2-77: Pirate Signals
Rachel paused for a moment and seemed to be collecting her thoughts. That was fine. She had a lot on her plate, and I figured there was a lot she needed to summarize.
Meanwhile the eternal dance between the military and bureacracy was still playing out in front of me with Lehrai and Varis trying to figure out a way to get through the Gordian Knot that was the forces of House Alarth refusing to give them clearance to move into a stable orbit around their pleasure planet.
It wasn’t a great way to stop a military force from actually attacking you, but it was a great way to stop a military force that was still interested in pretending everyone was one big happy group of friends when that couldn’t actually be farther from the truth.
“Maybe if we request docking privileges under the pretense that one of our ships is damaged and they’ll need to get repairs as soon as possible?” Varis said.
“That’s not going to do us any good,” Lehrai said. “We have a whole fleet up here that would be able to help out a ship if something like that was really happening. Not to mention we didn’t bother to set up that scenario. They’ll have scans on the whole fleet at this point, and they’ll know we’re full of it.”
“I was afraid you were going to say that,” Varis said. “Well it wasn’t a good idea, but sometimes the dumbest ideas are the ones that work the best.”
She turned and hit me with a look as she said that last bit. I cocked my head to the side and arched an eyebrow, trying to convey with that look just how unfair I thought it was that she was talking about my plans like that.
“Still with me, Bill?” Rachel asked.
“Yeah, I’m here,” I said, turning my attention back to my former XO on the screen in the simulation. “Just dealing with some bullshit docking protocol here on top of whatever report you’re about to give me.”
“Are you sure you want to do this right now?” she asked. “We could always do this later if you’re busy.”
“No, it’s fine,” I said. “Varis is taking care of things. It’s not like I’m trying to piss off the empress.”
“Yeah, she wouldn’t want to leave something important like dealing with local docking procedure to you when there are more important things like pissing off the sovereign who runs the whole Livisk Ascendancy,” Rachel said, her voice flat.
“Exactly!” I said.
“Okay,” she said with a sigh. “So it’s difficult to tell exactly how many people are watching our broadcasts. We’ve been sending out what amounts to a pirate signal that’s getting boosted through the main system, but I’m not sure how well it’s reaching other corners of the Livisk Ascendancy.”
“We’ve discussed working on something like that,” I said. “My understanding is the empress is the one who’s in charge of most of the fold space relays throughout the Ascendancy, and so we have to be careful about what we send through those if we don’t want her spanking us.”
“As though we could do anything that would piss her off any more than what you’ve already been doing,” Rachel said, rolling her eyes.
“I made that same point, and so Varis told me we could go ahead with trying to create our own network of fold space relays. The trick there is doing something like that and making sure the imperials don’t figure out what we’re doing.”
“So they don’t try to kill you?”
“The empress is already trying to kill me,” I said. “We want to do this so we can make sure they don’t go out and destroy the relays. It’s going to take some time and investment to do something like that, but we’ll have a wider reach for you and your network eventually.”
“I don’t know if eventually is going to cut it, Bill,” Rachel said.
The screen she was on suddenly fuzzed a little. I’d seen that sort of thing before. Usually when there was a communications disruption in the middle of combat.
“You still there, Bill?” she asked.
“Still here, yeah,” I said. “Is everything okay on your end?”
“I told you. The empress has been hitting us pretty regularly ever since you made your escape. I think it’s her way of throwing a tantrum as soon as she realized she wasn’t going to be able to get you in her clutches,” she said.
“Sounds about right,” I said.
“Like she’s really upset about that. She put a bigger price on your head than usual. Anyone who tells her where you are is going to be a very rich person,” she said.
“Really?” I asked, rubbing at my chin even though I didn’t have a beard there to rub at and look diabolical or anything. Maybe the mirror universe version of me could grow facial hair. Lucky evil bastard.
“Bill. If you’re thinking about turning yourself in so you can get the reward you should give that up,” she said. “You’re far afield of any of Varis’ main bases. You don’t want to cause any more trouble than you have to out there.”
“Yeah, I’ve had people telling me we shouldn’t put our cock on the chopping block since we’re far from anyone who can reattach it out here,” I said.
“Why do I get the feeling that’s not going to stop you from doing something stupid?” Rachel asked.
“Probably because we’ve worked together long enough that you know me well,” I said. Then I held a hand up to stop her before she could really start griping at me. “Don’t worry. I’m not going to do something stupid like give up our position, but there are a lot of people in this system who know we’re here. If the empress really is putting a bigger price on my head than usual then someone’s going to turn us in.”
“What did you do, Bill?”
“I mean… we showed up in a house’s sovereign system with a carrier group,” I said. “That’s not the kind of thing that’s going to make anyone happy.”
“I didn’t ask about that,” Rachel said, hitting me with the kind of look she only got when she knew I’d done something stupid. “What did you do, Bill?”
“I might’ve attacked one of their mining facilities. Threatened it, is more like it,” I said.
“Goddamn it, Bill,” Rachel said, rubbing at the bridge of her nose. “You need to do stuff where you look good so I can spin it to the rest of the blue sparklies and talk about how great you are compared to her royal bitchiness.”
“I’ll have Arvie send you a package on everything,” I said. “And in all fairness, we did save them from an invading Kith’var raiding force. They’re the ones who decided to attack us after we came in and saved the day.”
“I can work with that,” she said. “We’ve already been making hay with that attack the empress made on one of Varis’ picket fortresses. Showing pictures of all the kids who were orphaned. That sort of thing.”
“Is that actually working?” I asked, glancing to the real world for a moment to check in on Varis.
“What about this?” Lehrai asked, pointing to a bit of text on the tablet in front of her.
The rapidly scrolling text in the holoblock that showed Arvie was working on the problem stopped for a moment. Then it moved again, and a paragraph that looked similar to the one in front of Lehrai appeared there.
“Very interesting,” he said. “It would appear that Houses Alarth and t’Thal did have a mutual defense reciprocity agreement on the books once upon a time.”
“Once upon a time doesn’t mean it ever disappeared from those books,” Varis said.
“Well it was several Ascendancy Wars past,” Arvie said. “Back when the disposition of the Ascendancy was very different from what it is now. Traditionally, those haven’t been honored past the Ascendancy War that gave rise to the agreement in the first place.”
“Traditionally we haven’t had red tape being used to keep one of our fleets from moving into orbit around a planet either,” Varis said.
“That is a very good point,” Arvie said.
“You done paying attention to whatever’s going on in the real world that’s more important than all this empire toppling stuff?” Rachel asked when I turned my attention back to her.
“Sorry,” I said. “I know this is important, but we really do need to get in and talk to the people in House Alarth.”
“Anyway,” she said. “Yes. Showing video of all the kids who were trapped in the shielding units hiding from her attack are all doing their work. It turns out threatening children is a bad look even for a livisk. Who knew?”
“Parental instinct?” I asked.
“More that it’s considered dishonorable to attack someone who doesn’t have a realistic chance of fighting back,” she said. “Though you taking a swan dive through nuclear fire with nothing but a personal shielding unit to save Sera is also playing well.”
“Good,” I said.
“I can show you the feed they’re using if you’d like,” Arvie said.
Right in time with that promise, another window popped up. It showed footage from the cameras on my personal body armor and me going through the conflagration of the picket fortress that’d been destroyed by a nuke and the empress’ capricious desire to be a heinous b.
“Wait,” I said. “Are you showing me the footage you had on hand, Arvie, or is this from one of the broadcasts?”
A moment later the window got smaller and moved to the upper corner of a holo broadcast featuring a livisk woman who had a severe look on her face. More severe than you usually got from the livisk, that is.
That seemed to be the default setting for their news people, though. Not that I’d paid a lot of attention to it. Mostly it was the Imperial News Network saying bad things about us, and I didn’t need to give myself even more stress than what I was already getting from the imperials by watching them spreading lies about yours truly.
“And there you have it,” the woman said. “Another dramatic shot of General-consort William Stewart of House t’Thal making a dive through the irradiated remains of a House t’Thal picket fortress the empress attacked in a cowardly and honorless surprise attack.”
“Wait. The livisk actually have problems with surprise attacks?” I asked.
“Only if the person on the other side doesn’t die,” Rachel said. “It can be honorless if the person attacked survives long enough to complain about how honorless it is.”
“But how are we getting this signal out here?” I asked. “I thought you just said you couldn’t use the imperial relays?”
“Well, that’s something I wanted to talk to you about,” Rachel said. “There is another option we have available to us, but I wanted to double check with you before we continue to use it.”
“I was able to finagle the connection with my shard that remains back on Livisqa,” Arvie said. “I hope you don’t mind that I ruined the surprise, Rachel.”
“I’d expect nothing less from you talking to you, Arvie,” she said, grinning at the computer.
I raised an eyebrow at her. The universal sign for someone to continue. A little gift the great Nimoy had given to spacefarers across the stars.
“So every time we try to use imperial relays to send out our broadcasts beyond the planet, the empress is suppressing it,” Rachel said. “We’ve tried to work with Arvie’s local shard to counteract that, but it’s proving… difficult.”
I turned and looked at Arvie in the simulation with a grin.
“What?” he said.
“I’m just surprised that you back on the planet is having trouble with something as simple as the imperials trying to stop us from broadcasting a signal,” I said. “Brain the size of a planet, and you can’t get around something that simple?”
“If they have direct access to the hardware and I’m trying to break through then it might be difficult,” Arvie said with a sniff. “And I believe I’ve just demonstrated that we have a solution Rachel has identified.”
“Go on,” I said. “You’ve caught my interest.”
“We were able to get through by running a good old fashioned security scam at first,” Rachel said. “Calling some of the people who work at the relay stations pretending to be Imperial IT and asking for their password. Enough of them gave us access that we were able to get through for a bit, but that didn’t last for long once they realized what we were doing.”
“They sent out an e-mail letting everyone know not to fall for that?” I asked.
“They executed everyone who fell for the phishing attempt,” Rachel said.
“Damn,” I breathed. I felt bad for the poor bastards, but I reminded myself it was the empress who gave the order to have them killed. “That’s one hell of a way to ensure IT security.”
“It is,” Rachel said. “Which brings me back to how we’re getting that signal out to the Alartha System in the first place. I was counting on Arvie’s shard here sending that out when I opened this call. I wanted to use it as a proof of concept.”
“You used me,” Arvie said, sounding mildly scandalized.
“I anticipated what you were going to do and figured out a way to make that work for me,” Rachel said.
“Okay, Rachel,” I said, hitting her with a smile. “I see that you’re trying to be clever here, so go ahead and show me how clever you are.”
She smiled right back at me. “I thought you might never ask. You see. It turns out there’s actually a system of pirate relays littering the Livisk Ascendancy, and it’s a whole hell of a lot easier to piggyback on that.”
This time both my eyebrows shot up. Now that was very interesting indeed.