Penance (RN: Book 2) (16 page)

The splayed hand groped blindly about the tide of crates and loose equipment as the ship shuddered and klaxons blared, the other arm hanging uselessly from the right shoulder. The shaking and braying eventually stopped, but the nightmare of blind naked abandonment continued as her hand swung about the maze of tottered boxes and collapsed shelves. The voices were muffled, distant, as if from another room. Tripping and stumbling she felt her way toward them, her desperate cries choked by a throat ravaged raw as she tried to make them aware, and then it happened. A crack of amber light as a door broke open. A shadow at waist height; a hand on the door handle as someone chatted outside. She staggered forward, her cries coming out in a low zombie moan as bloody fingers reached toward the vertical slit of hope that grew wider as she approached. The door slid open illuminating her naked battered form as the silhouette stood watching her.

Brula dropped to her knees; her hand reaching, pleading as choking screams wracked her body. The person had to duck to enter the room and the door closed softly.

“It’s an emergency comm unit.” Stavener said, his head cocked to one side as he considered the image on the conference room display. He sat forward in his chair, an elbow on one knee with the fingers scratching through the shadow of a beard as he gazed at the image.

“That much is obvious,” Canthouse said. “Engineering looked them over and found a few anomalies, but as our resident bandit expert we would like you to tell us why they have so many different types with them.”

“They take them from every ship they raid, and use them to sucker other ships with the lame duck routine. Rinse and repeat. You’ll probably find they’ve modified the distress chips to transmit on a narrow beam rather than blanket coverage. They do this so only the ships they select receive the distress call. Where’d you find it?”

“We found three on the
Jeremiah
. One of which was damaged, another deactivated but with its coder card still inside and the third one, this one, still active.”. Canthouse said.

“Active!” Stavener said with genuine surprise as he swivelled to face Canthouse. “Well done, LC. The border control people have found a bunch of these, but always damaged or deactivated. And certainly never with the coder card still installed. The task force rarely gathers any intelligence of any significance and are always eager to have extra data on bandit activity. This is a genuine find!” Stavener gave Canthouse something of a significant look. “Tell me, where they connected to anything? A computer, a control unit of any sort?”

He first officer glanced at Denz who sat across the room in a high backed swivel chair. Denz merely nodded his consent. “This and the second one were connected to some sort of black box. Possibly a computer or transmitter of some sort.”

“About the size of a suitcase?”

“Yes. Why do you as …“

Stavener’s eyes became glassy as Canthouse spoke and he appeared to stop listening with his mouth slacking open as if astonished. “We need to go back!” Stavener cried jumping from his seat as if stung. His eyes were wide and his body agitated from a sense of nervous urgency as he glanced between the two men. “That black box. We need to recover it. And we need to do it now: before they return.”

“Return!” Denz said in disbelief. “What makes you think they’re going to return? We –“

Stavener turned on Denz, almost spitting as he said, “They’ll return because those boxes are the most important…”

“Control yourself, man!” Canthouse cried in his sergeant-major’s voice.

The operations officer bit his tongue, taking a step back and lowering his head at the first officer’s remonstration. He closed his eyes in an effort to control his immediate emotions, only to find Denz’s bitter steely stare when he recovered.

“Excuse me, Commander; Lieutenant-commander,” Stavener made slight bows of petition with his hands pyramided to his chin in entreaty. “But you have no idea as to the significance of that unit. That black box, the one the beacon was hooked up to is more than likely a deep unity transmitter. One of -”

“A what?” Denz said, his head tilted to inquiry. He glanced at Canthouse who looked equally as perplexed.

“A deep unity transmitter,” Stavener glanced between the two men with an expectation of hope in their knowing of what he was talking about, only for it to be replaced by barely concealed despair at their obvious ignorance. “A Norin, type two, tunnelling quantum entanglemen –“

Canthouse interrupted him, “From the beginning,
mister,
Stavener.”

The operations officer was quick to understand the emphasis on the ‘
mister’,
and paused to gather his thoughts “The black box is quite possibly a tunnelling quantum device. Essentially a very sophisticated comm unit that that uses quantum spin to communicate with a similar unit over enormous distances. It’s one of only six such devices ever constructed and provides the operator with near instant communication from the rim to the core. The absolute difficulty in locating paired electrons, the EDP have only located three tied pairs, means it’s practically priceless and the bandits will stop at nothing to get it back. And ….” Stavener paused, his face that of a garrulous man who suddenly realised had said too much in the wrong camp.“Oh, God.! What am I doing? They’ll kill me!” The man looked near tears and he covered his face with his hands as he turned away from them.

Canthouse’s countenance defaulted to confusion, and he glanced at an equally perplexed Denz who met his gaze as Stavener paced between the table and the display.

“Is there something you’re not telling us Mr Stavener?” asked Denz, his voice relaxed and coaxing. “Or, perhaps, something you can’t tell us?”

Stavener continued to pace for several seconds before turning to Denz, his face a deep worried red. “Sir, with all due respect, I’ve already said far too much. I …” Stavener realised the gravity of his error and froze as he believed himself to have crossed some concealed line of confidence or treason. He stood stock still, scared to utter a single word.

The commander again glanced at his first officer, who returned the significance the look carried. Denz stood, and in a slow careful step he approached the scarecrow of a man by an indirect path.

“Mr Stavener,” Denz said in a low conspiratorial tone, his gaze one of veiled subversion, “I believe, you believe, you have said too much about a guarded subject. A subject that should, perhaps, not be mentioned beyond certain borders or within the reach of certain ears. If your orders for secrecy come from some higher directive to protect the inner security of the EDP, then I commend you on your fidelity, and on my word this slip will be forgotten. However …” Denz paused in his slow pacing so as to park himself in profile next to Stavener, who remained still expect for the watery red rimmed eyes that followed Denz. “If you’re concerned that certain …
benevolent patrons
will discover what has been said here then I can assure you they won’t.” Denz raised his cautious seditious gaze to meet Stavener’s fearful look. “What you say here will never leave this room. You are amongst compatriots here.”

And with those words it was done.

Denz realised he had opened a door to an underworld he could not be sure existed, and wasn’t even sure why he had done so. He took it as granted that all RN officers were of the anti-Koll school,that some clandestine faction did indeed exist, and that they would all naturally work together with little more than a significant look to assure loyalty. It just seemed to be the natural order of things. If Stavener was from the other camp then he would say nothing or simply walk out of the room, and he himself would never leave the next station they visited. The Koll would return for him and he would simply disappear.

Then a mortifying thought struck him. What if Stavener was not the only concern here? Canthouse! For some reason he had presumed that his first officer was with him, no matter what he said here. But what if he was wrong? He had shared a look of significance with Canthouse. Traded what he believed to be confidences with a man he trusted, but who had so recently failed in his duty. What if Canthouse turned out to be more than a mostly competent officer and was just waiting for Stavener to sufficiently betray himself and then report them both?

He glanced at his first officer who remained stoical, his gaze on Stavener.

Could he be assuming too much? Could Canthouse be trusted? Maybe he was over thinking this. Yet what was done was done. There was no way he could recover from what he had opened himself up to, so he just had to push forward to see where it went.

God, how he wished Canthouse would say something, if for nothing more than to relieve the conspiratorial burden.

Stavener remained silent and unmoving, his eyes flicking between Denz and Canthouse and he seemed unlikely to ever move again unless toppled to the floor.

Denz perched himself on the lip of the table next to Canthouse, his face neutral and his hands clasped by his stomach in as natural an ‘at ease’ posture he could manage. “So let me ask you, Mr Stavener. Can you continue to explain the significance of this Unity device, or are we to leave this room with the issue forgotten?”

The operations officer stared at the two officers as it evaluating risk potential.

“You are amongst friends, Stavener,” Canthouse said with an encouraging smile.

Dens felt like a Christian unburdened at those words.

Canthouse continued, “This is an unofficial meeting. Nothings being recorded. You can say anything you want without fear or reprisal.”

The operations officer bore the look and posture of someone who was having the truth levered from them with a gun. “It’s for spying on The Koll,” he said. Only to immediately look like he wished he hadn’t. But when the imagined pistol failed to materialise he appeared to relax a little.

“If there’s a matter of urgency in recovering this device, then perhaps you could explain a little more?” Denz said.

Before Stavener could respond, a low meeping sound could be heard coming from somewhere behind Canthouse. The noise increased in intensity as the first officer looked about him and retrieved the beeping tablet from behind Denz. Canthouse glanced at it, swiped the screen and pushed several of the buttons only for the meeping to continue. He then spun it over, ripped off the rear cover and tore out the battery.

The first officer dropped the pieces to the floor saying, “Oops! Clumsy me.”

Denz understood this to be an offering of trust to Stavener. That Canthouse was reducing the ability for anyone to spy on them by inhibiting the device, but he still wished he hadn’t had to destroy a £3000 tablet to do it.

Yet it worked. Stavener appeared to understand the action as had Denz and relaxed past the threshold of mistrust into a low intimacy.

“The device,” The operations officer said followed by a significant pause, as if gathering courage. “The device, the unity device is a transceiver.” He said hesitantly.

“We figured that. Anything else?” Denz said.

Stavener let out a slow considering breath and then opened up. “The unity box was constructed by Secure Internal Resourcing before The Koll annex as a possible weapon to be used on The Koll forces as they closed on Earth. Where the plans came from, I’ve no idea. They just appeared. But SIR built it and it worked; to a degree.”

“How so?” asked Canthouse. “You mentioned quantum entanglement. Was this part of the problem?”

“Well …” Stavener began to pace, his hands animating his thoughts. “I’m assuming you know what quantum entanglement is. It’s the linking of two electrons over galactic distances. But not any two electrons. These are bound electrons. Electrons that are slaved so the action of one is reflected in the other, instantly, no matter the distance. As I mentioned, the SIR initially wanted to develop it as a weapon, but as the electrons have virtually no mass and we couldn’t bleed enough energy to make it viable, they fell back on communications, which was just feasible. They spun one electron one way the other gave a reverse action. We reversed ours and the opposite did the same. By manipulating the spin we could send a form of Morse code that reached any target at any distance, with between a hundredth and a tenth of a second delay depending on what encryption used. You’ll understand what a boon this is when you consider that our current communications systems can take days, even weeks to reach their destinations. Sometimes with the ship that sent them arriving before the message did. There was no voice, no images initially. Just dots and dashes, but it was enough …as long as the receiving station had the paired unity device.”

“I’m guessing this was the problem,” Denz said.

“Actually, not really, as we had the mirrored units and they developed a plan to deploy them.”

“Then I’m guessing they were easy to track or used incredible amounts of power?” asked Canthouse.

“Again no on both points,” Stavener said. His voice was calm and his posture relaxed as if he was leading a class on a well versed subject. “They were impossible to track as the communication path was completely random with every data bit sent. Not different with every message, you understand. But with every – data - unit. One packet could have been travelling to the far side of the universe and back. Another may have taken a laser straight line, but they always arrived in order and on time with no corruption. And the thing never used any power. At all! Well certainly no power supplied by SIR. They guessed it tapped into fabric energy but had no idea how.”

“And no power, no signature,” Canthouse’s skewed smile reflected his understanding.

Stavener nodded in accord.

“So the problem?” Denz asked.

Stavener sat down heavily and rubbed his furrowed brow, “The problem they identified was that if you took a single unit and pointed it randomly into interstellar space, you picked up voices.”

“Voices?” Canthouse said incredulously, “What kind of voices?”

“Just that: voices! Weird, staticky communications that made no sense. They sounded like a radio just short of a station, with lots of white noise, words fading in and out,” Stavener made a coming and going gesture with his fingers. “The SIR couldn’t make heads or tails of it, presuming they were receiving corrupted broadcasts from the ships and stations of the EDP fleet. Except for one thing …” The operations officer bore a look of infinite cunning.