Like Stars in the Night
Posted on Mon May 9th, 2022 @ 11:09am by Lieutenant Colonel Shaun Bradley
1,307 words; about a 7 minute read
Mission:
Roll With It
Location: Xaeprean Orbit
Timeline: The Night Following "Airing Out Suspicions"
The sun had set, and the spaceport was quiet as the Marine weapons techs slid their trolley across the deck towards the awaiting fighters. According to the Haumea control, it was just going to be a routine flight up to the space, with night flying and aerial navigation on the radar. The Colonel had stood in the civilian room and nonchalantly passed a few jokes around, leading to a gaggle of late-night laughter. A few old souls reminisced about their own adventures in the past and told stories of flying shuttles on lonely nights. Time had passed, the sun had set, and the Colonel had left the men to go "supervise training." That had been nearly half an hour ago, and in a quiet room, hidden away from everyone else, Bradley showcased the plan and gave people the chance to voice their concerns. None were placed, and so now, in their flight suits, the Marines skulked over to their fighters.
The lights were off, no one had called for them to be on, and civilian traffic was slim at this time of day, so it was unlikely they would be activated. Two weapon techs connected beacons to the probe bodies, in the moonlight they made sure circuits were connected, and lines were correct. Gently, these probes were attached to the underwing hardpoints of the two craft, and system checks were run by PaDD light. When it all came back clear, a series of thumbs-ups were exchanged and the pilots vaulted into their seats, an engineer sliding into the space behind them. It was rare to fly the Valkyries with two people, aside from training and tactical bombing runs, but this would be needed to ensure everything was done right and quickly.
The operation was, in itself, simple. There were four core navigational beacons around Haumea, each with its own smaller connected grid that passed navigational data about the surrounding space and the planet itself. The smaller beacons weren't of any real concern, they were slaved to the primaries, acting as a series of antennas. The fighters would head for two each and connect the probes to each of these. Once activated the equipment would scrub any nav computer that pinged the NavBeacons. In total the Xaeprean network would go down for five seconds, but unless anyone pinged the network, no one would notice.
But that was the genius of one of the techs, who'd found a way to tie the two fighters to the network and let them act basically as a cache for a moment, so if anyone pinged the network, the fighter would reply with the static image from before. If the data looked off, by the time the pinging ship realized and repinged, the network would most certainly be active again. Clean and easy.
It was a quiet flight into the stars and at the helm of one of the fighters, Shaun easily thumbed his way through controls, being careful to keep the flights slow and quiet from the perspective of those on the ground. The team burned their way to the edge of the atmosphere, well above the view of the average questioning eyes, before firewalling their throttles and heading for their destination. As he approached his first target, he slowed down, coming in on reaction thrusters only. It was a slow drift, carefully positioning the fighter so the nose ran along the same axis as the satellite itself, only a handful of meters between the pair. Inside the cockpit, both people double and triple-checked their suits, making sure they were pressure sealed. Finally, Shaun keyed in the sequence, and the cockpit depressurized, allowing the screen itself to slide away and the engineer in the back to push himself free. From the pilot's seat, the Colonel watched the oxygen reading from his partner, who had enough for nearly eight hours in the void, but not something he wanted to see him have to deal with.
On another of his MFDs, he watched as the computer connected to the beacon and captured a single point to hold that data and retransmit if anyone asked for it. Outside the fighter, the engineer disconnected one of the probes, drifted it over to the beacon, and began setting to work to connect the two. It was a slow process, careful as it needed to be. If they didn't want to cover their tracks it would be as easy as slapping it on and calling it good, but they also needed to create a sensor image that said it didn't have the probe hanging off the side of it as well. It was the silence of it all that could get to a person - Shaun sat in the void without the usual chirps and chimes of the fighter, and without the usual hum of various systems working around him. All he had was the noises inside his helmet, of which there was just the chirp every two minutes to let you know you were using oxygen. This was a safety feature, just annoying enough that if you saw the pilot in the helmet falling asleep, you knew something was wrong.
Once his partner had slid back into the cockpit, Shaun thumbed the controls, and the cockpit repressurized and filled with atmosphere again. Both pulled their facemasks off, breathing the air inside as they worked. From inside the fighter, the engineer keyed in a few more commands, and both watched as the probe lit up, waiting for the final command. At the second beacon, it was the same thing, roughly five minutes of work, and then both waited. A few minutes later the call came from the other fighter that they had completed their work, and Shaun nodded to his co-occupant. There was a brief pause, and Shaun could see in real-time the network go down, a short reload time, and then it was back together. The pair of fighters met back up at the same point and landed together in sequence. As far as anyone seemed concerned, their training had been a quick little training mission, and they were back on the ground.
Sitting back at the makeshift Marine command centre, Shaun stood at the end of the holotable, and looked as the entire navigational network came online. From there, the pilot watched as the systems began feeding data back to them about not just the planetary network, but the solar system's navigational logs as well - an unintended but desirable effect as it would give them a wider net to catch things with. There was a pause from the Marine, as he looked at his possible shared connections, looking over at the Captain's system, as well as the inhouse Intelligence team that the Colony had been provided with. But then there was the external connection, the Marine "hardline" to Falkirk, he paused. A part of his brain wanted to keep this as off the books as he could, between Luka and himself. Another part wanted to feed the data back to MacTaryn as well - a fly on the wall of Fleet operations was too valuable a bargaining tool to keep closed from the other man.
Finally, he keyed in the connection directly to the Captain and decided it was probably best if he find out where the data should go from there. It was only after, that he noticed something on the comms traffic, something else. It looked like there was another listening post somewhere, pulling and sending data, but this time directly from the network itself. Bradley looked at the connection, how it looked like a spider setting a web, and he had to stop and wonder who could possibly have this network set up. This was something he'd have to stop and think about and see if he could ever narrow down...
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