The Phoenix Conspiracy (25 page)

"Night time," he said aloud, tapping
his fingers on his desk. Even if that were the answer, it didn't
buy him anything. Night-time could be anywhere in the galaxy, and
there was nothing specific about it to link it to
Raidan.

Maybe Raidan had left this clue to
throw him off. Give him something distracting to slow him down. But
that didn't feel right. If Raidan had wanted to distract Calvin, he
would have offered him a false lead. Something to chase. Not taunt
him with a riddle. No, Calvin thought, Raidan was definitely trying
to tell him something. But what?

He wondered if the exact phrase itself
was useless and the real message was buried in the pattern of the
words, like a code.

So he wrote out the words and played
around with them for some time. Re-arranging the letters. Searching
for patterns.

"I find pale blue lights,
always…"

A normal person, Calvin thought, would
probably phrase it "I always find pale blue lights," not "I find
pale blue lights, always." The order of the words felt more awkward
this way. The order could be the cipher.

He started at the top by
taking only the first letter of each word, the simplest way he
could imagine burying a code. "I,S,S,S,I,F,P,B,L,A." The ISS at the
beginning seemed like a prefix identifier for an Imperial starship,
which excited him. But disappointment set in when he
realized
ISS SIFPBLA
didn't really fit the Empire's naming conventions. He tried
turning the latter part around and was equally unimpressed
with
ISS ALBPFIS
.

He considered the
possibility that it was scrambled but, ultimately, decided using
the first letter of each word in the clue wasn't the correct
cipher. He tried using the last letters, which came up with an
equally worthless answer.
IPYSIDEESA
. Again he wondered if it
were scrambled but couldn't come up with anything better than SAY
DIE PIES.

"This is a waste of time," he realized
and tapped his intercom. "Deck four auxiliary," he said, unsure who
was manning the post at this hour.

"Yes, sir. Midshipman Hughes standing
by."

"I'm sending you a short code for
textual analysis. I don't think it's very complex, either you or
the computer should be able to find a coherent message inside it
without much trouble. When you do, send the result to my computer
and contact me either in my quarters, my office, or on the
bridge."

"Yes, sir."

Calvin typed the message and
transmitted it to Hughes, adding, "let me know once you've figured
out what the deal is with that Isotome we picked up from the
debris."

"I already have some preliminary
results on that, Captain."

"Go ahead."

"Isotome is an extremely rare compound
stable only in the Xenobe Nebula region. It cannot be synthetically
produced and no one has devised a way to retrieve it without it
breaking down into simpler elements, until now.”

Most of this went over
Calvin's head, who hadn't studied chemistry beyond the
What is an atom?
course.
That and two classes on how to weaponize chemical compounds. At any
rate, the fact that the Rotham ship was carrying Isotome was more
interesting to him than how they managed to keep it stable outside
the nebula.

"What I want to know, Mister Hughes,
is why someone would be transporting Isotome in the first place.
Isn't it supposed to be useless?"

"Basically. There's no known utility
for Isotome. It's violently reactive, unstable, and until now it's
never been retrievable. Honestly... anti-matter is more
stable."

"So nobody buys it or uses it for
anything?"

"Correct."

"That we know of..." Calvin muttered
to himself. "All right, what about as a novelty. It's extremely
rare. Maybe someone would purchase it as a trophy or part of a
collection or something. Or it could be vital to some kind of
scientific study."

"I really don't know, sir."

Calvin realized he wasn't getting
anywhere with this, he dismissed Mister Hughes and terminated the
call with, "If you find out anything else, or decode that message,
let me know right away."

Now only one piece of evidence
remained—the data the Harbinger stole from the Station. If only
there were some way to get it.

He tapped his comm again, this time to
his Chief Engineer, First Lieutenant Andre Cowen's quarters.
"Andre, sorry to wake you up but I have a quick question for
you."

"Go ahead, Calvin, I was awake
anyway." The croak in his voice betrayed his polite lie.

"Is there something on our ship that,
if broken, would take about an hour to repair? A repair that might
be easier to do while docked than afloat in open space?"

"Well there are thousands of systems
on the ship and almost anything is easier to fix at port, but all
our systems are operating perfectly, why?"

"I was just thinking it'd be
very
convenient
if
we had to make a pit stop at Brimm One. You know, so their
resources could help diagnose and fix our problem."

"Are you asking me to sabotage our
beautiful ship?"

"Would it be too much trouble?" Calvin
was glad he was thoroughly trusted by most of his crew.

"Come to think of it, I thought I
noticed a few shorts in the electrical wiring and some trouble with
a few of the superconductors. Or, at least, there will be as soon
as I get dressed and down there."

"Good, just don't let anyone know it
was you."

Andre's laugh crackled over the
speakers. "Of course, I have my reputation to maintain."

"Thanks." He redirected the comm to
the bridge. "Mister Rose," he said, waiting for a reply.

"Rose here, sir."

"I just heard from engineering," said
Calvin, adding to his devious plot, "that some of our fuel cells
are tainted."

"Our instruments indicate everything's
fine."

"Just... take my word for it," said
Calvin. Rose got the hint.

"Now that you mention it, the fuel
cells could be better."

"I want you to make a pass around
Brimm's most distant moon and dump sixty percent of our fuel on the
far side."

"Why there, sir?"

"It's very important that Brimm
doesn't see us dump the fuel. They must think our fuel is low
anyway."

"Their sentry ships will notice
it."

"But not for awhile."

"Should we stop our scan and get to
that right away?"

"No, finish the scan, and then go
around the moon at a slow pace, nice and cool. Tell Brimm we're
doing a complete scan of the system. In the meantime I'll contact
the Commodore and let him we need to dock soon for a resupply and
repair."

"I'll see to it."

Calvin knew the senior staff of Brimm
One wouldn't want the Nighthawk to dock with their station,
especially if it put their "sensitive information" at risk. But he
figured he'd created enough reasons to demand a short link-up with
their docking bay and, hopefully, he could get someone
inside.

Now it was just a matter of getting
the right person for the job.

Chapter 16

Shen sat at his desk in his
quarters clicking through a slideshow of pictures on his computer.
Next to him sat the remains of a microwaved cheese sandwich
experiment that had turned out to suck. Not far away were a litter
of pastry crumbs and candy wrappers. The
coup-de-grace
was the half-empty
glass bottle of soda that was so orange it almost glowed in the dim
light.

Shen wasn't
too
overweight, in his
opinion. After all, if he were, he wouldn't be allowed in Intel
Wing. But, despite the yearly fitness exam, he knew he fell into
the barely-acceptable BMI range by only a razor thin
margin.

But he found food comforting and
wasn't particularly satisfied with his appearance even when he'd
been thinner. As he continued clicking through pictures he stopped
on one of himself with Sarah. The contrast between them was
glaring.

She was beautiful of course,
attractively thin with nice thick lips curled into a smile under
shining chocolate-brown eyes. Her hair poured down her face
stylishly and he couldn't help but imagine the sweet scent of
whatever it was she put on every day.

And then there was him. Untucked
shirt, unkempt hair, a little more belly than he'd like to see, and
the pale round face of someone uncomfortable in front of a camera.
His goofy expression didn't help things either. He looked like an
obese deer frozen in headlights with about as much personality as a
ghost. For the millionth time he wished he were as witty, sharp,
and attractive as Sarah was, so she could see something in him,
something more than friendship. Though that seemed laughably
impossible.

At least they were friends; he did
have that... if nothing else. But that just enabled him to be close
enough to her to realize what he was missing out on. He couldn't
get her out of his head and some loud, masochistic part of himself
demanded he make his intentions clear. At least let her know he was
interested. Then, when she inevitably rejected him, he could maybe
find some closure to his burning emotions. But he couldn't think
how to begin.

Send her flowers, maybe?
Women like flowers, right? Too bad flowers aren't exactly standard
on a military starship.

He considered giving her a card or,
perhaps best of all, a letter. But all of these seemed like
inadequate gestures and though the thought of doing something
tickled him inside, it also terrified him. And because of that
fear, talking to her directly was out of the question.

He closed the slideshow and stood up
to sweep his food mess into the garbage. He wanted to be a neat
person, but somehow his room just got away from him. Like the
eleventh wonder of the universe, he just couldn't figure out how it
happened.

His panel started flashing and
chirping so he hustled over to answer it. "Shen here."

"It's Calvin," his CO's
voice filled the room sounding scratchy. The low bit comm system
always irked Shen who knew it wouldn't be
that
expensive to put in something
better. "I have a pretty important mission for you."

Shen became excited. "What is
it?"

"We're cruising near Brimm Station and
not long ago the Harbinger forced entry and stole a bunch of data
off the station's hard drives. I want you to make a copy of all
that data and get it aboard our ship."

It took Shen a second to catch up with
what Calvin was saying. "So... I take it they don't want us to have
this data, which is why you want me to steal it instead of asking
them for it."

"No rust on you."

"And you're pretty convinced we need
this data."

"If the Harbinger stole it then we
need it, because we need to know why they took it." Calvin sounded
resolute, and since Shen considered himself a loyal friend of
Calvin's he would do all he could for him. But wasn't exactly sure
how to begin.

"I'll do what I can."

"Is there some way for us to link up
with their computers from here and hack in to get the
data?"

Shen sighed. Typical management,
always expecting more from software and hardware than it could
actually do. Just because computer expertise looked like magic
didn't mean it was. "You've been watching too many movies,
Calvin."

"All right, I suspected that but I had
to be sure. Which is why I have a plan B. How about if I get you
aboard their station? What would you need to pull this
off?"

Shen thought for a minute. "Okay,
first off I'd need some kind of external device I can hook up to
their system physically to download all the material. How much data
are we talking about here?"

"The report said 'several
terabytes'."

"OK that's no problem, I can use my
own thumbkey," his eyes automatically darted to its place plugged
into his linkup. "But the main problem is that I need access to
their system. I'm guessing it requires some kind of secure log-on
I'd have to get past in order to run searches and copy
data."

"Can't you just hack your way around
that?"

Again, too many movies. "It's not
quite that simple, Calvin. A really good security framework might
take years or even decades to break through. And for just one guy,
I might spend my whole life trying to do it and never
succeed."

"So what's your idea?"

Shen ran a hand through his mussy
hair. "What kind of time window do I get?"

"About an hour."

Considering it would take several
minutes to download the data, and maybe just as much to find it,
let alone find a computer hooked up to the right server, he didn't
like his chances. "I'm not going to lie, it's pretty grim. This may
not be possible."