3 Erbe 1117: Girar – Tlianke/Hinterworlds (1205 B645766-9 M Ag O:1104 A 322 Na M4V M5D)
Saahna never came in last night. That bothered me more than it should have. It wasn’t a new thing; in fact, I was used to it. But… I had thought that we were past that. Again. I sighed to myself. Why had I thought things had changed?
No, I had to stop thinking that way. I either trusted Saahna, or I didn’t. And if I didn’t, well… did we have anything at all?
I debated calling a crew meeting to let them know what had happened yesterday but decided to wait. Let them have their week of downtime.
I did send Saahna a ping making sure that she was OK, and she gave a quick response that she was. I didn’t bother her beyond that. Instead, I pulled up our status.
Most of the cargo had been sold, including our “special cargo.” It had been picked up overnight. We had a few lots left, but I decided to let things stay the way they were for a while.
There also weren’t any passenger offers yet. I was a bit surprised at that; no matter what the situation on a planet was like, you always had someone wanting to be somewhere else. Still, it had only been one day. I would wait a bit before worrying about that.
Instead, I found myself with free time. I needed to get out of my room but wasn’t entirely comfortable going back to Salome’s again either. I just grabbed my daypack and started wandering.
I found myself in a place called Inversion. It was dark inside, and there was a band on-stage performing something that I could only call “percussive wailing,” but the sonic dampeners were in place around the bar. I found an empty stretch and dropped onto a seat, pulling out my comp and remote.
There was a person behind the bar, but it was a waitbot that floated over and took my order. I got my usual tama leaves and beer, another of the local Glitterbelts. Once it left, I pulled up the latest on my comp.
No one on the crew had contacted me, which I supposed was good, though I really wished Saahna had told me she had made other plans. The news from the Imperium was the usual rehash of we already knew. I almost hoped that something big would happen just so we would get some more up-to-date news.
I also realized that, as a client state, Girar probably had whatever was on the local newsnet filtered by Tlianke. But I still suspected that there wasn’t much to talk about; censorship or not.
Instead, I went through the local market boards, trying to line up cargoes for the Jump to Gashuumi. There were the usual lots of ores and refined materials that one usually found on non-agricultural/non-industrial planets, but also a bunch of higher-tech cargoes that someone had brought in hoping to score a deal on without realizing that they really couldn’t make much use of stuff that they couldn’t maintain for themselves. It was sometimes cheaper to buy high-tech goods on low-tech planets for that reason; the seller didn’t want to take up cargo space with something the locals couldn’t use and was happy to have someone take it away from them. I put in a few bids.
That took a while, but it was still only a little past noon when I finished. Yeah, I was drinking early. Starports are 24, or whatever, hour operations.
I looked for something to do; I really didn’t want to go back to my room and also didn’t want just to start wandering around randomly. I flipped through my comp for a while, then looked in my daypack. There, I saw the journal from that Solomani courier.
I pulled it out and flipped through it. I was pretty sure it was in a code of some kind; I had at least seen almost all of the languages used in the Imperium and surrounding space, but this was unfamiliar. Plus, I was sure a Solomani would never deliberately use any language beyond Galanglic unless they were forced to. Some of the pages were obviously tables of… something, so I figured I should be able to figure those out at least. I opened the journal and my comp and started working.
After a few hours, it was evident that I knew nothing about cryptography. I had found several repeating patterns in the tables that I knew must mean… something. That was as far as I had gotten.
I looked around. The place was no more crowded than it had been when I had arrived; not that unusual in a starport, actually. The bartender was still in the seat I had first seen him, still looking at his comp, but the waitbot had made sure my glass remained filled. I ordered a sandwich and pulled out my comm. Reluctantly, I keyed in Dr. Korvusar’s code.
She answered surprisingly quickly. “Captain Kodai! It is so rare to hear from you! Have you not found where I am staying and therefore are not able to interrupt my reading?”
I sighed. “I was actually hoping you could join me for lunch.”
“Lunch? A bit late for that, is it not?”
“Probably. And I need your expertise.”
“Are you injured?”
“No. I have something that I’m forced to admit that I can’t figure out on my own. And I think you may have more experience with than I do.”
“Oh?”
“Yeah, but that’s all I want to say over open comms.”
There was a pause.
“Can you meet me at the bazaar?”
Most starports have “bazaars.” They are places where local merchants, artists, dealers, and vendors gather; businesses not big enough to be considered ‘Brokers’ but still hoping to sell their goods to passing ships. Ship crews usually avoided them, but a lot of passengers stopped there. I paid my tab and left.
—-
By the time I got to the bazaar, Dr. Korvusar was already there, calmly looking at her comp. She snapped it shut as I approached.
“Captain, it is so rare that you seek me out. What is it that you feel requires my attention?”
“Something that I think is important but that I can’t figure out. I’ll… explain when we’re not standing in the middle of everything.”
She nodded. “How… quiet do you want to keep this.”
“I’ll let us on the ship know, but I’d prefer to not let it beyond that.”
“And you’re still willing to talk to me?”
“Hey, you were the one saying that you trusted my decisions.”
She nodded. “Well then, I know of a place.” She immediately started walking. I had to hurry to catch up.
We wound up several levels down but close to the central lift. There were only about a dozen levels–the icecap wasn’t that thick–but we were in one of the lower ones.
She led me to a Happy/Joy. I frowned slightly. Happy/Joy was a chain of bar/restaurants belonging to the Sheldrake Retail Megacorp and could be found throughout a third of the Imperium and surrounding space. It was about as bland and innocuous as a restaurant could be and still be above fabricator output. Still, we went inside and soon found ourselves in a booth.
“Do you have that music cartridge you got on Tlianke?” she asked after we had ordered.
I nodded, pulled out my remote, then activated the program on my comp. “Will that work here?”
She smiled. “The danger of being too controlling is that your weaknesses are shared by all of your clients. I am fairly sure that any weakness that can be exploited on Tlianke can also be exploited here.”
“Fine.” I rubbed my eyes. I had really never wanted to get involved in this kind of thing. “So… how much do you know about what we got involved in on Tlianke.”
“Just what you told us back on board.”
“Well… there’s been a bit of an update,” I told her about my encounter yesterday at Samone’s.
“So they are part of Jestin’s network. Which I think you know something about. You were the one who helped set up my meeting with Kori Methasa back on Boilingbrook, right?”
She looked away into the distance for a long moment, finally looking back when the waitbot came over with our orders. I only had a Galactose Intolerance with some Tama Leaves while she had ordered a full meal. I waited as she tasted her wine, then cut out a slice of her steak and tried it.
Then she turned back to me. “Yes. I know who Jestin is. He and his organization have proved valuable to us.”
“In what way.”
She took another bite, nodded, then resumed. “The Hinterworlds are a fairly unique sector. They are in the sphere of influence of not just the Imperium, but of multiple other polities as well. The Solomani. The Hivers. The K’kree. All of them meet here.”
“Yeah, I know that. And?”
“There is always a need for a… buffer. A ‘neutral zone’ if you will. Ideas and ideologies spread. If any of the other significant polities gained ascendance here, then their beliefs and ideologies would start to bleed into the Imperium. Into the Old Expanses and the Glimmerdrift if nothing else. And yes, both of them are already bordered by the K’kree and the Solomani. Which is why we need to keep the Hinterworlds independent. It may sound strange, but we really don’t want the Hinterworlds as Imperial clients. We want them to be that buffer. Because that keeps the other ideologies from spreading. That is what my unit’s directive was in the Hinterworlds, and that is what I am following. We need them to be like us, but not be of us.”
“So, you’re fine with Boilingbrook doing their thing?”
“Yes. Their philosophies align with our own enough that having them here stabilizes this corner of the sector, protecting us further. The Imperium is vulnerable right now; we need what protection we can get.”
I took a moment to drink some of my beer while she resumed eating her meal. We sat in silence for several minutes.
Finally, she took a sip of wine, then looked back at me. “Now, what is it you wished my assistance with? I am sure you didn’t ask to see me just to confirm things that you already knew.”
I sighed. I paused the jammer long enough for both of us to get refills, then reactivated it as soon as the waitbot left. Then I pulled out the notebook and handed it to her.
She flipped through it, pausing every now and then to examine a page more closely. Finally, she looked back up at me.
“Solomani?”
“Yes.”
“From the ship that you helped salvage at Gimisapun?”
“Yes.”
She smiled slightly. “So you did find something there.”
“Hey, I try not to give away all of my secrets.”
“Of course. So… where did you find it?”
I told her about finding the pilot and how he had apparently hidden the notebook away from the ship. As I spoke, she was paging through it again.
“So it is something that he didn’t want to leave on the ship or be found on his body, but also something he didn’t want to destroy. And it was hand-written, not stored in his comp. I’m guessing it is something he didn’t want his superiors to know about or at least something they wanted to be able to deny knowledge of, but still something that he hoped someone would look for and eventually find.”
She was nodding, eyes still on the notebook. “A reasonable analysis. Maybe you aren’t as unfamiliar with this kind of work as you believe.”
“Not familiar enough to know what to do with that. You have any ideas?”
“It is a code of some kind.”
“Yeah, I had figured that much out.”
“Yes, of course. Did you try to have your ship’s computer look at it?”
“No. Since I didn’t know what it was, I didn’t want it on the computer. I also haven’t asked Saahna to look at it.”
“You’re learning to be cautious with your assets. That’s good.” She stopped, flipping back and forth between two pages. “He was clever,” she said finally.
“In what way?”
She lay the notebook in front of me. “Here, look at this page. You see how these two symbols repeat multiple times on the page? Here, here, and… here.” I nodded.
“Now, look at the next page. It only shows up once. There are a lot of symbol patterns here that don’t show up on other pages, and they cluster differently.”
I nodded again. “Yeah… It would have taken me a while to notice that.”
“You would have. It isn’t that different from seeing trends in market patterns, you just aren’t used to looking at it that way.” She closed the notebook.
“This has to be a fairly simple code because he was hand-writing it. So it must be something that he can read and write easily. To make it more difficult, he has added extra pages of gibberish to confuse anyone trying to decode it. But the patterns are too random.”
“Can you read it?”
“It shouldn’t be too difficult to decipher. Why don’t you try it?”
“What? Me?”
“Do you know Solomani?”
I waggled my hand. “Enough to negotiate a trade, if I have to. Can’t say I’m fluent.”
“That should be enough. He has assigned a pair of symbols to every letter, number, and punctuation in the language. On the random pages, he just has a random assortment of symbols, while on the real ones he has them in consistent pairs. Just figure out which pair goes with which letter.”
“That’s it?”
“Yes. That’s why you let the computers do your encryption and decryption for you. I can assure you this isn’t something Solomani Intelligence would have been doing. He was running something on the side for some other group.”
“You were able to determine all of that quickly?”
She smiled. “Captain, you are very good at your job. I assure you, I am just as good at mine.”
“Thanks.” I picked up the notebook. “So… what about this?”
“Think of it as a challenge, Captain. I have told you what you need to do. If you can’t figure it out, then I will be happy to look at it once we are back on-board. Until then, I will give you a chance to keep your asset to yourself.” She smiled again then stood up.
“Now if you will excuse me, Captain? I think I will see what else this planet offers. I will see you in four days, I believe?”
I nodded. “Yes, of course. Oh, Doctor!” I added as she turned to leave. She paused and looked back.
“Thank you for your assistance.”
She nodded and left.