Episode 601: Triumph, Part Two

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Episode 601: Triumph, Special Features

We could still use a little more money, though. Looking around for passengers, we do come across a passenger who needs to go to Persephone, though he’s in no real apparent hurry to get there. We meet him on the ship, since he’s willing to fly with us.

He arrives with a duffle bag. He’s a bit travel worn like his duffle bag but cleaned up, he’d be a good-looking guy. His skin is smooth and dark as milk chocolate, his hair lies in tight shoulder-length dreds, and his eyes are a startling grey green. His name is Bradley Sims.

We also think he’s been sleeping on the streets, when he does sleep. Can he actually pay for passage? Joshua gets the vibe that the man is also hiding something. But since 99.5% of the people in the Verse are hiding something, that’s not in itself anything alarming.

Bradley looks around appreciatively as Joshua escorts him up the stairs.

Sims: Big ship.
Joshua: Yes. Sure is. Unless we somehow manage to pick up some more passengers along the way, you’ll be the only passenger on board.
Sims: How big’s your crew?
Joshua: Crew of six. We have a steward dedicated to your passengers.
Sims: Yeah?
Joshua: Yes. If you’re paying first class, there’s fresh food—.
Sims: Yeah … about the payin’ …

Here it comes. Joshua stops on the landing between decks.

Joshua: Go on.
Sims: So, I assume you probably like … up front?
Joshua: Why don’t you tell me what’s on your mind and we can talk. I’m willing to listen to all sorts of interesting.
Sims: I’m coming into some money.
Joshua: Okay.
Sims: I don’t have a lot of money right now, but once I come into this money, it could be a lot.
Joshua: What kind of money are we talking about, here? I don’t need fine details, but I’d like to get a feel for what you’re talking about.
Sims: I don’t know … six, five hundred credits or so?
Joshua: Is this money you’ve been waiting on for a while or did you just find out about it?
Sims: If you can get me to Persephone, I can get it. Until then, I got some supplies but I’ve been trying to live kinda lean until I can come into this cash. So I could pay you maybe half of second class each week until we get there?

Is he really telling the truth about the money? Joshua Reads Bradley Sims to find out. ::Yes. He’s a little nervous talking about the money but he definitely has a pot of gold in his mind.::

Joshua: You’re not in any sort of rush to get to Persephone?
Sims: Well, if you take too long there might be problems but … I don’t think there would be.
Joshua: Right. What’s your drop dead date? The last possible date you can get to Persephone? If things go smoothly and they usually do, it should be just a relatively quick trip to Triumph and then over to Persephone.
Sims: That would be great. Triumph is, like, in Red Sun? Persephone is right near Red Sun.
Joshua: It wouldn’t be long. I just want to make sure that—
Sims: And I can help on the ship. I was a hand on another ship, beforehand.
Joshua: Was that Alliance or otherwise?
Sims: It was otherwise.
Joshua: All right. We got no issues with otherwise.

Joshua takes to the stairs again and they walk up to the passenger deck.

Sims: Landcaster.
Joshua: What’s that?
Sims: The Landcaster. It’s a light freighter.
Joshua: All right. Just a general hand?
Sims: Yeah. I loaded stuff.
Joshua: All right.
Sims: And I swept, and … (shrugs)
Joshua: Sure. Half second class rate and your agreement to be put to work in reasonable amounts. To Persephone as soon as we can reasonably get there. No commitments to how long it will take but we won’t be dilly-dallying around either.
Sims: Right. I understand. I don’t have enough to charter the ship to go there. I understand that’s kinda expensive. But once we’re there, I could … well, I dunno how much this fare will be.
Joshua: We’ll talk about it.

When we get there, is the general implication.

Sims: Oh, there won’t be any problems getting into Persephone, is there? You’re flying the flag and everything, right?
Joshua: We’re not flying the flag but we’ll get you into Persephone.
Sims: Yeah, I guess you guys know more about that. Yeah, they never really let me up on the bridge all that much so I don’t know how that stuff works.
Joshua: We’ll manage it. Don’t worry. So … you won’t eat first class but you’ll eat the same thing the crew eats. You’ll eat with the crew unless you got issues with it.

Joshua shakes his hand.

Joshua: Welcome aboard, sir.

Joshua hails Kiera via his comm.

Joshua: Kiera, can I see you for a second?
Kiera: Sure.

She arrives with a smile and a question.

Kiera: What’s up?
Joshua: We’ve got a passenger.
Kiera: (Slowly) Yeah?
Joshua: Right here. (gestures to Sims)
Kiera: Yeah?
Joshua: Could you show him to his room?
Kiera: Which room are we giving him?
Joshua: Any of them’s good.
Kiera: Oh. Well enough, then. (smiles at Sims) Nice to meet you. My name’s Kiera.
Sims: (bemused) Hi there.
Kiera: Come on, then.

She takes his arm and leads him to the cabin closest to the passenger lounge. They talk as they walk.

Sims: Are you the steward?
Kiera: Yes.
Sims: Very good.
Kiera: Um-hm.
Sims: So if you need anything, I can help out. I like to be helpful.
Joshua: Yes. He’s going to be putting in some work along the way.
Sims: And you can show me around the ship.
Kiera: Oh?
Joshua: He’ll be doing deck hand types of duties. Cleaning up.
Kiera: And he’s a passenger?
Joshua: He’s a passenger working on a reduced rates, with the agreement that he’ll put some work in behind the scenes.
Kiera: Wow, do I have some towels you can fold. Come with me.

Actually, she’s thinking he can help us finish the rooms that we’re remodding. Spackle. Paint. And when he’s put in the work and the first grade mods are done, she can upgrade him into a cabin he helped finish.

Kiera: Wow. Best passenger we’ve ever had.

Joshua leaves our passenger in her capable hands and tells the rest of the crew about Sims. Inveterate ship spotter that she is, Rina latches onto the name of Landcaster and does a light search for it. At the moment all she finds is that the Landcaster was with all hands somewhere in the Halo a couple of months ago. That puts it somewhere in mid-July, when we were rescuing the inhabitants of Armero on Ezra. She’ll have to spend more time and dig deeper if she wants to know more.

Nika’s not too entirely sure about upgrading Sims to first class accommodations. She’s still not convinced having first class cabins at all will net us any advantages. Joshua counters he’d rather have them and not need them, than need them and not have them. As for Sims working for part of his passage, Nika doesn’t seem to have an issue with it.

Meanwhile, Beglan and Rina are busy installing the sensor package. They’d been working steadily since yesterday and by the end of the day, it’s done. Seems to work fine. We’ll be able to give it a full workout when we hit the Black again. Now all we have to do is wait for the cargo to arrive. And it does, the very next day.

Thursday, 24 Sep 2522

The cargo arrives, along with the machine gun Kiera ordered for our machine gun emplacement. Rina’s got everything set up for it, all she has to do is mount the gun to the rack. Of course, Kiera wants to check the gun out first—run a belt or two of ammo through it to see how she shoots. She mimes mowing down invisible enemies. Joshua takes exception to that.

Joshua: I’m already not fond of machine guns.
Kiera: Don’t make me lecture you.
Joshua: Don’t make me unhappy even more.
Kiera: Don’t make you unhappy even more?
Joshua: I’m not happy about machine guns.
Kiera: Aw.
Joshua: I’m not going to say anything.
Kiera: Uh huh.
Joshua: I understand why we have it but—
Kiera: But you wanted the pacifist ship with a little peace sign on it.
Joshua: No.
Kiera: Uh huh.
Joshua: No. Not really.
Kiera: Yeah, you did.
Joshua: No.
Nika: All right, c’mon. Stop.
Joshua: (to Nika) Well, it’s your ship. (off her look) What? It is your ship.
Kiera: Mom! He’s poking me.

Nika stalks off. Kids!

Said kids busy themselves unloading the rest of the cargo. Brion’s sent over four trucks with eight containers and they all have to be unloaded and stowed. One of the drivers shows Nika the paperwork on the cargo. It’s labeled as “recycled electronics”. Kiera looks at Arden.

Kiera: See now, Arden? It’s recycled electronics, if that makes you feel better.
Arden: Have you opened it up and looked?
Joshua: No. Just—
Arden: Not that people lie or anything.
Driver: Sure. Take a look. It’s all right to be suspicious.

Rina opens up one of the crates and we take a look. We see shrink wrapped bundles of computers and stuff.

Kiera: Oh look. Junk. Just like you said.
Nika: (to Arden) Are you happy now?
Arden: I wasn’t unhappy before.
Kiera: Really?
Rina: Oh, really?
Arden: I’m just saying don’t take something without looking inside the package.
Joshua: Uh, huh.
Driver: I wouldn’t go cuttin’ into them because there might be other stuff in there too.
Kiera: Yeah. Computers. And junk.
Nika: All I need to know is it ain’t gonna, like, explode if it gets rocked around in atmo, is it?
Driver: No, but don’t rock around too much cuz you don’t wanna break ’em.
Nika: Fair enough.
Joshua: No worries. We’ve the best pilot this side of the Verse.
Arden: What side is that?
Nika: Whatever side of the Verse you happen to be on.
Kiera: And we can strap it down.
Rina: (nods at Arden) And we can strap him down, too.
Kiera: I dunno. Once you stick your finger inside someone’s sinus cavity it’s just hard to be mean. Although I’ll work back up to it, Arden. Trust me.

Meanwhile, the driver gives us the shipping info.

Driver: You’re takin’ this to a Franz Maddow. He’ll meetcha—not at a starport—but it’s like an old hangar. About out, way out in the country. It’s near a town called Bearclaw.
Joshua: Hangar? Outside of town. Bearclaw.
Driver: Yeah, there’s some kinda ruins and stuff in the area. Kinda like an old town that got ... (gestures)
Joshua: All right. Anything else you think we need to know?
Driver: You won’t be, exceptin’ payment from him. You might try and negotiate doin’ somethin’ for him.
Joshua: That’s all right. We’ll deal with him.
Driver: Here’s the thing ...
Joshua: Uh, huh. This was the part I was angling for.
Driver: Casual inspection is probably fine, but you can not allow full-fledged electronic inspection.
Joshua: Okay.
Driver: Hey, you already paid me and the payment is already in. So lemme tell’ya, you don’t want—you don’t want to be caught with this stuff.
Joshua: And we don’t want to do wrong by you either.
Nika: Thanks for the heads-up.

We’ve been avoiding the Core, haven’t been back since our last trip to Osiris. On that trip we had to bribe a Fed 250 credits not to detain us but give us paperwork that required us to be inspected once we kissed dirt. We haven’t been back since. Triumph is in Red Sun but Paquin and the other planets orbiting Heinlein are heavily covered by the Alliance Navy. Silverhold has an entire Alliance Army Division camped on the dirt, along with support vessels and transports. The Navy is helping by maintaining orbital support.

So no, we don’t want to get caught up in any Imperial entanglements, thanks.

Driver: (nods at cargo) Those will become quite valuable in a bit. Next couple of months. We’ll see how it goes.
Joshua: I guess we will. Pleasure doin’ business.
Driver: Just get it there.
Joshua: That’s the job.

The driver gathers up his men and trucks and leaves. While the crew secures the cargo, Nika studies the charts, thinking of how to plot an oblique angle of approach. Maybe a sneaky way in, a more circuitous route? Joshua advises her it’s a two-week run. More like 16 days. It’ll be 448 hours on the straight and narrow. It won’t leave us a lot of room to pulse in and out as we jerrymander our way to Triumph. We can save ourselves fuel for maneuvers if we wait for a more favorable approach window via orbital movement.

Meanwhile, down in the hold, the rest of the crew assess Bradley Sims’s deckhand skills as average to ... not so hot. Mediocre at best. He’s not incompetent. He just needs supervision. The steward can handle him. Rina leaves him to Kiera and goes up to the bridge to talk to Nika.

Rina: Do you want me to dig a little further into the cargo? That parting comment “It’s going to be valuable in the next couple of months”—what does he mean by that? Do we want to know? Cuz, you know, I’m thinking ...”
Joshua: (to Nika) Should I talk to her?
Nika: No.
Rina: Thank you.
Joshua: Really?
Nika: (to Rina) However—however—there will be no trace when you’re done. (to Joshua) Rina has a direct order that there is to be no trace that she’s been in the cargo. And by the way, Rina.

Nika nails her engineer with a gimlet stare.

Nika: When I mean no trace, I mean no trace for somebody like you. So if you can’t get into it in such a fashion, don’t open it.
Rina: Of course.

She dismisses her engineer on that order and gets back to the charts. She says to her XO once Rina is out of earshot:

Nika: You know I did this just to keep her busy for the entire two weeks. It’s keeping her out of trouble.
Joshua: You do realize this is our first trip we haven’t been haunted by ghosts. I was planning on keeping her busy.
Nika: (eyeroll) Well, then go distract her! Nobody’s stopping you.
Joshua: But now she’s all caught up in the—
Nika: (to her charts) I’m sure there is some way you can distract her. If you’re not good enough to do it, then you have more problems coming up in your future marriage than you might think.
Joshua: Fair enough.

Joshua leaves her to the charts and Nika muses a moment on all the changes he past few months has wrought on the crew. No more hauntings for Joshua, a new face for Arden ... and it’s a nice face, Nika has to admit. She likes it. She liked his old face, mind, and liked it a lot because it was his but she’s not blind to the advantages of having a decidedly cute new one. Not to mention he no longer looks like a clone of the Operative we call Otto (or Swordsman). There have been a couple of times were people mistook Arden for his older clone brother and it was not always a welcome thing. Now, with his new face, Arden can better define himself as his own man and not a clone.

As for better defining the cargo, Rina tackles the challenge the way she tackles anything—thoroughly. She uses all her covert skills to get past the locks and latches on the containers, then meticulously peels back the industrial plastic wrap from the bundled items for several revolutions around the pallet before slicing through the rest. She’ll rewrap the excess when she’s done, knowing the thick film will hide the slice. She uses gloves to avoid leaving fingerprints. She takes careful note of the location and placement of everything she moves.

She carefully unpacks an old computer and looking it over she realizes it’s merely a shell containing something else. She opens it up and finds it has several smaller bubble-wrapped items inside. She unwraps one of the bubble-wrapped items and discovers one of those ubiquitous hand held flip phone video cameras. They’re not big, literally the size of a small flip phone. She sees that it’s one of the social-media devices that people use for a ‘share-cam’. Primarily designed for children to use so they can share their photos with their families and friends, their range is limited and they need to be within the area covered by a wi-fi router/broadcaster in order to transmit pictures. On the face of it, it hardly seems worth all the trouble and secrecy.

But Rina being Rina, she suspects they may be more than they seem and she examines them further. She takes pictures of the device—front, back, all sides, opened and closed. She finds the memory card next and pops it out and examines it. It’s a higher quality chip normally found in a device of this caliber, but nothing that would seems unusually valuable of itself.

On a hunch, she fetches her card reader and plugs the memory card into it take a look at the files loaded on the thing. And this is where she hits pay dirt. The chip is crammed full of code. It’s mostly operating code. She stares at it, puzzling it out, since it’s not code controlling the hard drive or the RAM or anything. However, it’s definitely more than necessary to capture and store pictures for a simple child’s camera phone.

Lots more.

Scrolling through the code a little further, Rina realizes that she’s looking at code to turn the phone into a miniature Cortex hub. The lightbulb goes off and Rina realizes the covert ops potential such a device possesses, especially if it’s used to network with other such devices within range. Have a couple dozen of these flip cameras filming something simultaneously by different operators, linked together and transmitting ... For instance, if someone wanted to document police brutality in action, one could transmit it from the multiple sources and hit the planetary Cortex feeds all at once before anyone could stop it. If anyone needed to carry out guerilla/covert journalism, these babies would fit the bill. Given her recent run-in with the Feds on the ground on Boros, she’s reckoning that need for coverage is coming soon. Assuming it’s not already here. Looking at our cargo, she does the math. If every container is made up like the one she’s opened, we could be carrying hundreds of these flip cameras. Enough to outfit a small army.

Rina knows she can’t sit on this information. She has to at least tell her Captain what we’re carrying. In full paranoia mode, she returns the camera to its hiding place, closes up the computer shell, stuffs the unwrapped plastic back into the container and shuts the box. She’ll come back and make it perfect later. She traps a plucked hair in the seam of the box lid—if anyone comes by and opens it up before she gets back, she’ll know. When she’s satisfied she’s put the box back into its original position with the rest of the cargo and can find it again, she leaves to find Nika.

On the bridge, Nika’s keeping Equinox primed to leave Beaumonde. It’ll require waiting for a bit but once our orbital window opens up, we’ll be flying straight and true along the shortest distance between us and our target. That should save us the fuel we’ll need to maneuver past any imperial entanglements.

That’s the plan, anyway.

Rina steps on the bridge and finds her captain. Joshua’s standing on the bridge with her. Rina quickly tells them what she’s found.

Rina: I’m looking at this and I’m thinking I want to make a copy of this because—
Nika: No.
Joshua: Why not?
Nika: Because by cloning it, we could wind up tampering enough with that that they will be able to tell. And you know what? We have no reason to clone it.
Joshua: To be honest, I’m not sure they really care.
Nika: I’m not either, but ...
Joshua: I can see some vague possibilities where I can see it could be useful, but I’m not thinking ... do we really need to have this? I’m trying to weigh the value of having it versus not having it.

To be fair, the mechanics of it is similar to a virus, designed to spread information rapidly without people’s active participation.

Nika: Besides which, if you upload it into our computers you have no idea what the extraneous code in there might do.
Joshua: That’s probably the best point in the whole thing. I don’t know what on that computer that’s particularly valuable to spread widely but—
Nika: It could wipe our entire system.
Joshua: Now that I understand.
Nika: (to Rina) Just go put it back. We know what’s in there. We know why we need to keep it out of their hands. That’s all I really wanted to know. I wanted to make sure it wasn’t going to blow up on us. That’s it. Go put it back. If anything should ever come up, we know where to go to find something like that if we ever need it.
Rina: We’ll just go back to Mr. James Brion.
Nika: Yep. Knowing where to find such a thing could come in useful later.
Rina: Which is the reason why I came and told you about it. Because otherwise you never would have believed me if I came in at breakfast and said “What if we did this with a little kid’s camera?”
Nika: Go put it back. I’m waiting for clearance to leave. Go put it back.

Rina does as ordered. She opens the box—it’s just as she’d left it—and painstakingly covers her tracks with the cargo. When she’s done, she puts the box back in position and walks away.

The following morning, we get our clearance to leave. We dust off on September, the 25th and end our 6 weeks on the dirt of Beaumonde. Next stop, Triumph. ETA 16 days from now, Saturday, 11 October.

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Episode 601: Triumph, Special Features

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