Advent Signal
Chapter 1: Stern Chase
The Messiah Complex was not much to look at. The stolen light freighter was barely 100 meters long from bow to stern, with most of its mass taken up by the 70 meter tall drive assembly: a long fat tube through which the energies of a star were directed. Above the drive assembly was a living space made out of converted shipping containers welded and bolted onto premade habitat modules that would have looked more at home on the surface of Mars or Ganymede. The vessel rode atop a ten kilometer tall pillar of fusion fire; hot plasmas exited the back of the torch drive at relativistic velocities as she flung herself away from the ecliptic at 2 Gs of acceleration. She was a junkyard with engines, a duel lesson in human ingenuity and foolishness.
Aboard the ramshackle vessel, the sole occupant banged angrily on the console as temperature readings continued to creep upward and more and more overheat warnings flooded out onto the holographic console.
“Come on you piece of shit hold together!” She shouted at the emotionless machinery.
Astrid Eisndottir was a hacker, one of the best in the solar system, and with the computers on the Messiah Complex there wasn’t an encryption in the solar system she couldn’t crack with enough patience. She prided herself on being the best, and she was.
Unfortunately for her, that was proving to be her undoing. If one was to look behind the Messiah Complex and avoid the retina searing glare of the fusion candle, they might be able to see the faint twinkle of three false stars. The lights came from the fusion candles of the three Ashen Corporation destroyers giving chase to the Messiah Complex at hard burn. At 2.5 Gs of acceleration, they were slowly but inexorably closing the ten million kilometer wide gap between themselves and the fleeing freighter. After days of chasing, they were approaching spitballing distance. In their standard triangular formation, spaced twenty thousand kilometers apart, they would blast past her at kilometers per second, then flip bow over stern and decelerate to match velocity and trap her between them.
The corporate military vessels were painted in dull yellow, their wedge shaped hulls cutting through the solar wind like the keels of the ancient seagoing vessels they vaguely emulated. Designed for long durations at high G burn, they could easily handle the relatively paltry 2 Gs of the Messiah Complex.
The freighter on the other hand, was not designed with long durations of acceleration over 1.2 Gs, and her engines were slowly melting down from the stress of the chase. If the military vessels wanted, they could have fired their engines in a crushing 10 G burn and closed the gap in moments, but they were content to keep their speeds just above those of the hacker’s ship, slowly bearing down on her while keeping their crews as comfortable as possible.
Aboard the Messiah Complex a new series of warnings began flashing, warning of a failure in the G pylon of the plasma ejection bottle. Astrid overrode the warnings and kept the drive firing.
It was an exercise in futility, and she knew it, she’d never outrun the destroyers, and even if she could, there was nowhere in the system left for her to go.
Her old haven on 323 Brucia locked out her access codes and denied her port of entry. That was bad enough, but then they alerted the Ashen Corporation to her whereabouts, and she’d been on the run ever since. Weeks of running and preparations had brought her down to these tense final moments.
She looked over from the command screens to one of her custom consoles, it read ‘49% complete’ on it. She ground her teeth and after what felt like a small eternity, it crept up to 50%.
Data poured out of the tightbeam laser link to the relay station she’d attached a worm to months before. Terabytes of data were being shoved down the tightbeam as quickly as her ship’s computer could encode it.
She played her hands over the controls and prayed to the gods of chaos and freedom of that she knew what she was doing. The console read 55% completion.
A new screen popped up in front of her, informing her with casual indifference that the destroyers were painting the ship with targeting lasers.
She activated her radio and set to broadcast at wideband, highest strength.
“Fuck off!” She shouted into the void.
“This is Captain Alexander Oakfield of of the ACS Blackwater.” a silkily smooth voice answered her, “Astrid Eisndottir, you are wanted for theft of Ashen Corporation property. Deactivate your engines and surrender or your vessel will be destroyed.”
“We both know you’re just going to give me a summary trial and throw me out the airlock so don’t even pretend having my ship destroyed is any different. Suck fusion candle asshat!”
Captain Oakfield ignored her and repeated his demands for her to power down her engines. Options raced through her mind like a game of high speed chess. Move and countermove. They were almost within missile range, at which point she’d be screwed. The download was taking too long to just run out that particular clock. But if she could make them think she’d broken her ship, they might pick her up just to gloat before spacing her. The console read 63% completion. She just needed a little more time
“Assholes!” She yelled into the microphone before cutting the connection. It was going to be a close call. She overrode all the safeties and deactivated the magnetic fields on the ejection nozzle. The ship lurched sickening as a cloud of high speed plasma was blown out in all directions, melting away the delicate magnetic cowlings in an incandescent fireball. As the magnetic fields failed, the ship automatically cut the flow of plasma from the core into the drive. Thrust gravity fell away instantly and she was left on the float. The console read 69% completion.
“And now to make it convincingly pathetic.” She mumbled as she played her hands over the controls. The hot gas thrusters activated and the ship began a painfully slowly thrust. The tiny acceleration hopefully convincing Oakfield that she was still trying, in vain, to escape them.
She told the thrusters to fire until they ran out of propellant, then flung herself from the crash couch, arms windmilling as she air swam towards the ship’s main computer array. She had one more trick up her sleeve. The console read 71% completion.
She pulled herself into the ‘hot seat,’ her main computer hacking interface, and grabbed her ‘special surprise’ virus from storage. She loaded it with stolen Ashen Corporation military access codes, and downloaded it onto a fob.
Outside, the destroyers watched her engines fail and witnessed her increasingly pathetic escape attempts, and closed in like sharks smelling blood. They cut engines, flipped nose over tail, and performed a short duration 5 G burn to match velocities and begin maneuvering across the gulf of space between themselves and the seemingly incapacitated freighter.
By the time Astrid had finished modifying her virus, the vessels had closed to within ten kilometers and were preparing to extend their boarding tubes. She finished jury rigging the computer running the ship’s fusion core and set it to receive the instruction she had programmed into her virus. Then she threw herself out of the hot seat and rushed for the airlock controls. The console read 84% completion.
Two of the destroyers docked alongside her, one at each airlock. The third held station several klicks away, circling the the captive freighter like a lethal predator.
She yanked out the wires connecting the airlock from the rest of the ship’s internal systems and slammed the fob into the firmware patch port. The virus loaded itself into the airlock systems, waiting for the trigger to go to work. She repeated the procedure at the other airlock as the sound of boarding tubes clanged against the metal of the ship’s exterior. The console read 96% completion.
The interior airlock was sealed by Astrid of course. But this was little trouble for the military vessels. One member of each insertion squad came forward and plugged their bulky military smartphones into the airlock console. The smartphones were tethered to the destroyer’s computer cores, allowing them to brute force through her lockout. Standard procedure.
As soon as they connected, the virus executed, launching itself down the wireless link into the computer cores even as the airlock hatches opened.
Armed men and women in military spacesuits buzzed out into the EVA prep chamber. Astrid smiled blithely and put her hands up. “Looks like you caught me.” She grinned.
Her special surprised chewed threw layers of firewalls and tunneled into the controls for the fusion bottles. This would have raised all sorts of warnings and flags if the virus hadn’t also suppressed them. The console on the bridge read 99% completion.
The last thing the virus did before dumping all the remaining fuel pellets into the destroyer’s fusion cores and disabling magnetic containment was to send a radio message back to the Messiah Complex which repeated the actions the virus had just taken. The two destroyers and their quarry all turned into small suns.
Astrid’s death was instant. No one on either of the three vessels had time to realize their fate before being turned into relativistic plasma. Nothing larger then a screw survived intact as the conflagration expanded in a triple starburst of hard radiation.
Boiling plasma and ionizing radiation washed over the third destroyer less then a second later, swallowing up the small assault vessel. It was designed to survive a firefight involving nuclear weapons, but three blasts at once was simply more energy then it could take. The air inside the ship became superheated as, paper, clothing, and skin all instantly burst into flames.
As the light of the new sun faded, the last destroyer was left glowing red hot and spinning out of control as ionized gas vented from the now misshapen hull. The wreck went silently screaming into the night, interior still glowing and burning like a viking burial at sea. It would take weeks for the hull to re-radiate all the absorbed heat out into space.
The laser light of Astrid’s tightbeam left the scene of destruction far behind. The photons burned across space at the speed of light. Over the course of several hours it crossed the gulf of space to the relay station on Daphnis. The data worm Astrid had dumped into Daphnis’s mainframe months prior accepted the handshake from her tightbeam and scooped up all the data, before retransmitting it at the worm’s instructions to another relay station at saturn’s L1 point.
From there the signal was bounced again to a private array Astrid had stuffed into a disused storage room on Ceres. When the array on Ceres unboxed the signal, it received an instruction to transmit the data to 433 Eros. On Eros, the mainframe tried to flag the signal, but the act of flagging caused the transmission to jump to 3 Juno. On 3 Juno, the worm built into the transmission activated again and fired the signal towards Mars, where it was picked up by the Deimos server cluster. From Deimos the signal jumped to 10 Hygeia, and from there to 372 Palma. On Palma the worm told it to go to the orbital colony at Venus’s L2, where it was repackaged as an email by Astrid’s previously installed software. The email was mailed to an address on Skylark City, one of the floating cities in Venus’s upper atmosphere. The address was an automatic forwarding service Astrid had previously set up, which sent the signal back out into the void where it reached Europa. The address on Europa accepted the hidden handshake within the email and sent it via hardline across the surface to a hidden server cluster buried in the ice. The server cluster unpacked another set of instructions, the last ones Astrid had written into the system.
What do you do when you’re handed the most powerful and dangerous secret in the solar system, and have no one to share it with? What do you do when you know your death is rushing towards you at kilometers per second? Knowledge will get out. That was what Astrid had told herself. Secrets can’t stay secrets. She knew one person who had loudly espoused those virtues, the person who had taught her them in the first place. That which can be destroyed by truth should be, he had written on his blog all those years ago.
The server cluster interpreted the command and send the data back down the hardline to be fired towards the communications array at Jupiter’s L1 point. The array sent the massive file racing back towards the sun, where it was picked up by the main Mercury Darkside Array and bounced to Roveropolis.
Eli Yhekusai’s smart phone pinged as the email arrived at 3am local time. Eli groaned at the noise, the rolled over and went back to sleep.