"What's wrong?"
"Nothing, but I want you in on this."
Jason reached into his closet, pulled on a fresh jumpsuit, slipped into a pair of shoes and followed Tolwyn out the door.
It was the midnight to four watch, one officer and four enlisted personnel manning the controls. Actually, the time was an artificial creation, complete to the dimming of all lights aboard ship except in work areas. He looked over at the chronometer, 0308 Confederation standard time and it certainly felt like it. He realized it had to be important if Tolwyn was pulling him out of the sack now. Well, at least it was some excitement for a change. They'd been on station eight jump points inside the Empire for twenty days, the three ships of their fleet rigged down for complete silent running, tucked into an asteroid field in a small system that didn't even rate a name on the charts, only a numbered designation.
Jason followed Tolwyn on to the flight deck and saw a small crowd gathered around a monitor. They quietly approached. Vance looked up and nodded a greeting.
"We've just had a break on cracking their latest A code and we've caught a burst signal from Kilrah but again it was garbled, emanating from the far side of the planet aimed towards Hari. They're only sending this particular burst when this one station is facing towards the Hari system and thus turned directly away from us. We get bounce reflections off of their moon, but the signal is degraded to near gibberish as a result. It's a pattern which seems to be adding up to something. We've also had a couple of partial locks on a burst coming out of the Hari system but it's still beyond our range to get a clear read and fix on it."
"So?" Jason asked, wondering why he had been pulled out of bed to hear what was not any of his business to know anyhow.
"I want to take us closer in," Vance replied casually, as if asking to do a little jaunt from Earth to the moon and back as a Sunday afternoon pleasure ride.
Vance motioned for the two to go into an empty cubicle. He punched up a holo display and then a two dimensional screen on one wall.
"This is why I wanted to get in closer," Vance said quietly, pointing at the holo map which floated in the corner of the cubicle and then to the flat screen where a long string of what appeared to be gibberish, marked by occasional intelligible words scrolled by.
"It's definitely fleet code, their highest grade. We had a twenty-three percent decipher on the last one, then this new code came on line but is being used only by this one station aimed at Hari. It has all the markings of a highest priority fleet code. We got really lucky when one of my people saw a similarity to a code they used nearly eight years ago and pulled it for comparison. We immediately broke a string of words and can do a six percent translation and it's less than twelve hours old. In five or six days I can bring that up to thirty percent and from there comparisons of word groupings, even knowing the writing styles of certain operators and officials, can help us break the rest.
"So why go deeper in now?"
"Because in five or six days I might have enough of the code broken so that we can get some hard core information. When we do, I want to be in position to scoop those signals from Hari and also the signals going out from Kilrah."
"That means getting some place between Kilrah and Hari," Jason said quietly.
Vance smiled again and nodded
"Do you know what you're asking? Only one ship's ever gone to Kilrah and back and that's this baby. I don't know how many Confed spy or recon ships have gotten into the area and back, but I bet it's precious few."
"Enough to prove it's possible," Tolwyn interjected. "But you are not going in to Kilrah, you're going to circle the edge of the Empire out to the far side and head into Hari territory."
"You didn't say we, you said you," Jason replied, looking over at Tolwyn.
"I'm taking the jump-capable Sabre on this ship back to Landreich in an hour," Tolwyn said
"Hell, that's at least a seven day run, it'll be a nightmare in a ship that small. It doesn't even have ahead on board."
"Well, if you don't mind, I'm taking Kevin along to keep me company. It'll be a chance for us to catch up on family matters. We'll just have to make do and rough it a bit. One of us can sleep in the tail gunner's slot while the other flies."
Jason smiled, glad at least for once that Tolwyn was dropping the stiff upper lip routine and allowing himself to show some open attachment to his nephew.
"I'm putting you in command of this fleet Paladin is being sent out in Bannockburn within the hour, doing forward recon and moving ahead of you. His orders are to go straight into Hari territory, to track down their burst signal, monitor it, and if possible close in for a visual check on its location.
"I'm ordering you to go cautiously, feel your way out around the edge of the Empire but don't go beyond extreme burst signal range to a relay drone that I'll make sure is deployed here," and he pointed to a map, which he quickly pulled up on a screen, showing a position four jump points inside of the Empire. "If something should come up, either with you or back home, we don't want you out of touch. I need to go back, some things have come up I've got to attend to and Vance has a little assignment for me."
Vance nodded and pointed back to the screen.
"There's several standard code words imbedded in these signals that we've seen before. They're just like Kilrathi general fleet communications during the war, daily updates on the various fronts that fleet commanders had to be made aware of. I suspect this word 'Nak'tara' that keeps coming up refers to a possible target of interest to those furballs. We're going to try an old trick to see if we can smoke them out. Geoff here has to take the message back personally. It's something I would never trust to a burst signal because it could tip off this whole operation. I don't even want it in writing. It goes out in his head, and he can see to it along with his other business."
Jason looked over at the screen. This system was literally receiving and analyzing hundreds of millions of words, millions of conversations in Kilrathi, all its various dialects, and coded talk, hundreds of hours of video, and thousands of holo images every day. It was analyzing it, and boiling it down for info, and now because of a six percent translation of a half heard signal, he was being asked to jump Tarawa to the far side of the Empire. He had wandered into a shadow world of a quasi war which was beyond his ability to really understand. Either they were on to something, or they were all definitely nuts and he tended to think it was the latter.
Baron Jukaga smiled as he read the report. It seemed that both the Emperor and his son were to take the Imperial cruiser out to Largkza, the second moon of Kilrah to attend the yearly ritual of Pukcal, the day of atonement at the famed temple to Sivar located on that planet.
That the two would travel together was interesting in the extreme, a rare breach of security in allowing both the Emperor and the heir to travel aboard the same ship.
It was an opportunity he had to take though the thought chilled him. It was, after all, the greatest sin possible, one even beyond the imagining of nearly all of his race, to strike down a liege lord in secret without direct and open challenge. It was impossible, for to do so was seen as being beneath the contempt of the gods, and beyond that, would usually solve nothing for without challenge, one could not take the place of the rival destroyed.
And yet I would succeed to the throne in the end, he realized. And as for the sin of it, he thought, I do not believe in the gods, so it does not matter. Even as he thought that heresy, however, he still felt chilled by it. He found it interesting that some humans could believe thus, and therefore deny any ultimate reason for existence, but for one who knew the hierarchy of the hrai, the clan, and the Empire with the godlike Emperor above all, it was impossible to contemplate. For was it not evident that in the hierarchy of the living there was also a hierarchy in the universe with the gods above the Emperor so that even in death one would sit with his hrai in paradise?