Alan Shepler, the new Chief Executive Officer of the Indigo Consortium, considered his company’s financial future. The fire that killed his predecessor had destroyed some of the jewelry production capability in the main building. The remaining production capability in the two outlying buildings was insufficient to pick up any additional output. Unless he could find replacement production capability, he was going to record a very low profit for this year.
There was the flamestone cache on their asteroid 4533 facility near Rigel, but he wasn’t ready to use them yet. He would have to build a new production facility before he could chance using them. He had visions of an exclusive stone and mounting collection with platinum, silver, and gold rings, bracelets, and pendants — all designed to show off the flamestones’ special luminescence.
He wondered if he could re-establish trade with the K’Rang. Yes, he had several liters of flamestones, but who couldn’t use more? When he briefed Mr. Debran as a new vice president, Debran had seemed receptive to the idea of acquiring more flamestones. How could he regain contact with the K’Rang? All the contacts went up in flames when Charles Delphant died in the fire. There must be a way. He was attending the annual jewelry industry convention on Earth next month; perhaps he could put out some discrete feelers.
Irina Bugarov settled into her new office. Her executive assistant, Terri Hawkins, a tall, willowy, pale blonde woman in her late twenties, suggested that while her full glory wall of framed awards, decorations, and mementos from her 32-year career might have been appropriate for the military, it did not befit a new senior executive of a major corporation. Terri picked through her boxes and pulled out a handful of mostly pictures, a few key awards, and Irina’s folded Fighter Force forest green Two-Star Flag. She walked around the room, while Irina watched her curiously. She finally stopped and pointed to the wall behind the desk.
“Your pictures taken with dignitaries go there. That will show your visitors your connections and what you bring to the company. Over there, above the credenza, is where we put your framed flag. I’ll have it put in a walnut frame to match the credenza. Immediately below that, we will put your model of the F-53. On the opposite wall, we’ll put this painting of your old battle group traveling majestically through space. Over here on the entry wall, we will put your highest decoration certificates. The total look will be one of understated, but evident competence, service, and experience.”
Irina stepped into the middle of the room, spun around slowly, looking at each wall in turn, and said, “I like it. Terri, you have a good sense of style. Perhaps you could go shopping with me for a better professional wardrobe? This is just something I had left over from when I would occasionally wear civilian clothes.”
Terri smiled and said, “Of course, General, that’s why I’m here. I know just where to take you for the best look and quality.”
Terri walked to the credenza and retrieved her pocket terminal.
“Ma’am, how do you prefer to be addressed? Do you prefer ma’am or General or something else?”
Irina thought about it for a bit then said, “ General or ma’am will do for now.”
Terri looked at her terminal and said, “Yes, ma’am, your first appointment is in 30 minutes. Your company CEOs will be here for a meet and greet in the executive conference room. Here are their bios. There will be coffee, tea, water, and a small selection of pastries. It’s scheduled for an hour, and there will be no presentations at this time. Over the next five days, they will come in individually and brief you on their operations. They’re scheduled one in the morning and one in the afternoon from tomorrow to Saturday.”
“Excellent,” Irina said. “Now sit down. There are some things I want to let you know, how I want my days organized, and what I will expect from you.”
Andrew and Moira Blake caught the daily shuttle from Gagarin to Armstrong. They hadn’t seen their son since his assumption of command. Moira wanted to see her baby, the newest and youngest ship captain in Scout Force and the Fleet.
Admiral Tom Craddock, Scout Force Commander, received a call from Andrew, asking if it was all right for them to drop in and see their boy. The Admiral could hardly say no to the inventors of FTL communications and the transporter gates. They were also personal friends. He invited them to stay at his quarters if they wanted to make it a longer stay.
LTJG Tammy Nielsen, Kelly’s friend and daily shuttle pilot, messaged to inform him of their departure from Gagarin. She recognized them from having met them at Kelly’s assumption of command ceremony. The Admiral’s call, telling him to come by at 1800 for dinner, followed Tammy’s message. Kelly apologized to the Admiral for his father’s uncharacteristic spur of the moment visit. Admiral Craddock said not to worry, he always enjoyed the Blake’s visits, even if this one was unannounced. He told Kelly to come casual and he would see if he could get Candy down from her mountain aerie for the evening.
Kelly checked his calendar for tonight and tomorrow and found no conflicts. The ship was being loaded for his upcoming patrol, but that would close out well before 1800. He told Chief B and Connie his parents were coming to visit, and he would be having dinner with the Admiral tonight.
Kelly met his parents at the Military Spaceport Operations Building. They were glad to see him, but had something else on their mind. He drove them directly to Admiral Craddock’s house, where the late summer plantings were just as spectacular as those from the early spring. Candy’s mom was a master gardener.
Amy Craddock met the Blakes at the door, warmly greeted them, and showed Andrew and Moira to the guest room. Kelly waited in the den while they got settled. Mrs. Craddock walked into the den and asked if Kelly would care for anything. He politely refused, saying that he just wanted to make sure his parents were all right. He still had to return to the Vigilant and change for dinner. She assured him that they were fine and he should go and change.
He left when the transport arrived and returned to the Vigilant, then showered, shaved, and put on a shirt and slacks that he and Candy had shopped for on the southern continent. At 1720, he left for the Craddock’s house. He arrived a few minutes early and Candy met him at the door. She must have just arrived, as she was still in her pinstriped office suit. Mind, it looked very good on her.
Her face lit up when she saw him. “Kelly, I’m so happy your folks dropped in. I get to see you again. You haven’t been as much fun since you assumed command. Come in. Would you like some wine?”
Kelly took her hand and gave her a peck on the cheek. “I’d love some wine, thank you.”
He followed her to the bar and she poured him a glass of their favorite vidal blanc. Kelly took a sip, smiled, and pronounced it excellent. Andrew came up to the bar and asked for a glass as well.
Candy poured him a glass, then kissed Kelly on the cheek and excused herself to change into something more comfortable.
Andrew watched Candy leave almost a little too long and asked, “Are you two getting serious? Your mom sure would be happy if you produced a couple of grandkids any day now.”
Kelly laughed and said, “Okay, Dad, anything to make Mom happy, but don’t you think I should be married first?”
They both broke out laughing.
Moira walked in to find out what all the laughter was about.
“Dad was trying to get me to produce some grandchildren for you without the encumbrance of a marriage.”
Moira hugged Kelly and said, “You could hurry, you know? We aren’t getting any younger.”
Candy walked back into the room wearing a black silk shirt and a matching set of black silk jeans. The shirt set off her bust and the two undone buttons showed off her impressive cleavage. The pants clung to her legs, emphasizing their length and tone. High heel pumps accentuated the effect. She came over and hung off Kelly’s shoulder, probably to dissuade Andrew from leering. It didn’t work.
They had a lovely dinner punctuated with friendly conversation. Afterwards, Moira and Andrew asked Tom if there was someplace they could speak in private. He directed them into his study. After a few minutes, Admiral Craddock stuck his head out and motioned Kelly in.
Kelly walked in, was motioned to a chair and heard the admiral say, “Moira, repeat what you just told me, please.”
Moira said, “We didn’t come here to see you, Kelly, sorry. We have detected a large espionage cell on Shepard and Gagarin. It’s intertwined into almost all functions on Shepard.”
Admiral Craddock asked, “What makes you think that, Moira?”
She sat up straight and continued, “We knew when we designed the transporter gates that we had something transformational. It would put all other civilizations, especially the K’Rang, at such a strategic, operational, and tactical disadvantage that they would have to steal it. Therefore, we took certain precautions.”
“We designed the gates in three pieces, built in three separate assembly lines. We kept the design sheets to the absolute minimum. We put extra components in the rings that are functional, but excess to needs. We have a controller that uses some components one time and different components the next. If the sequence is wrong or the wrong component is used, the system shuts down and has to be reset by hand with a code available only in a special office in Defense HQ on Earth.”
“That is what we did to keep the gates’ hardware secure. We also put some sniffers in our network and nondescript surveillance gear around our research center, the factory, even in Defense HQ. The feed from the sniffers and surveillance gear flows into a computer we designed, and it searches for anomalies.”
“We can identify an agent on our staff that has been trying to learn our private language. There are two agents in the main factory that have been trying to gain access to the design sheets. A yeoman and a civilian admin assistant in Defense HQ have been trying to gain access to the copy in that safe. A colonel and a sergeant major in Defense HQ have been trying a little too hard to get assigned to the reset office. We haven’t determined if they are spies or just angling for what they consider to be a plum assignment.”
“Our former research assistant, Valeri Yestepkin, has two agents working for him, trying to turn him against the Republic. It won’t do them any good. He doesn’t know enough to help them build a ring, even a rudimentary one, plus he’s a good guy. You may remember him from our demo in your conference room. He was one of the assistants helping to bring in the rings.”
“He’s involved in a research grant, developing a new weapon on the basis of an offshoot of our technology. He’s developing a series of disruptor weapons that make things disappear permanently. He’s already delivered a prototype weapon to Fleet Ordnance. His weapon design alone is worth stealing.”
“We’ve also noted some instances of poor security at some of the factories building the components. We noticed excessive copying of specification sheets, design sheets, CAD/CAM files, and assembly instructions. It’s as if someone is trying to build a gate from the bottom up.”
The admiral looked at the two and asked again, “Why have you come to me with this and not your supporting Fleet Intel Field Office?
Moira replied, “Because we don’t trust them. They’ve been compromised. We don’t know specifically who it is, but one of the security officers has been turned. We’ve seen data on the rings leave their office network. Remember those data devices you found that had our design info on them? We think the security shop on Gagarin is where it originated.”
Admiral Craddock stood up and walked over to his desk. He picked up his communicator and contacted CAPT Hasselrode and had him call a meeting with CDR Timmons, CDR Johnson, and Kelly at 0800 hours tomorrow morning. He instructed Hasselrode to cancel all his other morning appointments.
He turned back to Kelly and said, “Your next mission just got a lot more complicated.”
Tom Baker was lead construction foreman on segment two of the ring system. His team had been catching hell for trouble with aligning his segment to segments one and three when the system was assembled at Tereshkova. He studied the drawing, looking for the mating plate dimensions, suspecting that the setting on the milling machines had drifted off during the milling operation. His machinist insisted he had the right dimensions, but Tom wasn’t sure.
Tom was also not feeling right. He was pretty sure his lunch from the gut truck was bad in some way and he could feel his insides churn. He was alone in the plan room, but the security guy was just outside if he had to leave suddenly. No sooner did the thought enter his mind than he felt an uncontrollable surge. He jumped up, running out the door for the men’s room at speed. He yelled for the security man to lock up the plans as he ran out the door. Unfortunately, the security man had stepped away for a chocolate bar from the vending machine down the hall and wasn’t there to hear him. A janitor walking by did hear him. Realizing the opportunity, he snatched at the door before it closed and locked, and went in.
There it was before him, one of the three plans, the Holy Grail of espionage. He quickly pulled out a camera and collected page by page until he had them all. He left the room as he found it and hurried away. The security man came back, found the door locked and no one inside and got a case of the jaws. He would write up the foreman for a security breach. He thought to himself it was a good thing he came back when he did.
The janitor hurried to the maintenance room, quickly disassembled the camera, and hid it in various spots around the room. He took the data device and uploaded it to a special hidden folder on his pocket terminal and encrypted it. The data device went into a special pocket in the tongue of his shoe. Now all he had to do was wait for normal quitting time. There was no need to do anything out of the ordinary when he had just scored such a coup. He was sure there would be something extra in his pay this month.
The foreman came back to the reading room and the peeved security guard initially would not let him in. Then he saw the foreman’s ashen face and quickly buzzed him in.
“My god, man! What’s wrong with you?”
“I think the fish sandwich I had for lunch was bad. I barely made it to the restroom in time. I’m going home. I just wanted to make sure you secured the plans.”
“Sure, I got them locked back up. Don’t worry about it. Now get out of here and go get well.”
The foreman and his rumbling guts checked out and went home. Before he powered up his transporter, he called the machinist and chewed his butt for using the wrong dimensions. He gave him the right dimensions and told him to make sure they stayed that way.
The janitor thought he was working for a competing manufacturing firm unfairly locked out of running for the ring contract. He waited until he got home at his usual time and formatted the data file for transmission in a cooking recipe. He chuckled as kindly old Aunt Martha from Schirra sent off her family recipe for Sickleberry Pie.
Alistair Bennett woke up as his ship’s computer dinged to let him know a message with the parameters he’d set had shown up. He read the recipe and waited for the fifth response to come in.
The fifth comment was from a young wife on Tereshkova wishing she could see a picture of the pie. Alistair assumed this was code for a dead drop. There was never a response back in any of the previous messages and he didn’t expect one this time.
Alistair had found the common thread when he noticed that in every suspicious message, the message was sent from a different planet than the one on the profile. He’d tumbled to the anomaly by accident and spent a few days testing his hypothesis and weeding out the real grandmas visiting their grandkids on another planet. He found three agents working on Carpenter at the factory — two dead drop servicers, a transporter, and a creditsman. They were brilliantly compartmented except in their communications, which used the assumed security and anonymity of the public network. That would be their downfall.
Shadow Lead Agent H’Topa was overjoyed. One of the covert collection ships in Human space had intercepted a success code from one of their agents in the factory on the Human main world Shepard. They sent a short coded burst, which a frontier collection site picked up and forwarded to him. He looked up the code and saw it was for acquiring one part of the three-part ring design plan. J’Kraul would be overjoyed to have something tangible to report to the Elders. They were being quite harsh with him, even though they understood how good Human security could be.
He placed a call to pass on the good news. J’Kraul was ecstatic, as he had an appointment with the Elders next day. J’Kraul asked him what chance there was that the other two parts could be acquired in the same manner. H’Topa had to burst his bubble by telling him he had no way of knowing at this time how this one part had been acquired and wouldn’t know until the agent could be interviewed or the data file off the public network could be delivered to a K’Rang world network for forwarding. It would take at least four days for the collection ship to arrive at N’Ganu, the nearest main world to their exfiltration route. The collection ships were built for collection, not speed. In the meantime, he would arrange for one of his enforcers to interview the agent and report as soon as possible. Although he didn’t tell J’Kraul, as soon as possible could be four weeks.
H’Topa remembered how his request to place a special communications device in one of the Human’s FTL hubs had been turned down by the Elders and how they had excoriated him for even suggesting such a thing. He remembered their instant dismissal of the idea, fear actually, at the danger that the humans may discover it and turn it into a way to gain access to the K’Rang communications system.
“There are times like this when it would be helpful for there to be direct connection between the Human and K’Rang networks,” he thought.
The meeting with the Elders did not go well for Shadow Leader J’Kraul. The news that they had obtained one of the three design plans just led to questions of when would they have the other two sections and the codes to make the rings work. J’Kraul was pummeled so hard by their impatient harangues that he had to use all his will power to keep his ears from flattening on his head. He barely salvaged the meeting by promising to put more resources to bear on the matter and was summarily dismissed. His aide read his superior’s mood and wisely kept quiet on their trip back to Shadow Force Intel HQ.
H’Topa was summoned to J’Kraul’s office immediately upon his return from the Elders. H’Topa could see the frustration in his friend’s eyes and demeanor.
“It was the worst I have ever felt in any briefing to any audience. They are almost in panic mode. They must have those other two other design plans or neither of our careers or lives are secure.”
H’Topa tried to calm his friend, but nothing he said helped. Finally he asked, “Would it help if I went into Human space and directed the network more closely? Our biggest problem is that it takes two weeks to get directions in and two weeks to get the info out, if we’re successful. If I go in on one of the collection ships I can direct my network in real time.”
J’Kraul looked up at his friend, “H’Topa, old friend, if you are caught it will mean your death.”
“Then I had better not get caught. How soon can you have a collection ship to take me to Human space?”
J’Kraul argued in his head against this course of action, but in the end realized he had no choice. If they didn’t make progress on this, Shadow Warriors would be sent to offer them the honorable way out, or they would do it for them.
“I will have the Special Collection Ship D’Ran at your disposal tomorrow. It is not your usual collection ship. It has teeth and legs. Captain M’Toth and I have served together before. He is steadfast and brave. He will be there when you need him and will give his last breath to keep you safe. Be safe, my friend. You are not just our best lead agent, but also my friend. Contact M’Toth and inform him when you want to leave.”
H’Topa looked down, then back up into his friend’s eyes and said, “When you tell him he is under my orders, tell him to be ready tomorrow morning at dawn. I will be there ready to load and leave. I don’t think this is the time to dawdle.”
J’Kraul smiled and said, “You’re right, it isn’t.”