Chapter 9. Data Old and New
22 Sep 2020Black Llama
September 4, 3306Phoenix Base, Meene system
"Not interested. Sorry." Ram Tah turned his back on me and returned to work on his console.
"Oh come on Ram" I pleaded. "You haven't even looked at it." He turned his chair around. "Well, why should I?" he asked, unamused. "It's probably some old Imperial Navy code. The kind of crap that any Alliance kid could use to hide messages from their teachers."
I held out the thumbdrive. "Well, you should be able to crack it in 10 seconds then. I pay a very nice service fee." Mumbling something under his breath, he snatched the drive out of my hand, inserted it into the console and started running some code.
"Old INRA logs. Trash. We all know this story already." He reached to yank out the drive, then something on the screen caught his attention. His hand froze in mid air.
"What? What is-" I asked, leaning forward.
"Quiet!" he brusquely cut me off, watching the scrolling lines in the screen. After a long pause, eyes still on the screen, he said "It's true I've seen patterns like these before. But this isn't some old INRA code. Well, there is a carrier signal which seems to be a variation of an INRA blockchain, one that is completely new to me. Whoever created it was a very skilled cryptographer. My routines can only pick up some random chunks here and there, and that only partially." He pointed at the screen. "But notice these blocks here and there? Those patterns I know too well."
I sighed. "Ram, it's all gibberish to me."
He turned around, a smile forming on his lips. "Those, my friend, are Guardian patterns."
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Later that day, as I watched a tech working on the heatsink launcher on the Rogue Star, Ram Tah walked up to me. "I have one of my clusters working on your little puzzle" he said. "I'm fairly certain that a Human coder, a very good one, created the sequence and meshed some Guardian data into it. At the rate it's going, it will take days until it's cracked. That is, if my initial guess is correct and I don't need to iterate too much." He paused for a moment. "I'm very puzzled. This could mean that INRA had knowledge of the Guardians more than fifty years ago. Shocking."
I stood in silence, thinking to myself. Did Maggie know what she was looking for? Was this just a chance find? Why were we attacked by Imperials, and why did she run away from us afterwards? Tah continued: "Well, the whole process is using up a lot of my valuable computing time, and I was wondering how you were going to pay for it."
"Name your price, Ram, I already told you I can afford it."
"Yes, you could pay, but I have a better idea" he replied. He pointed across the hangar bay to its other end, where a couple of pilots were talking to a group of techs. One of them pointed once towards the Star. "Those two came in a Clipper about an hour ago. So far, it's been plenty of questions and very little business. I would advise you to keep some distance from the Empire, or better yet, from the Bubble, for a few days. And I have something to keep you entertained while you do that."
"Go on", I said, keeping my eye on those two pilots.
"You know that I used to ask for help with decrypting data from Guardian Ruins. I've always wondered why my decryption keys fail after a few weeks. My hypothesis is that there is a functional remainder of AI in the obelisk network, that reacts to the decryption routine and adapts to it. If you could fetch me the latest version of the Guardian data blocks, I could track the evolution of the code blocks and perhaps figure out the mechanism behind that." He paused for a moment. "Heck, I may even end up paying you for the trouble."
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About an hour later my mobile chimed. Looking down at it I read "Your Asp Explorer has arrived at Felice Dock and is ready for collection." "Well?" Skinner asked.
"La Dolce Vista has just arrived in system. We split here. I'll hitch a ride out to the starport in one of Ram's cargo shuttles, then I'm off towards the Synuefe sector. I've collected enough info from the Canonn folks and I shouldn't have trouble finding Guardian stuff. But it will take me a week, at least."
"And me?" Skinner whispered, her head on a swivel. We hadn't seen the two suspicious pilots for a while, but their Clipper was still docked nearby. They could be using directional microphones. We were between a bunch of supply crates, hoping the background noise of machinery was enough to confuse any listening devices, at least for a while.
"Leave the Rogue Star here for a while. Ram has booked you passage back to Zandu under an alias. Once you are there, grab any of the ships -not the Dancer, that one's hot- and see if you can find any of your old contacts in the Fed intelligence." I made a few taps on my mobile. "I've just sent you a copy of the last logs of the Star. See if they can parse them to find data on the ships that ambushed us on Hermitage. I'll send you a message when I return to Felice Dock." Then, the pad next to us started lighting up, and we heard its clamps releasing. I stood up, jumped into it, and started going up the access ramp of the Adder that was docked there.
"What if you don't return?"
Looking over my shoulder, I replied "Oh, I will."
"Okaaaay!" she shouted as the hatch was closing. "But what was in that note?!"
"Nothing that you need to know" I shouted back. The pilot secured the latch and pointed to the empty copilot's seat, without saying a word. I sat down on it, muttering to myself. "Nothing that you need to know."