Both Murphy and the exec turned and stared at the marine. “And, Sergeant, how in hell did you know to expect to see it?”
“It had to be there. And because the alarms triggered at five one hundredths of a second, it was the one small section that could not be digitally redrawn before a secure offline copy was made. The two computers are substantially the same speed, but the general security and surveillance computer had a lot to do. It still almost managed.”
“And all this nonsense means what?” Murphy asked, genuinely confused.
“It means that your girls didn’t disappear anywhere. After they did what they needed to do, they simply stopped, got up, and walked out the door.”
“Impossible!” Lieutenant Commander Mohr asserted. “They’d be all over our sensors!”
“Not, sir, if the surveillance computer was told to remove them from any and all monitoring.”
“What?”
“They are here, somewhere. They are simply being completely ignored, both by the monitoring computers and any crewmembers they might come into contact with. The background for every single security point on the ship is in memory, so only the parts that move or change need to be dealt with. Wherever they are, the computer is simply not showing or reporting them, but painting each frame and adjusting all records using prior data to have them not show up. As I say, I don’t know how they do it, but the computers are self-aware and in many ways would be recognized as just other life-forms, so whatever they’re doing to make them not noticed by our people is the same thing they did with the computer. I don’t think they know how they do it. In fact, I’d rather doubt it. But they’re here, as you saw them, most likely walking around the ship, and absolutely no person or computer is taking any notice of them. Is, in fact, blotting out their very existence. That’s why I mentioned telepathy, although I don’t think they read minds, I just do not have another term for this. They could be right here, right now, and neither we nor our highly sophisticated surveillance equipment would show it. Our brains would simply paint them out, just like the computers are doing. Since they don’t seem very bright, sir, I think we’re in very big trouble if they stop sightseeing and begin pushing buttons and interfering with other processes. This ship’s run by computers that are of the same relative design as the one they’ve compromised.”
The chief of security and the executive officer were appalled. Murphy, a queer half-lunatic look in his eyes, stroked his chin and muttered to himself, “What an idiot I’ve been! And me with the three most perfect burglars in the universe!”
Sittithong, however, was not convinced. “This is all well and good, Maslovic, but it’s a fantasy. Never once have we ever observed such powers. We’ve had people working on such things for decades, probably much longer, but even if there is some sort of psychic power in some people, it’s very minor and very limited and not subject to control. I’ll need more than a few fuzzy frames of video to believe any of what you say.”
“The Holmes Conundrum,” Maslovic sighed.
“Eh? What’s that, Sergeant?”
“The Holmes Conundrum, sir,” Mohr jumped in. “If you eliminate all the other explanations, then what is left, no matter how unbelievable, must be the truth. And we’ve had more of these kinds of powers in our histories than you suspect. It’s mostly suppressed, since the results were much less than threatening to security. Still, within decades of us establishing colonies and going through wormholes, we have been getting mutations. Most are minor, of no consequence, or they simply can not be handled. Telepaths either grow up as idiots or they go rather messily insane. There’s no control. Contrary to their being in our minds, everyone and everything around them, from the start, is in their heads. We simply aren’t designed to cope with that. Until the Great Silence, there were squads of experts whose job it was to track down anyone with even mild paranormal talents and either recruit them into studies of our own or simply erase them if we could not. Now there are no secret laboratories and no central authority to do that. Sooner or later this sort of thing was bound to come up. It is possible that we have such a case here.”
“I wonder if it’s not more than possible, sir,” Mohr responded. “Take Tara Hibernius. Isolated, out of the way, totally controlled by its governing councils. Who’s to say someone there isn’t trying to develop these sorts of people? And if any are discovered, well, then, there’s this witchcraft thing. The planet’s normal but ignorant population acts as their guardians and security force without even knowing it. Surely not all of those scientific groups and psych squads were on the other side of the Silence…”
The exec was growing whiter with every sentence. Finally she asked, “Why have I never heard of these people and this operation? Why don’t even our databases on a ship like this contain anything?”
Mohr looked slightly uncomfortable. “Yours don’t. Ours do. You see, Commander, until now, you didn’t really have a need to know.”
Sittithong started to say something, but the words wouldn’t come. Finally she asked, “Does the captain know?”
“Um, probably not.”
“The Admiralty?”
“Um, unknown, sir. It depends on whether or not they’ve needed the information.”
“And who decides who needs this information?”
Mohr was now more than uncomfortable, he had the look of a man with a noose around his neck. “Well, the Security Directorate, sir.”
“Listen, Mohr… This is a small but compact independent task force. We no longer have a civil authority to answer to. You know that.”
“Yes, sir?”
“And you’re telling me that those who command this task force, those who make the life or death decisions on it, are having information withheld from them by junior officers and even”—she looked over at Maslovic—“enlisted personnel?”
“It is all available to them if they require it.”
“I see. And you, and your comrades, you alone decide if they require it?”
“Not exactly, but in a practical sense, yes. It has to be that way, Commander. It is a part of our job, our oaths. The information we have is far more secure than anything else on this ship. If the sergeant’s right, and I believe he may be, then your entire computer system, command and control and all support and subsystems, have already been compromised. Ours isn’t because they don’t know it isn’t. Now they can’t learn of it and compromise it because it remains in the Directorate and in this room.”
“And if they’re already here? Assuming I buy this nonsense?”
“We’ve taken some precautions, sir, in this area. But, they could still be here. We do not believe it would mean anything to them if they were, though. These aren’t highly intelligent secret agents. They are three units of someone’s breeding stock who think they are getting their powers from demons inside black holes.”
“They’da been bored to death by this point if they was here,” Murphy commented dryly.
“And what about him?” Sittithong asked, gesturing towards Murphy. “He certainly knows now.”