Special Forces 01 (8 page)

Anne spent the remainder of her lunch break explaining etiquette. Oddly enough, she thoroughly enjoyed their conversation. Arystair was one of those people that absorbed everything you told him — she never had to repeat herself, and he never forgot what she said. It was both flattering and at the same time nerve wracking. She found herself being more careful and precise with her words than normal, not wanting him to quote her saying something ridiculous.

By the end of lunch, Anne had come to two conclusions. One, this was the kind of guy that would make a really good friend; and two, he was definitely going to be
her
friend, if she had anything at all to say about it.

Chapter Five

Rys well understood that using any military base as a meeting place would destroy the cover of “sabbatical high school student” that all of SF01 was currently maintaining. Obviously, meeting in a base’s conference room was out of the question. Of course, that brought about the question of what would be the best place to meet? Everyone had debated this for a long while, throwing out different ideas, but finally a general consensus was reached that any veteran’s home would be secure enough, if the appropriate measures were taken.

They’d asked a few discreet questions, hacked a few files, and discovered that there were three homes that had the necessary clearance to be around a mission this highly classified. One of them happened to be the Dawlish’s — Gremlin’s foster parents.

When Rys arrived that evening, he discovered that finding a place to park in front of the modest two-story house had become a challenge because of everyone else’s arrival. Frowning, he checked the clock — no, he’d arrived ten minutes early, like usual. Yet there were seven cars already in the driveway and two parked half on the street. Had he missed something…?

A little concerned, he got out of the van and headed for the front door, eyes automatically sorting through the various vehicles around him. Five he recognized as belonging to the various computer experts in SF01 and the Dawlishs’. Two of them had government plates, meaning that someone had decided to join their little information party.

They’d been exchanging information with each other for the past two weeks. Rys knew that some of the emails had been cced to Bijordan Intel as well. Maybe… Shaking his head in bemusement, he raised a hand and knocked on the door.

Katherine Dawlish, Bijordan Naval Captain, Retired, promptly opened the door and smiled at him in welcome. “Come in, Captain Savar.”

“Thank you, ma’am.” He gave her a covert scan as he stepped inside the house. Every dark hair on her head was perfectly in place, shirt and pants crisply pressed, and the fine wrinkles on her face framed a happy smile. Well, she didn’t
look
like anything upsetting had happened. Taking that for a good sign, he continued, “We’re very grateful you let us commandeer the premises for the evening.”

She gave him a casual salute and a wink. “My pleasure. It feels like the old days, actually. Now, everyone decided to use the den. It’s this way.”

Rys followed her down the hallway and to a back corner of the house. He caught glimpses of different rooms as he walked. Everything was pristine and in immaculate order. The furniture looked a little worn-in and outdated, but he didn’t see anything in a state of disrepair. He doubted anyone could beg a speck of dust to settle in this woman’s house, either.

Captain Dawlish gave him a quick smile as she reached for the door handle and warned him cheerfully, “Brace yourself!”

Rys shot her a look of alarm. Brace himself for
what?

Then she opened the door and he knew.

Six different folding tables had been set up like a rough and ready command center. On it there were laptops, printers, what looked to be a miniature satellite dish and far too many cables running in every possible direction. Seven computer geeks sat in front of their respective computers, talking over each other in a computer code that Rys couldn’t even begin to follow, their fingers flying over the keyboards.

It put him eerily in mind of a bad science fiction movie. The part right before aliens invaded or something blew up.

Not sure if he wanted to walk into a place where angels feared to tread, Rys hovered in the doorway. He sensibly chose not to try and talk over the crowd but opened a mental line and pinged Gremlin.

Gremlin?

It took a second before he answered, and his dark eyes never left the computer screen. In fact, he kept his position perfectly. Gremlin’s dark hair was more tossled than usual, his trim frame tucked into itself in the chair, his usual posture while hacking. How long had he been sitting there?
“Yes, sir?”

Ah…where did the Bijordan Intel people come from?

“Oh, I called them in, sir. I thought they needed some practical hands-on with the finer points of hacking.”

Well, if anyone could teach them, it would be Gremlin.
I see. Are you hacking?

“Yes, sir.”

I thought this was supposed to be an intelligence swap and meet?

“It started out that way, sir. Then Boyce noticed something odd about the Novan’s network system, and we went in to do a more thorough check, and…”

Things grew from there, I understand.
Rys just shook his head in resignation. This was not the first time something like this had happened. Gremlin had never quite broken the habit of investigating first and then updating his superiors later.
So what have you turned up?

“Quite a bit, sir. I think I know what’s going on, but Captain, if you’ll just give me thirty minutes I think I can give a much more thorough briefing. Right now I’ve just got a working theory and only a little data to back it up.”

Rys vastly preferred that over no working theory and a lot of data to shift through. Still, he could wait thirty minutes for a more accurate picture. Especially since most of SF01 had yet to arrive.
Why don’t I order dinner for everyone and you can update me when it arrives?

“Sounds like a good plan to me, sir.”

Rys took another look at the people around the room that hadn’t even turned to look in his direction. He doubted they’d even noticed the door had opened. Maybe he should step inside and have a quick word with the Bijordan Intel people…no, on second thought, he’d wait for Gremlin’s briefing.

He stepped back out and softly closed the door behind him.

“I see your survival instincts are well honed, Captain,” Captain Dawlish observed with a quirky smile crinkling the corners of her dark eyes.

He responded, “I know better than to try and interrupt a computer geek when he’s fixated on something. At least, not without some kind of peace offering in hand.”

She softly chuckled, waving him to follow her back toward the main part of the office.

“I don’t suppose I could borrow your phone?” he asked as he followed her into the kitchen.

“Certainly, but why?”

“I need to order a peace offering.”

***

Everything seemed to arrive at about the same time. The rest of 01 came in small groups, and took a few minutes to exchange news about how their “civilian” lives were going. Rys, knowing full well how much they could all eat, ordered two dozen pizzas and the pizza delivery man was greeted with much cheer and back slapping. Rys took one box with him back to Geek Central and used it to lure the working men out of the room and back to the rest of the world.

There not being any room in the house that could really sit all twenty-two of them, they retreated to the back deck and found any available corner or vacant space to sit and eat.

Steve wound up sitting next to him. After consuming three slices, he leaned in and murmured, “So why do we have two Bijordan Intel officers here?”

“Gremlin invited them. He said they needed some pointers.”

“Ah.”

The evening air was slightly cool and pleasant. Rys felt himself go a little lethargic because of the peaceful scenery around him and the nice, warming sensation of having his stomach full. He made himself stop after six slices, afraid that one more would send him into a drowsy state.

When the last pizza box had been emptied, the relaxed ambience of the group fell away and they unanimously got down to business.

Rys, as the most senior Captain in the group, took lead. “Alright, Gremlin. You said that you found something interesting.”

“Boyce found something interesting,” Gremlin corrected with a quick thumbs up at his fellow geek. Boyce flashed him an acknowledging smile in response. “We’ve just been verifying it for the past few hours. Sir, this is far from conclusive, and I’d like to look at about a hundred more systems before we jump to conclusions, but it looks like there’s a piggy-back system on all of the Novans network systems.”

Rys frowned. He didn’t like the sound of this. “And what does this piggy-back system do?”

“It seems to have a two-part function.” Gremlin’s voice was painfully neutral as he spoke, his eyes tight. “Part one is that it taps into any network or device within range and makes a copy of it.”

As the words penetrated, Rys felt his blood just drain from his face and his stomach gave an uneasy lurch. “How sophisticated is this system?”

One of the Bijordan Intel officers responded grimly, “It can penetrate most firewalls, sir. Only the top two classified systems in the government could withstand its attack.”

Rys felt like swearing.
Not
the answer he’d hoped for.

“What’s part two, Bran?” Miles asked in a deceptively calm voice. “You said this thing was dual purpose.”

“Part two is actually what worries me the most,” Gremlin admitted with a quick glance around the group. “The second function is to do an in-depth scan of the infrastructure.”

A cold, heavy silence descended like a lead weight. No one had to voice the obvious: the only reason why someone would need a detailed blueprint of a planet’s infrastructure was if they were planning to either a) conquer it, or b) blow it up. It could possibly be a mix of both.

Duane was the one to break the silence and ask the next obvious question. “Which Novans are carrying this thing around?”

“That’s the part that we’d like to confirm by hacking another hundred systems.” Gremlin spread out his hands in a slight shrug. “From what we can tell right now,
every
Novan does. From merchants to tourists and everything in between.”

Rys blew out a breath as he asked the next hard question. “Do they know? Are these operatives undercover?”

“Another question I can’t answer until we can hack more systems. My gut feeling is…at least some of them are just innocent dupes.”

Well, at least they had
some
notion of what Nova was up to. Now if they could only figure out what use all of this information would be put to. “Gremlin, I don’t have to order you to re-start your hacking party, do I?”

Gremlin grinned at him like he’d just been handed tacit permission to do something naughty. “No, sir!”

“While you hack, we’re going to figure out just how much information they’ve already got and how much they can get before we jam their systems.” Rys would also have to figure out how to condense all of this into a report that he could forward on. “Before you dig back in, give me a better idea of how much intel we have. How many systems did you hack?”

“Well, I hacked four systems…” Gremlin turned in his seat to give the rest of his hacking companions a quick look. “Boyce did three that I know of, right? So that’s seven, and you did two, and you did two, and you had that merchie vessel that was such a pain in the arse, and you were trying to crack the Embassy—”

The Bijordan Intel officer winced. “Never got in, either.”

Gremlin waved this aside. “I’ll take a look at it after this. So I think we only got to look at about a dozen systems altogether, sir.”

“A dozen…” Rys repeated slowly, rubbing at his chin. “Now I understand why you want to look at another hundred before you make any judgment calls. How many hacking parties before you think you can give solid intel?”

Gremlin was struggling not to show it, but underneath his somber face, his inner child was jumping up and down with glee. “Quite a few, sir. It’s hard to estimate it right now.”

Rys absently hoped that Gremlin’s foster parents didn’t have any plans that involved their den in the upcoming months. He doubted they would manage to wrest it from Gremlin’s control now that the young computer genius had managed to sink his claws into it.

“So really, the rest of us are back to a waiting pattern until we have sufficient intel?” Aaron summed up, a slightly disgruntled look on his face.

Gremlin gave a helpless shrug. “Sorry, sir. We just stumbled across this situation two hours ago.”

“Alright, the rest of us are going to go back to observing traffic flow patterns of the Novans and learning how to blend better with Bijordan’s culture while we wait,” Rys directed to the group in general. “Feel free to visit places, gentlemen. The more familiar we are with the planet’s surface, the better off we’ll be.”

Rys sent up a prayer that nothing serious would happen while they tried to figure everything out.

Chapter Six

By the time the next weekend rolled around, Rys decided that meeting Anne was a gift straight from the Guardians themselves. She was very polite, extremely knowledgeable about her culture, and perfectly willing to explain anything he didn’t understand. Besides being the soul of patience, she didn’t make him feel foolish asking questions, and seemed genuinely happy and comfortable spending time with him.

Rys returned home from school that Friday determined to somehow acquire pertinent advice. He needed to know how to go about making permanent friends with teenage girls. Who did he need to tap for such information? Sara would probably know, but asking her would raise more questions than he was willing to answer at this time.

How about asking other teenage girls?