Safety, Chapter 3/9

Chapter 3

11 15 Saturday 14 October 2299.

Monarch Sector, disputed zone, USCS Rolling Thunder, deck #15, security.



“Captain on the deck!” a crewman says as several in the garb of the security staff stop to stand and salute, only because of the unexpected nature of the visit. Blue returns it casually, and the crewmen, cautiously, return to their duties.

Blue navigates the score or so of cubicles and desks built into the bulkheads and deckplates, following the path leading to the Chief’s office at the very back, directly across from the brig, perpendicular to the entrance of the deck. He requests entry to the Chief’s windowless office, and is allowed in after a pause.

“Captain,” Henry says, leaning over his desk, as the others around him stand and salute. Blue again returns it. “These are the people working with me on this case: senior chief Jocelyn Goldberg, second lieutenant Casey Jones, and master at arms first class Saria Hirohito,” Henry says, gesturing to his crew, all of whom are armed. “They know about what’s going on.”

“Then you all know about the technology in use on board,” Blue says as he sits.

“Yes, Sir,” says Jones, a man with a face that makes him look like he should be manning the engine of a locomotive, regulation mustache and clean trimmed hair. “Frankly, it’s amazing. I never thought that I’d live to see it.”

“Me either,” Blue replies. “Henry, did Kennison give you the sensor logs?”

“Yessir. We were just going over them, and here’s what we got:” Henry says, punching some commands into a console on his desk, turning one of the walls in his office into a display, showing the screen he was just leaning over. “Visible light, IR and UV spectra show pretty much as normal at the time in question,” he says, displaying the same on an overlay of the entire ship, appearing as colors indicating intensity, “but in the higher energy spectra, x- and gamma rays, we have this, right before the incident,” he says, changing the chart. The chart is nearly blank, save for reports of trace radiation along the outer bulkhead walls, and a series of intermittent, widely spaced dots that could be construed as a line, made of combined wavelengths of high energy readings. The line seems to originate from an outer area of the port side of the ship, toward the aft, making a beeline to the epicenter of the damage.

“Huh,” is all Blue can voice. “Where does that ray originate from?”

Hirohito, a young woman actually of Western European descent, replies. “I investigated it myself, Sir, and it seems to be just a corridor in the forward areas of deck ten.”

“Well, what do the personnel logs say about that?” Blue asks.

“That’s the thing, Sir,” Henry comments, bringing up another diagram, showing hundreds of dots all across the habitable areas of the ship. “This overlay shows the scanned positions of everyone with a tracer in them. Since that’s everyone… well… just look at it.” The ‘it’ to which Henry is referring is the fact that while the X-rays originate from what appears to be a corridor, no one is logged as being there at the time.

“Damn,” Blue says, observing the hard facts. “So there was a shot fired by someone the Fleet hasn’t tagged.”

“Well, according to the IR,” Henry says as he produces the corresponding overlay, “…here, no one was even near that place at the time in question.”

“Could these documents have been falsified?”

Henry looks directly to his chief cryptological analyst for the answer. “Casey?” He asks.

Jones responds in his thick, deep cadence: “In theory, yes. In practice, not a chance. Falsifying hundreds of threads of constantly measured sensor records would be a Herculean task to say the least, and to me, all these look to be in perfect order. Yes, it is possible to falsify such things, but in this case, and in such short time, it did happen the way you see it here.”

“Okay,” Blue continues, and pauses to think. “Well, it couldn’t be a Yvellian,” he concludes. While they may be cold-blooded, the clothing they wear is designed to provide them with exothermic energy, normally through electric or chemical heaters. In effect, the normal, cold-blooded, clothed Yvellian radiates more heat than your average human.

“Unless…” Hirohito begins, speaking for the first time. “Could he be using an IR masking heat suit?”

“Nah,” Henry replies. “Too much bulk. With their build and the necessary equipment for that system…” he shakes his head. “…he’d never be mobile enough. Besides, have a look at this,” he says, pulling up the motion sensor overlay, setting it into motion for the three frames per second before, during, and after the shot was fired. The aft area reveals a great deal of motion, up into the red levels, then sensory cutoffs, but absolutely nothing in the corridor. “No one was there.”

“One more thing; our intel was very specific on what they’re capable of with the teleporters, that they can’t yet send anything much larger than an ammo box, let alone anything alive,” Blue adds. “If he was Yvellian, then he’s very good. So good, in fact, that he can evade discovery of an entire destroyer crew and her computers, and yet, a soldier that his handlers would want floating inside a debris field. It has to be someone from Bernhard’s Pass. Speaking of which, I count eighty-nine persons from BP not on your security staff, which I know is solid.”

“Yes, we’ve come up with the same list, Sir,” Hirohito says after idly smoothing her regulation-length blonde hair, neatly tied at the back of her head. “We’ve only managed to account for the whereabouts of fifteen of them so far, Sir,” she says, then sighs audibly, betraying her exhaustion.

“Is there a problem, crewman?” Blue asks, somewhat offended at her demeanor, his keen sense of observation easily identifying Hirohito’s weariness. For her part, Hirohito perks up.

“Nosir. Sorry, Sir.”

Henry speaks out on her behalf, before Blue can say anything else: “We’ve all been exasperated by this thing, cap’n. The discussion came up about those top-of-the-line internal sensors installed on all the newer destroyers;” he says. “They can immediately differentiate from among all the tracers on the ship, and attach a number to each individual call signal, not just the location beacons. Did you know that the individual signals get massed under our system, too?”

“Was that supposed to be a feature?”

“No Sir. When a couple of tracers get too close, their signals disappear into one large blob on the scanners. During the time frame, we’re missing a count of thirty, but all of them could have been in one area or the other. It’d really be so much easier on all of us if we could account for everyone at once, to see who is where they’re supposed to be.”

“I sympathize with you,” Blue says to them, “but we can’t let ourselves to fall prey to our frailties. We have to maintain security on this investigation, for the safety of this ship, and security requires the utmost attentiveness. One breach of protocol, and we’re all as good as dead,” Blue says in as deep, morose a voice as he can muster. “Is that clear?”

Assents from all four assembled.

“Good. Saria, how long have you been on shift?”

“Sixteen hours, Sir. Since before the shot.”

“You’re relieved,” Blue commands.

“Thank you, Sir.”

“Just get some rest, sailor,” Blue says, the sympathy barely palpable in his meaning, but present. “Be back on shift in eight hours, clear?”

“Aye, aye,” she says, saluting. Blue returns, and she slinks out.

“How about the rest of you?”

Henry answers for all of them. “We’ll be fine, Sir.”

“Exhaustion does no good,” Blue says, quoting a proverb from his mentor, “so, try to keep on your sleep shifts, okay? Now, have we figured out what happened to the shields?”

“I talked to commander Wright; he’s got two engineers with another of my staff rooting through the aft defense control systems. He told me that the power readings indicate that something was draining the systems at the time, but they have yet to find a problem related to the generator crystals,” Henry says. A ship of the Fleet generates added defense by charging extremely large, flat crystalline structures grafted on to her wings with vast amounts of power from storage capacitors located across the ship, spaced to prevent a cascade failure. The charged crystals generate EM fields designed to repulse, deactivate and destroy inbound objects and to dampen inbound energy.

“Make sure they keep at it.

“Aye Sir.”

“How many of us are on the in with this thing?”

“The people in this room, Saria, commander Tharsis, commander Wright, chief Kennison, and five of my men are out there, doing interviews. That’s thirteen total. Wright’s men don’t know anything more than that they’re looking for something that could interrupt shielding.”

Thirteens, Blue thinks. Sportsmen of all sorts are often superstitious, and Blue really isn’t much of an exception. Sabotage on Friday the thirteenth. Thirteen people investigating. I don’t like this omen. Too many people; Command would have my head for this, he realizes. He can’t possibly allow himself another participant to make it an even fourteen, not for a superstition. That’s another possible leak, another opportunity for things to go wrong, and he sure as hell can’t take anyone out of the presence of this pandora’s box. “Let’s keep it at thirteen.”

“Aye Sir.”

“Is there anything else?”

Henry thinks a moment, still leaning over his desk. Finally, he shakes his head. “I don’t believe so, Sir.”

“Keep me updated,” Blue says. “Carry on.”

“Sir!” They say, saluting. Blue again returns the salutes, exiting the office.