“Why won’t you open!” Jacob demanded as he wrenched on the ship hatch’s latch until the metal started to bend.
He took a step away from the representative’s ship and kicked the airlock hatch in frustration. He should have specified that the ship remain accessible, but that would have given away his plan. Considering the representative had locked him out of the vessel, he probably already knew what Jacob planned to do, but that was just an assumption on his part.
“AI? Any chance you can help me unlock the hatch?”
“Captain, that vessel is not station property, nor is it equipped with an imperium interface.”
“I didn’t think so,” Jacob grumbled. “Have you been able to generate a full schematic of the ship with the drone scans?”
“No, Captain. The drone scanners are designed to look for stress fractures.”
“Show me anyway,” Jacob sighed. Having access to the AI again was a huge help. He didn’t have time to waste trying to force the door open, but he would like alternatives before he decided to cut through the hatch or the loading ramp.
Katherine and Barry didn’t need oxygen to breathe or even an atmosphere of any kind, but Jacob didn’t want to risk weakening the vessel’s hull by cutting holes into it. He knew that the phase coils put a lot of stress on a ship. The transport was proof of that. When he had first launched it, there was no evidence of stress cracks in the structure of that ancient vessel, but that changed after only a few trips back and forth from Vorlos Station. Some of that damage could surely be attributed to age, but Jacob didn’t know enough to say how much.
The AI complied, and a rendering of the ship appeared in his vision. Nobody else could see the floating image since it wasn’t real or a hologram. It was just data being processed by the drone’s sensors for him to view as a sort of augmented reality.
Jacob stepped back and mentally manipulated the image until it overlaid the vessel. “AI, can you lock the image rotation while I move around the vessel?”
“Image locked, Captain.”
He wasn’t sure that would actually work, but it made his job much easier. He went to the first panel that the drones had identified with their scans and fumbled around for a bit until he figured out how to open it.
The only thing within that hatch was the ship’s waste drain. The next contained the fuel connection.
Jacob kept opening hatch after hatch, looking for something that might allow him to bypass the ship’s lockdown. He wasn’t sure there would actually be something like that, but he was going off a hunch.
He knew some vehicles and buildings on Earth had emergency access systems. The first responder loop on electric cars was one example. He also recalled hearing a rumor that certain buildings, like banks, had special codes to allow certain police agencies to bypass the alarm systems in hostage situations.
He had no clue if that last one was true or not, but it made sense. He was hoping that a representative’s ship had something similar, since it belonged to a political figure. He finally located a small hatch that contained a touchpad inside. When he touched the screen, it lit up, but then went dark again a moment later.
Jacob couldn’t think of any other reason for such a device to be located under a panel on the outside of the ship, so it had to be what he was looking for. The problem was that he had no clue how to activate it, and there was no address or remote connection, only the touch screen.
“Couldn’t have just been a secondary hatch,” he grumbled as he studied the panel’s interior.
Jacob couldn’t see any sort of fastener or lip to pry up the touch screen panel. Whoever had designed the ship had done so with far more thought than the people who had put Melody together.
With the panel open, the maintenance drones were able to get a slightly deeper scan. Jacob noticed that the area behind the panel was located outside the pressure hull. With that knowledge, he used the maintenance drone to cut the panel holding the touch screen out.
The panel and screen fell out of the opening, stopping only when the cable connecting the device to the ship went taut. Jacob quickly scrambled to hold it up so the hot edge of the hole didn’t cut through the wires connecting it to the ship.
He had another drone bring him something to cover the edge of the hole, then he inspected the back of the panel, finally finding the hardware that attached it to the surface.
From there, it didn’t take him long to open up the touchscreen and remove the cable. The touchscreen was sent to have its programming scanned. Once the AI confirmed that was completed, Jacob popped back into the apartment.
“AI, give me a virtual rendering of the device I just sent you.”
This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.
“Yes, Captain.”
The touchscreen appeared on the kitchen table, and Jacob played around with it for a bit, pressing buttons to see what they did. He even pulled up a virtual window that showed the touchscreen’s programming. He didn’t understand any of the code, but that wasn’t a surprise. What he was looking for was complexity, and the touchscreen code didn’t have any of that.
“It’s just an interface,” he realized.
“AI, can you use the information from this device to make me an interface that is compatible with the connector?”
“There are interface devices in my memory, Captain. It wouldn’t take much effort to modify them to have the code and connector for the device you are holding.”
“Then do it, and have it sent to the hangar where I was working as soon as possible. Also, please put together a translation package for the code and send it to my private storage.”
Jacob felt the data enter his storage a few moments later and verified that his guess had been correct. The code embedded into the touchscreen was just designed to allow the interface to function, but now he had an access point.
***
An hour later, Jacob plugged in the new interface and connected to the address. He was met by more foreign code and left scratching his head. All of the Concord systems had a virtual component, so seeing random data was new to him.
He decided not to poke at it, so he didn’t trigger some sort of security measure. Thankfully, he didn’t need to poke at it himself; he had an AI to do that for him.
“AI, there is a new connection on the network. Please translate the code in that connection.”
“Translation complete, Captain,” the AI said only moments later.
“That was fast. Display the code for me, and annotate what the sections do.”
A floating window appeared in the apartment, but no annotations appeared. Before Jacob could ask the AI what was up, it spoke. “I can only theorize as to the purpose of certain code segments, Captain. Would you still like the data?”
“Yes.”
The annotations appeared, colored in green, yellow, and red. “What do the colors represent?” Jacob had a pretty good idea, but he wanted to be certain.
“Green sections are fully understood. Yellow sections are sections that should be correct, but without seeing the system they connect to, I cannot be entirely certain. Red sections are parts of the code that I cannot ascertain a purpose for.”
Yup, so pretty much what he suspected. At least there were no black sections of code.
Jacob perused the data, looking for security triggers. He didn’t really know what he should be looking for, but he hoped something would pop out at him.
“What’s this?” A voice jerked him out of his work.
Jacob turned to see Barry studying the same code window that he had just been studying. “Code from the alien ship. I think if I can figure it out, I can get into their vessel.”
Barry turned to him and frowned. “Get into? I thought all you needed to do was get them out of the vessel?”
“They secured their ship before they left,” Jacob grumbled in annoyance.
Barry raised an eyebrow. “You don’t secure something unless you expect someone to break into it. I think it’s safe to say the representative suspects what you are planning.”
“I know,” Jacob admitted grudgingly, “but that doesn’t change the plan.”
“You could always force him to tell you,” Katherine said as she appeared from the living room.
“How long have you been here?” Jacob asked.
“Long enough to hear you bitching about code.”
Jacob pushed the code to the side, but Barry grabbed the virtual window and took it over to the kitchen table to examine it. Jacob shook his head in exasperation and turned back to Katherine. “I understand you don’t like aliens. What I don’t understand is why your first response is to harm them? They haven’t done anything to you.”
“They haven’t!” she gestured around angrily at the virtual apartment. “I would say this was pretty fucking harmful, wouldn’t you?”
“That was Melody, and it is dead.”
“So what?” she demanded. “The AI didn’t create itself; it was created by the Concord Imperium. Now, two of the three species that made up that twisted government are fighting over this station. They wouldn’t have gotten here without the help of the representative, so fuck all of them!”
“I doubt it’s as simple as that,” Jacob sighed.
“You don’t get it, Jacob. I don’t care if their reasoning is simple or so complex that I’ll never understand their motivations. I only care that their actions have caused me harm, and I’m not going to sit back and allow them to keep causing me harm. If you don’t figure something out soon, I’m going to take matters into my own hands.”
Jacob narrowed his eyes at the woman. “Don’t do anything rash. I’ll figure this out.”
“You’d better,” she said, before storming off.
“She’s not wrong,” Barry said.
“She’s not entirely right either,” Jacob added. “AI?”
“Yes, Captain?”
“Monitor Katherine’s activities and notify me immediately if she goes near any of our guests, or does something that might cause them or the station harm.”
“She’s not going to like that,” Barry commented without looking away from the code windows. Yes, plural, the man had opened more.
“No, she isn’t,” Jacob agreed, “but I don’t need her to inflame tensions right now.”
“This section is for the hatch,” Barry said, pointing to one of the yellow sections. “I believe the red ones are for verifying credentials. Maybe a physical card or something.”
“How can you tell?” Jacob asked as he looked at the code.
Barry shrugged. “I was in the robotics and engineering club in high school. I wrote more than one code that allowed a robot to follow a set path for our competitions. This looks something like that.”
“Dammit! So even with the code, I wouldn’t be able to get in?”
“You might be able to trick it,” Barry said. “AI, can you duplicate this code and run simulations internally until you determine what the code is looking for?”
“Yes, Barry, but without a framework to start from, it could take time.”
“How much time?” Jacob asked.
“Up to a thousand years, Captain,” the AI replied happily.
Obviously, that wasn’t going to work.
“And if you had a framework?” Barry asked, seeming undaunted by the AI’s response.
“Ten to twenty minutes, Barry.”
“Well, there you have it,” Barry replied. “You just need to figure out what form that framework takes.”
“Yeah, easy,” Jacob muttered. “How exactly am I supposed to do that? I can’t just go up to the representative or his captain and ask them.” Well, he could, but he doubted they would tell him. If they wanted him inside their ship, they wouldn’t have locked the vessel in the first place.
Barry had no response to that, which meant it was up to Jacob to figure out how to convince Representative Chalto to hand over the item containing the framework.
He rubbed at his temples as he felt a headache building. Why couldn’t anything just be easy?