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really put the pressure on us to get this D-5 on line and also caused the loss
of a lot of good intel people behind the lines. The jump we just completed is
the deepest in we've ever been able to take equipment like this. You can see
already the streams of data pouring in."
Richards led them over to his command booth and offered a couple of cups of
coffee to his guests. Jason noticed that these people seemed to live on
caffeine, and a fair number of them were addicted to Ian's habit of tobacco, a
practice he found totally mystifying and somewhat disgusting.
"The D-5 can monitor any signal within its six hundred light year range and
pinpoint its origin. The hard part is programming it to figure out what is
worth looking at out of the billions of messages it picks up every day and
then passing it to a human analyst for evaluation.
"The analyst's job is the toughest. It takes someone with a sixth sense to
decipher what appear to be unrelated facts but actually are part of a
pattern.
"We do the same thing for the media channels, the public communication lines,
and of course the military and government lines,"
and he pointed to the flashing red and yellow lights back on the holo display
of Kilrah.
"Those are the tough buggers, a lot of it is burst signaled and highly
encoded."
"Damn, there's hundreds of them," Jason said. "Something must be up."
Vance laughed softly.
"Over ninety percent are dummy channels, broadcasting complete gibberish,
total nonsense words that actually tie up most of our decoding equipment since
we're not sure if it's garbage or the real thing. Sometimes you might have a
burst signal with a million words in it, all encoded, and the real message is
twenty words in the middle, each word separated from the next by say six
thousand four hundred words.
"Why that number?"
"Remember they have eight fingers and we have ten, so their numerical system
is base eight We tend to look a bit more intensely at base eight numerical
lines as a result. What gets frustrating is that they are using at least a
dozen different codes at any given time, with the highest level material going
on what we call Fleet Code A, which tends to change every twenty-four to forty
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days. The real messages are hidden in a lot of garbage and we have to wade
through each message and might spend weeks tracking down promising stuff only
to discover it's a decoy.
"Some of their people even have a sense of humor about it. One message, when
finally translated, was a simple 'Hey, stupid, we fooled you,'
and another was a long excerpt from what I guess was a Kilrathi dirty book.
Decoding and translating each of those things took up time and equipment. We
can't ignore a single message because we never know if we might hit paydirt or
not. So we wade through all of this, figure out the real signals from the
fake, then spend a hell of a lot of time cracking the code, and just when we
think we've got it, they go and change the code and we're back to square one.
Then to top it off they might have a station
that's quiet for weeks or months, and it pops off a lone burst signal then
shuts down. Trying to even figure out where it came from out of a billion
cubic light years of space was nuts until the D-4 model, which could do a
Doppler analysis and at least do a probable trace."
"I'd go mad," Tolwyn said.
"Some of us do," Vance replied. "It takes a special kind of person to do this.
You fighter jockeys, your battle is one of skill and wits, but it gets played
out in seconds. Some of our battles last years."
Vance smiled.
"I've been in this game for twenty-nine years. I've dreamed all those years of
having something like this D-5. With the new antenna array we can pick up
bursts from up to six hundred light years out; only a couple of generations
back in the system we were lucky to get consistent reads from ten light years
away. We used to spend billions on recon drones which would go in, store up
data for a week, then send out a burst signal. Once it signaled the Kilrathi
would be onto it and take it out. Now this one system can cover an area that
would have required thousands of drones.
"The big problem now is that counter intel believes they knew of the
D-4 and maybe suspected our D-5. We've noticed a decrease in signal traffic
and suspect they're shifting more to courier. So far we've yet to figure out
how to read a dispatch pouch six hundred light years behind the lines."
As they continued to talk, Vance led them around the flight deck. Small
cubicles had been set up in the center of the room, and hunched over in each
was an operator, going through data that the computer felt was of sufficient
importance to bring to the attention of a human operator.
"I've got a hundred and three analysts with me on this mission, each of them a
specialist and the best in his field with eight or more years of training
behind him. There are another forty programmers who feed in the requests and
another twenty just to troubleshoot any glitches in the machine."
Jason looked around the room, wondering just who indeed was paying for all of
this. He had his suspicions but knew it was best not to ask. What was equally
troubling was the matter-antimatter mine that was almost
casually brought aboard with the rest of the equipment. It was placed in the [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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