Orbital Disruption Page 8

  Tony’s paused and ran his hand through his hair. “That’s fucked up,” he repeated. “Are they sure it was targeting Eddie? I mean, Eddie was such a nice guy. Awkward as hell sometimes but he had no enemies.”

  “I don’t know, Tony. From what I read it sounded like it was targeted.”

  “Jesus,” Tony muttered again. “That’s just awful. I’m going to have to tell Dennis and Molly. They knew Eddie, too.”

  “Of course, Tony,” Jessica said. “I’m so sorry to bring you awful news.”

  “I’d rather hear it from you than read it in the paper. Look, are you still coming up to New York tonight?” Tony asked.

  “Yes, I was just heading over to Union Station now. I’ll be on the six o’clock Acela. I should arrive a little before nine. Do you want to grab a late dinner?”

  “Definitely.”

  “Ok, I’ll text you when I get to Penn.”

  “I love you, Jessica,” Tony said.

  “I love you too. See you tonight,” Jessica replied.

  Jessica ended the call.

  Tony stared at his phone for a few moments. Of all the people in the world, Eddie Morton seemed like the least likely person to be killed.

  Tony shook his head and then walked back to the conference room. The two men were still there, one typing on his phone while the other played with a gold cufflink.

  “I’m very sorry gentlemen, but something quite serious has come up and I really need to get back to my office immediately. I apologize but I am afraid we will need to reschedule.”

  “No problem at all,” the older of the two men said with a formality that indicated that he was merely being polite. “We will be in New York for a few more days. Perhaps there will be time to resume our discussion.” The man’s voice and body language suggested that this was an unlikely outcome.

  “I certainly hope so, Herr Schmidt. And it was very nice to meet you as well, Herr Müller.”

  Handshakes completed, the men left.

  Tony gathered his briefcase and jacket. He picked up his phone and held it to his ear.

  “Get me a ride back to the office right now,” he spoke into his phone.

  A moment later his phone replied, “An eZeeCab Express will be arriving for you in two minutes. You should arrive at your office twenty-two minutes later based on current traffic.”

  “Thanks,” Tony muttered into his phone. He stepped into the elevator and pressed the button for the lobby.

  Dennis stared at the screen. It showed an intricate montage of overlapping ellipses, circles and spirals, each drawn in a different color. A table of numeric parameters was on the left side of the display and a table of dates was on on the right.

  Dennis tapped his fingers. He chewed his gum. He clicked the mouse a few times and adjusted a parameter labelled “thrust duty cycle”. An icon spun in a circle to indicate that the computer was performing calculations. A few seconds later the screen refreshed and the visualization was unchanged except for a slight adjustment to the spiral. One of the dates shifted by a few days.

  “Damn,” Dennis muttered.

  Molly looked over.

  “Still trying to find a way to move that rock faster?” she asked.

  “Yeah, trying and failing. Those damn Excelsior drives are just shit. We’re not going to hit the dates Tony’s expecting.”

  “Even if we get a few more birds up there?”

  “Yeah, even if we had another dozen ready to go today, it just wouldn’t help much. They’d still need months to get there even assuming they thrusted 100% of the time on both sides of the flip. By the time they’re on station and pushing we’d be most of the way there.”

  Dennis leaned back in his chair and sighed.

  “Physics is a bitch,” Molly agreed. “But… you can’t mope about it. Let’s tell Tony that we’ll just have to work with later delivery dates.”

  “Yeah,” Dennis agreed. “He’ll be thrilled but there’s no way around it. And to be honest, it's still not our biggest risk.”

  “Excelsior.” Molly stated simply.

  “Uh huh. They still haven’t figured out that we nabbed their asteroid. Their recovery craft are what, three weeks out from where they might see our drive plumes?”

  “Give or take. We don’t know how good their sensors are,” Molly replied. “Of course, if they’re clever they’ll have figured it out already from the rock’s orbit. They ought to be able to tell that it’s not rotating anymore and that it’s under thrust. Kind of hard to miss.”

  “Right,” Dennis said. “And when they figure it out, we have to go public with our statement about this being a salvage operation. I know Ruben. He’s going to go fucking ballistic and throw every lawyer at us he has. And he has a lot of lawyers. And that was even before this business of whatever Eddie was trying to tell us yesterday.”

  Molly nodded.

  “So we really need to have locked in delivery contracts - and that requires getting the rock into Earth orbit or at least pretty close. Even a highly eccentric elliptical. And right now that’s looking pretty far away.”

  “Yeah.”

  The door slammed at the entrance of the office space and Tony strode into the room.

  “Speak of the devil,” Dennis muttered to Molly and turned to Tony.

  “Hey Tony,” Dennis said.

  “Dennis. Molly. We need to talk,” Tony answered brusquely.

  “Yeah, we’ve got some bad news, Tony.” Molly said.

  Tony stopped mid stride. “What? Really?”

  “Yeah, we’re going to miss the target date for first payload orbital capture.” Dennis stated matter-of-factly.

  “Mine’s worse,” Tony stated after a pause. “Eddie Morton is dead.”

  Molly gasped. Mike and Ricky looked up. Tabitha stopped typing.

  “The fuck?” Dennis spluttered. “Are you shitting me?”

  “I’m serious,” Tony said in a softer voice. He sat down in a spare chair next to Molly and Dennis. Mike walked over.

  “They’re saying he was murdered yesterday. Car bomb.”

  “Oh shit.” Dennis said, turning pale.

  Molly looked at Dennis.

  “The phone call.”

  Tony looked at Molly and then Dennis.

  “Phone call?”

  “Yeah.” Dennis took a moment to collect himself. “Eddie called me yesterday. Weirdest thing. He said he had something important to say but then the call got cut off.”

  “Eddie called you?” Tony asked. “When, exactly?”

  “Um…” Dennis took his phone from his pocket and flipped through his call logs. “Just after seven.”

  “Jesus.” Mike said. He had his phone out as well. “I just googled the story and according to Reuters the car bomb went off just after four pm, local time.”

  “That would be seven here,” he added.

  The room was silent for a few moments.

  “You said Eddie wanted to tell you something, Dennis. What was it?” Tony asked.

  “I don’t know, actually. He was being all secret agent and sent us a dump of Excelsior’s source code by drone courier and then…”

  “He what?!” Tony exclaimed, interrupting Dennis.

  “Yeah, he sent us their source code and then told me he would call again to tell me why. He said it was big. But then the call dropped.”

  “Jesus,” Tony muttered. “This is insane. What would Eddie want to tell us that was so important that someone would kill him for it?”

  “I have no idea,” Dennis replied.

  Tabitha spoke up. “I think I do.”

  The room grew quiet.

  “Care to enlighten us, Tab?” Dennis asked.

  “Come over here and I’ll show you,” she replied.

  Tony, Dennis, Molly, Mike and Ricky crowded around Tabitha. She had moved the burner PC to her desk. Its monitor and keyboard were placed alongside Tabitha’s regular workstation. Dennis leaned in over her shoulder to look at both screens. They were filled with c
omputer code.

  “What are we looking at here, Tabitha,” Tony asked. “Is this Excelsior’s code?”

  “Yes, on the right is Excelsior’s code. And yes, I know we’re not supposed to have this. I’ve kept it fully isolated since it arrived, of course.”

  “Of course,” Tony repeated. “But what was Eddie trying to tell us?”

  “Checksums,” Tabitha stated.

  “Check what?” Tony asked.

  “Checksums,” Tabitha repeated. “Excelsior’s checksums are much too long.”

  “Oh shit,” Dennis muttered. “Seriously?”

  Tony looked at Molly. Molly shrugged.

  “Um, what’s a checksum and why does the size matter?” Tony asked.

  “When you send a message over an unreliable medium,” Tabitha explained, “you include some extra information at the end so that you can tell if any part of the message got messed up and maybe correct it.”

  “For example, you might sum up the previous data. The recipient could compute their own sum and compare it to the one at the end of the message. If they didn’t match, they’d know something got garbled. Of course we use more complex functions than just summation in modern systems but the name stuck around.”

  “Ok, I get it,” Tony replied, “but why is it important that Excelsior’s checksums are large?”

  “It’s normal for long-distance communications like we have between the Earth and spacecraft in the asteroid belt to have communications challenges. So large checksums are not a big surprise,” Tabitha explained. She gestured at her own workstation and continued, “But this morning I reverse engineered some of their transmissions that we intercepted a while back. And I noticed that the checksums were huge. Hundreds of kilobytes in many cases. Sometimes larger. That’s just crazy.”

  “It’s a second channel, isn’t it.” Dennis said softly.

  “Yes, I think so,” Tabitha agreed. “I also found that the checksum handling is offloaded. It’s handled on a separate daughterboard which means it’s isolated from the rest of the system. Most of the developers working on communications wouldn’t have even been aware that there was a second channel.”

  “So what were they using it for?” Molly asked. What would be so secret that they’d want to be able to hide it from most of their own team?”

  “I don’t know yet,” Tabitha admitted. “The checksum payload is encrypted and the key is hardwired into the communications hardware of their spacecraft so even though I know the protocol and we’ve intercepted a lot of their messages, I can’t tell what they say.”

  Tabitha paused for a moment and then continued. “But I can see how the hidden message is getting logged to a file on the receiving spacecraft and I think that file is decrypted. We jacked in to one of their ships during the initial capture so in principle we could do it again - and grab that file directly. But it’ll take some time to write the code and get it out to the rock. And then we’d need to shut off the drives for a little while so that we could maneuver the hijack ship into place. Maybe two or three days?”

  Tabitha looked up and Dennis and then at Tony.

  “Yeah, better get started,” Dennis said. “Excelsior’s going to be getting close soon and we don’t want them to see us attached to their ship.”

  “Jesus,” Tony muttered again. “This is some crazy shit, you guys. Whatever is in that file might be what they killed Eddie for.”

  “Do you think they know we have a copy?” Mike asked.

  “They might,” Dennis replied. “Eddie seemed like he was being careful to avoid detection but…”

  “Yeah.” Mike answered. “And he’s dead now.”

  Ricky stepped back and took a deep breath.

  “This pirate shit just got real.”

  Fourteen

  Ruben stepped into the car and slammed the door closed.

  “Good evening Mr. St. James!” the car said cheerily.

  “Oh, fuck off,” Ruben replied in frustration.

  The car’s feelings weren’t hurt but it had a rudimentary understanding of human emotions and decided to stay silent. As soon as Ruben clicked his seatbelt, the car gently pulled away from the curb.

  “Those bastards,” Ruben muttered to himself. Dennis Li had stolen his asteroid. In the meeting that had just concluded, Diane had insisted that their ships were still too far away for high-resolution imaging and that the data was inconclusive but Ruben was sure of it. Asteroids didn’t stop spinning on their own. And Ruben suspected - no, Ruben knew - that Dennis had done this and that Eddie Morton had been in on it somehow. Ruben had been shocked when he heard how Eddie had died yesterday but this latest news only confirmed that the traitor deserved it.

  The car exited the corporate office park and turned onto Embarcadero Road. It considered telling its passenger that the trip to Santa Cruz would take about fifty-five minutes but decided that he was probably not interested. He’d taken this trip many times before and seemed to be in a foul mood. The car kept quiet as it approached the US 101 entrance ramp.

  Ruben skimmed his emails and fired off a few harsh replies but he just couldn’t focus. He knew he was pushing himself too hard and needed to decompress. He put his phone down on the seat next to him and looked out the windows. Bland office parks with garish corporate logos drifted past. Relaxation is what he needed and he needed to get the hell out of Silicon Valley to clear his head. That was why he was in a car heading to Santa Cruz Harbor where his sixty-foot motor yacht Intrepid was docked. Someday he’d make the trip by chartered helicopter. Hell, he’d have a much bigger yacht - far larger than the piers at Santa Cruz could hold. If those bastards at Jovian didn’t screw things up.

  Ruben realized his blood pressure was building. He really needed to unwind. He picked up his phone again and opened a secure chat app. When prompted he typed a password and then selected a contact labelled “Rose” from the list.

  He typed out a brief message:

  me: in the mood for carry-out. what’s on menu tonight?

  A few moments later, he received a reply.

  rose: Good afternoon. We have European, American and Asian dishes. Are you hungry for anything in particular?

  me: surprise me

  rose: I know just the thing. Your usual location?

  me: yes

  rose: Excellent. Bon appetit!

  Ruben cleared the app’s chat history and slipped his phone into the pocket of his jacket. It wasn’t hard to hire an escort in Silicon Valley as long as you had a little money. But ensuring it was discreet took extra effort these days, what with all the useless angst about human trafficking and such. Rose (undoubtedly not her real name) understood the importance of secrecy. She took great care in her communications and only worked with clients who had been personally referred. One of the venture capitalists who had invested in Excelsior had made that introduction. Ruben did not take advantage of Rose’s services often but it had been weeks since he’d last gotten laid and today he was due.

  As the car passed through Los Gatos, the endless suburban sprawl that filled most of the valley gave way to forest. The highway began to gently bend back and forth as it entered the Santa Cruz Mountains. Ruben tried to relax but his thoughts kept coming back to Dennis Li. It didn’t seem possible but somehow Dennis and his barely-functioning band of misfits had done the impossible and captured Ruben’s asteroid. Ruben had done all the hard work and now Jovian was trying to steal it out from under his nose. He’d already instructed his chief counsel to file a lawsuit and seek an immediate injunction but Ruben knew that enforcing the law would be difficult millions of miles from Earth. That meant that the focus of the legal operation would have to be bankrupting Jovian and that would take time. Jovian’s gambit would be a distraction, no doubt, but it ultimately would have no impact on Ruben’s greater vision. He had to keep up appearances for the time being. Ruben clenched his fists and then forced himself to relax again.

  “Car, play some music,” Ruben ordered.

  “Yes,
sir,” the car responded.

  The car sent a short query to a central server. There, Ruben’s profile was linked to a streaming music service. A quick analysis of his listening history indicated that he liked both classical and electronic dance music. Two hundred milliseconds and a few hundred thousand matrix multiplications later the central server sent back a list of suggested songs organized into two potential playlists with some metadata to describe the differences between the playlists. The car examined the metadata and formulated the question.

  “Classical or dance?” it asked, less than a second after its previous response.

  “Classical,” Ruben replied. “And not too loud. I’m trying to relax.”

  “Of course, sir.”

  The soft tones of Vivaldi’s Violin Concerto in G Minor began to play and Ruben felt his muscles relax. He leaned back in the seat and watched the trees go by. He thought back to his last visit to the Intrepid and the blonde he’d enjoyed. What was her name? Mindy? Cindy? Oh well, it hardly mattered. He wondered who it would be tonight.

  “We have arrived, sir.”

  Ruben woke with a start. He hadn’t realized he’d dozed off but he felt much better. Refreshed. Seeing the familiar parking lot of the Santa Cruz Yacht Club improved his mood, too. Something about the smell of the sea always put him at ease. He could remember when most of the boats that docked here were fishing boats, before the overhaul that made the yacht club truly worthy of the name. Now the berths were filled with sleek hulled power yachts and tall masted sailboats. No more fishing boats. Things were as they should be.

  “Good evening, sir,” the car said as Ruben opened the door. “Thank you for riding with...”

  Ruben slammed the door shut and walked toward the guardhouse at the entrance of the piers. The car quietly rolled out of the parking lot and on to its next customer. Ruben had already loosened his tie, now he removed it completely and stuffed it carelessly into the front pocket of his slacks.

  “Good evening, sir.”

  Ruben nodded at the security guard sitting in the little hut at the side of the entrance to the marina.