STEP 2: Every trap has a maker, find them.

  RG Doctrine

  Conflict always has an author

  Feebee’s ‘manual’

  Feebee decided that she needed to use the QI’s propensity for hacking, so gave it agency to flex its digital muscles.

  ‘I want you to look into the Royal Guard systems.’

  The QI remained quiet.

  Feebee continued, ‘Purely around the ambush attempt. Ok?’

  There was a noticeable pause. ‘I… already am.’ The QI sounded tentative.

  ‘Oh. Ok. Good. Be careful. Find the author.’

  Alpha-2 asked, “Is that legal?”

  Alpha-3 was more pragmatic, “Not if we asked first.”

  Alpha-2 continued and asked the obvious question, “Did we?”

  It was met with a shrug.

  Within minutes of being tasked, the QI had mapped anomalies. It showed Feebee a trail of data that had pushed two RG shuttles off course and into the micro-mine field. Adjusted route plans.

  These in, and of, themselves looked bad, but then the QI showed an update received by the mines. A software switch had been changed; a search parameter that would lock the mines onto the specific signatures of the shuttles.

  ‘That was quick. Well done.’

  ‘I’m getting good at this.’

  The response surprised Feebee, was the QI bragging?

  ‘Have the mines been updated with our idents?’

  The QI responded, ‘The mines were updated very recently, not with our idents. Updates take seconds to transmit and put in place but you can’t tell what was there before. No log, by design.’

  Feebee focused the QI, ‘We need to find the author of the ambush,’ she paused before continuing, 'You need to find the author.'

  The QI was relieved. It hadn’t been sure whether Feebee would be happy with its actions. Not only did she understand but she had given the QI agency to continue.

  It cloned administrator credentials, allowing it to walk untraced and anonymously across the RG’s digital landscape. The QI reconstructed logs, deleting its own footprints as it went and analysed the steps of others.

  Mail was scoured, deleted drafts recovered, discarded drafts that existed on secondary devices read. It was mostly of no value to the QI’s search, but a thread began to emerge. Initially nothing. The QI pulled on the thread; kept digging and found a small history of messages overwritten with innocuous details. The originals made for much more interesting reading.

  The author had a username but no identity. Not yet.

  The QI was closing in, but it wasn’t quick work. Painfully slow for a QI. Yes, recent history was there but a lot of the historical data the QI needed had been backed up off-site and then removed locally. Standard procedure, security, space saving, but also covering of one's tracks.

  The QI sent data requests, these were delegated to people, real people, who shuffled paper and eventually loaded the required backup media in a machine the QI could access. And so it went on. Sometimes the offsite storage was automated and therefore hackable. In these cases, turn around was quicker... and more enjoyable.

  Feebee awoke aboard the Scout ship as usual. Early but not desperately so. The gas giant dominated the forward view. There was an unfamiliar green glow in her room. She looked around, then up. A small green mote hovered above her head. It began to circle and in the centre of the after image burnt on her retina other motes appeared briefly. They danced within the circle of green light described by the mote then were gone. Just the green mote remained. She reached out towards it but the mote remained beyond her grasp.

  ‘Not yet,’ came a familiar sounding voice in her mind, and then it was gone.

  That was weird, she thought, shaking her head and, coming back to the task at hand, she asked the QI to call an all hands meeting in the rest room. The QI laughed its scratchy laugh. All hands. We’re three people! Six hands!

  All three wore their black fatigues. Feebee carried a long rifle over her shoulder. A pistol and knife at her waist. Spare ammo in webbing. And of course her camo backpack, it went everywhere with her. She was eating chocolate, looked like a forged produced variety.

  Alpha-2 and Alpha-3 were loaded down with weapons, spare ammo, grenades and their backpacks.

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  “Two minutes thirty-eight. Good.”

  “Can we go back to bed now?”

  “No. Not immediately. We’re going to do some stillness exercises.”

  “Not more monk training.” Alpha-3 wasn’t a fan.

  “It could save your life. Live with it.”

  They started to take their gear off.

  “No, gear on. Stand. Relax. We train our minds in the same way we train our bodies.” She looked at them. “Eyes closed. You can open them at any time if you wish. Now stand At Ease. Spine straight, not rigid. Stillness is about being relaxed and calm. In balance.”

  She waited, gently whispering, “Stay calm. Be balanced. Be still.” Then when this had run it’s course she used a different mantra, “Slow is smooth. Smooth is fast.”

  “Inhale for four seconds. Fill your lungs. Hold it for four. Breath out for four. In for four, hold for four. Out for four.”

  And so it continued, they were used to these sessions. Knew the drill. She keep them at it until they were calm. There were other exercises, cycles around weights, always different but always lasting exactly thirty minutes. Every time.

  Their decision making under pressure, but without urgency, improved. They gelled tighter as a team and even worked together on a language of hand signals that removed the need for comms.

  “Tomorrow. Alpha-2 will assume leadership for the day.” The rotating leadership worked well, they all knew the objectives of the mission and how they were going to achieve them as a team. Each understood the others role and their daily cadence.

  “OK. We’re done here. Alpha-3, blindfold on. Alpha-2 will lead you back to your bunk. Verbal assistance only.” They seemed to enjoy this trust exercise, so she always did it when she handed out a new leadership rotation. Initially Alpha-3 had demanded that Feebee be blind folded, and that he be given a go directing her. She'd put the blind fold on, then sprinted through the ship to her room. Even opening the door and was asleep on her bunk by the time they caught up with her. Neither of the Alphas asked her to do it again.

  There was other ‘stuff’. The QI briefed them all on the crystal worlds, the ecology and the silicon-based morphology of its indigenous inhabitants. Feebee also got them working through their equipment, adjusting EVA suits, optimising their overlays and practicing field medicine. Something she discovered, Alpha-2 was particularly adept at.

  By the time the QI called a meeting to present the findings of its search, for what they were calling The Author, weeks had passed and they weren’t just marines on standby. They were a small, highly tuned problem-solving fire team. And importantly, they trusted their nineteen year old captain completely. She had proved herself against them again and again.

  The QI worked from the bottom up. It showed supply movements that went missing. Small alterations to assignments and patrol patterns. Controls access to early-warning grids. Most damning were the black-market crystal exports it had been able to find. These were almost certainly the tip of the iceberg. The numbers were staggering.

  The RG also had a documented kill ratio of 23:1. Twenty three hostiles killed or captured for each RG operative. Unbelievably good. Too good.

  Feebee questioned this. It didn’t match the feel of the reports.

  The QI justified the findings to Feebee, ‘I am presenting data I can find. But I agree. Something’s off. They are spending a lot on medical supplies. And before you ask, I did check, the purchases are real and match stock transfers.’

  And through all of this analysis, at many of the data intersections there were the fingerprints of a single RG officer. Either on one side or both sides of the transactions. The touch was light and would have been missed were it not for the abilities of the QI.

  ‘Do you have a probability score for it being this person?’

  The QI was succinct and to the point. ‘Yes. Culpability is 94.6%’

  Feebee nodded, ‘Oh. Ok. Good. Nice job.’

  ‘I have set-up a series of digital worms that will digitally annihilate the officer. They will also expose them, posting evidence to news agencies, police and the RG. Just say and I'll release them.’

  Feebee shook her head then spoke out loud, so her Alpha team could hear it directly.

  “I’m also annoyed by this. I feel betrayed but that’s not the way to play this. We need to reign this in or we’ll damage the RG more than this officer ever did. And not just internally. We cannot leave chaos behind. They’ll never work with us again.” She continued, “We’re not here to break the Guard. Just the people poisoning it.”

  The QI and Feebee discuss plans. Plans that the QI silently executed.

  The officer was quietly locked out of key systems. The accounts that he controlled were frozen. The true mission logs were restored, and all evidence was re-routed to Chen directly.

  As a test, Feebee transmitted false approach plans for her Scout ship through the channels compromised by the RG officer. The approach data was picked up and immediately resources were reallocated. Proximity-mines shifted to the approach vectors Feebee had provided. The final proof was obtained when the proximity mine settings was updated to match the idents Feebee had provided.

  People working with the RG officer were identified. Again, all the evidence went to Chen. A needle comm arrived, Chen’s response.

  OFFICER AND ACCOMPLICES REMOVED

  PROCEED

  Alpha-2 summed it up perfectly. “We never fired a shot.”

  Feebee’s response was also brief, “We ended it without spectacle or fanfare. We found the author… and their helpers.”

  With the ambush threat removed Feebee felt it safe enough to proceed to the planet.

  Chen sent them security codes that granted access through the planet’s defences.

  Feebee assumed that he’d alerted the Royal Guard of their impending arrival. That was how he’d got the codes.

  She asked the QI to duplicate the idents and security codes and load them into a drone. This was sent ahead of them as they followed a slow and adjusted approached. The risk that the codes were route specific was worth taking. The drone mitigated that.

  They flew in low over the canopy of the crystal jungle. Alpha-2 was looking out the window, "It's very pretty for a war zone."

  They touched down without challenge in a corner of a forward compound which was anything but pretty.

  A dozen buildings were dug in, deep and spread out with clear lines of fire across the compound. The ‘crystal bush’ had been cleared back from the wire laving a scar on the ground. There was even a flag pole, surrounded by a circle of white painted stones. Atop, the flag lay limp, lifeless, without energy. There were no elevated sentry posts, just a few dugouts at the corners of the compound. Others were dotted about, seemingly at random. The base felt... nervous.

  No-one came to greet them. No-one was visible. Feebee didn’t mind that but had expected a bustling community. People on watch, training drills underway. Like back home.

  “We go light. Three weapons max.” For Feebee that was her long gun, a pistol and her hunting knife. Spare ammo in her webbing and the backpack. Not ideal but it kept her light. The other two took their favourite three items. Both had backpacks that bulged, she smiled.

  As they walked across the compound Feebee observed, and notes, their surroundings. Every footfall seemed to resonate, as if in a low ceilinged hall. Even their voices sounded unusually loud.

  She looked to the perimeter wire. The sentries were well hidden, where were they? Very well hidden.

  There were no clouds above them. But where mountains reached into the sky, clouds hung low, weighed down with crystal droplets, small glittery spheres that scattered light across the rocky crags below. The multi-coloured spray blurred outlines and caused shapes to merge.

  IR didn’t help. Vision below the clouds was psychedelic and chaotic.

  She ramped up her auditory senses. One of the buildings was humming, louder than the others. People.

  As the trio walked towards that building a solitary soldier emerged from a small hut off to the right. Big enough for one person to get into, just.

  ‘Latrine.’ The QI informed.

  Feebee nodded, ‘Oh. Ok. Good.’

  He detoured towards them.

  As he got near his two stripes were clearly visible on his newly pressed and clean uniform. Corporal Taggett clearly visible on a large, regulation name tag.

  "Your ship?" He pointed.

  Alpha-3 responded. He’d been the one addressed. "Yes."

  "What you doing here?'

  Alpha-3’s response was brevity itself, "Observing."

  The corporal looked them over, his thoughts written across his face. They stank and wore identical black fatigues. No rank or name tags.

  Two old grunts and a child. Amateurs. That’s why we’re here.

  “Follow me, this way. The boss is about to brief the company.”