Chief Lamarr shared her namesake’s good looks and keen intellect. She was in charge of the refit. Over the two weeks since my meeting with the Captain, the Karearea was heavily modified from standard GCP specs. Two additional VASIMR thrusters had been attached as well as an additional bank of liquid fluoride thorium reactors (LFTRs). These power units could be switched between powering the thrusters and a set of side-mounted railguns. Most of the modifications were Hedy’s designs. Bottom-line… my little bird was both fast and carried a big stick. Somewhere along the line we had taken to calling the ship by a nickname… Kara.

  Kara’s biggest downside was that at full-tilt she could burn through her fuel reserves in less than a day. The good news was her fuel, thorium and simple volatiles like methane, ammonia or even plain H2O were plentiful in the main belt.

  For armor the Karearea’s skin was studded with miniature hyperfield momentum inverters. The inversion fields had trouble working in the presence of the artificial hyperfield dampeners that were thoroughly seeded throughout the main belt. Fortunately, as the shields were designed to work within a fraction of a centimeter of the hull where they generated, they were still effective against dust, micro-meteors, plasma beams and any kinetic rounds that were traveling at less than 0.3c… at least as long as the Karearea didn’t get too close to a dampening field generator and had ample energy to feed into the hyperfield emitters.

  They would burn out relatively quickly but while they lasted they gave the small ship a distinct advantage in shielding – an advantage that translated directly into faster safe operating speeds as well as staying power in a fight.

  The afternoon of the day the planned refits where completed, I was ordered to report to a meeting with Captain Mueller and Commander Savage. By this time I was used to meeting with these two men on a regular basis. This particular meeting was unusual in that, per the orders I received, Duffy accompanied me. Ensign McGinnis would be serving as my second-in-command on the Kara.

  “Ensigns McGinnis and Stone reporting as ordered,” I barked as I entered the Captain’s Ready Room.

  “At ease Ensigns,” said Captain Mueller in a perfunctory manner. “Ensign Stone, you will be acting as Captain on your ship. For the purposes of this mission you will carry a brevet rank of Lieutenant Junior Grade.” He smiled, “If you do well, we may even let you keep the rank. I don’t have to tell you boys that the Puller will likely not be in position to render assistance if your situation becomes less-than-optimal. Be careful out there.”

  “Aye Sir,” Duffy and I answered in unison.

  I looked over to the briefing table that had an active display going. Doc Savage and the Captain had been reviewing a three-dimensional holographic display that floated just above the conference room table. It showed the Ceres mining outpost. Ceres should have been an ideal location for mining within the asteroid belt. It has a surface gravity of about 3% Earth normal. That meant there was enough gravity to hold heavy equipment down while at the same time not getting in the way of operations. Add to that the abundance of frozen water and other volatiles and it was a miners dream. Or at least it should have been.

  Cryovolcanism, or ice volcanos, made mining on the dwarf planet a real challenge. It didn’t take much digging to generate an explosive outgassing that could launch an unsuspecting miner into the deep-dark of space never to be seen again. It turned out Ceres was more valuable as an outpost with easily accessible water and O2 than it was anything else. It was essentially a watering hole in the middle of the main belt asteroids. And like watering holes in Africa, it was a place where both prey and predator gathered.

  “AG,” Commander Savage nodded towards the display, “your team ready?”

  “I believe so Doc. Hedy is overseeing the final coat of the radar-absorbing passive cloak. We should be ready to head out in under an hour. Do we have a final destination yet?”

  Doc looked over at the Captain. “We were just discussing that. Since your mission is a covert one… it wouldn’t be too smart to just drop you off near Ceres itself. We’ve created a fake data trail that has the Kara coming in from Triton… and yes we have changed your ships’ transponder to reflect her cover registry, a private main belt security cutter named the PSS Kara.”

  “The Puller will drop you off about ten light minutes from Triton. We will be under cloak so with any luck you should be able to make your way to Ceres and start sniffing around,” Captain Mueller added.

  Duffy looked at me and asked the question we both wanted answered. “Beggin the Captain and Commander’s pardon… but can we assume we and our crew have a similar bogus data trail following us?”

  Doc eyes twinkled and he smiled.

  “Oh… you each have top-notch covers. Let’s just say… If you run afoul of the authorities you will be spending some quality time making little rocks out of big rocks,” he said with a grin.

  That should have been all the warning I needed. It wasn’t too late to back out… but hey, as I’ve shared before… I was young and foolish.

  ***

  “Captain on the bridge!” Hedy yelled as I stepped up the ladder and into the small bridge of the newly, if temporarily, renamed PSS Kara.

  We had just been passively pushed out of the GCP Puller’s cargo bay. We couldn’t risk using thrusters until we established we were completely alone in this region of space.

  I looked over at Duffy who was the only other person on the bridge and for that matter on the ship. He gave me a shrug and turned back to his navigation station.

  “Hedy, for the purposes of this mission, we are supposed to be renegade rogues… essentially opportunistic thieves and pirates. I think we can lose the formality.”

  “Aye Aye Captain,” she answered crisply.

  “Ah yeah… about that whole Captain thing,” I shook my head. “It might be better if you just called me AG. Rank is only going to get in the way out here and in the wrong place it might actually get us killed.”

  Duffy belched. The sound welled up from deep within his chest and lasted a good fifteen seconds. Hedy and I turned to look at him with shared looks of disgust. Duffy, for his part just smiled. He apparently had this informal thing down to an art form.

  “The folks we are hoping to meet up with,” Duffy said when he was done making a pig of himself, “are not going to be the types that take well to Coalition authorities. If they peg us for military pukes… well let’s just say ‘things will get dicey and then go downhill from there.’”

  “Agreed,” I said as I sat down in my command chair.

  The Karearea, or Kara as we were calling her now, was configured with a bridge that had five stations including the command chair. Two of the stations were configurable for sensors and weapons while the other two were for navigation and engineering. In truth, the ship was small enough that the command chair and its embedded holographic displays could adequately control the majority of the ship’s systems during normal operation. As we were in passive recon mode I took the first watch and encouraged the others to grab a bite to eat. It would be eight hours before we began our first burn.

  The Kara was not a big ship so it was easy to hear people talking in the galley which was located just off the bridge. It was with no small amount of dismay that I heard Duffy exclaim from the kitchenette… “Hey somebody left us peaches!”

  Chapter 9: Ceres…

  The trip to Ceres was a full twelve days. The length of the trip was due, in large part, to the relative positions of Triton and Ceres in their respective orbits… Triton in its retrograde orbit around Neptune and Ceres around the sun. The Kara was forced to play catch-up as it spiraled in towards the sun and Ceres’ closer orbit about Sol. Her VASIMR engines hummed softly as they provided the steady thrust that accelerated us towards our goal. A little over six days into the trip the ship flipped over and our acceleration in the opposite direction began in earnest. This allowed us to reach a parking orbit around Ceres with only a couple hundred KPH of residual velocity.

  The infonet, which we monitored on the way in, carried news of a number of bar fights and a few minor fender-benders near Ceres but no news of any activity which might be attributable to Donalite pirates.

  We were just entering into our parking orbit when the news of a missing supply ship came in over the infonet airwaves. The ship was owned by General Hull Dynamics and was on a lease carrying a cargo hold full of a rare earth metal called Yttrium. The element was used in the superconductors that powered hyperfield emitters and was therefore one of the most valuable commodities mined in the main belt.

  I leaned back in my command chair and called Hedy to the bridge. Duffy was already in his seat with his feet crossed and perched atop his co-pilot’s seat. With his now scruffy face, he was the very picture of a rogue.

  As I heard Hedy making her way up the short ladder to the bridge, I decided to ask for an update. “Duffy, does the net have anything else on the GHD Skipjack’s disappearance?”

  He looked over his scanner before shaking his head. The ship’s AI was running multiple infonet streams through its search algorithm but wasn’t coming up with any hits.

  “Just the one report and then nothing… in fact even that one report is now gone. If Kara’s AI hadn’t archived it as soon as it flew across the net we wouldn’t know anything happened.”

  I heard a whistle behind me. I turned, Hedy was wearing a towel wrapped around her head and a form-fitting jumpsuit that looked like it had been put on wet. My mind went places it probably shouldn’t. If Hedy noticed my distraction she was kind enough not to say anything.

  “Do you know how hard it is to suppress a story on the infonet?” she said in amazement.

  To be honest, I didn’t. It wasn’t the type of thing I spent much time thinking about. “I take it that dumping the original source material in the delete bin is not enough?”

  Hedy pulled the towel off her head and shook her long blond hair out. Her jump suit was not zipped as high as it should be and my mind was definitely going places it didn’t need to. She must have seen my eyes wandering because the next thing I knew she was pulling her zipper higher.

  “Sorry for the distraction boys.”

  “No worries,” Duffy said with a wolfish grin. “I always enjoy a good show.”

  “We were talking about removing stories from the net,” I prompted... trying to keep the conversation on track.

  “Well for starters you are right AG. Simply deleting a source document would never be enough. The infonet is a quantum entangled information mesh that is comprised of billions of nodes spread across known space. The instant an article is placed on the net it’s replicated by domain servers tied into storage nodes. The only way to kill a story would be to launch a worm to travel the mesh suppressing references to the replicated source document.”

  “Are we talking about deleting all the copies or just the indexed references to the information?” Duffy asked.

  “Neither,” I speculated. “The net is too big and too dynamic to ever be fully indexed. Heuristics have been the only way to reliably retrieve information for as far back as the end of the twentieth century.”

  “Correct Captain,” Hedy agreed. “The only way to suppress the information would be to DINI with heuristics to cause them to have a vanishingly low chance of returning the target data.”

  “Dini?”

  Hedy smiled. “DINI is a technical term… it means to diddle intensely with nefarious intent… it means to tamper.”

  “So why not just say ‘tamper’,” Duffy asked.

  “DINI sounds better,” Hedy offered.

  “Does not,” Duffy mumbled.

  “Does too” Hedy whispered under her breath with a mischievous twinkle in her eye.

  “Children!” I said with just a hint of exasperation in my voice. “Why does… tampering with the heuristics present such a challenge?” I tried to ignore Duffy sticking his tongue out at Hedy.

  “Because,” Hedy said, while pointedly ignoring Duffy, “As you can imagine, access to the domain servers is very tightly regulated. It would be almost impossible without a highly vetted access badge.”

  “Maybe they just dini’d one,” Duffy offered.

  I shot him a look that shut him up.

  “Could they?” I asked.

  “Could they what?” Hedy said.

  “Could they…” I looked at Duffy who was smiling, “could they ‘forge’… a badge?” Duffy’s smile fell.

  “Anything is possible with enough resources,” Hedy answered, “but my guess is it would be easier to just subvert an existing employee.”

  “I thought you said access was highly vetted?”

  “It is… but the ability to tamper with the flow and veracity of information is a time honored technique for social upheaval. Germany pioneered the use of propaganda to control information in WWII. The United States had the same problem with rogue states and organizations tampering with social media to influence elections in the early twenty-first century. My point is sir, the potential rewards are so high… it would be worth almost any risk by an organization like the Donalites to gain covert access to the net… even if all they could do was strategically suppress information. It would prevent patterns of behaviors from showing up...”

  “Thereby making their pirating activities harder to track,” I finished for her. “If this is what is going on… and this is still a BIG if… how do we use it to track down our targets?”

  “If we could monitor a diverse set of DNS servers at the time a story arrived and then became suppressed we could begin to isolate and localize where the tampering was originating from.”

  “Duffy, open a channel to the Puller and brief Commander Savage on Hedy’s theory. I think they are going to be in a better position to run down this lead then we are.”

  “Sure thing boss… wouldn’t it be better for Hedy to have this conversation though?”

  “She can’t. She and I will be heading down to Ceres City and hitting the bars. We are going to start mingling with the natives to see if we can’t pick up some work.”

  “Hey now!” Duffy objected. “I like beer too.”

  I shook my head. “Someone needs to stay with the Kara and besides you ate peaches an hour ago… no way I’m letting you anywhere near a beer.”

  ***

  Hedy and I took one of Kara’s two hoppers to Ceres’s orbital terminus. The terminus was a massive structure located on the top of a space elevator that serviced Ceres City. The gravity on Ceres was low enough that a space elevator was not technically necessary. It was easy to land and take off from its surface with only a minimal amount of fuel used in the endeavor. The thing was, it was because the gravity was so low, that the safest way travel to and from the surface was via the space tether.

  Years of experience had demonstrated the dangers of low gravity dust fields which could bury objects the size of spacecraft in a heartbeat. There were even stories of entire families of miners being killed on Ceres when an unsuspecting shuttle landed on top of them as they were shrouded by dust kicked up by other craft that were landing. A hot plasma exhaust was just as deadly to a person in a shipsuit in low gravity as it was in full g.

  A space elevator was an economical solution to the problem. It also allowed Ceres City managers to control the flow of travelers and minimize the dangers created by dust clouds.

  At 1.2 million inhabitants, Ceres City was the largest human population center in the asteroid belt and the third largest in the solar system after Earth and its moon. There was a time when Mars would have ranked number two, pushing Ceres to the fourth spot but the D’rlalu invasion had sterilized my home planet… which was only now beginning to repopulate.

  As we rode the space tether down to the surface I reviewed the city layout with the military-grade AI built into my subdermal encounter unit.

  Ceres City was essentially a massive metal space station built under the slushy methane and water ice that made up the bulk of the surface of Ceres. There were five spokes that radiated off a center hub. These spokes were interconnected by five concentric rings. A sixth spoke was under construction. In addition, most of the spokes had sixteen levels. The structure was the largest manmade object in existence.

  Ceres city was first and foremost a manufacturing center. Entire sections of the city were dedicated to refining volatile organics for use in the plastics industry as well as hydrocarbon fuel for the VASIMR propulsion systems that were a mainstay of the asteroid belt.

  Other sections of the city processed the various ores that were brought in by cargo haulers. Everything from nanite-infused rolled steel to massive sapphire glass panels were made and available in Ceres City.

  In orbit around Ceres was the second largest collection of private shipyards in the Sol system. Only the multitude of private shipyards in orbit around the Earth-Moon system were larger.

  The result of all of this industrial activity was a series of secondary industries. These included various cottage industries, restaurants, brothels and the ubiquitous pubs that many felt formed the true center of the Ceres economy.

  As we neared the ground I watched as our elevator car detached from the space tether and entered a gaping steel maw that opened on some automated signal from the tether system.

  I looked at Hedy. She was wearing a one piece shipsuit, the design of which had been in vogue about five years ago. It was form-fitting and played to her physical charms quite nicely. It was our hope that her not insignificant intellect would go unnoticed by the distraction the suit afforded. Our mission was to locate the Donalites and put an end to the misery they were inflicting on the system as well as determine their ultimate nefarious intent.

  My own shipsuit appeared to be even older. Both were of course brand new and fitted with the latest Marine augmentation technologies… not the least of which was a built-in energy dissipation system that would provide some protection from both kinetic energy weapons and the stun of a mid-range pointer. Anything beyond that and they would be little better than the run-of-the-mill fabric they appeared to be. Still, some protection was better than nothing.

 

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