Scorpius 14, m0039, continued
Their assailant has chosen his ground well; the trio are in a steep-sided gully, and would have to make ten or fifteen feet of height to get out of it and clear of the rocks, while there are few buttresses or projections to screen them. Florence, who is in the lead, decides on a simple solution; she takes a run straight at the oncoming rocks, then jumps, passing clear over them. The other two, lacking her training, opt to move more laterally; Jianwei jumps well up the side wall of the gully, but then finds himself hanging on by his fingertips, while Vajra finds himself falling back into the path of the rocks.
Florence makes a graceful landing despite the very uneven ground as Jianwei clambers laboriously onto a more level spot and Vajra's cybershell suffers a bruising impact from the first, smallest oncoming rocks. Florence charges the attacker, and is pleased not to find herself facing any kind of weapons fire; Jianwei twists around to watch, but can't do much else; Vajra scrabbles aside from the rockfall and begins desperately scrambling up the side of the gully, barely clinging on as the rocks pass below his feet.
Covering the last few yards of the distance with a leap, Florence aims a flying kick at her opponent, but he seems to have a little martial arts training (not unusual on Mars); he twists aside and hits her with a rock that he's gathered up. Fortunately, her protective environment suit absorbs the blow. They face off, and then Florence hears Jianwei; he's calling on the man to surrender, but the man evidently lacks her Felicia ears, and the call didn't carry well over the distance in the thin Martian air. She takes up the idea, echoing Jianwei in identifying the team as EU consular services employees - and faced with a skilled and aggressive catgirl fighter at close quarters, the man deflates and gives up. Jianwei and Vajra clamber back down to join Florence; fortunately, the damage to Vajra's cybershell is light.
The attacker is, as expected, Piotr Lipinski. Confronted with an accusation of foul play against his partner by people who identify themselves as EU agents, Lipinski defends himself; so far as he was concerned, he and Professor Zajdel were attacked, together - with orbital weapons! - and he didn't know who to trust. So he fled, and hoped to drive off anyone who came after him. He had ideas of contacting unspecified friends when he'd got far enough.
It sounds an odd story, but the team escorts Lipinski back down the slope to their rover, listening to him as they go. He is able to illustrate his claims; as he describes things, he and Zajdel were camping out, and her physiological software model was still on Mars University time, so she took a late-night "stroll" down to look at the site which they were set to study while he watched before retiring for the night.
His NAI wearable's video recording of that scene for the important few seconds show a single glowing line suddenly appearing from above to strike the rock face, which trembles and then collapses onto Zajdel's exploration shell before she can get away. The image certainly looks like a hypersonic kinetic strike arriving from orbital altitudes - although the frame rate of the recording limits the details that can be derived. Of course, it would be trivial to fake such imagery, given modern video editing technology - Lipinski's wearable doesn't have any kind of secure evidence-bonded encrypted storage, and this really wouldn't stand up in court - but arranging such fakery would have been tricky in the circumstances, and overall, the team start to trust Lipinski's account. His actions of the last few days may have been unwise, but they were quite understandable, given what he says and shows them. On the other hand, as murder attempts go, this one was both bizarre - no one would even have known that Zajdel's cybershell was where it was, unless they used some quite intensive satellite imagery analysis - and wildly excessive - an orbital weapon against one or two civilians?
The group reaches the rover, and they remember the other puzzle; the mass of accounting data that reached them recently from an anonymous source. They briefly wonder if this was some kind of distraction attack, but decide that the timing was probably pure coincidence. (Lipinski denies all knowledge of this stuff.) So they and their companion AIs review the data. A quick check suggests that it's apparently all valid and mostly public material, but it's been carefully examined by someone, and a number of seemingly innocuous entries have been neatly highlighted for attention. Looking at these, the team are driven to conclude that Chen's business, while well enough run over the decades, received a fair amount of very subtle assistance from various other enterprises - most of them Chinese, and some known to be either government-run or closely associated with the government. In other words, the Singaporean Chen was in cahoots with the Chinese authorities, or had otherwise given them good cause to support him over the years. The likeliest guess would be that he was an agent of influence within the Singaporean business community.
As the rover moves off, the team also download some analysis software and run it against Lipinksi's image of the orbital strike. This contains enough information that they can project the glowing line up to orbit, and then cross-reference with standard navigational databases. The likely candidate for a point of origin of the attack is an unmanned US-owned satellite, marked as a non-functional meteorological survey unit - which, strangely enough, showed a very small "undocumented orbital trajectory change" at the time of the strike. This was small enough that anyone who noticed it would put it down to a micrometeorite impact or a bit of out-gassing - but it could also reflect a projectile launch.
So this looks like a US attack, from one of the military units that no one admits to having in Mars orbit but everyone assumes that other people have. But what was it for? Lipinski has no idea, and as murder attempts go, it was imprecise and expensive. It's conceivable that the Americans didn't even know that Zajdel was near the strike zone. The team confer as the rover drives itself southwards; they decide that Maria Vega almost certainly is an SIA agent, but what's her mission? And what was Hua's call of earlier in the day about? Why was he concerned?
Jianwei makes a decision. He writes up events so far, and files his report with the embassy, marked for prompt attention. Within minutes, Colette Schmidt responds, agreeing with his provisional analysis and offering support; she authorises hire of a four-seat hopper, which will meet the team at an arbitrary point in the wilderness and bring them back to Port Lowell, hopefully before anyone hostile with orbital weapons to use can locate them.
And so the rover changes course slightly as the embassy makes arrangements. As they travel, the team talk more, and Lipinski kills time by asking for access to the geological data that the team accumulated from various sources concerning the landslip site; he wants to know what may have provoked the attack. By the time they reach the rendezvous site, he's drawn a provisional conclusion; the landslip exposed geological materials that suggest significant deposits of rare earths - quite valuable stuff, in fact. This is news to him, and he isn't sure if anyone else could have known about it; like most of Mars, that area has been surveyed a little, but so far as he knows, only cursorily and from a distance. Still, it's possible that someone could have put enough information together to guess at the possibility.
So - intentionally or otherwise - the strike exposed this fact, right in front of a pair of trained geologists, in fact. But the team can't work out why anyone would have taken this approach. However, reviewing recent communications traffic from the site, they realise that although Maria Vega has now flown away, she's left some kind of active communications node there. One likely guess would be that it's the snakebot that was riding in her hopper. If she knows about the rare earths deposit, it could act as a claim marker, although it's not doing so at this point.
At the rendezvous site, everyone transfers to the hired hopper, and Vajra uses a microbot swarm to sanitise the rover, seeking to eliminate any evidence of Lipinski having been on board. Then, they send the unmanned rover back towards New Buffalo, and take off towards Port Lowell. There'll necessarily be some refuelling stops along the way, but before the first of those, Jianwei receives a call - from Maria Vega. She's pretty clearly fishing for information about the EU's position and intentions - albeit politely - and he straight-faces in response. He does mention the snakebot, and Vega confirms when asked that it might serve as a marker on a geological claim. So when that call ends, Jianwei calls Hua to ask about his current situation, letting slip more or less deliberately in the process that they believe that Mr Chen may be intending to change his national allegiance in the near future.
The hopper lands at a field outside Port Lowell, and the team take a taxi back to town, from which they intend to call the ambassador - except that she calls first, to tell them that, well, whether through their efforts or otherwise, a large cat now seems to be out of the bag. Mr Chen has declared the intention to apply for Chinese citizenship, and the Chinese have responded favourably - which will mean that a Chinese citizen's residence is deep in the middle of American territory, with a good claim to much of the surrounding area under "fair use" conventions. The Americans have responded by registering a formal claim to the mineral deposits on and around the landslip site (with, yes, that cybershell acting as their claim marker). Everyone is doubtless scowling at everyone else.
The team admit that they're still not sure what happened, but Schmidt, the long-time career diplomat with experience of the politics of Mars, is able to make some educated guesses. Her guess is that the Chinese identified the mineral deposits first, from some previous survey or whatever, and decided to use their agent of influence to move into that area. However, the SIA must have identified Chen as a Chinese patsy, worked out what was going on, spotted the deposits themselves once they had cause to look at that area, and decided to do something about it. Schmidt doubts that the kinetic strike was meant to be homicidal - the Americans probably honestly didn't know that Zajdel was in the danger zone. Rather, the intention was probably to expose the rare earth deposits to the geologists when they came to examine the site the next day, on the plausible (and correct) assumption that, although they had been hired by Chen, they were neutral parties - giving the American Commonwealth an excuse to move in.
However, after Zajdel's late-night excursion got her temporarily killed and thus drew so much attention, everyone had to scramble and improvise. Vega was doubtless sent in to try and salvage the situation, and Chen and his handlers have been forced to show their hand in response. So both sides were trying to exploit the E.U.'s neutrality to their own ends, and will doubtless continue to do so - which may turn out to be beneficial, or just annoying. Coming out of this with provisional identification of Hua and Vega as, respectively, Chinese and US agents, and with that "dead" satellite identified as a clandestine American orbital weapons platform, is all bonus.
Anyway, Schmidt tells the team to bring Lipinski into the embassy for personal debriefing, and he's willing to go along. They assure him that, even if they weren't pretty sure that no one is aiming orbital weapons now, this is a safe place - the effect of which is only spoilt when he meets a cluster of maintenance cybershells, and is told that they are just completing the repairs occasioned by the last armed assault on the place.
Showing posts with label Maglev. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Maglev. Show all posts
Wednesday, December 8, 2010
Tuesday, November 30, 2010
Geological Research
Scorpius 13, m0039, continued
Reckoning that time is still of the essence in all this, the team make their excuses and leave Mr Chen's house as soon as they have eaten. Florence takes control of the rover, and drives them - quickly and efficiently - to the site of the incident. Specifically, they first visit the Poles' camp site, which proves to have been ignored by the automated rescue mission to the actual landslip. They take a proper forensic approach, with Vajra first sending in an aerobot swarm, leaving the ground and all material objects untouched. Vajra shares the data feed with Aunty, who has the skill sets to process some of it usefully, and it is she who identifies and catalogues the various footprints and exploratory cybershell track-prints in the surrounding dust.
Applying criminological software to the task, Aunty's first conclusion is that this doesn't look like a crime scene; there are certainly no signs of violence. Vajra, however, notes that there is no sign of any kind of comms base station, as a two-person expedition in the Martian wilderness might be expected to use. Professor Zajdel's cybershell may have had good comms capability on board, but this does seem like a curious oversight.
So the team next move in carefully, sweeping the camp with EM scanners. They pick up no signals, and a quick look at the equipment lying around finds little with much in the way of sentience or memory. Looking round, they find other, perhaps more significant, lacks; there's not much in the way of food, and those party members with training in survival skills see other bits and pieces of equipment missing that they'd assume should be present. There's also at least one set of tracks, heading north, which might be compatible with a human leaving and not having returned.
This causes them to examine the Web access logs for the two Poles more closely, and Vajra notes that Zajdel seemingly dropped out of communication entirely about ten minutes before Lipinski. The team begins trying to construct hypotheses to fit all this data. They're now suspecting some kind of criminal action on Lipinski's part - but if that's correct, whatever he did, he didn't engage in much intelligent planning. Of course, a lot of crime is opportunistic or generally unintelligent...
Anyway, the team promised to find a landing site for Maria Vega. Jianwei calls her, but she says that doesn't plan to come out to the site that night. Florence, the trained pilot, looks around for sites, but doesn't find very much at this point.
So now, the team looks at the automated systems working on the landslip site. These turn out to consist of a cluster of small "swarmdozers" (with non-sapient control systems with a certain amount of communal intelligence) under the authority of a low-sapient program in a static unit. These haven't found much that the LAI judged it necessary to report as yet, but the team run analyses on the samples which the burrowing swarmdozers have accumulated, and turn up a few volatiles and metallic micro-fragments to suggest an area to search for Professor Zajdel's cybershell. The LAI acquiesces to their suggestion, and Vajra sends in a small "surveillance worm" and works with the rescue systems. This leaves the two organics free to go and take a look higher up the landslide site. They don't pick up much in the way of geological evidence there, though, or find any tracks. Vajra, meanwhile, has some problems, mainly with the tunnel behind his worm collapsing (the LAI had problems plotting a safe mining scheme), but does find some metallic fragments. Forensic assessment suggests that these come from the missing cybershell - although only from the outer casing.
Vajra doesn't have to sleep, but the other two do, so they head back to Mr Chen's house, leaving Vajra and the other AIs working. Chen has retired to bed by the time they arrive, but two people are still up and showing an interest in what they might have to report; Maria Vega, who Jianwei realises is maybe carefully judging what she says and how she says it, and the servant named Hua, who they have down as Mr Chen's secretary (in the most traditional sense) or personal assistant, who is coolly bland. The four individuals share green tea and engage in subtly guarded conversation, before the Europeans retire to bed. On an instinctive judgement, Jianwei tells Aunty to research possible links between Ms. Vega and Lipinski while he sleeps. Meanwhile, the team have also asked Quentin, back at the embassy, to acquire some thermal imaging data for a wide area around this location from satellite sources; they suspect that it might locate Lipinski.
Scorpius 14, m0039
Vajra and the LAI rescue system work through the night, but there's one small accident in that time - Vajra's surveillance worm gets trampled by a swarmdozer, disabling it. Still, by the time the sun rises, the swarmdozers have recovered enough fragments of manufactured material for Vajra to conclude that some hardware, including computer systems, was crushed by the landslide, and everything about the finds is compatible with it having been Zajdel's cybershell.
Meanwhile, Jianwei and Florence awake to news from Quentin; the IR imagery has indeed picked up a trace of what looks like a one-person camp, at a distance that might well rate as a couple of day's walk north of the landslide site. Quentin also has messages from some of Professor Zajdel's friends in the academic community, who have been applying their skills to the puzzle of their colleague's misfortune; they've been analysing available imagery, including the reports that Vajra and the other AIs have recently filed from the site, and combining it with the seismic traces from the time, and their conclusion is that the landslide looks to have been triggered by some kind of abrupt and not very natural-looking shock or impact.
Aunty, on the other hand, has little to report; if there are any signs of Lipinski and Vega having any kind of association, she hasn't been able to locate them on the Web. However, when Jianwei takes a few minutes to casually review the raw data which Aunty has acquired, he notes that Vega is a very mobile sort of operative; it looks as though working for the Martian Commonwealth not only keeps her busy, but almost permanently on the move, in person. Then, in a moment of inspiration, Jianwei looks again at some wilderness travel plan filings from about a year ago - and realise that she was most likely in the region west of Olympus Mons at exactly the time when Dr Tiberius Vartex had his nigh-fatal hopper crash. That could just be coincidence, of course.
Jianwei begins the process of filing confirmation that Professor Zajdel's processor has been destroyed, which will allow the insurance company to begin the process of releasing her latest backup to run and covering the cost of a replacement cybershell - although they'll probably cautiously wait a little longer to complete the process. He also decides to tell Vega some but not all of what they know, including Vajra's discovery of the cybershell remains, to provide her with some of the visual imagery that they acquired the previous day (but not much from the camp site), and to make another effort to find a landing site for her hopper. She flies over to the site quite promptly, and when she arrives, Vajra notices a spike in local network traffic; her snakebot is hitting the rescue-system LAI with lots of queries for accessible data.
The European team meet up and head back to the camp site, but only take a quick look there. Then they slip behind a ridge, hoping to avoid Vega's attention as they head north in pursuit of (they assume) Lipinski. Jianwei and Florence both have tactical training, which pays off here in helping them to be subtle about this. They do make a call to Mr Chen, though, to thank him for his hospitality and to bid him farewell.
They find the site which they picked up on the satellite IR images, but it's now been abandoned, so they continue to track their quarry northwards. It's slow going, though; they spend a lot of their time out of the rover, walking ahead of it while scanning the Martian dust from as close as possible. This carries them through the late morning and afternoon, and they find that they are now moving into an area of rising hills. Florence's driving skills enable them to keep the rover with them for quite a while - albeit sometimes with only three of its six wheels on the ground at a time - but eventually, they enter a seriously rocky region, and have to leave the vehicle behind.
As they climb, they receive a call from Hua, who wants to ask them to place the data which they've accumulated under a diplomatic seal - not making it a secret, but certifying it and protecting it against tampering, the better for use in, say, future court cases. Hua now seems increasingly cagey; Jianwei doesn't perceive him as a servant any more. When Jianwei suggests that he make the same request of Ms Vega, he demurs; "your employers' neutrality is much respected", he adds, slightly gnomically.
Then, as the party ascends a slope, Jianwei spots a figure, waiting and lurking behind a stack of rocks further up. Those rocks begin to slide, tumbling down the slope towards the group - and at that same moment, their AI aides report that a large volume of data is arriving in their in-boxes. It appears to be a great deal of accounts data relating to Mr Chen's past business career...
Reckoning that time is still of the essence in all this, the team make their excuses and leave Mr Chen's house as soon as they have eaten. Florence takes control of the rover, and drives them - quickly and efficiently - to the site of the incident. Specifically, they first visit the Poles' camp site, which proves to have been ignored by the automated rescue mission to the actual landslip. They take a proper forensic approach, with Vajra first sending in an aerobot swarm, leaving the ground and all material objects untouched. Vajra shares the data feed with Aunty, who has the skill sets to process some of it usefully, and it is she who identifies and catalogues the various footprints and exploratory cybershell track-prints in the surrounding dust.
Applying criminological software to the task, Aunty's first conclusion is that this doesn't look like a crime scene; there are certainly no signs of violence. Vajra, however, notes that there is no sign of any kind of comms base station, as a two-person expedition in the Martian wilderness might be expected to use. Professor Zajdel's cybershell may have had good comms capability on board, but this does seem like a curious oversight.
So the team next move in carefully, sweeping the camp with EM scanners. They pick up no signals, and a quick look at the equipment lying around finds little with much in the way of sentience or memory. Looking round, they find other, perhaps more significant, lacks; there's not much in the way of food, and those party members with training in survival skills see other bits and pieces of equipment missing that they'd assume should be present. There's also at least one set of tracks, heading north, which might be compatible with a human leaving and not having returned.
This causes them to examine the Web access logs for the two Poles more closely, and Vajra notes that Zajdel seemingly dropped out of communication entirely about ten minutes before Lipinski. The team begins trying to construct hypotheses to fit all this data. They're now suspecting some kind of criminal action on Lipinski's part - but if that's correct, whatever he did, he didn't engage in much intelligent planning. Of course, a lot of crime is opportunistic or generally unintelligent...
Anyway, the team promised to find a landing site for Maria Vega. Jianwei calls her, but she says that doesn't plan to come out to the site that night. Florence, the trained pilot, looks around for sites, but doesn't find very much at this point.
So now, the team looks at the automated systems working on the landslip site. These turn out to consist of a cluster of small "swarmdozers" (with non-sapient control systems with a certain amount of communal intelligence) under the authority of a low-sapient program in a static unit. These haven't found much that the LAI judged it necessary to report as yet, but the team run analyses on the samples which the burrowing swarmdozers have accumulated, and turn up a few volatiles and metallic micro-fragments to suggest an area to search for Professor Zajdel's cybershell. The LAI acquiesces to their suggestion, and Vajra sends in a small "surveillance worm" and works with the rescue systems. This leaves the two organics free to go and take a look higher up the landslide site. They don't pick up much in the way of geological evidence there, though, or find any tracks. Vajra, meanwhile, has some problems, mainly with the tunnel behind his worm collapsing (the LAI had problems plotting a safe mining scheme), but does find some metallic fragments. Forensic assessment suggests that these come from the missing cybershell - although only from the outer casing.
Vajra doesn't have to sleep, but the other two do, so they head back to Mr Chen's house, leaving Vajra and the other AIs working. Chen has retired to bed by the time they arrive, but two people are still up and showing an interest in what they might have to report; Maria Vega, who Jianwei realises is maybe carefully judging what she says and how she says it, and the servant named Hua, who they have down as Mr Chen's secretary (in the most traditional sense) or personal assistant, who is coolly bland. The four individuals share green tea and engage in subtly guarded conversation, before the Europeans retire to bed. On an instinctive judgement, Jianwei tells Aunty to research possible links between Ms. Vega and Lipinski while he sleeps. Meanwhile, the team have also asked Quentin, back at the embassy, to acquire some thermal imaging data for a wide area around this location from satellite sources; they suspect that it might locate Lipinski.
Scorpius 14, m0039
Vajra and the LAI rescue system work through the night, but there's one small accident in that time - Vajra's surveillance worm gets trampled by a swarmdozer, disabling it. Still, by the time the sun rises, the swarmdozers have recovered enough fragments of manufactured material for Vajra to conclude that some hardware, including computer systems, was crushed by the landslide, and everything about the finds is compatible with it having been Zajdel's cybershell.
Meanwhile, Jianwei and Florence awake to news from Quentin; the IR imagery has indeed picked up a trace of what looks like a one-person camp, at a distance that might well rate as a couple of day's walk north of the landslide site. Quentin also has messages from some of Professor Zajdel's friends in the academic community, who have been applying their skills to the puzzle of their colleague's misfortune; they've been analysing available imagery, including the reports that Vajra and the other AIs have recently filed from the site, and combining it with the seismic traces from the time, and their conclusion is that the landslide looks to have been triggered by some kind of abrupt and not very natural-looking shock or impact.
Aunty, on the other hand, has little to report; if there are any signs of Lipinski and Vega having any kind of association, she hasn't been able to locate them on the Web. However, when Jianwei takes a few minutes to casually review the raw data which Aunty has acquired, he notes that Vega is a very mobile sort of operative; it looks as though working for the Martian Commonwealth not only keeps her busy, but almost permanently on the move, in person. Then, in a moment of inspiration, Jianwei looks again at some wilderness travel plan filings from about a year ago - and realise that she was most likely in the region west of Olympus Mons at exactly the time when Dr Tiberius Vartex had his nigh-fatal hopper crash. That could just be coincidence, of course.
Jianwei begins the process of filing confirmation that Professor Zajdel's processor has been destroyed, which will allow the insurance company to begin the process of releasing her latest backup to run and covering the cost of a replacement cybershell - although they'll probably cautiously wait a little longer to complete the process. He also decides to tell Vega some but not all of what they know, including Vajra's discovery of the cybershell remains, to provide her with some of the visual imagery that they acquired the previous day (but not much from the camp site), and to make another effort to find a landing site for her hopper. She flies over to the site quite promptly, and when she arrives, Vajra notices a spike in local network traffic; her snakebot is hitting the rescue-system LAI with lots of queries for accessible data.
The European team meet up and head back to the camp site, but only take a quick look there. Then they slip behind a ridge, hoping to avoid Vega's attention as they head north in pursuit of (they assume) Lipinski. Jianwei and Florence both have tactical training, which pays off here in helping them to be subtle about this. They do make a call to Mr Chen, though, to thank him for his hospitality and to bid him farewell.
They find the site which they picked up on the satellite IR images, but it's now been abandoned, so they continue to track their quarry northwards. It's slow going, though; they spend a lot of their time out of the rover, walking ahead of it while scanning the Martian dust from as close as possible. This carries them through the late morning and afternoon, and they find that they are now moving into an area of rising hills. Florence's driving skills enable them to keep the rover with them for quite a while - albeit sometimes with only three of its six wheels on the ground at a time - but eventually, they enter a seriously rocky region, and have to leave the vehicle behind.
As they climb, they receive a call from Hua, who wants to ask them to place the data which they've accumulated under a diplomatic seal - not making it a secret, but certifying it and protecting it against tampering, the better for use in, say, future court cases. Hua now seems increasingly cagey; Jianwei doesn't perceive him as a servant any more. When Jianwei suggests that he make the same request of Ms Vega, he demurs; "your employers' neutrality is much respected", he adds, slightly gnomically.
Then, as the party ascends a slope, Jianwei spots a figure, waiting and lurking behind a stack of rocks further up. Those rocks begin to slide, tumbling down the slope towards the group - and at that same moment, their AI aides report that a large volume of data is arriving in their in-boxes. It appears to be a great deal of accounts data relating to Mr Chen's past business career...
Wednesday, November 17, 2010
Hydraulic Engineering
Scorpius 4-11, m0039
And so, as Ferdinand goes into therapy, the team find things going comfortably quiet for over a week. They continue to handle routine administrative and PR work for the embassy, and settle down to life on Mars.
Scorpius 12, m0039
Then, the team all get an early-morning call from one of the embassy LAIs (Quentin is being required not to work 24-hour days, as it looks bad on the embassy's staff management records, which don't necessarily know how much of that time he spends playing Robo Rally); an incident has occurred which seems to require a formal E.U. presence. Unfortunately, the incident has occurred some way around the planet; the LAI has monorail reservations for everyone, and suggests that they take themselves to the station promptly.
Once they're settled on the train, the three embassy employees get a full briefing from the AI systems - although details of the matter are still hazy or being collected. It appears that a pair of Polish citizens, named Piotr Lipinski and Professor Jolanta Zajdel, have been working as consultants for a Singaporean citizen, a Mr Pao-Wen Chen (no relation of Jianwei's), who is building a house for himself well out in the Martian wilderness, 1,500 miles or so east of Port Lowell. (This sort of project obviously demands considerable private resources; Mr Chen will find himself numbered among the "Millionaires of Mars" if and when he comes to public notice.) Lipinski and Zajdel are geologists, specifically specialists in the hydrology of the Martian landscape; Zajdel teaches at the University of Mars, and Lipinski, it will emerge, is a graduate student working under her. Presumably, they're conducting some kind of site survey for Mr Chen. Anyway, they were apparently working out in the desert a few miles from Chen's home last night, when they both dropped off-line. The AIs managing their Web links began raising alert flags when the loss drew out long enough to appear exceptional, and then some smart system correlated that with reports from various areophysical monitoring services of a brief but significant seismic spike from near to the pair's last known location. Satellite imagery soon confirmed a probable emergency; there appears to have been a fairly major landslip - some hundreds of metres across - at that site.
Mr Chen's household were alerted, and responded appropriately. They didn't have excavation gear of their own, and rapid acquisitions are a problem - any cost issues aside, they don't have landing space for sub-orbital transports - but they were able to arrange deliveries of excavator and rescue cybershells by fast cargo hopper, and acquired appropriate AI operation systems over the Web. This stuff is still being delivered, but everything they've found so far indicates the worst, especially as Lipinski and Zajdel's personal systems are still off-line.
The team aren't expected to be able to assist much with any rescue efforts - it'll take them too long to reach the site, and Chen appears to be doing pretty much everything that's possible - but they should do what they can, try and discover what happened, and provide formal statements and affidavits. This is likely to become especially important because, although Lipinski is or was an organic human, Zajdel is a ghost, who was operating a specialist exploration cybershell. She can be restored from her last backup, but the insurance company will require a very reliable death certificate. They're very correctly cautious about accidental xoxing - but on the other hand, their clients tend to be quite touchy about being left inactive for too long a period.
The embassy LAI has now made all the transport arrangements. As the team's specific mission can't be assigned maximum urgency, they'll be travelling on the surface all the way; it will take them all this day to reach the small American monorail halt at New Buffalo, and then they'll spend the night there before picking up a hired rover with sufficient range to cover the 250 or so miles to Mr Chen's house. They briefly discuss driving overnight, but the hire company wouldn't be happy about anyone driving over rough and poorly-mapped Martian terrain in the dark (yes, even with modern night vision gear), and Jianwei and Florence would have trouble sleeping on the vehicle.
With all this covered, the team discuss what they might find, including the possibility of malfeasance - but they don't have any indication of such a thing at present. Vajra does a quick Web background search on Mr Chen, who had a long and prosperous past career in business in Singapore, but although he certainly had fingers in many pies, there are no obvious signs of criminality there.
So Vajra arranges to receive imagery of the incident site, with updates as frequent as is feasible. Florence takes a look at these, and her training in Martian wilderness survival enables her to spot a lot of details. The Polish duo were looking at a feature that would be assumed to have been a river valley, billions of years ago, and that will probably become one again as terraforming increases the volume of liquid water on the surface and sends rivers once more flowing through this region towards the North Polar Ocean. The landslip appears to have happened where a substantial bluff overlooks a bend in the dry river. It's the kind of thing that happened a lot a couple of decades ago; it's not so common today, but not entirely unknown.
Meanwhile, Jianwei has put a call through to Mr Chen's house, and has found himself explaining the team's assignment to a suave AI named Shen, who evidently functions as Chen's housekeeper. He asks if there's anything that the team can bring with them to help with the emergency work, but Shen says politely that it can't suggest any such needs at this point - everything that any relevant expert systems can suggest has already been acquired, or at least arranged for acquisition as soon as possible.
And so there doesn't seem to be much more that the team can think to do, as the maglev train skims around the Martian equator. By the end of the day, it reaches New Buffalo, which proves to be no more than a halt on the maglev track, with one capsule hotel, a basic bar or two, and a field that's been bulldozed level to act as a landing spot for hoppers and a marshalling area for rovers, including those from the hire company. Jianwei has anticipated the lack of resources and arranged to acquire the necessary components for a meal off the train, so at least he and Florence can enjoy a passable dinner. Beyond that, the evening proves remarkably unexciting, and they retire to their capsules and enjoy a night's sleep, while Vajra powers his cybershell down and spends the night on Web, occasionally monitoring relevant satellite imagery.
Scorpius 13, m0039
The organic team members wake up in the morning and eat what they can scrounge up by way of an acceptable breakfast, and soon, their hired rover emerged from the clutter of hire vehicles on New Buffalo's vehicle park and pulls around to the front of the capsule hotel. As the team are loading up their gear, they see another arrival; a light hopper drops out of the sky, lands smoothly on the other side of the field, and taxis over to the public pumps to refuel. As it does so, the canopy opens, and a lone human emerges - a woman of indeterminate apparent age or ethnicity, dressed for flying but smartly. She looks around, notices the group, and strolls over to say hello.
She introduces herself as Maria Vega, an employee of the American Martian Commonwealth. When Jianwei admits that the team are heading north, she says that she's going the same way - it seems that her employers are taking an interest in the incident there. This might seem odd, but the Americans do tend, very politely, to classify this whole region of Mars, east of Marineris, as their domain; whatever territoriality the Singaporean Mr Chen may claim for his house, the Americans are likely to claim at least a neighbourly interest. Jianwei judges that Ms Vega is being a little guarded, but she may have her reasons; she's outwardly entirely polite, suggesting that she and the team might exchange information when they've got some. Then she boards her fuelled hopper, and the team notes that the second seat is occupied by some kind of non-humanoid cybershell - probably a snakebot model - before the canopy closes and she takes off northwards.
The team speculate about this encounter. For some unclear reason, they decide that Ms Vega must surely be an SIA agent, but they can't currently see any reason why the Agency would be taking an interest in this matter. But once they are on their way, they do take another look at the accumulated satellite imagery of the incident scene, and spot one more detail; a set of small, clearly artificial objects or structures a few hundred metres from the landslide. The likely guess is that it's the hydrologists' camp site. They also tap various data feeds to track Ms Vega's flight path, but that shows no unexpected deviations.
They reach Mr Chen's house by early evening. Shen evidently detects their approach and greets them over the radio, and a pair of humanoid cybershells meet them at the door to take their bags and show them to the rooms which have been assigned to them. The house currently consists of a number of semi-permanent modules that were doubtless delivered in the form of a road train, and subsequently dug in and partly covered with local soil to improve insulation and radiation protection. It's a substantial but not terribly luxurious looking dwelling now, but it could serve as the start of a more extensive and impressive mansion in years to come, and the interior is more than comfortable enough. Shen tells them that a buffet meal will be served when they've had time to freshen up.
Over the meal, they are able to meet the suave Chen and also to renew their acquaintance with Ms Vega, whose hopper was parked outside when they arrived. Mr Chen expresses regret and concern over the fate of the hydrologists, but it's clear that he regarded them as temporary employees rather than anything more; he seems genuinely concerned about them, but not to be taking this incident personally. He is, he is happy to explain, looking to settle here for some time (which could, given modern medicine, be a very long time), and the house, which is safely on a hilltop, should acquire a view of the restored rivers when they begin to flow through those valleys. The hydrologists were hired to assess exactly how these things should develop. All this fits well with the guesses and assumptions that the team made in advance.
As for Ms Vega - she too seems happy to talk, and admits that she hasn't been able to find out much yet, despite having been here for most of the day. She did over-fly the accident site, and she offers the E.U. team free access to the images she accumulated; in return, she asks that, if they get out to the incident location first, they check for possible landing sites for her hopper.
And indeed, the team are keen to get out there, telling Chen that they'd like to do so once they've eaten. So that seems to be the next step...
And so, as Ferdinand goes into therapy, the team find things going comfortably quiet for over a week. They continue to handle routine administrative and PR work for the embassy, and settle down to life on Mars.
Scorpius 12, m0039
Then, the team all get an early-morning call from one of the embassy LAIs (Quentin is being required not to work 24-hour days, as it looks bad on the embassy's staff management records, which don't necessarily know how much of that time he spends playing Robo Rally); an incident has occurred which seems to require a formal E.U. presence. Unfortunately, the incident has occurred some way around the planet; the LAI has monorail reservations for everyone, and suggests that they take themselves to the station promptly.
Once they're settled on the train, the three embassy employees get a full briefing from the AI systems - although details of the matter are still hazy or being collected. It appears that a pair of Polish citizens, named Piotr Lipinski and Professor Jolanta Zajdel, have been working as consultants for a Singaporean citizen, a Mr Pao-Wen Chen (no relation of Jianwei's), who is building a house for himself well out in the Martian wilderness, 1,500 miles or so east of Port Lowell. (This sort of project obviously demands considerable private resources; Mr Chen will find himself numbered among the "Millionaires of Mars" if and when he comes to public notice.) Lipinski and Zajdel are geologists, specifically specialists in the hydrology of the Martian landscape; Zajdel teaches at the University of Mars, and Lipinski, it will emerge, is a graduate student working under her. Presumably, they're conducting some kind of site survey for Mr Chen. Anyway, they were apparently working out in the desert a few miles from Chen's home last night, when they both dropped off-line. The AIs managing their Web links began raising alert flags when the loss drew out long enough to appear exceptional, and then some smart system correlated that with reports from various areophysical monitoring services of a brief but significant seismic spike from near to the pair's last known location. Satellite imagery soon confirmed a probable emergency; there appears to have been a fairly major landslip - some hundreds of metres across - at that site.
Mr Chen's household were alerted, and responded appropriately. They didn't have excavation gear of their own, and rapid acquisitions are a problem - any cost issues aside, they don't have landing space for sub-orbital transports - but they were able to arrange deliveries of excavator and rescue cybershells by fast cargo hopper, and acquired appropriate AI operation systems over the Web. This stuff is still being delivered, but everything they've found so far indicates the worst, especially as Lipinski and Zajdel's personal systems are still off-line.
The team aren't expected to be able to assist much with any rescue efforts - it'll take them too long to reach the site, and Chen appears to be doing pretty much everything that's possible - but they should do what they can, try and discover what happened, and provide formal statements and affidavits. This is likely to become especially important because, although Lipinski is or was an organic human, Zajdel is a ghost, who was operating a specialist exploration cybershell. She can be restored from her last backup, but the insurance company will require a very reliable death certificate. They're very correctly cautious about accidental xoxing - but on the other hand, their clients tend to be quite touchy about being left inactive for too long a period.
The embassy LAI has now made all the transport arrangements. As the team's specific mission can't be assigned maximum urgency, they'll be travelling on the surface all the way; it will take them all this day to reach the small American monorail halt at New Buffalo, and then they'll spend the night there before picking up a hired rover with sufficient range to cover the 250 or so miles to Mr Chen's house. They briefly discuss driving overnight, but the hire company wouldn't be happy about anyone driving over rough and poorly-mapped Martian terrain in the dark (yes, even with modern night vision gear), and Jianwei and Florence would have trouble sleeping on the vehicle.
With all this covered, the team discuss what they might find, including the possibility of malfeasance - but they don't have any indication of such a thing at present. Vajra does a quick Web background search on Mr Chen, who had a long and prosperous past career in business in Singapore, but although he certainly had fingers in many pies, there are no obvious signs of criminality there.
So Vajra arranges to receive imagery of the incident site, with updates as frequent as is feasible. Florence takes a look at these, and her training in Martian wilderness survival enables her to spot a lot of details. The Polish duo were looking at a feature that would be assumed to have been a river valley, billions of years ago, and that will probably become one again as terraforming increases the volume of liquid water on the surface and sends rivers once more flowing through this region towards the North Polar Ocean. The landslip appears to have happened where a substantial bluff overlooks a bend in the dry river. It's the kind of thing that happened a lot a couple of decades ago; it's not so common today, but not entirely unknown.
Meanwhile, Jianwei has put a call through to Mr Chen's house, and has found himself explaining the team's assignment to a suave AI named Shen, who evidently functions as Chen's housekeeper. He asks if there's anything that the team can bring with them to help with the emergency work, but Shen says politely that it can't suggest any such needs at this point - everything that any relevant expert systems can suggest has already been acquired, or at least arranged for acquisition as soon as possible.
And so there doesn't seem to be much more that the team can think to do, as the maglev train skims around the Martian equator. By the end of the day, it reaches New Buffalo, which proves to be no more than a halt on the maglev track, with one capsule hotel, a basic bar or two, and a field that's been bulldozed level to act as a landing spot for hoppers and a marshalling area for rovers, including those from the hire company. Jianwei has anticipated the lack of resources and arranged to acquire the necessary components for a meal off the train, so at least he and Florence can enjoy a passable dinner. Beyond that, the evening proves remarkably unexciting, and they retire to their capsules and enjoy a night's sleep, while Vajra powers his cybershell down and spends the night on Web, occasionally monitoring relevant satellite imagery.
Scorpius 13, m0039
The organic team members wake up in the morning and eat what they can scrounge up by way of an acceptable breakfast, and soon, their hired rover emerged from the clutter of hire vehicles on New Buffalo's vehicle park and pulls around to the front of the capsule hotel. As the team are loading up their gear, they see another arrival; a light hopper drops out of the sky, lands smoothly on the other side of the field, and taxis over to the public pumps to refuel. As it does so, the canopy opens, and a lone human emerges - a woman of indeterminate apparent age or ethnicity, dressed for flying but smartly. She looks around, notices the group, and strolls over to say hello.
She introduces herself as Maria Vega, an employee of the American Martian Commonwealth. When Jianwei admits that the team are heading north, she says that she's going the same way - it seems that her employers are taking an interest in the incident there. This might seem odd, but the Americans do tend, very politely, to classify this whole region of Mars, east of Marineris, as their domain; whatever territoriality the Singaporean Mr Chen may claim for his house, the Americans are likely to claim at least a neighbourly interest. Jianwei judges that Ms Vega is being a little guarded, but she may have her reasons; she's outwardly entirely polite, suggesting that she and the team might exchange information when they've got some. Then she boards her fuelled hopper, and the team notes that the second seat is occupied by some kind of non-humanoid cybershell - probably a snakebot model - before the canopy closes and she takes off northwards.
The team speculate about this encounter. For some unclear reason, they decide that Ms Vega must surely be an SIA agent, but they can't currently see any reason why the Agency would be taking an interest in this matter. But once they are on their way, they do take another look at the accumulated satellite imagery of the incident scene, and spot one more detail; a set of small, clearly artificial objects or structures a few hundred metres from the landslide. The likely guess is that it's the hydrologists' camp site. They also tap various data feeds to track Ms Vega's flight path, but that shows no unexpected deviations.
They reach Mr Chen's house by early evening. Shen evidently detects their approach and greets them over the radio, and a pair of humanoid cybershells meet them at the door to take their bags and show them to the rooms which have been assigned to them. The house currently consists of a number of semi-permanent modules that were doubtless delivered in the form of a road train, and subsequently dug in and partly covered with local soil to improve insulation and radiation protection. It's a substantial but not terribly luxurious looking dwelling now, but it could serve as the start of a more extensive and impressive mansion in years to come, and the interior is more than comfortable enough. Shen tells them that a buffet meal will be served when they've had time to freshen up.
Over the meal, they are able to meet the suave Chen and also to renew their acquaintance with Ms Vega, whose hopper was parked outside when they arrived. Mr Chen expresses regret and concern over the fate of the hydrologists, but it's clear that he regarded them as temporary employees rather than anything more; he seems genuinely concerned about them, but not to be taking this incident personally. He is, he is happy to explain, looking to settle here for some time (which could, given modern medicine, be a very long time), and the house, which is safely on a hilltop, should acquire a view of the restored rivers when they begin to flow through those valleys. The hydrologists were hired to assess exactly how these things should develop. All this fits well with the guesses and assumptions that the team made in advance.
As for Ms Vega - she too seems happy to talk, and admits that she hasn't been able to find out much yet, despite having been here for most of the day. She did over-fly the accident site, and she offers the E.U. team free access to the images she accumulated; in return, she asks that, if they get out to the incident location first, they check for possible landing sites for her hopper.
And indeed, the team are keen to get out there, telling Chen that they'd like to do so once they've eaten. So that seems to be the next step...
Wednesday, June 30, 2010
Observations and Assessments
March 10, m0039, continued
And so the team are on their train, in a carriage temporarily defined as EU territory, for a twenty-hour journey. Actually, the trip is going to be divided in two; once they reach a stop on the edge of more densely inhabited territory, they're booked to transfer to a sleeper car. Meanwhile, this two-carriage train picks up only a few more passengers - Chinese colonists, only one of whom decides that a carriage occupied by a bunch of foreigners, one of them a Felicia who's nursing an automatic weapon, is preferable to one occupied by a group of large gentlemen whose manner screams "Chinese government agents" (and even he sits as far from the group as possible).
Just moments before the train reaches the stop where they're due to change, Jianwei efforts in preparing reports for the embassy are interrupted by a call over the Web. The caller speaks as though she knows him, and identifies herself as "Diana D'Ollio".
"Oh yes," says Jianwei, guessing that this is the bartender from the elevator car, "I've been thinking about you..." Which is no more than the truth; however, he asks her to call back in ten minutes, by which time he's able to chat as he eats takeaway Chinese food in the sleeping compartment.
It turns out that her software agents alerted her to a report appearing on a technological problems board; wildly misbehaving hoppers aren't exactly common on Mars, and the incident earlier that day is sure to draw attention - she's merely got in first. She was quite impressed by the video footage she found, and is politely amused by Jianwei's responses to her probing. (Well, politely by her standards. "Oh yes - you're government scum, not corporate scum, aren't you?") She knows some basics that the team also picked up - that the hopper, which had only recently arrived at the maglev stop, was the property of a small hire company with rather obscure ownership, now that anyone checks. The software and software-hardware combination (supposedly) involved are being investigated, but no other anomalous behaviours seem to showing up so far. She suspects that there's more to be found.
"I don't suppose that you can give me anything else to look up while you decide what you can tell me?"
"No," Jianwei replies, "but do check the news for the last 36 hours."
"Okay. That's not just a distraction for the next six or twelve, is it?"
"I don't know."
"Fine, okay. By the way, do bear in mind that not all of my colleagues are as subtle and polite as me..."
She ends the call, and the train journey continues, with the train stopping occasionally for other passengers. Dr Vartex explores the benefits of his new part-electronic condition, turning his hearing down so as to sleep more easily. But as everyone settles in, the unsleeping Vajra notices one passenger, apparently confused and in the wrong carriage, pausing for oddly long outside the group's compartment. He puts some surveillance dust out through a ventilation vent, and is pleased to determine that there are no obvious booby-traps or weapons outside; however, when he follows this up with a bug-hunter swarm, he does find some other surveillance dust. So he sends a surveillance swarm further afield, into the carriage where the "lost" passenger is now sitting, and manages to identify him and acquire a decent video image. Running this through a facial recognition system and accessing a few public databases achieves a quick success; this is a known professional freelance reporter. So Vajra leaves messages with his colleagues' AI aides
March 11, m0039
When the organic team members awake, they all consult silently and decide on a policy. Florence lends Vajra her cleaning swarm, and he uses that and his other resources to locate and gather up the dust that's supposed to be watching them. They put it in a disposable cup, to be left in the compartment when they depart.
When the maglev train eventually reaches Port Lowell, Dr Vartex receives a message from "some people he knows", and announces that he's going to have to leave the others now; somebody to whom he evidently feels obliged to respond has called him in for a debriefing. The others bid him goodbye and head to the embassy, where Colette Schmidt calls them all in for a meeting in person. Once they're all seated and basic courtesies have been observed, she gives an invisible signal, and one whole wall of the room turns into a viewscreen, showing a virtual space that is designed to look like an extension of the office. This space holds one chair, which is occupied by a figure - clearly an avatar, not designed to look entirely realistic; a man all dressed in grey, with his grey-tinged face partly in shadow.
Schmidt introduces this as "Mr Grey", a representative of certain agencies who've been assisting with background investigations regarding recent incidents, and then hands things over to him. Mr Grey nods and begins to talk.
First, he apologises for any mistakes on the part of his organisation that may have caused or exacerbated the team's recent problems. It's clear that they became mixed up in a complex situation, made worse by what was probably sheer coincidence in that they found themselves in company with Dr Liang. Anyway, it would be useful to know more, so "appropriate people" have been trying to extract more information from the SIA, who have been slow to respond; it seems probably that they've been escalating questions of need-to-know right back to Earth orbit. Still, they've released a little more now.
So the EU now has a file on "Quipu", although they aren't necessarily sure that it exists as anything more than a codename for some temporary operation, or perhaps just a piece of disinformation. There really isn't much to go on. The betting in European circles is now that, a year ago, the SIA determined, through what the EU thought was an exchange of routine information, that Dr Vartex was on good terms with British military intelligence, and used the information that they had about him to lend them weight when they requested a private chat with him, out in the desert. However, "Quipu" (if it exists) must have spotted that something was going on, decided that having someone with potentially hostile allegiances actually working in the middle of its operation at Nova Iquitos was dangerous, and chose to eliminate this potential threat by a brutally direct method.
After Dr Vartex was saved for uploading by the Chinese medical team, Quipu must have decided that he was no longer a threat, or that attacking him in a Chinese hospital installation was too dangerous. Hence, it left him alone there, and was evidently slow to respond when he and the team began investigating his murder. The team then became entangled with Quipu's countermeasures against the problem posed by Dr Liang, and in the end, after they helped her work, it may simply have panicked or turned downright malicious. The attack with the hopper may have been a desperation measure, or an opportunist attempt to remove both the immediate threat of Dr Liang (and her collected samples) and a possible hostile agent in the person of Dr Vartex - or both.
In any case, it failed, and with Dr Liang under Chinese government protection and the EU prepared to make it clear that attacks on the team will be investigated strenuously, the threat is hopefully now over. Anyway, Mr Grey thanks everyone - and the wall screen switches off.
Colette Schmidt has one or two things to add to this. It seems that Dr Vartex is probably being checked over by his old military superiors, who can't be entirely happy that his brain scans have been in Chinese hands for a year - but she's seen his record, and while he had routine military clearance, there was nothing in his past (that she can discover) that was either deeply secret or of great interest to the Chinese (or his scans would perhaps have been pulled out of Chinese hands much sooner). The current "debriefing" will presumably include tests and checks to make sure that he hasn't been edited; if those don't find anything, though, it's unlikely that the military will be entirely sure about him.
However ... Schmidt is pleased to be able to say that she suddenly seems to have acquired a little more funding for the consular services team project, somehow. Hence, the team can now add one more member - and she wonders if the existing members would mind if that new member was in fact Dr Vartex. After all, he's an EU citizen, a medical doctor with military experience; it might be hard to find anyone better.
The team agree happily enough, and so the decision is formalised; Dr Vartex will be asked if he'd like the job. Then, Jianwei raises one more matter; the contact from "DD". The main question is how much they can release to her; he thinks that she could be a useful press contact, and he'd rather not antagonise her; on the other hand, the Nova Iquitos affair presumably rates as at least somewhat secret. He and Colette Schmidt review the matter, and she gives him permission to admit to some elements of the incident, and perhaps to hint at a little more - but mostly, he should be careful. He's going to have to be cagey if he speaks to "DD" again, while playing matters by ear.
And so the team are on their train, in a carriage temporarily defined as EU territory, for a twenty-hour journey. Actually, the trip is going to be divided in two; once they reach a stop on the edge of more densely inhabited territory, they're booked to transfer to a sleeper car. Meanwhile, this two-carriage train picks up only a few more passengers - Chinese colonists, only one of whom decides that a carriage occupied by a bunch of foreigners, one of them a Felicia who's nursing an automatic weapon, is preferable to one occupied by a group of large gentlemen whose manner screams "Chinese government agents" (and even he sits as far from the group as possible).
Just moments before the train reaches the stop where they're due to change, Jianwei efforts in preparing reports for the embassy are interrupted by a call over the Web. The caller speaks as though she knows him, and identifies herself as "Diana D'Ollio".
"Oh yes," says Jianwei, guessing that this is the bartender from the elevator car, "I've been thinking about you..." Which is no more than the truth; however, he asks her to call back in ten minutes, by which time he's able to chat as he eats takeaway Chinese food in the sleeping compartment.
It turns out that her software agents alerted her to a report appearing on a technological problems board; wildly misbehaving hoppers aren't exactly common on Mars, and the incident earlier that day is sure to draw attention - she's merely got in first. She was quite impressed by the video footage she found, and is politely amused by Jianwei's responses to her probing. (Well, politely by her standards. "Oh yes - you're government scum, not corporate scum, aren't you?") She knows some basics that the team also picked up - that the hopper, which had only recently arrived at the maglev stop, was the property of a small hire company with rather obscure ownership, now that anyone checks. The software and software-hardware combination (supposedly) involved are being investigated, but no other anomalous behaviours seem to showing up so far. She suspects that there's more to be found.
"I don't suppose that you can give me anything else to look up while you decide what you can tell me?"
"No," Jianwei replies, "but do check the news for the last 36 hours."
"Okay. That's not just a distraction for the next six or twelve, is it?"
"I don't know."
"Fine, okay. By the way, do bear in mind that not all of my colleagues are as subtle and polite as me..."
She ends the call, and the train journey continues, with the train stopping occasionally for other passengers. Dr Vartex explores the benefits of his new part-electronic condition, turning his hearing down so as to sleep more easily. But as everyone settles in, the unsleeping Vajra notices one passenger, apparently confused and in the wrong carriage, pausing for oddly long outside the group's compartment. He puts some surveillance dust out through a ventilation vent, and is pleased to determine that there are no obvious booby-traps or weapons outside; however, when he follows this up with a bug-hunter swarm, he does find some other surveillance dust. So he sends a surveillance swarm further afield, into the carriage where the "lost" passenger is now sitting, and manages to identify him and acquire a decent video image. Running this through a facial recognition system and accessing a few public databases achieves a quick success; this is a known professional freelance reporter. So Vajra leaves messages with his colleagues' AI aides
March 11, m0039
When the organic team members awake, they all consult silently and decide on a policy. Florence lends Vajra her cleaning swarm, and he uses that and his other resources to locate and gather up the dust that's supposed to be watching them. They put it in a disposable cup, to be left in the compartment when they depart.
When the maglev train eventually reaches Port Lowell, Dr Vartex receives a message from "some people he knows", and announces that he's going to have to leave the others now; somebody to whom he evidently feels obliged to respond has called him in for a debriefing. The others bid him goodbye and head to the embassy, where Colette Schmidt calls them all in for a meeting in person. Once they're all seated and basic courtesies have been observed, she gives an invisible signal, and one whole wall of the room turns into a viewscreen, showing a virtual space that is designed to look like an extension of the office. This space holds one chair, which is occupied by a figure - clearly an avatar, not designed to look entirely realistic; a man all dressed in grey, with his grey-tinged face partly in shadow.
Schmidt introduces this as "Mr Grey", a representative of certain agencies who've been assisting with background investigations regarding recent incidents, and then hands things over to him. Mr Grey nods and begins to talk.
First, he apologises for any mistakes on the part of his organisation that may have caused or exacerbated the team's recent problems. It's clear that they became mixed up in a complex situation, made worse by what was probably sheer coincidence in that they found themselves in company with Dr Liang. Anyway, it would be useful to know more, so "appropriate people" have been trying to extract more information from the SIA, who have been slow to respond; it seems probably that they've been escalating questions of need-to-know right back to Earth orbit. Still, they've released a little more now.
So the EU now has a file on "Quipu", although they aren't necessarily sure that it exists as anything more than a codename for some temporary operation, or perhaps just a piece of disinformation. There really isn't much to go on. The betting in European circles is now that, a year ago, the SIA determined, through what the EU thought was an exchange of routine information, that Dr Vartex was on good terms with British military intelligence, and used the information that they had about him to lend them weight when they requested a private chat with him, out in the desert. However, "Quipu" (if it exists) must have spotted that something was going on, decided that having someone with potentially hostile allegiances actually working in the middle of its operation at Nova Iquitos was dangerous, and chose to eliminate this potential threat by a brutally direct method.
After Dr Vartex was saved for uploading by the Chinese medical team, Quipu must have decided that he was no longer a threat, or that attacking him in a Chinese hospital installation was too dangerous. Hence, it left him alone there, and was evidently slow to respond when he and the team began investigating his murder. The team then became entangled with Quipu's countermeasures against the problem posed by Dr Liang, and in the end, after they helped her work, it may simply have panicked or turned downright malicious. The attack with the hopper may have been a desperation measure, or an opportunist attempt to remove both the immediate threat of Dr Liang (and her collected samples) and a possible hostile agent in the person of Dr Vartex - or both.
In any case, it failed, and with Dr Liang under Chinese government protection and the EU prepared to make it clear that attacks on the team will be investigated strenuously, the threat is hopefully now over. Anyway, Mr Grey thanks everyone - and the wall screen switches off.
Colette Schmidt has one or two things to add to this. It seems that Dr Vartex is probably being checked over by his old military superiors, who can't be entirely happy that his brain scans have been in Chinese hands for a year - but she's seen his record, and while he had routine military clearance, there was nothing in his past (that she can discover) that was either deeply secret or of great interest to the Chinese (or his scans would perhaps have been pulled out of Chinese hands much sooner). The current "debriefing" will presumably include tests and checks to make sure that he hasn't been edited; if those don't find anything, though, it's unlikely that the military will be entirely sure about him.
However ... Schmidt is pleased to be able to say that she suddenly seems to have acquired a little more funding for the consular services team project, somehow. Hence, the team can now add one more member - and she wonders if the existing members would mind if that new member was in fact Dr Vartex. After all, he's an EU citizen, a medical doctor with military experience; it might be hard to find anyone better.
The team agree happily enough, and so the decision is formalised; Dr Vartex will be asked if he'd like the job. Then, Jianwei raises one more matter; the contact from "DD". The main question is how much they can release to her; he thinks that she could be a useful press contact, and he'd rather not antagonise her; on the other hand, the Nova Iquitos affair presumably rates as at least somewhat secret. He and Colette Schmidt review the matter, and she gives him permission to admit to some elements of the incident, and perhaps to hint at a little more - but mostly, he should be careful. He's going to have to be cagey if he speaks to "DD" again, while playing matters by ear.
Wednesday, April 28, 2010
The Venom of the Serpent
March 8, m0039
Back on a maglev train, the group discuss the next phase of their investigation. First, though, Tiberius mentions that he has received a Web message from an acquaintance in Military Intelligence, which among other things, notes that, so far as that organisation has been able to establish, the hospital where he was uploaded is run ethically, and there have been no signs of the Chinese "Bureau" agencies taking an interest there lately; the privacy of his scan has probably not been compromised. Perhaps of more immediate importance, the agency has noted Tiberius's activities and concerns since his restoration, and having checked its own data sources, it has reason to believe that American Space Intelligence Agency operatives were active in or near the same part of Mars when Tiberius suffered his accident - although the SIA is unwilling to explain what exactly they may have been doing there.
This leads to a little discussion in itself. It seems unlikely that the SIA would be responsible for shooting down Tiberius's hopper - while they and the Europeans sometimes work at cross purposes, the two factions aren't actively hostile - but it's possible that Tiberius diverted to meet an SIA agent, although he can't suggest any reason why he'd have done so. Anyway, it's more information to consider. The group also discusses how to handle the visit to the Peruvians, although Florence rapidly loses interest as the planning grows more detailed and conditional.
As they travel, they are also contacted by Quentin, who tells them that he's arranged transport for them to the Nova Iquitos site. It's been hard to find a vehicle to rent - they're heading into more sparsely populated territory - but he's been able to book passage on a cross-country road train. However, the group aren't entirely happy with this; it will leave them on site with no transport of their own if they suddenly find that they have to leave in a hurry. Quentin is apologetic, but vehicle availability is a problem... Eventually, though, he says that, if they can avoid getting into trouble for twelve to twenty-four hours or so, he can arrange for a rented rover to drive itself to the site and make itself available for them after that time.
Eventually, the maglev train reaches the team's stop - which proves to be a halt rather than a station. They disembark, and determine that they have a couple of hours to wait before the road train arrives. Sitting around on their luggage proves boring, so they decide to take a walk and look at the local rock formations.
After a little while, they hear another maglev arrive from the other direction and stop, and Web tags indicate that someone else has disembarked. They contact the new arrival by radio, and discover that it is Dr Ming-Mei Liang, a Chinese planetologist, who is meeting the same road train; when they say what they are doing, she asks to patch through to their cameras, and promptly spends ten minutes telling them about the science of the rock formations. They return to the halt, and discover Dr Liang sitting with a large travelling case; however, she says that she isn't packed for a long visit - this is simply her professional equipment.
She's happy to talk, and explains that she too is visiting Nova Iquitos; indeed, it emerges that it was her who arranged for the road train to come this way and to have a passenger module installed - Quentin then got lucky on the party's behalf, as the module has enough spare capacity for them. Dr Liang, it seems, is heading this way to perform some research. Nova Iquitos have recently been reporting some much better-than-expected performance by the ecological "oases" they monitor - gene-crafted bacteriological/fungal cultures planted out in the Martian desert, part of the terraforming process. This has attracted a certain amount of attention, as it would be good news for the terraformers if these results are accurate, but they do seem very good, so it seems like a worthwhile idea for an impartial scientific investigator to review them in situ.
The road train arrives, and proves to be owned and run by a single driver - an organic human, not an upload like some Martian truckers. This is Harvey Hernandez, an American citizen who wears a Stetson over his heat suit and speaks with a definite drawl. Hernandez seems amiable and spry enough, but some of the party decide that he has something of the look of an elderly man; indeed, he eventually lets slip that this is his second career - he spent forty years working as an accountant. He's a rejuvenated eloi, and a recurver.
The PCs and Dr Liang load their luggage onto the road train and climb into the passenger module. This proves comfortable enough, with sufficient bunks for all of them (with sound-deadening curtains), giving Florence a chance to catnap a little, and also a fully functional miniature kitchen. It's docked immediately behind the train's tractor unit, with a linked airlock, and once the whole assembly is underway again, Harvey leaves the driving to his personal AI, Sundance, and comes through to join them and talk. He doesn't get company on many trips, and while this may not worry him, he's happy enough to have someone to chat to.
The travellers swap stories of Mars and elsewhere, and get on well enough, although Harvey's taste for Country and Western music on the sound system might become wearing (Florence decides that she likes it in small doses). Eventually, the group call up dinner; Harvey's systems specialise in Tex-Mex cookery, and can produce a passable taco if one allows for the possible provenance of the "meat". However, as the travellers eat and drink, both Harvey and Dr Liang look a little oddly at their drinks, although the Europeans, their taste buds adjusting to unaccustomed spicing, don't notice anything. Harvey steps over to the recycling system maintenance panel and begins checking diagnostics as all the organic travellers begin to look a little queasy.
Harvey sits down looking distinctly unhappy before he can complete the maintenance checks, and both Jianwei and Florence are feeling fairly seriously unwell by now; however, Dr Liang didn't eat or drink as much when she noticed the odd taste, and Tiberius has the benefits of a boosted liver, installed in his original body during his military career and carried over in the spec for his bioshell, which counteracts the toxins without difficulty. He considers the diagnostics available from his computer-body interface systems, and recognises the problem instantly; a bacteriological infection that sometimes occurs in some types of water recycling system. It's supposed to be a rare problem, easily eliminated by competent maintenance, but sometimes people do get sloppy.
As Florence takes to her bunk and then grabs a bowl more or less in time (leaving her cleaner swarm with a little work to do on her fur later) and Jianwei and Harvey sit groaning, Tiberius checks the vehicle's medical supplies and his own portable kit, and comes up with a reasonable set of treatments. Then he tells his AI aide, Vediovis, to load the system's maintenance manual, takes Harvey's place at the panel, and works out how to purge and reset the water recycling system. By now, Sundance is asking if it should turn the vehicle back towards the nearest community with medical facilities, but this is vetoed all round; Tiberius's treatments seem to have been effective, and there's some sense among some of the travellers that this may not be as much of an accident as it looks.
So Vajra sends a swarm into the interior of the module's life support systems, using it to look for anomalies - and finds one. Something - larger than a swarm element, small enough to fit in the access spaces - moves quickly across one microbot's field of view. So Vajra pulls up more schematics and consults with Jianwei, who has an eye for tactics. Then, he and Tiberius begin to move and dismantle some elements of the system, isolating their target. Eventually, they give it no more places to hide - and they are ready when the miniature snakebot pops into view.
Florence fires first, but the snakebot ducks away from her tangler shell, which merely makes a mess on wall. However, the thing is unable to evade Jianwei's electrolaser bolt, and lies twitching and writhing for long enough for Florence to score a clean hit with a second tangler shot. Then Tiberius's army background kicks in, and he suggests that everyone takes cover - he's trained to expect miniature cybershells to incorporate self-destruct systems. Everyone follows his lead, with varying degrees of agility and haste, but the snakebot takes a while to recover any sort of control, and any autonomous self-destruct systems it may include evidently aren't set too sensitive. Eventually, Vajra decides that he can afford to take a risk, grabs a cushion from the seating, and tries to use it to screen the effects if the snakebot does explode. He's still trying to get the cushion in place when it does explode, in fact, but it only carries a small charge, and the tangler covering it effectively absorbs the blast.
There are some parts of the snakebot left intact, though; it may be time to try some ad hoc forensics.
Back on a maglev train, the group discuss the next phase of their investigation. First, though, Tiberius mentions that he has received a Web message from an acquaintance in Military Intelligence, which among other things, notes that, so far as that organisation has been able to establish, the hospital where he was uploaded is run ethically, and there have been no signs of the Chinese "Bureau" agencies taking an interest there lately; the privacy of his scan has probably not been compromised. Perhaps of more immediate importance, the agency has noted Tiberius's activities and concerns since his restoration, and having checked its own data sources, it has reason to believe that American Space Intelligence Agency operatives were active in or near the same part of Mars when Tiberius suffered his accident - although the SIA is unwilling to explain what exactly they may have been doing there.
This leads to a little discussion in itself. It seems unlikely that the SIA would be responsible for shooting down Tiberius's hopper - while they and the Europeans sometimes work at cross purposes, the two factions aren't actively hostile - but it's possible that Tiberius diverted to meet an SIA agent, although he can't suggest any reason why he'd have done so. Anyway, it's more information to consider. The group also discusses how to handle the visit to the Peruvians, although Florence rapidly loses interest as the planning grows more detailed and conditional.
As they travel, they are also contacted by Quentin, who tells them that he's arranged transport for them to the Nova Iquitos site. It's been hard to find a vehicle to rent - they're heading into more sparsely populated territory - but he's been able to book passage on a cross-country road train. However, the group aren't entirely happy with this; it will leave them on site with no transport of their own if they suddenly find that they have to leave in a hurry. Quentin is apologetic, but vehicle availability is a problem... Eventually, though, he says that, if they can avoid getting into trouble for twelve to twenty-four hours or so, he can arrange for a rented rover to drive itself to the site and make itself available for them after that time.
Eventually, the maglev train reaches the team's stop - which proves to be a halt rather than a station. They disembark, and determine that they have a couple of hours to wait before the road train arrives. Sitting around on their luggage proves boring, so they decide to take a walk and look at the local rock formations.
After a little while, they hear another maglev arrive from the other direction and stop, and Web tags indicate that someone else has disembarked. They contact the new arrival by radio, and discover that it is Dr Ming-Mei Liang, a Chinese planetologist, who is meeting the same road train; when they say what they are doing, she asks to patch through to their cameras, and promptly spends ten minutes telling them about the science of the rock formations. They return to the halt, and discover Dr Liang sitting with a large travelling case; however, she says that she isn't packed for a long visit - this is simply her professional equipment.
She's happy to talk, and explains that she too is visiting Nova Iquitos; indeed, it emerges that it was her who arranged for the road train to come this way and to have a passenger module installed - Quentin then got lucky on the party's behalf, as the module has enough spare capacity for them. Dr Liang, it seems, is heading this way to perform some research. Nova Iquitos have recently been reporting some much better-than-expected performance by the ecological "oases" they monitor - gene-crafted bacteriological/fungal cultures planted out in the Martian desert, part of the terraforming process. This has attracted a certain amount of attention, as it would be good news for the terraformers if these results are accurate, but they do seem very good, so it seems like a worthwhile idea for an impartial scientific investigator to review them in situ.
The road train arrives, and proves to be owned and run by a single driver - an organic human, not an upload like some Martian truckers. This is Harvey Hernandez, an American citizen who wears a Stetson over his heat suit and speaks with a definite drawl. Hernandez seems amiable and spry enough, but some of the party decide that he has something of the look of an elderly man; indeed, he eventually lets slip that this is his second career - he spent forty years working as an accountant. He's a rejuvenated eloi, and a recurver.
The PCs and Dr Liang load their luggage onto the road train and climb into the passenger module. This proves comfortable enough, with sufficient bunks for all of them (with sound-deadening curtains), giving Florence a chance to catnap a little, and also a fully functional miniature kitchen. It's docked immediately behind the train's tractor unit, with a linked airlock, and once the whole assembly is underway again, Harvey leaves the driving to his personal AI, Sundance, and comes through to join them and talk. He doesn't get company on many trips, and while this may not worry him, he's happy enough to have someone to chat to.
The travellers swap stories of Mars and elsewhere, and get on well enough, although Harvey's taste for Country and Western music on the sound system might become wearing (Florence decides that she likes it in small doses). Eventually, the group call up dinner; Harvey's systems specialise in Tex-Mex cookery, and can produce a passable taco if one allows for the possible provenance of the "meat". However, as the travellers eat and drink, both Harvey and Dr Liang look a little oddly at their drinks, although the Europeans, their taste buds adjusting to unaccustomed spicing, don't notice anything. Harvey steps over to the recycling system maintenance panel and begins checking diagnostics as all the organic travellers begin to look a little queasy.
Harvey sits down looking distinctly unhappy before he can complete the maintenance checks, and both Jianwei and Florence are feeling fairly seriously unwell by now; however, Dr Liang didn't eat or drink as much when she noticed the odd taste, and Tiberius has the benefits of a boosted liver, installed in his original body during his military career and carried over in the spec for his bioshell, which counteracts the toxins without difficulty. He considers the diagnostics available from his computer-body interface systems, and recognises the problem instantly; a bacteriological infection that sometimes occurs in some types of water recycling system. It's supposed to be a rare problem, easily eliminated by competent maintenance, but sometimes people do get sloppy.
As Florence takes to her bunk and then grabs a bowl more or less in time (leaving her cleaner swarm with a little work to do on her fur later) and Jianwei and Harvey sit groaning, Tiberius checks the vehicle's medical supplies and his own portable kit, and comes up with a reasonable set of treatments. Then he tells his AI aide, Vediovis, to load the system's maintenance manual, takes Harvey's place at the panel, and works out how to purge and reset the water recycling system. By now, Sundance is asking if it should turn the vehicle back towards the nearest community with medical facilities, but this is vetoed all round; Tiberius's treatments seem to have been effective, and there's some sense among some of the travellers that this may not be as much of an accident as it looks.
So Vajra sends a swarm into the interior of the module's life support systems, using it to look for anomalies - and finds one. Something - larger than a swarm element, small enough to fit in the access spaces - moves quickly across one microbot's field of view. So Vajra pulls up more schematics and consults with Jianwei, who has an eye for tactics. Then, he and Tiberius begin to move and dismantle some elements of the system, isolating their target. Eventually, they give it no more places to hide - and they are ready when the miniature snakebot pops into view.
Florence fires first, but the snakebot ducks away from her tangler shell, which merely makes a mess on wall. However, the thing is unable to evade Jianwei's electrolaser bolt, and lies twitching and writhing for long enough for Florence to score a clean hit with a second tangler shot. Then Tiberius's army background kicks in, and he suggests that everyone takes cover - he's trained to expect miniature cybershells to incorporate self-destruct systems. Everyone follows his lead, with varying degrees of agility and haste, but the snakebot takes a while to recover any sort of control, and any autonomous self-destruct systems it may include evidently aren't set too sensitive. Eventually, Vajra decides that he can afford to take a risk, grabs a cushion from the seating, and tries to use it to screen the effects if the snakebot does explode. He's still trying to get the cushion in place when it does explode, in fact, but it only carries a small charge, and the tangler covering it effectively absorbs the blast.
There are some parts of the snakebot left intact, though; it may be time to try some ad hoc forensics.
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