Red Angel (12 page)

"A budget is a good idea. It will be a good
exercise, and you need to understand what it costs to run a house whether you
choose to live here or not. If you don't need to work on something, we could
spend an hour before dinner talking about expenses." She linked her tablet
to mine and began listing her monthly and yearly expenses: utilities, food,
Joetta the cook, Jason her driver, hydrogen for the car, and taxes. She owned
the house and the ground vehicle but explained many people paid them off with
monthly payments. Then she made a list of potential expenses: clothes;
maintenance on the house, car, and skimmer; fuel for the skimmer; and
miscellaneous items such as entertainment, eating out, clothes, and trinkets.
My head was spinning by the time Joetta called us for dinner.

"That's worse than navigational math," I
said as we rose. "I thought my pay was excessive for my needs ... and I'd
have lots left over to help."

"You do. Most of these expenses I have whether
you are here or not. We can work out some expenses you can contribute toward.
For example, you can pay for the skimmer's expenses."

"I'd like to contribute now that I can. I should
take care of the skimmer's expenses and help with some of the others."

"We'll discuss it again tomorrow. I don't need
the money, but I think it will be a good experience for you, and I'd like you
to understand what it takes to run our home." She didn't explain why, but
I knew she hoped I would live to inherit the house from her. I doubted it, but
I wanted to help her for the years of taking excellent care of me.

After dinner we sat on the couch, Alexa working on her
caseload and me reviewing my new solar system timelines. That too turned out to
be a bit overwhelming, as the Alliance had thirty-one planets and the merchants
we were tracking visited the majority of those systems at least twice each
year. In the end, I wasn't sure if developing a budget or finding a pattern for
the merchants was more difficult. I decided I needed a break and retired early.

* * *

For the next two days, I slowly eliminated one system
at a time because the merchants' travel to that system was either too random or
too seldom. That left twenty-five. Then I assumed the merchants wouldn't each
have a separate drop
—
although
there might have been more than one and they might occur on different days
—
and eliminated all
but six. Then I assumed only two drop systems and eliminated all but three. I
wasn't comfortable with making so many assumptions without anything to base
them on, but the only other choice was to give up. When I arrived at the office
on the third day, everyone looked like I felt.

"Who would like to start?" Adrian asked.

"I admit to not having any fun because I went to
bed every night frustrated and alone," Wilber said, shaking his head.
"I believe the solution lies in the data you gave us, but damned if I
could find it. Too many permutations with eight ships, thirty-one planets, and
hundreds of visits. If I had to guess, I'd say Zespa."

"I agree," Kris said. "I like Eastar
and Zespa but I wouldn't bet my rings on them."

"I had the same problem. The answer is there but
buried in the mass of data. I liked Black Water but don't have a concrete
reason. Anna?" Adrian asked.

"I had the same problem as you, so in desperation
I made some rather unsubstantiated assumptions and narrowed it down to Eastar,
Zespa, and Black Water."

"Now that's interesting. We all liked the same
systems. What assumptions did you make, Anna?" Adrian asked. I spent the
next hour going through my elimination process and each assumption.

"Reasonable assumptions, given we only know the
merchants involved and the systems they show as having visited," Wilber
said when I finished. "They could have stopped at an uninhabited system,
but then they wouldn't need the celestial coordinates or the missiles."

"Agreed." Adrian linked his tablet to the
large monitor in the room and began plotting the coordinates for the Wheeler's
missile into each of the three systems. It could have been any one of them, as
the location in each system was out of the normal traffic patterns and far
enough away for the planet to be undetectable. "I'd suggest we send our
conjecture to commander Stauffer. He might want to pass it on to someone."

"We need the time for the drop. From the timeline
I created, the Wheeler doesn't appear to have visited any of those three
systems on a regular schedule," Kris said, looking at her tablet. Reviewing
my timeline for the Wheeler, I agreed.

Adrian sat staring at his table, then nodded. "That
would make sense. This isn’t a production line where you know what and when
something will come off the line. They would have to communicate by some means,
probably coded messages. What if I put in a request for the incoming and
outgoing messages to the Wheeler from each system it visited?"

"Worth a try," Kris said. "We don't
have another project."

"All right, I'll get Stauffer to put in a request
and let you know when I get it. Actually, I'll send it to each of you
encrypted. After you get it, let's meet every three days here in the office. I
will also verify with the commander that he is okay with us continuing with our
current line of pursuit."

We all stayed while Adrian went to talk to Stauffer. I
think everyone hoped we could solve the mystery, rather than the astronomers
solving it. We all liked puzzles, and I suspected none of us wanted to hand the
solution off to someone else. He returned an hour later.

"Stauffer wants us to stay on the case and is
making this the number one priority and agrees with our line of pursuit. He was
pleased were doing it without waiting for approval. He had talked with Admiral
Rawls, and she wants us involved. He was just about to tell us when I caught
him."

Everyone left smiling. Like them, I wanted to solve
the problem. I didn't care about the credit for solving it, just that we were
able to do it on our own. And I guessed secretly, I thought that would increase
the odds that the powers-that-be would be less likely to split us up.

The next two days dragged, since I was anxious to get
started on the messages. Instead, Alexa and I spent time discussing budgets and
expenses. I came to the conclusion that a junior lieutenant's salary wasn't
that much—mid middle class at best. Alexa had a retirement at the rank of
commodore, a salary as a magistrate, and more importantly thirty years of
savings. Her wants had been minimal, and most of her money had gone into
savings and investments. That was another thing I had to learn about and
another reason I wanted those messages, so I could stop thinking about budgets
and investments. Red didn't seem interested either.

To my relief, I received a coded package from Adrian
the morning of the third day and quickly invoked Crazy Numbers and watched as
the package slowly decoded. There were several hundred messages. I sat back
trying to decide how to attack the problem. Just reading each one was not only
slow but would make it difficult to see a pattern. So I decided to sort the
messages into categories: from the Wheeler to a merchant, a merchant to the
Wheeler, in-system message from the Wheeler, in-system message to the Wheeler, inter-planet
messages from the Wheeler, inter-planet messages to the Wheeler, and lastly,
all other messages.

That produced workable piles from twenty-five to
seventy messages each. The next question, where to start? Which would be most
likely to produce results? The Wheeler had to get pickup and drop-off times and
maybe coordinates from an outside source, so communications between merchants
seemed least likely. In-system to the Wheeler seemed inefficient since the
Wheeler traveled to many sites over the months, consequently inter-planet to
the Wheeler seemed more likely. That category included forty-one messages. I
was getting ready to start when Alexa returned home from work, and I decided to
take a break. Dinner was an important meal to me because Alexa and I used it to
catch up on each other's activities.

"I'm glad you have something to work on because even
I was getting tired of budgets and expenses." she laughed as we settled
down on the couch with our drinks and reading matter.

"Me too. That was making me feel like an adult,
and I'm not ready. You'll have to put up with your juvenile daughter a bit
longer."

"Can't blame you; being an adult can take the fun
out of life." She smiled as she picked up her tablet and began reading. I
picked up mine and opened the group of letters that went through the Wave communications
System, WCS, commonly referred to as the WavCom, which provided
faster-then-light messaging between planets, and began reading. The messages
were short, as you paid by the word. I finished my first pass in three hours.
They fell naturally into subcategories: to the Wheeler from customers to the
captain, personal to the captain, and personal to crew members. It was getting
late, and looking for patterns when you are tired is a waste of time, so I
selected the ‘customers to the captain’ messages, which contained eleven
messages over the three-year period. Even so, it was late when I finished
checking the seven company names and their product lines with the messages. I
saw nothing out of place and decided to call it a night. Apparently Red didn't
either, since he had retired into my sleeping smock an hour earlier.

After a quick breakfast, I returned to the problem.
With Red on my forehead, I checked the ten sent directly to the captain. They
were about scheduling, maintenance, and fees concerning the Wheeler. Three
hours later I could find nothing that would suggest a further look. After a
break for lunch, I began on the twenty sent directly to the crew. Since the
messages were expensive, I wasn't surprised to find that only seven crew
members had received personal messages. Four had one each, one had two, and the
other two had the remaining fourteen. The fourteen messages concerned family
members and sickness.

It was probably my imagination, but I thought Red
seemed more interested in the messages to the crew than to the captain. A two-hour
check of the Wheeler's crew rosters for the three years I was examining
indicated that Dan Mcrae wasn't listed as a crew member. He had received nine
messages concerning his ailing mother. Further digging revealed five Mcraes on
Black Water where the messages originated, but no Vanessa Mcrae—his
mother. The other crew member, Victor Decker who received five messages, did
have a brother named Charles on Black Water. Hoping to speed things up, I sent
a message to Adrian.

To: Lieutenant
Adrian Shrader, Copy: Lieutenant Kristyn Sinclair, Lieutenant Wilber Weiss

 
There is no crew member named Dan Mcrae nor
any mother named Vanessa Mcrae on Black Water, and the hospital has no record
of a Mcrae being admitted during the period we are searching.

Signed: Paulus

I forced myself to take a deep breath, relax, and stop
for dinner with Alexa. I had been at it all day and needed a rest. Two hours
later, I felt relaxed as I settled down on the couch, opened my tablet, and
began reading the nine messages. By midnight I felt certain the numbers were
times and or coordinates, but I couldn't find the key to decode them. I went to
bed hoping one of my team members had broken the code.

* * *

When I arrived at the office, everyone was there
looking tired and nursing cups of coffee.

"We all feel you found the critical messages, but
no one has managed to decipher them. Have you?" Adrian asked.

All eyes turned on me.

"No. I'll wager the coordinates we found are for
Black Water and those messages are the pickup and drop off dates and times. But
I couldn't find the key."

"I ran every code-breaking algorithm I know
against them, and nothing," Wilber said looking frustrated.

"Lots of numbers, real dates, and times, but not
meaningful for our purposes. The Wheeler wasn't in Black Water on those
dates," Kris said, throwing up her hands.

"Or in Zespa or Eastar," Adrian said,
confirming what I had thought to accomplish by sharing my
findings—examination of the data from several different perspectives. If
we could decode the Wheeler's messages, we could probably decode the messages
to the other merchants, which would hopefully lead to the foreign connection.
"What say we try brainstorming, since we are all here. Maybe we'll stumble
on something." Adrian stood and began walking toward our conference room,
with us following. The minutes passed in silence; every once in a while someone
would get up to get something to drink or visit the latrine or stand and stare
out the window.

"This is the quietest brainstorming I've ever
participated in," Wilber said, breaking the two-hour-long silence. I had
been pondering Red's lack of interest—my imagination—in Mcrae’s
messages this morning versus last night.
Probably
disgusted I can't find the solution
, I mused.

"Won't it be likely the entire crew was part of
the smuggling? If that's true, maybe one or more of the other messages contains
the key," I mused, thinking out loud. Suddenly, everyone had their tablets
in hand. I shrugged and began my own examination of the other messages.

"There seems to be a correlation with the receipt
of messages to the other individual crew members and Mcrae's messages. I wonder
if the two crew members with family sicknesses are the pickup and drop off
dates and times and the other messages contain the key," Kris said, her
hands flying across her tablet.

"Let's first check out the senders of those
messages. Maybe we can eliminate some as legitimate. Not only that, but also
while the names are real, the facts in the messages appear inconsistent,"
Adrian said and proceeded to distribute names to each of us one at a time. As
we finished one, he would give us another. Late in the afternoon, we finished.
"Interesting, it appears except for one, none of the messages are real. The
senders’ names are real but not the facts. Ironically, the Mcraes did live on
Black Water but moved prior to the start of the messages. I suggest we work
independently tomorrow and meet the day after," Adrian said to nods of
agreement.