First Command (13 page)

      
There were also agents being run by Mr. Shepler, who was running a small network of his own.
 
He had an administrative assistant, Silke Watson and her boss, Bart Morton, the local security officer on Gagarin, working for him.
 
H’Topa decided that initiative like this must be rewarded.

      
He also read reports from his two agents working for Mr. Yestepkin.
 
They didn’t feel he was a good source for the plans, but the weapon he was working on would be worth acquiring.
 
He read their précis and agreed, and sent a message authorizing them to proceed.

      
H’Topa sent directives to all agents in proximity to the target, ordering them to concentrate on acquiring copies of the ring design plans.
 
He knew that this might compromise his network, but he didn’t look forward to being offered an honorable way to die when he got back to G’Durin.
 
A network could be rebuilt, but he was one of a kind.

* * * * *

      
Kelly undocked from Alistair’s ship and started a high orbit of the planet.
 
Their sensors were set to high gain, and within a day had a complete list of all ships in Shepard’s space.
 
Sensors ran the list against all ships on the planet registry, then forwarded Kelly a list of ships in orbit, but not on the registry.
 
There were four:
 
two bulk freighters, a bulk liquid gas carrier, and an auto-container freighter.
 
Vigilant made a close pass to all four and scanned them for any signs of K’Rang occupants.
 
The scans proved negative.
 
Kelly guessed that the ships were merely avoiding the system entry fee.

      
Kelly sat down with his sensor experts and Chief B to see if there was any way to detect K’Rang signatures externally.
 
The discussion went back and forth between Chief B and Chief Johnson, but neither came up with a workable solution.
 
The winning answer to what was different about K’Rang and Humans came out of the mouth of a diminutive Cryptologic Tech 3rd Class, Daisy “Pixie” Benson.

      
Pixie sat quietly, listening to her superiors getting nowhere near a solution on what was different about K’Rangs that could be detected by the Vigilant.
 
The discussion was getting quite heated when Pixie said loudly, “Their poop and pee are different.”

      
The startled participants sat in stunned silence, and then laughed as they absorbed what Pixie had just said.
 
Of course, ships pump their toilet waste overboard.
 
If there were K’Rang on board, it would be detectable by the Vigilant’s multiple sniffers.
 
Getting silly in their exhaustion, they wondered if K’Rang used litter boxes and what kitty litter brand they used, if they did.
 
There was much laughter before they got serious and back to work.

      
Chief B ran a search for the chemical composition of K’Rang bodily wastes.
 
She pulled it up on her pocket terminal and beamed it to Chief Johnson’s terminal.
 
Kelly sent the sensor section back to their positions to “sniff” out the K’Rang poop and pee.
 
Pixie received an on-the-spot achievement medal for her blinding sense of the obvious.

* * * * *

      
Bart Morton decided to reinstate after hours security checks in the Gagarin Research Facility.
 
After a week of very visible signs left on desks from people leaving their terminals on, tossing classified material into regular wastebaskets, or forgetting to lock safes, people started taking security seriously.
 
The facility manager even congratulated Bart on his success in increasing security awareness.

      
In addition to gaining him kudos, he also was making his presence, wandering through offices at night, a routine thing.
 
People thought nothing of him checking safes, opening unlocked safes, rifling through desks, and digging through waste bins.
 
It became a joke when he found a violation in the early evening, while the late workers were still preparing to leave.
 
Workers applauded him when he caught a violator.
 
Bart suspected in some cases that workers were setting up their office mates.

      
He and Silke worked together to find out how to open the safe combination envelopes for the triple locked safe holding the ring plans.
 
Bart’s office maintained the combination envelopes for all safes in the facility, even the Blakes’ personal safe.
 
They just had to open the sealed envelope in such a way that it could be resealed so that it didn’t look like it had been opened.

      
Bart and Silke practiced with empty envelopes, using steam from her teakettle to soften the glue on the seal.
 
They practiced until they could do it perfectly each time.
 
Late on a Friday, Silke steamed open the main safe combo envelope, wrote down the combination, and resealed it.
 
She did the same with the three internal safe drawer combos.

      
After the last worker left for the weekend, Bart and Silke put their plan into effect.
 
They first made a sweep of the offices looking for security violations.
 
Bart found two and left his famous yellow ‘gotcha’ signs on the desks.
 
This gave them justification for being there late on a Friday.

      
After completing the security sweep, they entered the Blakes’ office and opened the safe.
 
The main safe door opened easily.
 
The first drawer opened and Bart had Silke photograph the one document in it page-by-page.

      
When Silke had the first document copied, she handed the document back.
 
Bart put it back the way it had been, using a photo he’d taken as reference, and locked the drawer.

      
They did the same with the second and third drawers, where each held only one document.
 
When they finished, they put everything back exactly as it was before.
 
As a final step, he left one of his yellow ‘gotchas’ for having unclassified papers on top of the safe he’d just rifled.
 
Bart and Silke took the camera’s data device with them as they checked out through the security guard, the data device securely stashed in Silke’s brocade and lace bra.

      
They sent the success code through the network’s cooking forum and received the code phrase to put the data in their dead drop within two hours.
 
They copied the data to another clean device and triple-sealed it in plastic bags, then took his ground car to a certain public park.
 
Their dead drop site was a public restroom.
 
The third sink from the door had a lip on its underside.
 
Bart went in, made sure the stalls were empty, and secured the bag under the sink, where it was not visible to the casual eye.
 
He washed his hands and carried the paper towel outside, to toss in the container by the entrance to the park.

      
Bart and Silke went back to his apartment and spent the weekend celebrating their imminent reward.
 
Bart wondered if it might be enough to retire on.
 
He’d heard of a hidden world run by pirates, if they could only find it, which sounded like a perfect retirement location.

* * * * *

      
Colonel David Little had been a brigade commander assigned to reinforce the New Alexandria Ground Forces during the second battle of New Alexandria.
 
Sergeant Major Frank Days had been his senior enlisted advisor.
 
Little had been on a fast track to a star and planned to take Days with him as he rose in rank.
 
After the New Alexandria campaign, he was informed he would not be considered for a star because he had no combat experience as a brigade commander.
 
The K’Rang invasion fleet had been destroyed before they could land any ground troops for Colonel Little to fight.

      
When he was told this in a phone call from his mentor and superior, he exploded and said things to a two-star general that could have gotten him court martialed; instead, it got him relieved from command three months early.
 
That effectively ended his career.
 
After that, Little felt betrayed by a service to which he’d devoted his adult life.

      
It was time for him to get some payback.
 
He found out what bars were of interest to the local counterintelligence detachment and frequented them, letting his dissatisfaction with the military be known.
 
It wasn’t long before he came to the notice of some shady types and was recruited.
 
He smiled when they encouraged him to apply for the special ring security detachment.

      
Little and Days had excellent records and were approved for the special ring security detachment.
 
As the senior member, Colonel Little was made acting chief.
 
A one-star admiral was to be the eventual chief, but had not yet been confirmed by the Senate.
 
The Colonel and Sergeant Major settled in and established the processes for the office, effectively ensuring they had access to every code.
 
After a week, Little transmitted the success code to the cooking forum and received a dead drop code in return.

      
Frank Days made the drop by placing an envelope containing the codes, triple sealed in plastic bags, up onto the smoke shelf of the crumbling chimney in an old abandoned house.
 
Two days later they received another dead drop code.
 
When they opened the package in Days’ apartment, there were two packages of backdated stock certificates totaling 200,000 credits.
 
Days and Little celebrated with beers.

      
In his triumph, Little completely forgot that becoming visible in those bars of interest to the counterintelligence detachment had made him of counterintelligence interest.

* * * * *

      
Pixie’s brainstorm worked.
 
The Vigilant’s sniffers could detect the chemical signature of K’Rang bodily waste.
 
Unfortunately, the Vigilant could not determine which ship contained the K’Rang in the orbital parking area holding over 200 ships without spooking the courier ship.
 
Alistair did some magic with the planet’s servers and increased his computational power exponentially.
 
He called up the ship’s logs for every ship that had entered Shepard’s space in the last four weeks.
 
He let the combined computing power look for anomalies.
 
In seven hours, the computer spit out three ships.
 
One was an ore carrier, another was a cargo and passenger ship, and the third was a decommissioned military gunboat converted to civilian use.

      
Sensors plotted out the ships’ locations in the parking orbit.
 
Kelly looked at how the three ships were parked in relation to each other and had navigation plot a course that would put the Vigilant in close proximity to all three ships.
 
When plotted out, it looked very similar to a standard approach pattern, which gave Kelly an idea.

      
The Vigilant left orbit and looped around the next nearest planet.
 
It came back lined up on the vector to pass all three ships and started a standard approach.
 
Kelly called to Shepard Station and requested docking at the station, also on the same vector.

      
In sensors, Pixie jumped up and shouted, “Bingo!” when they passed the second ship, the combined cargo and passenger ship.
 
She had found the K’Rang courier ship.

      
Kelly had them put the visual of the ship up on their main monitor.
 
Kelly couldn’t believe his eyes when he saw the paint scheme, crimson red with an eagle’s head on the bow.
 
It was so obvious that nobody would suspect it.
 
He kept his ship on course for the station and docked long enough to send Connie and Cookie with a shopping list and a set amount of credits.
 
They bought spices and delicacies and returned to the Vigilant.

      
Kelly departed the station and made a low angle approach to the planet.
 
He kept them on this vector until they pushed beyond the spot where the K’Rang courier ship’s sensors could still range on them and had them climb back up to dock with Alistair.

* * * * *

      
Alistair spent the time that the Vigilant was away to break out more data on the cooking forum discussions.
 
He found he could decipher more of the spoofed data and find out from which planet the reply messages came.
 
The first reply originated on Tereshkova, to a recipient on Shepard.
 
The second came from Shepard to a recipient on Gagarin.
 
The third came from Shepard to a recipient on Earth.
 
The first message was from four weeks ago and must have been from another courier ship or the one here on its transit in.
 
Alistair deduced that the courier ship would need to leave here after it retrieved the first package and go to Earth and Gagarin to pick up those packages.
 
Kelly agreed and proposed to move his ship out to the edge of the star system.
 
There he would monitor the ship and follow it when it left to retrieve the data from its next stop.