The Far Bank of the Rubicon (The Pax Imperium Wars: Volume 1) (16 page)

Helena let the last few seconds play.

“Captain, you need to get yourself seated.”

“Shut up, Joey!”

The countermeasures officer spoke up. “Rail guns and point defense lasers tracking, Captain.”

Then sensors reported in. “Sensors have failed, Captain. I have nothing on my screen!”

Captain Ramus whipped around to face his sensors officer. Then he looked up at the ceiling as the voice of the female AI joined the chaos. “Impact in five seconds. four… three…”

“Point defense have lost contact, captain. They have not fired.”

“two…one… impact, now and now.”

A loud bang caused everyone on the bridge to jump. The captain looked around.

The computer spoke again. “Hull integrity 100 percent. Incoming missiles did not detonate. Mild damage to the port side armor from debris impact.”

The bridge erupted in cheers.

Only the captain and the XO continued to look worried.

“Captain, the engines have stopped!”

Ramus turned to look at his helmswoman. “What?”

“I have them offline. They have stopped.”

“Sensors are back online, captain!”

“Railgun system is going active, captain. It’s trying to acquire the missiles.”

Ramus pointed at his countermeasures station. “Shut that down now!” Then he looked at his helm. “Do you have full control back?”

“Yes, sir. I think I do.”

Captain Ramus barked an order. “Turn this PoS around and get us the hell back across the border! Maximum speed! Maximum mass bending!”

“Captain, I have an incoming hail from the Unity vessel!”

Ramus turned white. “Are we still broadcasting a distress call?”

His communications officer answered. “Yes, Sir.”

Ramus nodded. he flipped down his heads-up. “Answer the hail. Put it up on the screen.”

Porter quickly moved the two clocks to the side of the room so as not to block the view of the Unity captain.

As soon as the image of the Unity captain appeared on the view screen at the front of the bridge, Ramus spoke. “This is Captain Dieter Ramus of the Athenian cruiser Kronos. We have had several major system failures of unknown origin. We are attempting at this time to leave Unity space as quickly as possible.”

The Unity captain, a tan man with dark salt and pepper stubble poking out from the sides of his hat, grinned. He spoke calmly. His demeanor provided a distinct contrast to Ramus’ animation. He feigned a look of concern. “We understood your situation when we received your distress signal, which is why we destroyed our own missiles. Do you need any assistance at this point in time?”

Ramus seemed completely taken aback. “Not at this time. Our systems seem to be operational.”

Jack wasn’t surprised. He was sure that Ramus must have been expecting much worse. The violation of treaty had become quite severe at this point. If the situation had been reversed, it is possible that the Allied admirals would have demanded the surrender of the vessel or at least attempted to board it.

The Unity captain didn’t say anything, although he grinned again and nodded. “Would you like an escort back to the border?”

In light of the situation, the Unity captain’s offer wasn’t a question. Ramus recognized this and also his good fortune. He answered calmly, with a forced politeness to match that of his adversary. “That would be very kind of you.”

The rest of the presentation went as badly as Jack predicted it would the day before when he and Helena had met for coffee. Obviously, the
Kronos
systems had been hacked in some way. Helena and the engineers at Machpoint had been over their AI code for the missiles with a fine-tooth comb. There was no sign of tampering beforehand. Helena was considered a foremost expert in the field of AIs and security, so she ought to know. She concluded that the missiles must have been hacked using their data umbilical cord back to the ship.

As for the other systems, it was hard to see how they could have all malfunctioned at the same time, unless it came through some central control point to which they were all attached. The obvious system was the black box. The time differential seemed to back that up.

However, that’s not how everyone saw it. To agree with Helena Porter’s conclusion would have been a heavy blow to Allied military planning as cyber supremacy was assumed by Allied planners. If that were now compromised, as it appeared to be, it was hard to know what would happen if a war started.

Jack figured the day before that he could have told Helena the exact expressions which would greet her conclusion. He hadn’t been wrong. Admiral Penelope Dawson, the head of the Ministry of Intelligence, nodded vigorously through the whole thing. She had been leading the charge for the government to focus on cyber-security, which she felt to be completely inadequate.

On the other side, there was General Goring from the Athenian marines, who remained skeptical. He resisted a push for a focus on cyber-security, arguing that a wholesale change in procedures was not what the Athenian kingdom needed during a run up to a possible war. He had told Jack privately, “I’ll be damned if I see unit readiness compromised by some nerd with a stick up her ass about security.” Then there was the head of Allied command, Admiral Hansen. He seemed to be riding down the middle, neither dismissing Dawson’s concerns nor ignoring them, as Goring would have had him do.

Jack tended to think like Dawson. The admiralty and the military overall needed to rethink their approach to security. It all seemed too nonchalant for Jack’s tastes. It felt a little like an EMT pulling out a package of gauze and some tape and declaring himself well equipped, but such was the general attitude about the possible war in Athena and other Allied capitals. Three hundred years of relative peace created complacency, and no matter what Jack did, he couldn’t seem to convey the dedication and complete devotion Timothy Randall brought to his cause.

Yet that being said, Jack wasn’t sure he could completely agree with Dawson, either. If she could have her way, the government would be able to monitor, without notice, every activity in the cyber-world. She wanted to give the Athenian government the power to shut down intraspace altogether in the name of security. That raised all sorts of concerns for the private sector, and King Nicholas had made it clear he would not go along with any such proposals.

In some ways, Jack had to agree with Goring that prevention seemed a somewhat Sisyphean task when it came to cyber-security. The best bet was to be better on offense than the other side. He also emphasized having crisis task forces ready to go to patch holes as they became apparent. Goring had been training several cyber-battalions ready to deploy in intraspace, right alongside their meatspace counterparts. If the war came, Goring intended to make sure it was fought on both fronts.

It wasn’t the debate between Dawson and Goring that really pissed Jack off. The debate was probably healthy. What really made Jack mad was that everything revolved around it in the military and security apparatus on Athena. The cyber-security debate, like the procurement debates, and the other various scandals and debates, all functioned to politicize the Admiralty. They and the rest of the military seemed so caught up in jockeying for position that they missed the obvious.

To Jack, the importance of the
Kronos
attack wasn’t the missile hack but what Randall was willing to risk in order to make an operational test of his cyber-warfare plans. To order such an attack, Randall must have felt confident that he was ready to win the war at that moment in time.

Clearly Randall wasn’t intending to begin the war at Pluton. If he had wanted to do that, he would have destroyed the
Kronos
. Randall gambled rightly that an Allied captain would tuck his tail and run from conflict. However, he wasn’t a man to shoot without being able to back it up. Jack wondered how many ships had been hidden in Unity space during the
Kronos
incident, just waiting for Captain Ramus to make a mistake.

An hour after her presentation to the brass, Jack sat with Helena eating a consolation lunch. The mood wasn’t cheery. Porter’s analysis was glum.

Sometime after the food arrived, Jack asked a question which had been on his mind for the last hour. “Why do you think they did this? Why would you tip your hand and tell your enemy that you’ve hacked the black box system? It’s kind of a Rosetta stone from a tactical point of view, don’t you think?”

Helena gathered her thoughts before she answered. “I’ve been asking myself the same question. I have two ideas, and both of them terrify me. But let me start out by saying that contrary to what Goring thinks, hacking the black box, while difficult, isn’t impossible, and it is relatively simple to fix. After looking at the data, I was able to recreate the same conditions in the lab. We have a field test with a destroyer scheduled for next week. If we can recreate the same kinds of problems the
Kronos
faced, then we will have the final nail in the coffin in my theory, and we will be able to make sure it doesn’t happen again. So even if you did this during a war, it’s a one shot deal. It’s not that useful, but still the question remains, why give up any advantage, and the best I can come up with is that either you have better advantages to exploit when the time comes, or you’re ready to start the war in the near future, and you didn’t really care about losing this advantage if it proved that you could do it.”

Jack nodded his agreement. “Or both.”

Helena raised her eyebrows and shrugged a little. They were silent for a few seconds before Helena spoke again. “All right, enough already. There’s only so much you or I can do.” She smiled enthusiastically, “You have to congratulate me, Jack.”

Jack smiled back, enjoying the warmth coming from the young woman in her late twenties. He knew he was old enough to be her father, but there was something about her which seemed to demand his attention. “What’s the good news?”

“I’m getting married.”

“Congratulations!” Jack made sure to match Helena’s smile. “Wow, who’s the lucky guy?”

“He’s an officer in the fourth fleet. A weapons systems Lieutenant, first class, on the
Calliope
.”

“Military, eh?”

“Didn’t pick me for a military wife?”

“No offense, but not really.”

“He’s not your ordinary officer, but to be fair, I didn’t think of myself as a military wife, until I met him.” A little heat rose to Helena’s cheeks. “My mother didn’t either, apparently.”

“Oh?” Jack was completely lost. Before this, their conversations had mostly revolved around Helena’s consulting work for the MoD. Now they were far afield, and Jack wasn’t sure he was enjoying this line of conversation. It picked at the scab of his own loneliness.

“My mother has decided that graduating in the top ten of your class from St. Almo’s isn’t good enough for her. I guess she was holding out for the heir to a fortune or maybe the crown prince.”

Jack laughed politely. “Well, she’ll have to get in line. I can tell you for a fact there are a whole group of mothers grooming their daughters for that eligible bachelor. Anyway, congratulations from me. I’m sad to hear about your family, but I have to say that even after just a little time, I’m sure he is getting the better end of the deal.”

Helena laughed a little. “Damn straight, he is.” She stood from their now empty plates.

Jack followed.

She offered her hand to him. “Thank you, Jack. You made a difficult task much easier. I appreciated your help understanding the den of wolves I would face.”

Jack shook her hand warmly. “You’re welcome. You have my information. Don’t hesitate to contact me if you need anything.”

“I appreciate that.” Helena turned and walked away from the table.

Jack restrained himself from watching the swish of her hips as she strode away. He sat back down, lonely. In the old days on Aetna, he would have had no hesitation. Lunch with a vibrant woman like Helena would have been an opportunity to look for the key to attraction—a way to seduce. He would have simply seen Helena as a means to an end.

He used to see bedding a woman as a way to be a man, a way to affirm his superiority over other men and the women he bedded. The thing was, it never really worked out that way. There was always someone else to seduce or some other man to climb over. The whole process just left him lonely, a reality he didn’t comprehend until he met Anna, but that hadn’t lasted, and now he felt himself at sea when it came to women, unsure and hopeless.

Jack looked up to see a lovely olive-skinned woman with dark hair enter the commissary. Anna turned his direction, caught his gaze, and smiled. Jack’s lips smiled back. He wasn’t sure the rest of his face had successfully followed.

For being the largest residence on Aetna, the palace sometimes felt small. It didn’t help that Jack’s security arrangements with the King kept him a virtual prisoner much of the time. If he wanted to go to Olympia, it was an ordeal. Anna, on the other hand, had created for herself a job in which clandestine travel to far parts of the empire were the norm. She acted as an unofficial go-between for the Empress’s personal secretary—read the Empress herself—and the various allied heads of state. The last four years had been a second life for her, and she had blossomed in the role.

Back when they used to hook-up on his po-dunk little space station in Unity, he hadn’t paid much attention to Anna’s intelligence or her business skills. He had been too focused on her breasts and the warm patch between her legs to notice. In the last four years, she had made quite a name for herself. She was now considered one of the most powerful people in the palace, a close confidant of both the king and his sister.

Anna turned and took a table away from his view. He could try to deny it all he wanted; he could pretend he was a monk; he could cover it up with schoolboy crushes like the one he had for Helena Porter; but there was no getting around it. I’m still in love with Anna…and I’m too much of a coward to let her know.