The Black Ships (22 page)

Low Earth Orbit

May 25
^th
, 2027

S
on of a bitch, that’s big,
thought Frank
looking out the cockpit window of the orbital airship. They were on final
approach to the dockyard where the hull of the
Ares
was almost complete.
At fifteen hundred feet, it was easily a couple hundred feet longer than the
cruise ship he had been building and it was staggering to think it was being
built in space. The hull was over ninety-five percent complete and there were
only thirty-two modules left to attach around the outside edges of the vessel.

The seals for the massive internal hangar
deck were complete and the ship had been declared operational. The airship that
had carried Frank into orbit was also loaded with the first of the carrier’s
breaching assault vessels. The BAV’s were designed to carry a platoon of
marines on a fast approach to the enemy ship. Once within range, they would
fire everything they had at one focused point and attempt to ram their
heavily-armored nose through the hull. The inner hull of the BAV was designed
with a complement of pneumatic and hydraulic dampeners that would
help
the
platoon inside to survive the impact.

Assuming that was successful, shaped
charges would blow a hole through both hulls and it was hoped that the boarding
party, wearing combat EVA suits, would be able to find a way through the
wreckage and fight for control of the ship. There were a lot of assumptions at
work.

“Alright Frank, that’s as far as we can
take you,” the pilot said over his shoulder. “You better get down and hook up
if you still plan on going over to the
Ares.
”

“This seemed like a good idea when I was
sitting at my desk back on Ellis Island,” he grumbled, earning a laugh from the
four-man bridge crew. He pushed off and spun in the air like a
two-hundred-pound cat, moving neatly around the stair rail and down to the
lower deck. Brad, the loadmaster, held the door open for him and he glided into
the airlock, fumbling with his helmet as the door closed.

“De-pressurization in three, two…”

“WAIT,” Frank yelled as he scrambled to
engage the seal on his EVA suit. He could see Brad laughing through the window.

“If you had paid more attention when I
briefed you on this yesterday, you would remember that
you’re
the one
who has to de-pressurize the airlock.” Brad was wiping tears from his face and
Frank could hear more laughter from the control deck. “Have fun, Frankie.”

“Thanks, jackass,” Frank felt the seal
click and hit the button to clear the air from the small room.

At least I
didn’t crap my pants…
The light turned red and he
threw the switch to open the outer airlock door, grabbing a handhold before
aiming for the BAV. He pushed off and reached the pre-marked spot where he was
to tether. Hooking on, he looked up to see the cargo bay door opening. The view
was spectacular. Behind the hive of activity that was
Ares
, the Earth
looked fragile and vulnerable, its thin layer of atmosphere seemed hardly
enough to sustain life.

The thruster team came into the hold and
attached their units. The lead hand drifted over to Frank and checked his tie
before grasping his helmet and bringing their visors together. The gesture was
unsettling for Frank until he realized that this was how they talked without
having the entire shipyard listening in.

“Mr. Bender, your tether looks fine but
make sure you keep a firm grip on the bulkhead, OK? We don’t want you coming
loose and de-orbiting on us. My cousin Tony asked me to keep an eye on you.”
The man grinned. “He’s not getting all sentimental or anything, it’s just that
he hasn’t finished paying for his new place in the Azores and the invoices will
pile up if you go missing.”

Frank had known he would run into John
sooner or later. Tony’s cousin had one of the contracts for module placement.
“Tony would have come with me but you can’t smoke in these helmets.”

John moved back to his control module and
attached it. After a quick confirmation that it had control of all eight
thruster units, he started them moving out of the hold. This was Frank’s first
time in space without the comforting bulk of an orbital airship surrounding
him.
I should probably be afraid of falling but this is just too amazing,
he thought as they headed for a point a few hundred meters astern of the
largest vessel humans had yet made.

The stern was where the inbound doors were
mounted. The portside half of the stern was one large airlock door while the
starboard side was split between one larger door and two smaller ones. John
steered the OAV towards one of the smaller doors as it began to open. They
passed through and stopped in front of a second door while they waited for the
outer door to close.

After a couple of minutes, the lights on
the wall turned green and John removed his helmet. Frank had half-expected
gravity to assert itself when the air was pumped in, much like a diver in an
underwater airlock. He knew the difference, of course, but he was nervous and a
nervous mind likes to cast about for familiarity.

He tentatively rotated his helmet lock to
the open position and winced as a rush of air came in. The pressures weren’t
completely equal between his suit and the airlock. He pulled the helmet off and
looked over at John who hovered over his control module with a grin. “Welcome
to the
Ares
,” he said expansively as the two inner doors swung out of
their way.

The hangar deck was roughly thirteen
hundred feet long, three hundred feet wide and fifty feet in height. A series
of structures ran down the center line of the hangar, linking the dorsal and
ventral halves of the ship.  The thruster team took the OAV to the first
empty docking cradle and rotated it sideways before ‘lowering’ it to the huge
clamps on the ventral deck of the hangar. The clamps closed around the small
hull, locking it firmly in place.

There were clamps on almost every surface
of the vessel and some of them would have to be replaced. The new, modified
V-22’s would need their own section of deck to call home and they would need to
be secured or else they would simply start to drift around the hangar, smashing
the ship to pieces when she accelerated or maneuvered.

“The engineers were over by the port launch
door when I saw them last.” John nodded in the direction of the huge door where
a small knot of figures in the new, reddish combat EVA suits were floating.

Frank pushed off and started to move from
clamp to clamp, picking up speed until he judged he had reached the middle and
then began to slow his progress a little each time his hand came in contact
with a clamp. He wouldn’t mind trying one of the new suits. They were intended
for soldiers and gave better freedom of movement and visibility. The reddish,
patchwork pattern was intended for combat on the surface, but the suits,
embedded with Kevlar fiber, would also be of use to any boarding party fighting
in orbit.

Suits were mandatory in the hangar, though
helmets would only be worn during combat operations. While fighting, all of the
ship’s aft hangar doors would be left open: a lucky shot could cause a closed
door to fail. If enough doors were to fail while closed, the
Ares
would
become a ship without a purpose, filled with combat vehicles and troops who
couldn’t deploy. Keeping the aft doors open would prevent that but it meant
that the hangar deck would be unpressurized during combat operations.

“Afternoon, Ted,” Frank greeted the DARPA
officer as he came to a halt. It seemed odd to refer to times of day when they
were in space, but it was afternoon at the new UN headquarters on Ellis Island
and he preferred to stay in touch with his own time zone whenever possible.

“Hey, Frank,” Ted responded with a nod. “We
think we have it worked out.” A drawing floated beside him, showing the
interior walls of the hangar.

“Let’s take a look,” Frank said as he
drifted closer. “If we can agree on it, we might be able to catch a ride back
on the same ship I came up on.”

Sixty
Meter Observatory

Mauna
Kea, Hawaii

April 27
^th
, 2027

M
ike pushed his chair away from the group and rolled backwards,
leaning as far back as he could he stared up at the trusses rather than the
newcomers.
Almost a week with these guys and nothing but arguments.
 The
team from Echelon, the five nation signals intelligence network, had arrived
six days earlier and had set to work immediately. Each nation had provided an
officer of equal rank and Mike wasn’t sure whether that was by design or
accident but it certainly wasn’t helping. Australia, Canada, New Zealand,
Britain and the U.S. had each sent a major and they each spent more time in
pushing their own ideas than they did in analyzing the signals.

After a brief pause as they watched him
glide away, they got back to the important business of arguing over
methodology. Mike’s head bumped the conference table hard enough to knock over
an empty glass left near the edge. He sat up with a loud curse, rubbing his
head and glaring at the five men.

When he had applied to go with the response
fleet, his acceptance had been immediate, thanks to Colonel McCutcheon, and he
had been given a rank equivalency of major.  That didn’t mean that he was
an actual army major but it did give him a place in the hierarchy.  He had
been surprised at how useful it was in working with technical officers. It was
almost like a military version of tenure.

He took his hand away from the back of his
head and was relieved to see that it had no blood on it.
These guys are all
too similar,
he mused as he went back to massaging his bruised scalp.
No
wonder they can’t agree on how to move forward.
He winced.
I hope I
don’t end up with a concussion.
Then an idea hit him and he forgot about
his head.
I can embarrass them into cooperating.

He sat up, looking at the Echelon officers
who were grinning at his accident now that it was obvious he was fine. “You
guys need to just flip a coin and get to work,” he said reasonably. “Chances
are, you each have a good plan for analyzing the data but you need to pick a
direction and go with it.” He picked up the glass, which hadn’t broken despite
falling on the hard concrete floor. “My cousin Mickey in Van Nuys could have
had this done by now.”

They looked a little embarrassed by this
but Major Edwards - Mike still wasn’t sure if he was the Aussie or the Kiwi -
was unconvinced. “Y’ reckon some shonky bludger in his mum’s basement can run
rings around us?” He grinned. “Too bad you can’t have him take a squiz and
prove you right, seeing as he’s all the way out in California.”

I thought I was the one who hit his
head,
mused Mike. He realized that he might have to
carry through on his bluff and that it might be a good thing. “If by ‘squiz’
you mean ‘look’, then why not?” he asked mildly, looking around the room to see
how it was being received. They seemed dubious. McCutcheon looked as though he
was considering whether it would be worth the wait to fly Mike’s cousin to
Hawaii. To his credit, the colonel was willing to consider just about anything
if it brought results.

“Take days to get him here and it might be
a waste of time,” Angela Compton chimed in. She had a slightly twangier accent
and Mike was starting to think she might be the officer from New Zealand.

“You folks don’t quite get what I’m
suggesting here.” Mike couldn’t help smiling at what he had just decided to do.
“I’m suggesting a full dress interview. We call Mickey, explain ourselves and
see what happens in the next twenty minutes.” He turned calmly and snagged his
mug, getting up from his chair to fix a new cup of coffee. “If my cousin can
penetrate our network, find the record of the alien data stream and tell us
something useful about it in twenty minutes, we add a new team member.”

McCutcheon called over to Mike who was
putting his fourth packet of sugar into the mug. “Is your cousin really that
good?”

Mike turned from the table, noticing the
Canadian and American Echelon officers were giving the colonel an indignant
look. “Yep.” He took a deep drink.

McCutcheon said nothing more. He simply
gestured to the speaker phone on the conference table.

Be careful what you wish for.
Mike punched in the number and hit the speaker button to start the
call. The speaker warbled a couple of times before the line was picked up.
“Hello?”

“Hi, Monique, is Mickey there?”

“Hang on…” There was a pause as the phone
travelled down the hall of the small Van Nuys apartment.

“Mike, is that you?” The voice was
undeniably feminine.

Mike looked up at Pete, whose attention had
suddenly piqued. He began scratching his new beard. “Hi, Mickey, I have you on
speaker.” Mike looked around the room. “I have some army officers with me who
specialize in intercepts and I kind of told them that you could run circles
around them.”

“Well gosh, Mike, it’s sweet of you to be
so supportive but why exactly are you telling me about this? Don’t you have a
planet to save?” All the Wilsen family talked about was how Mike was doing such
important work and Mickey was probably a little tired of it.

“Well, they don’t quite believe me so I
sort of told them that you could break into our network and make some sense of
a recorded alien data stream in less than an hour.” He knew he should have
given her the real time limit but he was worried that she would just hang up in
disgust.

“How much less than an hour?”

“Forty minutes.”

“You said I could do all that in forty
minutes?” She sounded amused.

“Um, no, forty minutes less than an hour.”
Mike made shushing sounds as the team members chuckled at his delivery. “I said
you could do it in twenty minutes.”

“I wish Dad had that kind of faith in my
abilities,” she grumbled, keys clacking in the background. “You’re still at the
telescope?” she asked as she typed.

“Yeah, we have a whole nerve center thing
going here and some specialists who keep the security up to military
standards.” He looked over at the colonel who had sat down next to him.
McCutcheon was leaning on the table propping his chin on his hand as he stared
at the speaker.

“OK, the front door’s probably locked so
let’s check the windows,” Mickey murmured as the staccato noise of the keyboard
rattled the speaker. “Nope, nope, nope, disco. OK, I’m in  the network,
let’s find the right file.” More keys rattled.

McCutcheon sat up with a start, throwing
his hands out to the side with an expression of resigned amusement on his face
as he shook his head. “That had to be less than a minute,” he whispered to
Mike.

“Yeah, well, she probably already had her
laptop running.” Mike shrugged.

“Here’s a nice big file on Mike’s desktop,”
Mickey said with a tone a surgeon might use in locating a tumor. “Before I open
this, have you been surfing any naughty websites? I wouldn’t want to embarrass
my big important cousin in front of all his co-workers.” Despite their wounded
pride, the Echelon officers joined the rest of the team in chuckling at her
playful attitude.

“Yeah thanks, Mickey, but I’m clean.”

“Alright, let’s have a look at what we have
here. Looks like it breaks down by method. I see stretches of frequency
modulation; looks like sound transmission.” Another flurry of keystrokes. “The
rest is data but it’s not base 2 like we use. These guys must have some smoking
hot computers; this is base 10 data.” She sounded impressed.

“Base 10?” Mike prompted.

“Yeah,” she replied absently, fingers back
at work on the keys again. “It takes more power than most of our computers can
provide. Listen, Mike,” she sounded worried. “This is a digital translation
that I’m looking at; please tell me you have an actual optical recording of the
full stream.”

“Well, yeah, the whole thing is in our data
bank. What’s wrong?”

“This file is probably missing most of the
data. You have the voice because they used frequency modulation for that but
the rest is a mess.” Her keyboard was silent now. “I would bet you everything I
own that they’re using hundreds of colors. I would suggest that we’re looking
at a transmission based on Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing. They
fire up a huge bank of lasers, each one a different color, and send hundreds of
separate data streams in one shot.”

“So how do we decode this?” Mike was
starting to hope that his cousin could walk the team through it on the phone.
He wasn’t sure how she would take being drafted onto the team. His worries were
unfounded.

“Does the term
Fast Fourier Transform
mean
anything to your team?”

Mike looked at the faces around him.
“Nothing but shrugs here, Mickey.”

“First thing you need to do is book me on a
flight out there.” Her voice was calm but determined. “Luckily, your favorite
cousin used to work at SoCal Cable so I know how to cram a hundred Terabits of
data into a laser signal.” The keys began to chatter again as she talked. “I’m
sending you a list of parts. Please make sure they get there before
I
do.”

McCutcheon joined the conversation for the
first time. “You seem pretty sure that we’re sending you a plane.” His grin
gave the lie to his stern voice.

“Who am I speaking with?”

“This is Colonel McCutcheon. I run this
little dog-and-pony show.”

“Well, Colonel, you’re welcome to carry on
without me but I was under the impression that the Army never turned down a
suitable volunteer.”

The colonel grimaced at Mike’s screen as a
list of parts popped up. “I believe we’ve more than established your abilities.”
He looked over at Sgt Davis. “Nellis,” he said quietly. Davis nodded and pulled
out his phone to find the right number. McCutcheon pulled Mike’s laptop over
and brought up a map of Van Nuys. It had a busy airport.

“Mickey, I need you to get over to Van Nuys
Airport and announce yourself to the management. I’m getting you an aircraft
from Nellis Air Force Base so you should have about an hour before it lands.
It’s going to be a fighter so you’ll only be able to take a small bag – pack
only the absolute essentials. We’ll cover a shopping trip once you get here.”

“Don’t you know how to recruit a girl,”
Mickey replied, amused. I’ll be out the door in ten minutes.