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Day 243/2545
When Jutland emerged from hyper-space near Sparta, Drake was surprised to learn that the Task Force hadn’t left yet, due to the inevitable delays that always seemed to occur when military operations were being prepared. With his status report sent, Drake sat back and waited for a reply. He knew it was the middle of the night at the Capital and therefore wasn’t expecting a quick answer to his query whether Jutland should land immediately to replenish her consumables to the level needed for participation in Operation Sorcerer. But to his surprise, he got one. The text message scrolled across his viewscreen.
Permission to land denied. Shuttles with consumables will rendezvous with you shortly. Sorcerer will commence in 8.5 hours. It is imperative that you be ready to join the Task Force by then. All further communications should be directed to Task Force Leader Lee. Good Hunting! End of message.
Eight point five hours was not a lot of time to unload half a dozen cargo shuttles and stow all those supplies. He expected that Lee would want to talk with him in person before the Task Force left orbit. As things turned out, he was right on both counts. His crew was still stowing the last of the supplies when Jutland accelerated out of orbit in formation with the other 15 ships of the Task Force. The meeting with Lee wasn’t all that pleasant either. Newly promoted Vice-Admiral Lee had displayed what could only be described as a bad mood and was annoyed at everything Drake said, no matter how polite and co-operative he was. After all this time, Drake still didn’t know what bug Lee had up his ass when it came to Roland Drake. Lee left no doubt in Drake’s mind that if it had been left up to him, Jutland would not be part of the Task Force. At least Drake wouldn’t have to talk with Lee during the 13 week trip through hyper-space.
Day 255/2545
Foster sighed as she entered the groundcar and sat beside her husband, Bret Murphy. He had already programmed the auto-pilot to take them home after another long day of work. As he looked at her face, he realized that she wasn’t just tired, she was also looking despondent.
“Bad day?” he asked.
She took in and then let out a long, slow breath before answering. “I’m tired of banging my head against the wall. My staff are tired too. We’re chasing our tails trying to figure out how Oracle can outthink a machine that’s designed to be at least ten times as smart. This hunt for planets to place Site X and the shipbuilding center is going nowhere. All the planets that Oracle for perfectly good reasons comes up with as candidates, are also places where Majestic will urge the FEDs to look, for exactly the same reasons.”
Murphy said nothing for a bit. As one of the Instructors at the Naval Academy, he technically wasn’t part of the Oracle Planning Group, but his wife sometimes used him as a sounding board for ideas, so he thought about her problem. Even with the Phase II expansion to Oracle, the SSU version still wasn’t as capable as Majestic’s estimated ability. Murphy wondered if the OPG was over-estimating Majestic’s capabilities, but then decided that under-estimating them would be a far greater mistake. An idea occurred to him.
“Let me ask you something. Do these super-computers have intuition?”
“Intuition? No. Why?”
“They use logical reasoning exclusively, right?”
“Yes. You’re leading up to something. I can tell. What is it?”
He shrugged. “Well, it’s just that you’re trying to use one machine to outthink another machine, and if both of them are using logical reasoning, then our Oracle will always be at a disadvantage. If we want to outthink Majestic, then WE, and by that I mean we humans, will have to do it ourselves because we have intuition and inspiration, both of which are not based on logic and therefore can’t be predicted by logic.”
Foster shook her head. “Wait, how can we possibility outthink Majestic when it can mathematically manipulate hundreds, maybe even thousands of variables at the same time?”
“We don’t try to outthink it rationally. We base our choice of planets for Site X and shipbuilding on something other than logic.” He paused to think. Foster waited. “Where is Oracle looking for candidate planets?”
“Ah, well, it’s looking at SSU member planet star systems and star systems that don’t have colonies on them.”
“So it’s not looking at star systems that have colonies that are still in the FPS?” asked Murphy.
“No, of course not.”
Murphy smiled. “Then Majestic isn’t likely to be looking at those star systems either.”
Foster shook her head. “That makes no sense, Bret. How can we set up Site X or a massive shipbuilding operation on a FED planet?”
“By deception.” He could tell that his wife still wasn’t getting it. “Okay, let’s use the shipbuilding project as an example. If we find a system with the right resources that has a FED colony, we go there and pretend we’re a company chartered on Earth that has entered into a contract with the Federation to build a shipbuilding complex from scratch. As far as the locals are concerned, that’s what it’ll be. We can even hire local people to work on the project. Only the senior project people need to know the real story, and when the complex finishes building ships and those ships leave, how will the locals know that they’re not going to a FED naval base?”
Foster looked skeptical. “If someone from Earth arrives, they might check and find out that there is no company chartered on Earth.”
Murphy laughed. “Then we set one up on Earth using the FED currency that SSU planets collected when they issued their own currency. The entire enterprise can be perfectly legit, except that the ships will go to us instead of the FEDs.”
Foster rubbed her forehead and said, “That is such a crazy idea.”
“Which is exactly why Oracle would never suggest it, and Majestic won’t think of it.”
After a few seconds pause, she looked at him and said, “It is just crazy enough to work. But what about Site X?”
“What exactly is Site X? I mean, what physical form will that function take?” he asked.
She shrugged. “It’s essentially a bureaucracy, that will co-ordinate logistical, economic, and military policy.”
“So it’ll consist of people working in offices?”
“Yes.”
“And if those offices happen to belong to a company that’s been chartered to build a new shipyard...?” Her eyes grew wide.
“You mean combine both Site X and the shipbuilding in one location?” She stared off into infinite space. “The backup Capital of the SSU located on a FED planet,” she said softly. “I’m not sure I can make that big of a leap. It’s just too...bizarre.”
Murphy nodded. “Exactly.”
They spent the rest of the evening, what little was left of it, working on the details of how to make it work. When they were all talked out, they undressed and laid face down, side by side on the bed. By mutual and unspoken consent, they knew they were too tired to have sex. Foster looked at Murphy’s face and saw that his eyes were closed, but she could tell by his breathing that he was still awake.
“There’s one problem with the concepts we’ve been discussing.”
Without opening his eyes, he said, “What’s that?”
“Setting up an alternate capital and a dedicated shipbuilding complex are so obviously to our advantage that there’s no way that Majestic won’t think of them and recommend counter-strategies. If we try to hide the fact that we’re doing both, Majestic will eventually wonder why we haven’t done it, and if it thinks long enough about that, it might even go so far as to consider bizarre alternatives.”
Without any hesitation at all, Murphy said, “In that case we have to allow the FEDs to find Site X and the shipbuilding complex.” He opened his eyes and saw her stunned expression. “We’ll set up a dummy Site X and complex somewhere Majestic is sure to tell the FEDs to look. They’ll find it and believe that they’ve successfully countered our strategy.” He heard her sigh in relief.
“You had me going there for a second!”
He laughed. “Sorry. What can I do to make amends?”
“Well...I haven’t had a foot massage in a long time.”
“One foot massage coming up.”
The next morning Foster arrived back at the Oracle Project offices and sat down in front of the computer terminal that hooked directly into Oracle. Finding a suitable FED planet for the combined Site X and shipbuilding complex needed to be done carefully. She and her husband had come to the conclusion that asking Oracle to widen the search for a suitable planet could seriously compromise the security of the whole effort if the FEDs conquered Sparta and their computer experts examined every request made to Oracle. Telling Oracle to include FED planets in the search for possible Site X sites would be a dead giveaway. But if Foster asked Oracle to evaluate FED planets/star systems as potential FED shipbuilding backup sites in case Makassar was destroyed and had to be abandoned, then she could get the information she wanted without giving away the real reason. The results that Oracle had provided so far could be used to select planets for the dummy Site X and the dummy shipbuilding complex.
The hard part was getting approval from the Chancellor or at least Secretary Shaw to allow access to billions of credits worth of the FED currency now in storage in underground vaults, without revealing too much of the details. As Murphy had pointed out, forcing information from a captured Chancellor would be much easier for the FEDs than getting it from Oracle. The Chancellor and his ministers, and even Admiral Janicot, were too high profile, and therefore it was too risky to entrust them with the knowledge that Site X and the shipbuilding complex would be built secretly in a star system that was still part of the Federation of Planetary Systems. As far as the people at the top of the SSU were concerned, they had to believe that the dummy locations were in fact the real locations. As for the FED currency, she and Murphy had come up with a way to get their hands on that too. She had to lie to CSO Janicot so that he could convince Secretary Shaw. When her husband had first suggested it, she had felt a twinge of conscience. She took her loyalty to the SSU seriously, and so far that had also meant being a loyal subordinate of the CSO. Murphy had pointed out that Janicot would be the first one to understand the need for absolute secrecy and limiting information based on ‘a need to know’. Only in this case, Janicot himself didn’t need to know. In the end, she agreed that lying to him was easier than going to him and saying ‘I need billions of FED credits, but I can’t tell you why, so don’t ask me’. If she were the CSO and a subordinate came to her with the request worded that way, she’d be suspicious too.
By late afternoon, she had the list of still-loyal-to-the-Federation planets that were in star systems with abundant metal and fissionable resources. At the top of the list was Midgard. It was perfect for their needs. An Earth-like planet that was a little cooler and dryer than Earth, it was habitable but not as comfortable as other colony planets. Population was just over a million. Its star system wasn’t too far from Sparta or the other major SSU planets. Best of all, Midgard had a large moon that had been surveyed and was known to contain generous amounts of iron, nickel and other useful metals, including radioactive elements. Midgard’s low population would welcome the investment of billions of credits, even if most of that ended up on the moon, because the new company’s employees and management would be spending a lot of time and money on Midgard. The inhabitants didn’t have enough indigenous industry to provide all of the equipment needed, but their tech base was sufficient to be able to maintain the equipment once it was installed.
By the time she was ready to talk to the CSO, she had the broad outlines of the plan figured out. A freighter would be sent there with the setup team and a cargo hold full of FED currency. They would tell the Midgardians that they represented investors from Earth and wanted to charter a mining and shipbuilding company on Midgard. Once the company was set up, the passengers would travel to Earth where they would pretend to be Midgardian businessmen looking for investors for the proposed shipyard complex. Shares would be ‘sold’ to several hundred wealthy investors who didn’t really exist except on the company’s books, and the funds would be deposited in company bank accounts. Thereafter the Midgardian company would order and pay for the necessary equipment to begin building the complex on Midgard’s moon, and the company would also lease or buy office space on Midgard for its employees and for the people who would set up the Site X administrative systems and functions. Earth-based shipping companies would be hired to transport the equipment to Midgard, and its moon and local technicians would be hired to help build and operate the complex. It was a large project that would take over a year to produce any tangible results, but that would be true regardless of where the shipyard complex was set up. She took some comfort from the knowledge that the Midgard complex would only be about five months behind Makassar in terms of delivering completed ships.
When she walked into Janicot’s office, she had her story straight. Janicot greeted her warmly and gestured for her to sit opposite his desk.
“I can tell from your expression, Captain, that you’re not bringing me bad news. You seem more relaxed than usual.”
“Yes, Admiral. I actually have good news. Oracle has finished its search for locations for Site X and for the shipyard complex.” She handed him a data tablet which he read.
“I’m not familiar with these locations. Tell me more about them.”
“Certainly. The shipbuilding location is in a star system that’s quite close to Hekla. There’s a planet there that’s barely habitable, which is why it hasn’t been colonized yet, but one of the system’s gas giants has a moon that was surveyed when the planet was under consideration for a colony. That moon is loaded with metals. The Site X location is a star system that’s deep inside SSU territory and has an asteroid belt with an asteroid that is large enough to be considered a small planet in its own right. It has plenty of water in the form of ice. The actual administrative complex where the personnel will work and live will be constructed underground.”
Janicot nodded. “I see. I’ll need a complete report from Oracle to take to Secretary Sorensen, Captain.”
“I’ll have that report ready for you within 24 hours, Admiral. There is another matter that Oracle is now recommending as well.”
“Something new?” asked Janicot. Foster nodded. “Let’s hear it,” he said.
“As you know, Admiral, most of the Federation currency on SSU member planets has been collected and replaced with the new Union currency. Here on Sparta we have approximately 233 billion Federation credits sitting in our vaults. Oracle is suggesting that we put some of that money to work on the Core FED planets to sway public opinion in our favor. Oracle has calculated that hiring public relations firms to disseminate press releases and Op Ed pieces in the media will influence enough voters to support some kind of negotiated peace that the odds of such an outcome will increase by 11%.”
Janicot frowned. “Eleven percent doesn’t seem like a big difference.”
“It’s not a huge difference. I agree, Sir, but on the other hand, that FED currency isn’t doing us any good sitting in our vaults.”
“Would we be able to get our people and the currency to those Core planets?”
“Yes, Admiral. We’ll have to be careful how we do it, and we’ll have to go through other, less developed FED planets first, but it can be done. Oracle has figured out what we have to do to make it work.”
“Okay, I suppose we should pursue anything that can help the cause, even marginally. How much currency will be required for this undertaking, Captain?”
Foster hesitated then said, “Ah, Oracle is recommending 10%, Admiral.”
Janicot was clearly shocked. “Ten percent? That’s over 23 BILLION credits. That’s one hell of a lot of Op Ed pieces, Captain.”
Foster played her trump card. She knew she wasn’t a good enough actor to avoid giving away the fact that she was hiding something, so she allowed her natural reactions to take over.
“Well, ah...I admit that I was holding something back because not telling you would give you deniability in case there were political repercussions down the road, Admiral. Most of that 10% will be earmarked for bribes and campaign contributions to candidates who are more sympathetic to our cause. Please keep in mind that we’re talking about a long term project taking place on a dozen planets.”
“Hm. I can see why you might think that I’d be better off not knowing about this, Captain, but let me reassure you that I want to know, and I’m prepared to accept the consequences of having that knowledge.”
“Yes, Sir.”
He thought for a few seconds. “What about the risk that the whole thing will generate anger towards us if the public finds out we’re bribing elected officials?”
“Oracle has calculated that if we can keep this secret, the net benefit outweighs the downside risk if the secret gets out, Sir.”
“Well if Oracle says it’s so, then who am I to question its calculations. Okay, Captain, am I correct in thinking that you’d rather not put all this in writing?”
Foster tried to keep her relief from showing. “Yes, Admiral. The less written down, the better.”
“Fine. I’ll present a verbal report to Secretary Shaw. I believe he has the authority to release those funds. Anything else, Captain?”
“No, Admiral, that’s all.”
As Foster walked back to her office, she wondered if she could contain her excitement until she saw her husband. Operation Chameleon, the unofficial name she’d come up with for the real Site X/shipyard project, had overcome its first hurdle.
Two days later, Janicot surprised Foster by walking into her office, something he had only done twice since she joined the Union.
“You’ll be pleased to hear that Secretary Shaw has agreed to authorize the withdrawal of the amount you requested, Captain, but I have to tell you that it took a lot of effort on my part to convince him to approve the full amount. He expressed concern that our people assigned to that project might be tempted to misappropriate some of it for their own uses.”
Foster thought fast. “I asked Oracle about that, Admiral. It turns out that Oracle already took that possibility into consideration when it calculated the requested amount. Naturally we’ll do our best to keep unauthorized use of those funds to a minimum, but Oracle is of the opinion that it’s unrealistic to expect zero misappropriation. And after all, we’re not going to keep detailed records of where the money went, because that would increase the risk of exposure.”
“Yes, I can see how that would be the case. Well, as I said, Frank Shaw will authorize the withdrawal, and he understands the need for secrecy. This will be under your supervision, Captain. I hope you know what you’ve gotten yourself into.”
“I do, Admiral.”
There’s something more to this than she’s telling me. I hope my trust in her isn’t misplaced, he thought to himself as he walked away.
