Riker
September 2175
Sol
Pieces of space station mingled with desiccated plants and the carcasses of livestock that had been unlucky enough to be living on that donut. The debris had scattered with the explosion, but orbital chanics and mutual gravity were bringing everything back together.
Hor’s image floated in the video window. “We’d just brought this one on-line. Six months’ work, gone.”
I nodded silently. The donuts were Hor’s babies. He’d co up with the idea and head-manned it to completion. This couldn’t be easy for him. “Any announcents?”
“Yeah. VEHENT. The usual crazy-ass rant. Humanity is a cancer, the universe is better off without them, blah, blah.”
“I’m sorry, buddy. But we’ll get them, one way or another.”
Hor was silent. His expression said everything. Sadness, anger, confusion. He wouldn’t et my eyes. I felt guilty about all the bad thoughts I’d had about him in the past. He was a fully contributing mber of the team, and this was killing him.
I was concerned about Hor. He had pretty much stopped ribbing . Hadn’t called number two in months. In fact, he seed to have turned all business. I wondered if soone had offended him, but on the one occasion I’d tried to talk to him about it, he just deflected the conversation.
“We’ve got enough redundancy now that this won’t leave us dead in the water,” I said. “But with the reduced planetside output, it’s going to an short rations. Or more kudzu.” I smiled, trying to lighten the mood. Hor wasn’t having any. He shrugged, then ended the connection.
“Guppy, what have we got relating to Farm-6?”
[Querying AMI team. One mont]
After a short delay, Guppy continued.
[No related transmissions detected. No nearby activity except by Heaven vessels]
Crap. They were covering their tracks too well. “Sothing will break. Sothing has to.”
Guppy didn’t comnt. He wasn’t much on encouragent. Huge fishy eyes blinked once.
* * *
Just to really make my week, there were several terrorist attacks on Florianópolis as well. I kept wondering if there was so anniversary coming up that was triggering all the activity. The terrorists were getting smarter, and hitting more critical targets. One of the attacks had taken out the power system. It would take a couple of days to fix.
It wasn’t the first ti that the actions of VEHENT and the Brazilian attacks seed to be coordinated. I wondered if there was so connection. It was almost certainly two different groups, but maybe they were talking to each other, sharing intelligence. That could actually be of benefit to .
The old Earth, pre-war, had global technology and every form of communications you could imagine. This post-apocalyptic reality was far more limited. There were fewer thods of communication for collusion between the two groups, or even cross-talk between VEHENT cells.
But I’d been monitoring all channels. At least everything I could think of. So either I’d missed so form of communication; or they were using so kind of steganography, which would be almost impossible to recognize unless you knew what you were looking for; or they had gone low-tech.
Option three would be too slow, number one I couldn’t do anything about, so that left two. Steganography was by definition inefficient, since you had to spread the ssage out enough for it to be unnoticeable. Therefore the transmission dium would have to allow a high bandwidth, which would imdiately rule out a lot of possibilities. And there were statistical thods that could ferret out steganographic ssages.
I retired to my VR, to give this more thought.
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