Chapter Four
Orkhana
Sorilla observed from the back as Kriss and Sienele towered over the small Sirhan, demanding answers as to why he had been shadowing them.
They were getting nowhere with the little guy, but she wasn’t particularly concerned with their results as she was gathering more and more information on body language, both from the Sirhan but also from the Lucians’ and Sienele.
Most of that was just being filed away, intelligence for another day, but the Sirhan was keeping her focused as she worked to map out his responses and connect them to emotional drives that she could comprehend.
He was frightened, certainly, but there was steel in his spine… well, if he had a spine, which she wasn’t actually sure of.
Steel in his… her, or its character, I suppose would be better terminology.
Sorilla sighed mentally, pushing that issue of whether or not the little creature even had a gender by human definitions to the side as it was doing her little good at the moment. It was important information, of course, but it wasn’t of current tactical importance.
The steel he was showing, now that was tactically important. She didn’t know enough yet to attribute that to the individual or the culture. Likely, it was a mix of both of course but the exact mix would be vital information if SOLCOM forces ever had to deal with the Sirhan in the future. At the moment, the fact that it existed in the individual was enough.
He’s hiding information, but is being clever about it. They’re not going to break him.
The interrogation had only just begun, much of it in a language she was barely fluent in, but she could already read that in the byplay between the three. Sorilla suspected that Sienele had also made a similar read, as she was seeing more and more frustration bleed off him. She felt sympathy for the Alliance spymaster, but also a fair bit of amusement deep down.
All of the advantages were on his side. He held all the power with the authority of the Alliance backing him up and the muscle of the Sentinels standing right behind him, and he wasn’t going to get the little guy to speak.
That spoke well of the Sirhan, Birchee, Sorilla reminded herself… spoke well of him and caused her to make a note about the species, just in case he wasn’t an exception.
The alliance saved them from these… Jara…
The Jara was not a species that Sorilla felt any need to fast track a meeting of, not if the Alliance had difficulty turning them around, but the story was interesting.
It wasn’t merely the Alliance that had saved them, no… it was the Ross. From the comments made by Kriss and Sienele, she gathered that the Alliance Navy had engaged them, but it was the Ross that turned them back.
Were they recruited then? Are they all part of it, or just a few individuals…?
There were too many variables at play, and the more she learned, the less Sorilla felt she understood the situation, but this was an important piece of the puzzle. It was one that caused multiple other pieces to snap into place.
The Ross are undermining the Alliance from within.
*****
Sienele forced himself to maintain emotional control rather than give into his frustrated instincts and lash out at the Sirhan, Birchee. Birchee was a young member of the species from what he gathered, but for all that had proven himself to be quite adept at maintaining discipline under stress.
Perhaps too adept?
It was a point he had to consider. Resisting interrogation was not something that came naturally to most, it had to be trained. Intelligent and deft deflections of questions that didn’t give away any small tells that an interrogator could use against you were not easily played out, but that was precisely what he was seeing here.
An untrained person might simply refuse to answer questions, keeping quiet. That worked well for a short time, but it also confirmed that you were hiding something and kept the interest in place. Eventually, the time varied from species to species, but eventually the mind lost the ability to maintain that level of single tracked focus. Things slipped.
Deflecting, answering without imparting any real information, those were better techniques by far. They kept the interrogator off balance, trying to determine if there was anything of value in the statement, and thus provided the subject with more breathing room. If they were very lucky, it might even convince the interrogator that they were chasing the wrong Cora and simply let them go entirely.
That wasn’t going to happen this time. Sienele was quite certain that this Birchee knew more than he was letting on for one. He’d been following Lucian Sentinels in the pursuit of their duty for another, and by his manner of response Sienele was now certain he had training as the final point to lock his fate… but under other circumstances, it might have worked.
Finally, Sienele tired of the game and decided that as much as could be accomplished in the moment had been accomplished.
“Secure him,” He growled. “Remove this one to the ship. We will continue with the interrogation in less… hospitable environs.”
“Finally,” Kriss snarled, stepping forward.
A clatter behind them startled each of them, even the trained Lucians, who swung about to see the Colonel picking her helmet up off the ground.
“Sorry,” She said. “Slipped.”
“Stop! Get back here!”
Sienele spun back at the Administrator’s yelling, frustrated to see that Birchee had bolted and was weaving through the equipment even as the Lucians set off in pursuit.
“Alive!” Sienele yelled. “Take him Alive!”
The Lucians barely bothered to respond, but he really hadn’t expected anything different. Exasperated, he turned back to Colonel Aida, more than a little annoyed by the whole thing only to freeze as he saw her finishing mounting her helmet.
“I’ll track him too,” She said, leaping off before he could say anything.
Damn it. That human is going to be more trouble than she is worth, I just know it.
Sienele rather liked the Colonel, actually, on a personal level. However, he was all too aware of just how dangerous she could be, and likely would be. He quietly cursed Kriss for having brought her into the mission within the Alliance borders but couldn’t do so too terribly much since he had signed off on it himself.
He knew that she was gathering intelligence on the Alliance, of course. He’d be foolish not to… however, he was gathering intelligence on her and the humans through her actions. And… distasteful as it was, should she get a little too much information in her pursuits while inside Alliance borders… well, accidents were known to happen, and there would be none to gainsay the Alliance side of the story in that case.
He hoped it wouldn’t come to that, of course, but the woman was pushing it.
*****
Sorilla was pushing it, and she knew it, but she wanted some time alone with the Sirhan if possible… or, at least, wanted to see where he ran.
Her implants were locked onto the little alien as she pursued from a distance, keeping the Lucians in sight as well. They were like the proverbial bulls in a china shop as they blew straight through anything between them and the object of their pursuit, only going over or around something if it was too big or solid for them to go through.
That was gaining them nothing in this little run, however, as the Sirhan was consistently edging away from them with superior understanding of the terrain he was running through and clear knowledge of the various shortcuts you’d have to work in the area to know.
She let him go, paying out the line so to speak, while working primarily to keep the little guy in sight instead of trying to catch him. In her suit she was faster than the Lucians’, so she probably could have made the capture, but turning him back over to them wasn’t a priority at the moment.
Sorilla watched the Sirhan slide under a gap in one of the big machines, coming out the other side with little lost momentum, and smiled tightly at the frustrated snarls from the pursuers as they skidded to a stop and had to redirect and go around. Kriss made a good run of it, accelerating instead of stopping and jumping up to climb over it, but that still lost him a decent chunk of time in the pursuit.
Sorilla herself jumped from machine to machine, gaging her leaps with a combination of practice and the kinetic software in her implanted processor to keep her from screwing up in the slightly different gravity than she had trained in.
In a short time both she and the Sirhan had left the Lucians well behind.
Sorilla could see the little alien shifting his strategy, his pace becoming more metered as he began to ease from the panicked sprint to something more sustainable. She dropped from the high ground then, ensuring that she would be out of sight, and increased her own pace as she used the mapping software in her suit and implants to run predictive analysis on his likely escape routes.
Time to throw the dice.
*****
Birchee looked behind him without slowing, careful to keep his breathing regulated as his musculature began to burn. The Alliance inspectors were no longer in sight, so he could slow enough to ensure he didn’t burn out his endurance, but he knew he could not yet relax. He wasn’t sure if he even should be running from them, but it was clear that they were not going to buy into his deflections, so running was the least bad of his options.
The Sirhan wasn’t sure how the Alliance had tripped onto the Operation, but it had happened. That much was clear from the questions the interrogator had demanded of him, but he did not know what to do with the information.
That would not be his duty to determine, however. He merely had to report it and determine if it were possible for him to be hidden or evacuated… otherwise, well, he was quite determined not to be interrogated so the final option would remain in the worst of scenarios.
After a while longer with no pursuit in sight, Birchee slowed as he determined his location and altered his direction accordingly as he chose a true destination beyond the simple desire to escape.
The Commander will know what I must do.
*****
He’s done running like a little rabbit, Sorilla noted as she stepped out from behind a fabricator and watched the fleeing alien make a deliberate turn that also saw a definite shift in his body language. Good. Now let’s see where you’re going.
*****
Portal Ship
We require options.
Destroy the planet. Do it now.
That is somewhat of an overreaction. She is a single entity.
She is entropy! No single entity has every been the direct cause of destruction for so many portal ships before or since! Destroy the planet!
Should we do so, the Operation will be entirely compromised, we would lose another portal ship, and the alliance would certainly retaliate against us, bringing the hated enemy with them.
Silence followed that statement, as it was the truth, and they all were entirely aware of it. The conclave fired ideas back and forth in a rapid-fire exchange of complex formulations of universal mathematics beyond the ken of even the geniuses of most species, but no immediate response was determined to be both effective and have acceptable outcomes.
This species is infuriatingly annoying.
That statement was greeted with general agreement. The conclave had, of course, encountered far more powerful species, the hated enemy for one, but none quite so irritating.
Of course, the conclave was aware that much of the irritation was in the fact that they dared not move on that irritation. There were far too many unknowns at play, and the hated enemy was waiting for them to make a mistake. All it would take was a single misstep and the end war would begin ahead of their preparations, putting everything at risk.
Combined with the unknown method by which the irritant species had eliminated an entire battle fleet, and the fact that someone… presumably the irritant species… had created and maintained a temporal fold loop for a significant portion of time during the brief clash between the species, and making a move against them was fraught with significant known and unknown risks.
And now entropy is working with the Alliance fools. This is unacceptable. Destroy the planet!
That would be foolish and likely would trigger the end war, which we are not prepared for. That is the entire point of this operation!
The conclave argued ferociously, trying to determine the available options that were left to them, but coming to little agreement on the subject.
All they knew for certain was that the current operation was at risk, and with it a great deal of their future plans.
*****
Orkhana
The little Sirhan stopped running, Sorilla noted as she followed while using her implanted and suit sensors to remain mostly out of sight.
It was a smart move. Walking brusquely now, like a man with an assignment rather than a rabbit fleeing for its life, the Sirhan blended in with the others coming and going through the production floor. He made his way to a door in the far wall, checking surreptitiously around him before slipping through it, leaving Sorilla with a bit of a conundrum as she also approached the door.
Now that he felt he’d evaded his pursuers, he was likely to relax, but if he were heading to report back to whoever was involved in this little infiltration scheme then he and their security protocols would come into play.
Unfortunately, she wasn’t following him in a jungle or any sort of natural terrain, and the unfamiliar industrial location put some major limitations on how well she could cover her own approach.
Without any real options open to her, however, Sorilla waited just a few handfuls of seconds before she cracked the door open and slipped a fiber-cam through to take a peek around. With no sign of the target on the other side, she pushed it the rest of the way and slipped through herself.
Sorilla found herself standing in what had to be an access corridor, a length of space designed to allow people to quickly move to any point on the floor without disrupting work. There were others there, but they were all moving as if they had somewhere to be and barely spent any time so much as glancing in her direction.
Security was not something that appeared to be of large concern to the majority of the workers.
She blinked, changing the settings of the liquid lens that floated over her eyeball, and brought her thermal FLIR mode of the corneal implants online.
There.
Footsteps glowed against the composite flooring, fresh and warm against the cool background. She moved off in pursuit, following the fading heat of her target.
*****
Birchee made his way through the access corridors, heading for the Sirhan lodgings. Few paid him any mind as he passed, and that was as he hoped it would be. If the inspectors had put out an alert, then the word would already have filtered down and made it quite obvious. For whatever reason they had not done so… yet.
The inspectors must be attempting to keep the infiltration quiet as well, He supposed.
It would be a scandal, he knew, if it came out that a major Alliance Authorized production facility had been infiltrated as this one had, but Birchee did not wish to wager the Operation on the inspectors preferring to quietly bury the fact rather than dig him and everyone else up from beneath their cover.
He spotted the first of the sentries as he approached, signaling the Sirhan subtly as he passed, and knew that a quiet alert would quickly spread through those in the know of the Operation.
He was met, of course, before he reached the lodgings.
“You have been tagged, an alert posted,” His supervisor said, coming out to meet him.
“Public?” Birchee asked, wincing.
“Not as of yet. We have time. Precious little, but some. Come.”
Birchee nodded and followed quickly.
They made their way into the lodging area, a bare minimum facility for workers to eat and sleep within, accounting for little else beyond some basic entertainment to keep them from becoming troublesome while they should be resting. Birchee ignored it as he passed, well used to the relative squalor of the facility.
Within the area controlled by those in the know of the Operation, things were cleaner and held to a more professional standard, though a casual observer would have a hard time seeing that for themselves. The mess was still there, but it was far less casual and haphazard and now served to hide what was really there rather than simply to exist for the sake of being a mess.
The Commander of the Sirhan Operation was waiting.
Birchee felt himself flush cold, but nodded respectfully and bowed as he came to a stop in front of the Commander.
“Speak.” The Commander ordered, not bothering with any pretense.
“Commander, I was assigned to monitor the inspectors in the hopes of learning what it was that they were looking for,” Birchee responded.
“You were not supposed to be apprehended.”
“I have no excuses,” Birchee said simply. “I did not believe they had seen me. I was incorrect.”
“What did they ask?”
“The inspector is aware of the unmarked production of weapons, and they have traced them back to this facility,” Birchee said. “That was evident from the questions, but I do not believe that they are fully aware of the Operation.”
“That is a poor consolation even if you are correct,” The Commander grumbled. “And still leaves me with the issue of what to do with you.”
Birchee nodded slowly, fortifying himself.
“Commander, if you deem it will aid the Operation, I will allow them to relocate me… somewhere away from here,” He offered. “I will not be taken.”
“Tempting. However, I will consult with the highest before we make such a plan,” The commander told him. “In the meantime…”
“Commander! Sentries have spotted someone approaching!”
Birchee and the Commander both swiveled. Birchee felt his body chill in fear.
“I was not followed, I swear!”
“It would appear that you are not correct concerning that,” The Commander said. “Optics.”
A screen lit up on the wall, showing the corridors outside the habitat. It took some searching before Birchee pointed.
“There, sector Cora Mun.”
The Commander gestured and that image took the place of the composite one, enlarged to the entire wall. They watched in silence as a figure appeared on the optics, at times quite difficult to spot against the neutral background of the shadowed corridors, but clearly moving in their direction.
“I am not familiar with this species,” The Commander said after a moment. “Find the entry in the Alliance database.”
“Working on it, Commander, I am not finding anything!”
Birchee shook slightly. “An unregistered Alliance species?”
“Possibly. An Operations species, perhaps,” The Commander said. “Kept dark intentionally to prevent people like us from learning about them. It is difficult to say, however, it might be one of the blue ones… though it seems short for one of them, and tall for one of the thugs…”
“Too thin as well,” Birchee offered.
“Indeed. Troublesome. This one clearly followed you and will be upon us shortly,” The Commander said. “We must assume that our location has been compromised. Destroy the equipment, burn any identifiers, we’re leaving.”
“Yes Commander!”
*****
Sorilla paused in her approach, noting that the corridors had emptied sometime in the previous few seconds and there was no sign of anyone in any direction.
That would not be a good sign. Damn, I’m made.
She pressed forward anyway. There was too much to be won to give up quite so easily, but a moment later another bit of information became apparent.
Carbon monoxide, carbon particulates, other traces… someone’s burning hydrocarbon composites. Shit.
There was no good reason for anyone to be burning things in a facility like this, well not good for her at least. Sorilla threw caution away and sprinted forward, spotting a sealed door with wisps of smoke curling through the cracks along the floor, walls, and ceiling. She didn’t pause, hitting the door at a full run and blowing through it into the next area, finding herself in the midst of a fire.
“Shit, shit, shit!”
The fire was consuming everything in the area, including what looked like technical gear and sheets that were akin to flimsy screens. She knocked some of it to the ground and proceeded to stomp out the flames on anything she could, with an eye to anything that looked like it might possibly prove valuable. Unfortunately, there wasn’t nearly enough time to get it all.
This place should have built-in fire suppression. No one would be stupid enough to build something this complex and not put that in, Sorilla cast about, her implants locating likely gas emitters in the ceiling, but they had clearly been disabled as nothing was pouring out.
Giving it up for a bad end, she gathered up what little she’d been able to save and left the inferno behind.
Professional operation, Sorilla thought grimly, examining her score as she walked.
Pieces that were too badly-burned despite her intervention she tossed aside, but a few chunks were partially intact. They were standard Alliance tech for the most part, but the encryption she was reading was most assuredly not.
It wasn’t anything she knew of, in fact, but it was somehow… familiar.
What is this? It’s not even close to Alliance encryption… in fact, the closest thing I’ve seen to this was on…
Sorilla trailed off as she recalled where she’d previous seen the patterns she was now examining.
It’s Ross encoding. We were never able to crack it during the war, but… I don’t think we were going about it the right way.
The Ross, she was certain, didn’t see the universe the same way as most species. They might have eyes and ears, the ability to touch and taste, but those senses were not how they viewed the universe as their primary window to creation.
Gravity. Mass. Those were the bread and butter of the Ross. Sorilla had begun to get an inkling of that on Child of God. She knew that Ross technology was littered with interfaces that you needed to be able to sense and interact with gravity to properly utilize. Something no other species could do naturally, so far as she knew… but it was something that she, herself, could manage.
Not naturally, no, but she could do it nonetheless.
However, that ability to use an interface didn’t translate into being able to read their coding.
It might, however, give her a way forward.
Sorilla copied up the encrypted documents, storing them in her own implant digital storage, then casually tossed them back into the flames.
Grudgingly she tipped her hat to the infiltrators.
They ran a tight operation, Sorilla thought with some irritated respect. I didn’t even see the sentry that spotted me.
She would remember that.
Fool me once, Sorilla thought with some amusement as she began to walk back up the corridor, already putting together the story she would tell Sienele and the others. Next time, friends. Next time.
*****