Against The Middle Page 7

  He leaned back in his chair and rubbed the back of his neck as Captain Middleton asked, “Have you found anything, Mr. Fei?”

  “No, Captain,” he replied with a shake of his head. “It would seem that they have all been too badly damaged,” he said, gesturing to the screen full of seemingly random numbers and letters.

  But then he saw a fragment of code and, like a light going on in the back of his mind, he realized what it was that had seemed familiar about the jamming signal.

  “Sima Yi?” he breathed unthinkingly, his throat tightening as he did so. “Impossible…” he breathed, leaning forward and, after several seconds, finding that same string of code—his code!—buried in the data stream. The reason he had not recognized it earlier was because it was incomplete; only the access algorithm remained wholly intact, while the attendant programs were of a completely different design—a design with which he was only too familiar. “You backstabbing little thief,” he cursed under his breath in his native tongue after deducing who had stolen his code, knowing it could have only been one person.

  “What is it?” Captain Middleton asked, swiveling his Command Chair toward Fei Long’s trio of workstations in the Comm. section.

  “I believe I have gleaned at least some useful information from these slates, sir,” Fei Long explained. Gesturing to the isolated console, he continued, “There are traces of an old…acquaintance of mine’s handiwork here, Captain Middleton. There can be absolutely no doubt, since this person is the only one who had access to any of my source code—code which is present, at least partially, in the program which has wiped this particular slate clean.”

  Captain Middleton arched an eyebrow. “You’re friends with people who work for the Raubachs?” he asked, a hint of warning in his voice.

  Fei Long shook his head, “Whatever our…relationship had been was dissolved the day the Purity Bureau arrested me—an event I later learned had been orchestrated by my revealed nemesis. This person is my sworn enemy, Captain,” he assured his Lord and Master, “and I can assure you that nothing would give me greater pleasure than to erase every trace of my rival’s existence from the universe.”

  “A rival?” Middleton repeated with a hint of incredulity. “That’s high praise, coming from you.”

  “I do not bestow it lightly, sir,” Fei Long assured him after scanning the repeating data stream and concluding that the slate was well-and-truly empty of any usable information. “Aside from myself, this is the most dangerous living person of whom I am aware,” he said matter-of-factly, knowing that while the technical disparity between their skills was wide enough to be definitive – in Fei Long’s favor, of course—Fei Long came up short when it came to a certain…guile which his arch-nemesis had been shown to possess ‘in spades,’ as his crewmates would say.

  “Does this information help us here and now?” Middleton asked, and his question snapped Fei Long’s attention back to the present.

  Fei Long pondered the question for several seconds before realizing that it almost certainly did, “Yes, Captain, I believe it does.” He initiated a complete system purge of the isolated console after disconnecting the data slate and placing it into an isolation container. He then opened his DI-linked console and accessed the topographical data gathered by the Recon Team. While he did that, he cross-referenced the Harmony Destroyer’s best-known specifications and made adjustments to his hasty calculations based on the damage Hephaestion had noted to the enemy vessel prior to its engagement with the Pride of Prometheus.

  After tweaking a few more variables, he forwarded a set of coordinates to Hephaestion’s console. The young man made eye contact and nodded, to acknowledge he had received the instructions, and Fei Long turned to Captain Middleton.

  “I believe I have triangulated the most likely location of the access way which will lead us to whatever it was that the Droids were digging toward,” Fei Long explained. “I have forwarded the coordinates to Hephaestion’s terminal, but he must re-calibrate the sensors to detect the relatively tiny passageway.”

  Middleton narrowed his eyes, “You deduced its location based on a fragment of code you found on a data slate?”

  Fei Long blinked in surprise, realizing just how insane it must have appeared to his commander since the other man lacked the necessary expertise. He was about to explain how various wireless frequencies—like those on which the data slate he had just examined operated—could actually be adjusted to ‘piggyback’ on the widespread interference being pumped out by the jamming field’s generator, if one knew the algorithm operating said field’s seemingly random fluctuations, but he paused before saying a word.

  He did so because he realized that he would then also have to explain how the topography of the area only allowed for a single subterranean access point which could have allowed back-and-forth communication with the data slate in question over those frequencies. And, to top all of that off, he would then have to explain how he had gained familiarity with this ‘piggybacking’ technique—one he had learned from his aforementioned arch-nemesis—and all of that seemed to constitute what Captain Middleton would refer to as a ‘long answer.’

  So, instead of spewing technical jargon and launching into a long exposition on particle emission theory, Fei Long merely bowed his head deferentially and said, “Yes, Captain Middleton; I was.”

  “Scan the area once your modifications have been made, Sensors,” Captain Middleton said after looking at Fei Long doubtfully for a moment. He then swiveled his Command Chair around to face Hephaestion’s console before adding, “I’m glad you’re on our side, Mr. Fei.”

  “As am I, Captain,” Fei Long assured him with absolute honesty before returning to his duties.

  “So it looks like the walls of this shaft,” McKnight gestured to a three dimensional representation of the area where Fei Long had correctly guessed the location of the access way to the facility buried deep under the planet’s surface, “is composed entirely of carbon. We suspect it’s skinned with graphene and supported with braces comprised of carbon nanotubes,” she explained, pulling up some technical specifications as she did so.

  “How far down does it go?” Sergeant Gnuko asked from the far end of the table. He was flanked by Kratos and Lu Bu, his team leaders.

  “Twenty two miles,” McKnight replied promptly. “Given the planet’s relatively stable geological phase near the end of its atmospheric-retention life cycle, we’re putting ambient temperatures at the bottom somewhere around one hundred thirty degrees C.”

  “Nothing like a sauna first thing in the morning to get the blood pumpin’,” Garibaldi quipped dryly, making clear his dislike of high ambient temperatures.

  “Will that be an issue for any of your equipment, Chief?” Middleton asked, knowing that Garibaldi and a team of his people were going to be needed once they got down to…whatever it was.

  “Shouldn’t be,” Garibaldi replied after a moment’s thought. “Depends on the humidity though,” he added belatedly, “if it’s over 70% at the temperatures we’d expect down there, we could have some issues.”

  “That shouldn’t be a problem,” McKnight assured him, “the graphene—if that’s what the passage is actually made of—shouldn’t allow water vapor through, and even if it did the atmosphere on this rock is so thin it wouldn’t persist down there for any length of time before the heat blew it straight out the top of the shaft.”

  “Speaking of the shaft,” Gnuko leaned forward, gesturing to the screen, “how are we supposed to get down it? That thing only looks like it’s about three feet wide, and I didn’t see anything about a lift mechanism.”

  “We’re going to have to hope that whatever lift mechanism was used by the archeological team is still functional,” Middleton said.

  “And…just how do we know the archeological team is even down there, Captain?” Garibaldi asked skeptically.

  Middleton turned to Fei Long, “Mr. Fei?”

  Fei Long stood with his usual grace and turned to ad
dress the Chief Engineer. “I have uncovered incontrovertible evidence which points to Raubach operatives at work inside this subterranean structure, Chief Garibaldi. There is no possibility of error on my part in this matter,” he added with a smooth, but unyielding note to his voice when Garibaldi scoffed quietly. “My best conclusion, given the facts available to us, is that the archeological team discovered the shaft some time ago and at least some of them attempted to hide below the surface when the Red King entered orbit. They failed to cover their tracks sufficiently and the Red King’s crew pursued them below ground. Before all of the Red King’s crew could exit the facility, however, the Harmony Droids appeared and destroyed the Red King, stranding the human survivors—a group possibly comprised of both archeologists and Raubach operatives—below ground.”

  “What is ‘graphene’?” Kratos asked, waving to the screen and making no attempt to hide his scientific ignorance.

  Fei Long bowed slightly as he replied, “It is one of the first forms of advanced carbon architecture of which humanity is believed to have been capable of producing. It has fallen out of favor as a core building material in modern times due primarily to economic reasons, but essentially it is a nearly-indestructible sheet of carbon with a thickness measured in atoms.”

  “Nothing is indestructible,” Kratos said flatly.

  “It’s about as close to indestructible as it can be what with only being atoms thick,” Gnuko said evenly.

  “Why not construct starships—or armor—from this mythical substance then?” Kratos asked in a clearly challenging tone, his lone eye narrowing skeptically.

  “There are significant engineering obstacles,” Middleton interjected, “not the least of which is constructing a superstructure that’s capable of maintaining the graphene’s position when a tear actually does occur. The value of graphene is that it is a continuous sheet, which is a major plus until you realize just how much tension is placed on the stuff to make it form a battle-ready armor coating. One tear and the whole thing starts to unravel, and there’s no way to fix it under less than ideal circumstances.”

  “Alloys will always beat carbon since metal can be mended on the fly,” Garibaldi agreed, “but in certain applications, graphene is pretty invaluable and still sees plenty of usage.”

  “The fact that this passageway was constructed using it,” Fei Long continued, smoothly interjecting himself into the conversation, “suggests that either it was built by humans and subsequently forgotten, or…” he trailed off with a pointed look on his face.

  The room was silent for several seconds until, naturally, Garibaldi quipped, “What, you mean this was built by aliens?”

  Much as Middleton desired to engage in idle speculation along with the rest of his officers, he knew he needed to keep the meeting on point so he said, “Thank you, Mr. Fei. This meeting, and the intelligence gained on the planet, must remain compartmentalized to the department heads present and, naturally, any personnel who are assigned to the away mission. But let’s cut the talk of aliens for the time being, shall we?”

  “Yes sir,” Lieutenant McKnight said, ever the apple polisher, but in this case it was an attribute he appreciated in his XO.

  “We’ll send down a part comprised of three teams,” Middleton said, tilting his head toward Sergeant Gnuko and his people. “We’ll need the Recon Team to escort the specialists—in this case, Mr. Fei and the two engineers Chief Garibaldi selects to accompany him—and we’ll need the Assault Team to secure the surface entry to the passage while providing support for Recon, as Corporal Lu secures the subterranean end. Due to the jamming field, communications will be limited so each member of the away team will need to be capable of thinking on his or her feet. The shuttle launches in twenty minutes—dismissed.”

  Chapter VII: First Contact

  “It looks like it’s through here, Corporal,” Vali Funar reported after coming out of one of the seemingly endless number of crags in the canyon’s wall. “I see Confed-style boot prints and what looked like an interface about a hundred meters in.”

  Lu Bu nodded, “Good work.” She turned to see Fei Long, who was accompanied by Garibaldi’s two engineers, examining an outcrop of rock with intent fascination. “Fei,” she snapped after several seconds of patiently waiting for him to take the hint that he was holding up their progress. “Long!” she snapped, and he turned to face her through his pressure suit’s face shield. “We have found the passage,” she explained, gesturing to the crag from which Funar had just emerged.

  “Of course,” he replied, giving one last look at the rock shelf before trudging—awkwardly—toward her. He possessed a truly brilliant mind, but his physical talents often left much to be desired, and he moved toward her with obvious difficulty. If he had not been so necessary to this particular mission—and if his ATTACK DOGs had not been rendered useless by the jamming field—he would most certainly have remained aboard the Pride of Prometheus.

  But eventually he managed to cross the thirty meters which had separated them, and barely gave her a sideways look as he focused on moving his boots one in front of the other as he made to follow Vali Funar. Lu Bu turned to face Kratos who, along with the rest of his Assault Team members, wore old-style Confederation power armor. He had brought thirteen of his warriors with him, and Lu Bu knew that he would be able to hold the entry against anything but an all-out assault by an overwhelmingly powerful force.

  “Send six of your people inside to guard the entry, Private Kratos,” she instructed, and he nodded wordlessly. Before she could finish her order—since she technically outranked him, as a Corporal—six of his people stepped forward as one. Realizing he must have relayed her order over his suit’s com-link as soon as she had given it, she smirked and continued, “Recon Team and specialists will attempt to descend; if we succeed, we will be out of contact until we return to surface. Your orders are to neutralize anyone who exits before us, using whatever means necessary, understood?”

  “Understood,” he replied staidly.

  “Good,” she said before turning to follow her group into the crag.

  Funar had dropped light sticks at several points along the way, which helped prevent them from getting lost in the labyrinthine, criss-crossing series of apparently natural tunnels. But she soon came to Fei Long’s position and found that he had stopped to admire the rocks.

  “Move, Fei,” she said, the name sounding awkward to her ears. She usually called him Kongming in private, as it was his chosen style name and was proper to use among peers. But on those occasions where she chose not to use his style name she called him Long, which was the given name of his birth. Referring to him by his family name had never seemed proper to her for some reason.

  “Look at this, Fengxian,” he said, throwing protocol to the wind and using her chosen style name—the one shared by her historical namesake—as he pointed to a section of the rock, “these passages are artificial, and there is the proof.”

  She looked skeptically to where he was pointing and leaned closer to see what he was indicating. It took her several seconds, but she eventually did recognize what he was fixated on: a segment of ‘rock’ which had been scored recently by something—a mark which looked suspiciously like that which a vibro-blade would make—and beneath that scoring was a sheet of clearly man-made or, if Kongming’s theory was correct, alien-made metal on which the rock had somehow been fused to give the appearance of a natural cavern.

  “You find evidence of battle scene,” she said in their native tongue with a shake of her head, “but instead you report that the canvas on which the scene is painted is artificial? This is a combat zone, Kongming, not a science excursion; maintain your priorities.”

  He turned to her with one of his insufferable, almost smug, looks and said, “We knew this was the site of some battle or another before we arrived, Fengxian. What we did not know was whether or not this entry was, indeed, created by non-humans.” He pointed at the vibro-blade mark, “The handheld scanners date this ‘r
ock-face’ to be somewhere between fifty thousand and five hundred thousand years old. This entry’s disguise was engineered before humanity could reliably harness fire, Fengxian,” he said with awe, and for a moment even Lu Bu had to admit that it was a fairly momentous discovery. He sighed wistfully and shook his head, “And, now that I have seen evidence of nonhuman intelligence having arisen independently in our own galaxy, I am left with one less unsolved mystery than I awoke to this morning. What a shame.”

  Lu Bu rolled her eyes at his peculiar nature before giving him a not-so-gentle shove toward Funar’s position twenty meters ahead. “Move out, Fei,” she said in Confederation Standard, “stick to mission.”

  “Yes ma’am,” he said in a jesting tone, but he somehow managed to evade her follow-up shove by skittering down the passage more quickly than she had assumed him capable of moving.

  They came to a relatively large section of rock, in front of which was a small, portable micro-fusion generator connected to an access panel of some kind. The panel appeared to be something the archeologists had brought with them, which made sense to Lu Bu since they would have needed some sort of interface to open the passage.

  “Can you use it?” she asked as Fei Long knelt carefully before the cube-shaped, two foot tall interface.

  “Of course I ‘can’ use it,” he replied irritably as the two engineers gave the micro-fusion generator an inspection before giving him the thumbs up. “The only question is ‘how long will it take me’?”

  He removed his suit’s gloves, which Lu Bu had advised against in the pre-flight briefing, but he had insisted that there was no other way he could interface with a keypad like the one they had found. Fortunately, the ambient temperature was only minus twenty degrees C, which meant that he would be able to work in the relatively arid environment for several minutes before needing to re-don his gloves and warm his hands.