedicated com terminal. "He's been a little on edge lately and isn't known for his appreciation of bad news."

  "Get to work," Jason said, logging into the terminal and selecting the slip-com nodes and encryption routines he wanted. He looked at the mission clock, showing under the ship clock on the forward display. Mok's ships would still be at least two days from the rendezvous, and the Devil would be at least three and a half thanks to their unplanned detour. He punched in all the addressing data from memory and waited, expecting to see the face of Similan, Mok's consigliere and right-hand man in all matters. Instead, the big boss himself accepted the channel request almost immediately.

  "I was just about to try and contact you," the quadrant's most notorious crime lord said brusquely. "We've found trackers on two of our ships. We're dropping everyone out of slip-space and searching the rest."

  "Understood," Jacob said. "We haven't found any on this ship yet, but we suspect they're there. It's why I'm reaching out to you. We were hounded by a ConFed agent all the way from the Skaxis System and were brought aboard his ship. It's disguised to look like a tramp freighter, but she looks like a new build."

  "What were you doing in Skaxis?" Mok's eyes narrowed.

  "This big damn ship you gave me can't land without a massive pain in the ass and leaves a paper
trail as long as my leg when I even request a de-orbit," Jason said. "I needed to pick up a strike craft for my crew, and I figured a new buy from a broker we've never used before would be the safest bet. Turns out our agent friend was a step ahead of me."

  "I loaned you that ship…I did not give it to you," Mok rumbled. "Keep that distinction firmly in the front of your mind while you're flying her. That ship was built to my personal specifications, and I've never even gotten the chance to step foot on her."

  "You're missing out," Jason said. "She's nice. Probably much more luxuriously appointed than that com ship you're on right now." A low growl was the only answer he received, so Jason decided to not press any further.

  "So, what did your new friend want?" Mok asked. Jason filled him in quickly on the broad strokes. Mok listened without interrupting until Jason was finished. "So, you believe him?"

  "He makes a compelling argument, but they all do." Jason shrugged. "This is the usual type of counterintelligence game they like to play. This could be nothing more than a way to get me to lead him right to the rebellion's leadership."

  "But you don't think so," Mok said shrewdly.

  "It doesn't matter what I think," Jason deflected. His gut instinct had been that the agent had been sincere in what he'd said. "The risk is too great. Even if he's not running an op, that doesn't mean someone isn't using him as bait. If they found out he was having doubts or that his loyalty was wavering, they'd dangle him out in front of us."

  "You're getting smarter." Mok nodded. "Or at least you now understand that leaping rashly hasn't always served you well in the past. I agree the risk is too high to accept what he's saying at face value, but that doesn't mean we can't play a little game of our own and see what we might draw out."

  "Counter-counterintelligence?" Jason asked. "I feel a headache coming on already."

  "Don't worry, my young blunt instrument, now we're getting into my area. We'll use your new contact to draw out anyone who might be using him to get to us. For now, clean your—my—ship and be at rally point bravo-six in one-hundred and fifty-three hours." The translation matrix in Jason's neural implant handled not only languages, but units of measure. Sometimes it made for some interesting conversions when talking about time or distance.

  "Bravo-six," Jason repeated, referring to one of the many pre-arranged rally points they'd set up with the expectation they'd be quickly compromised by ConFed Intel. Most of the ConFed might be a bloated, inefficient, unwieldy bureaucracy, but one underestimated their intelligence service at their own peril. They were fast, ruthless, and given a lot of authority to perform their mission. In the early planning stages, well before the attack on Miressa Prime, Mok had designed their own command structure with the assumption that ConFed Intel would be on them almost immediately.

  Mok terminated the channel just as Twingo walked back onto the bridge. He held a dark blue disk about the diameter of a hockey puck and maybe three millimeters thick. He just held it out to Jason without a word.

  "Tracker?" Jason asked, taking the device.

  "Definitely ConFed. Found it on the SX-5," Twingo said. "We'll need to drop from slip-space to check the Devil and pull any of those off her engine emitters."

  "How would they get these on without us detecting them?" Jason wondered.

  "When we're loitering in an area, especially in a large formation, usually we're only running navigational sensors to keep from bumping into anything big. These get loaded up onto small, stealthy drones and dispersed along a ship's course. Once they fly close enough, it spits these out, and they have limited ability to maneuver and attach themselves to the engines," Twingo said. "The real question is how they got the drones so close to our ships. We were flying nav sensors only, but two ships on overwatch were running full tactical sweeps."

  "Traitor in the fleet?" Jason asked. He much preferred a stand-up fight to all the sneaking around and suspecting everyone of selling them out.

  "Most likely," Twingo agreed. "This party is made up of mercs and criminals for the most part, excluding the Eshquarian regulars we released." Jason thought about that for a moment. The Devil's Fortune had been in Flight Three, the largest grouping of the rebel fleet and the one with most of Mok's ships. Flight One had been the Eshquarian group, and Flight Two had been Kellea's ships, along with a few stragglers.

  "I feel like there should be a way to see who the likely culprit was for releasing a tracker drone by looking at the flight data and seeing who was around us at the time," Jason said.

  "I can begin that now that my task with the ConFed data core is complete," a soft voice said from behind Jason, causing him to almost jump off the deck.

  "Damnit, Lucky! I've asked you to stop sneaking up on me!" The battlesynth just stared at him, not offering any further comment. Jason just sighed. His friend had good days and bad days as his processing matrix struggled to fully integrate itself with the new body they'd stuffed it into. "You finished with the ConFed data? That was fast."

  "Not especially so," Lucky said. "Once all the security measures and encryption locks were disabled, it was simply a matter of parsing the raw data. You and Mok installed enough computational power in that hold to manage a Tier Two planet's entire infrastructure, so the work went quickly."

  "Cool," Jason said. "Can you give me the thirty-thousand-foot view right now?"

  "The ConFed has propped up an entire science division dedicated to developing new types of alloys that incorporate a unique crystalline structure that—"

  "Forty thousand feet."

  "The ConFed is secretly building manufacturing facilities that have the ability to use quantum—"

  "Fifty thousand feet," Jason said. "I almost fell asleep when you said quantum." A visibly frustrated Lucky shifted back and forth on his feet a moment before answering.

  "They are building a series of enormous, orbital factories that work in a way that would allow them to build lots of other large things very quickly," he said.

  "So, all those objects we saw on the sensor data were actually manufacturing facilities?" Jason asked. "They haven't even started building anything yet?"

  "Not according to the data you gave me."

  "Have the computers build a searchable database and repackage it into a single transmittable file," Jason said. "I want to send it to one of our off-site servers before we hand it all over to Mok."

  "Of course," Lucky said. "After that I will begin going through our flight logs to look for the ship that might have dropped tracker drones."

  "You and Kage both are going to work on that…together," Jason said, stressing the last word. Lucky stopped but didn't turn around. After a split second, he clomped off the bridge, his footfalls heavier and more petulant than when he'd arrived.

  "Why are you messing with him like that?" Twingo asked. "What was with having him explain something three times?"

  "You mean besides the fact it's funny to get him all pissed off and bouncing on his feet?" Jason laughed. "Because he's still not fully there yet. I'm trying to give him mild stressors in social settings that force him to work on dealing with minor problems without shooting them."

  "And you think pretending to be too stupid to understand basic explanations will do it?" Twingo sounded skeptical. Jason just shrugged.

  "My perceived stupidity has been one of the cornerstones of our team dynamic for years," he said. "It doesn't bother me—well, except when Kage says it. I actually want to punch him in the face—and it's something familiar and old he can dig back into his memories and examine."

  "What if you just piss him off, and he punches you in the chest, collapsing your ribcage?"

  "In my paperwork you're set to inherit the Phoenix, the hangar, and my house," Jason said.

  "But the more I think about it, the more I like it," Twingo said. "Definitely keep at this approach."

  "Get down to the hangar. I'm dropping us out of slip-space now."

  "I'm gone." Twingo waved over his shoulder.

  As it turned o
ut, the Devil's Fortune had more than just the two ConFed trackers Twingo found. Despite his assurances otherwise, Mok had installed a couple himself that would allow him to keep tabs on his shiny new corvette-class ship. Jason ordered those kept but put into shielded containers. He felt like there was an opportunity to have fun with them at Mok's expense. All the ConFed trackers they pulled off were analyzed, logged, and destroyed.

  "You should reach out to your new ConFed buddy and tell him we found his trackers," Crusher said.

  "I know you're just being an asshole, but that's actually not a bad idea," Jason said. "It could be the conversational inroad I need as an excuse to reach out to him."

  "Why are you going to talk to him at all?" Doc asked, frowning. "Haven't we spent most of our time trying to avoid ConFed agents?"

  "When we were just a bunch of hired guns, sure," Jason said. "But we're playing for bigger stakes now. This might be an advantage we could use."

  "Or it could be the thing that brings it all down," Doc argued.

  "He already had us in custody," Twingo said. "You know how they usually operate. They don't like to let one target go back into the wild if there's a chance to torture them for information now. He'd have had all of us strapped down to tables while his technicians went to work on us."

  The term technician when talking about ConFed Intelligence didn't mean someone who worked on their ships or equipment. It referred to a group of merciless torturer agents called in for extractions. They were very good at getting even the toughest being to spill all their secrets, and the subject never survived long once they started.

  "These people aren't to be trifled with," Doc said. "Even over the assumed safety of a slip-com channel, they're dangerous."

  "I hear you, Doc," Jason said, putting up his hand to shut Twingo up. "I really do. But I think this is worth pursuing, and I want you there with me, sitting off-camera and observing. You can pick up any context I miss since you're just watching the conversation not participating." This seemed to mollify Doc some.