CHAPTER TWO
In which my sister and I discover something we shouldn’t have.
“Where’s my brother, and what did you do with him?” Tinkie demanded, striding through the French doors from the terrace and dropping her kit bag. Behind her the muted hum of the rovers trimming the lawn mingled with the buzzing of the flitterbugs swarming around the rose bushes. The scent of the flowers, overlaid with the sinus-tickling odor of new-mown grass, drifted behind her into the conservatory, where I’d settled shortly after breakfast. On the edge of my datasphere the limited AIs of the gardening drones were flickering, barely noticed, just as the whining of their gravitics merged seamlessly into the soundscape of a sunny Southdown afternoon. Engrossed in my studies, I’d completely forgotten my sister was due to visit the family estate on embarkation leave. “Simon never looks that serious.”
“Hi, Tinkie.” I extricated myself from the dataflow, my personal ‘sphere shrinking to the neuroware I normally left running in the background. None of that merited my immediate attention, although there were a number of messages I ought to reply to, mainly from former classmates commiserating with me over my rapid rustication; it seemed I was missed, or at least the service I used to provide was. “Forgot you were coming.” If I’d surprised my family with the diligence I was displaying, I was no less surprised by it myself: but now that I’d committed to applying for the Academy, I was determined to make the grade. All right, if I succeeded I’d still have people like Mother telling me what to do all the time, but that would be by my choice, not hers, and once I passed I’d be taking at least some decisions for myself. For the first time in my life I could see a realistic prospect of a measure of independence within reach, and I meant to grab it with both hands.
“Now that sounds more like my brother.” Her smile broadened, and I hauled myself off the battered old chaise my father doggedly refused to throw out into the path of a rib-crushing hug.
“Good to see you too,” I said, returning the embrace before I passed out from oxygen deprivation. My sister had inherited Dad’s build, short and stocky, while I took after Mother, in that regard at least, which left my chin resting on the crown of her head. We broke apart, and I felt the air rushing back into my lungs. “Where are you off to?”
“Tintagel,” Tinkie said. “The briefings are all strictly need-to-know, and junior lieutenants aren’t supposed to. But a reliable source told me—”
A phrase I’d heard many times before. “Some clerk in the battalion office you lured into bed—”
“Believe me, he wasn’t complaining.” Tinkie looked distinctly smug for a moment. “Then again, neither was I. Kind of wish I could remember his name.”
“You’d better hope he doesn’t remember yours,” I said, mindful of the regulations I’d been wading through in preparation for the Academy entrance exam. “Fraternization between officers and other ranks—”
My sister grinned again. “We did a lot more than fraternize. Twice. At least. To be honest it all went a bit hazy after that, but the hangover was definitely worth it.” I clearly hadn’t kept my doubts off my face, because she reached up to ruffle my hair, something I’d always detested, and which she knew would be a reliable distraction. “Besides, you don’t think I was stupid enough to give him my real name, do you?”
“Of course not,” I said, a little coldly, as I pulled away. Like rather too many women I’d met, Tinkie’s attitude to my own gender could best be summed up as of course I like men, I shag them, don’t I? without worrying too much about how the men concerned might feel about that. But she was still my sister, so I swallowed my disapproval as best I could, and tried to return the conversation to safer ground. “And this fraternizee of yours said—”
“We’re off to rattle sabers as close to Rockhall as we can get without the Leaguers being able to claim we’re fortifying the place ahead of a negotiated settlement.”
“I see,” I said, hooking the local star charts into my ‘sphere from the manor’s datanode. The Rimward Commonwealth and the League of Democracies had been squabbling over the sovereignty of the Rockhall system ever since the first Commonwealth colonists turned up there a couple of decades before I was born; which, by now, meant that the place was thoroughly infested with native-born Rockhallers who felt like Commonwealth citizens to their bones, and weren’t about to listen to any Leaguers whining “we saw it first.” If they wanted the place so badly, they should have left a garrison behind when their own colonization effort collapsed. Most of the time the League just accepted the fait accompli, but every now and then they’d get arsey about it, usually just before or after an election; this time round the hardliners had won a majority in both houses of government, so things were unusually tense on both sides. “Which puts the Leaguers in Caprona, if they’re playing the same game.”
Tactically, that was a no-brainer—you don’t grow up in a family like ours without being able to read a rift map, and Caprona was the nearest League system with enough logistical support to mount an invasion from. Like Tintagel, there were only two rifts between it and Rockhall to transit, so if the diplomats on either side fumbled their sessions of verbal rock, paper, scissors it would just come down to which fleet was the quickest off the mark.
Tinkie meshed into my ‘sphere, and I felt the tickle of fresh neuroware melding with my own. “You’re missing the best bit,” she said, directing our attention to one of the two systems connected by a rift directly to Rockhall. I called up the stats for it: Sodallagain, uninhabited, a few rocks devoid of interest orbiting an equally anodyne red dwarf. Two other rifts connected to it; one linking directly to Tintagel, and the other the League outpost at Caprona. “This’ll be the flashpoint.”
“I can believe it,” I said. Unless one of the two fleets was hellishly fast off the mark, and managed to slip through the choke point before the other could mobilize, they’d meet head-on in the Sodallagain system, and things would get ugly as soon as they closed to within firing range. “Could be an uncomfortable ride for you, if you’re not first out of the blocks.” We’d both heard enough dinner table talk about naval engagements to have few illusions about that. Grandma never tired of reminding us that she first took command of a ship as a midshipwoman (“First cruise, mind, still wet behind the ears”) after all the senior officers had been incapacitated by a rift bounce.
“We will be,” Tinkie said, with all the confidence I’d come to expect since her enlistment. Royal Marines pride themselves on being able to take the fight to the enemy wherever they are: her cap badge read Per Inane Per Terram, and I truly think she barely saw the difference, apart from needing less life support in the latter case. When you came right down to it, though, despite the first part of their motto, Marines in a space battle were just so much perishable cargo unless they were needed for a boarding action.
“What’s that?” I asked, indicating a data packet embedded in the Sodallagain stats. It bristled with the same kind of encryption I’d felt when I poked Mother’s message traffic back on the orbital, and I was faintly surprised she’d been careless enough to leave something so clearly important lying around in an accessible node. It wasn’t as though Dad or I could read it, of course, but it still wasn’t like her; then I realized the full significance of the sudden increase in dataflow I’d noticed between the ship and her Captain before Mother’s abrupt departure, which, at the time, I’d put down to her feeling irritated at not being able to browbeat me into acquiescence as usual. The Queen Kylie’s Revenge must have received new orders connected to the deployment, and in the hurry of preparation for that she’d simply forgotten to delete the packet from the node at home. Not that any League spies were likely to find it there, but it was a definite breach of protocol, and I recorded its presence with a sense of gleeful mischief. The next time Mother started in on me, I’d have some potentially career-stalling ammunition to defend myself with.
“Shall we take a look?” Tinkie asked, no doubt with the same idea in mind; though Mother was slowly coming round to the idea of having an air-diver for a daughter she’d made her disappointment all too evident to begin with, and there was still a fair amount of lingering resentment between the two. Nothing like I’d had to put up with over the years, of course, but still enough for Tinkie to relish putting one over on Mother if she got the chance.
“I’m not so sure—” I began, reflecting that it was one thing to know the file was there, and quite another to access the information it contained. Especially as the prosecutor would undoubtedly cite my little college enterprise as evidence that I was a hopeless recidivist, undeserving of the benefit of any doubt, should our nosing around ever come to light.
“Don’t be such a willy,” Tinkie said, poking at it with a military grade decryption key. The packet’s defenses slapped it away, and my sister frowned. “Whatever that is, it’s got to be Eyes Only stuff.”
“All the more reason to leave it alone,” I said, already knowing I wouldn’t. I’ve never been able to resist a challenge, at least where sneaking in somewhere I’m not supposed to be is concerned, and the harder it was to pull off, the more determined I became. Meshing with the university ‘pool had started out as nothing more than a puzzle to solve; it was only once I was in there that the idea had come to me to exploit the access I’d gained for money and social connection.
“Course it is,” Tinkie agreed, knowing full well I’d be on this like a terrier with a bone from now on. I pulled up the sneakware I’d put together at college and started fiddling with its datanomes, patching in bits I remembered from the sting of Mother’s encryption, molding and inverting them to reverse engineer a key. Tinkie’s decrypt was still floating in the shared datasphere, and I pinched off a few bits, adding them to the chain I was constructing. “Hey! You’re not supposed to be able to do that!”
“Your point being?” I asked, to deflect any questions about how I’d managed to get inside a piece of ‘ware she’d fondly imagined was impossible to penetrate, let alone start messing about with.
The truth was, I wasn’t all that sure myself. I’d started modifying neuroware about the time I started kindergarten, and I’d just got better and better at it as time went on. It was like Tinkie’s perfect pitch—she just tuned her violin with minute twists of the pegs, chatting away the whole time, barely even looking at the instrument, and when she stroked the bow across the strings they all resonated in harmony. She was around seven the only time I ever asked her about it, and I could still remember the almost comical expression of confusion on her face as she asked “Can’t everybody?”
“Do you think it’ll work?” she asked instead.
I shrugged. “Haven’t a clue,” I lied, in case my first attempt required some pre-emptive face-saving. In any event, I didn’t get fully inside the packet, but managed to rip enough of it open to be able to exploit the breach, and began copying the contents into my personal ‘sphere. Once done, I sealed the whole thing up again tighter than a Guilder’s purse, making very sure I’d left no traces of my intrusion. Duty, I knew, would always come first with Mother, and if she had the slightest suspicion I’d been breaking into confidential files again she’d report me in a heartbeat.
“Just movement orders,” Tinkie said, scanning the contents of the packet with a faint air of disappointment. “For Tintagel.”
“Not that much of a surprise,” I agreed. The task force assembling there would need warships to escort the troop carriers, and the Queen Kylie’s Revenge was in the right place at the right time to be roped in. I was about to discard the file I’d broken into so painstakingly, when something else struck me. The orders were for Tintagel all right, but they didn’t end there. On arrival, Mother was supposed to report in person to the Commodore in charge of the assembling fleet for a confidential briefing, before “Proceeding onwards.” And there was only one logical place to proceed to . . .
“What?” My sister knew me well enough to read the surprise on my face before I had a chance to hide it.
For a moment I debated trying to hold back some of what I’d deduced, then thought better of it—she was persistent enough to get round me eventually, and, despite being grownups now (physically at least), I couldn’t entirely discount the possibility of wedgies being involved.
“I’m reaching here,” I admitted, “but I think she’s being sent to Sodallagain.” It wouldn’t be the first time an escort vessel had been deployed as a tripwire at a choke point in the rift network, but if the League found out it would wreak havoc with the negotiations; the uninhabited system was supposed to be neutral territory, and both powers had pledged to keep their forces within their borders while the diplomats tried to thrash things out. All right, so far as we were concerned Rockhall was within the borders of the Commonwealth, which meant Sodallagain was too, but the League didn’t see it like that, and if they discovered a Commonwealth warship in the system the shooting would start as sure as a woman’s lying when she says “Of course I’ll still respect you in the morning.” More to the point, the Revenge’s chances of surviving longer than the handful of minutes required to transmit a warning would be minimal, and however much I failed to see eye to eye with Mother, I wasn’t quite ready to see her committed to the void just yet.
“We never saw this,” Tinkie said, joining the dots almost as rapidly as I had once I’d pointed out the first one. “Right?”
“Right,” I agreed, wishing I could delete knowledge from my brain as easily as a datafile. If anyone ever had the faintest suspicion we’d stumbled across something so sensitive, Tinkie would spend the rest of her career training civilian auxiliaries to pass muster at the weekends, and I’d . . . My scalp prickled. I didn’t really know what would happen to me, but I was damn sure I didn’t want to find out.