[RFC][Fiction] Hi Streamer

[Dartz]

Hopefully this'll finish. A spinoff from the ongoing Lun monster thing.

Mackie and Anika build a ship, then take a trip.

Part 1 on Pastebin due to Yuku now triggering 403 errors for any post that includes an email address in the text. Even a fake one.

Part 2 of 4-ish

It sat waiting, frost forming on the steel skin covering the nitrogen tanks. White ice-fur had begun to grow around the fill-ports while pale fingers of cold fog fell from the hoses joining them to the cryogenic cart. A tangle of other cables rolled across the hanger floor to a power point, bringing the onboard electronics gently up to their operating temperatures. The sterile scent of pure ammonia drifted in the air, mingling with the oily smell of diesel fuel, sharp chemical vapours venting from the drive coolant tanks, hot carbon, electric ozone and raw brushed steel.

Anika stared up at the bare-metal fuselage, resisting the urge to touch it with her hand where it was frosting. It left her feeling cold inside, an apprehensive chill filling her body. It raced along power-hydraulic lines and crawled up her back.

It'd been given a beautiful brushed-steel finish by the paint shop, matched with metalflake-effect Bubblegum Pink accents acriss the top of the wings, on both tails and on the engine intakes. It was a tribute to her original A-wing.

A pair of massive engine intakes threatened to swallow her whole, both of them being large enough for her to stand upright inside. Variable ramps, bypass ducts and vents shaped and formed the supersonic gas-flow, allowing the the monster craft to properly fly at supersonic speeds in an atmosphere.

Riding Hi-Streamer was a steel-built monster, bigger than many passenger shuttles. It loomed over her, pushing her down into the ground while the Little Cool Rider always invited her aboard. It stood aloof, a prima-donna requiring meticulous preparation before every flight. She had to stretch to reach the bottom of the fuselage under the cockpit. Even if she could support herself again on her outstretched hands, she still doubted she'd be able to reach the canopy.

The big Mig was a cool thing - no doubt about it. The sensor arrays alone made her grin reflexively just thinking about the radiated power even if they were a generation or three behind on the power efficiency curve. A pair of chin-like buldges under the cockpit thrummed with electric power, resonating with the power feeds in her body. Phased array sensor built into oversized winglets hummed as they warmed up.

But it just didn't feel like it was *hers*. She was proud to have built it and excited at the positive reaction the underspace gave it - even if some voices criticised it for being inelegant and unsubtle.

It was the one thing spoke of it belonging to her, something she hoped was enough of a foundation to start building a relationship. Anika's skill was in adapting the tools she could get, learning to work with them and making them work. Even if it resulted in something twice as heavy and with four times the power requirement of its nearest competitor. Only the Blackbird was larger, and it was classed as a space-ship because it actually had a proper crew cabin.

Even with two successful tests under her belt, it didn't feel like her. She didn't want to tell Mackie she still regretted selling her beloved A-Wing to build it - not after the work they'd both put in to make it real. She barely wanted to admit it to herself.

"Hey, Anika? You ready to go? Third time lucky."

Mackie stood on top of the engines, holding an empty plastic container that'd once been filled with twenty litres fresh coffee. He tossed it away, not paying attention to where it'd landed. It joined a jumble of other parts. He took a moment to try and adjust the skintight electroactive polymer flightsuit once again, struggling to make it comfortable. Anika felt herself compelled to stretch against the polymer squeezing down on her body.

"We should've used normal seats." The suit started to creak as she strained against it. "These suits are so uncomfortable."

"Tell me about it," the teenaged android grimaced."Just need to unhook the nitrogen feeds and we're finally done."

By his tone, she could tell that even he regretted building something that required so much molly-coddling before it'd fly. It'd taken most of a day to get Riding Hi-Streamer ready to fly - and that was just the normal checklist before flight. Even the flight suits took forever - and more than a little secret purple helper - to get into.

"I don't want to have to do all this anytime I want to go to Serenity to see Nene."

Anika took a tight grip of the grab handles on the Nitrogen feed nozzle. It unlatched with a gaseous hiss and a spray of cryogenic fluid. Flakes of frost fell around her feet, trailing streamers of white fog. She began to think it might've been a good idea to get a proper pair insulated gloves right before a frigid chill shot up through her arms, stabbing straight to the core of her body. The shock of it caused her hands to jam shut, shock-cooled valves all along the hydraulic lines feeding her arms binding up and grinding together. She yelped in surprise, struggling to drop the hose even as she felt it eat into her hands.

She shook her arms for what seemed like forever, cold fingers rising through her body, before it finally dropped to the concrete floor with a clatter, the last few dregs of nitrogen hissing out into a puddle on the concrete.

Her arms spasmed as she worked the jammed valves loose.

Mackie's face appearred from over the lip of the air-intake, looking down at her with a smile. "You Okay?"

"Peachy," she answered sourly, kicking the frigid hose away.

"Time for the blessing then," he grinned at her.

She frowned back at him. "Even I feel silly..."

"Can't help it," said Mackie with a shrug, "You know what happened last time."

Anika's shoulders fell. "I know."

That was the funny thing about wave quirks. Nobody would naturally think that marching three times backwards in a circle around the spacecraft chanting "Gremlins Out" while dousing it in lemon juice cast from an aspergillium made from the bumper of an old AMC Gremlin would save them all from constant annoying glitches, but after the chaos of the second test flight when they'd resisted the urge to do so, neither of them doubted that that was exactly what was necessary to ensure and safe and reliable flight. They just knew it had to be done... no matter how many people in the hangar thought it was funny

Kotono stood on the gantry above with her own maneuver gear strapped to her waist, watching with a well aimed video camera covering half of her face.

Anika gave her the finger

Kotono's teasing grin broadened as she waved down with her free hand. "Don't worry! The interwave will see everything."

Her voice echoed off the hangar walls.

"You're mean!" Anika whined, doing her best impression of a wounded puppy.

"You're own fault," Kotono called back. "It stays up until I get an apology."

Anika stopped, feeling a hot flush of embarrassment rush up through her body. Her cheeks turned rose-pink as hydraulic pressure rose behind synthetic skin. "No!"

She felt a finger tap her gently on the shoulder. She whipped around on her heel, storm-clouds already brewing over her head.

"Hey Anika. You screwed it up. We have to start again," Mackie said.

Golden eyes bored through him. A nervous giggle quivered up his throat as he took a step back.

"Fine!" the gynoid huffed, snatching the chromed aspergillium from his hands, before turning once more and

"We're just lucky Daryl has a follow up appointment," sighed Mackie.

"They're horrible to me..." Anika fished for sympathy.

"Frigga's Dirty Pair," Mackie breathed. "Just don't hack their terminals again...."

Anika's lips pursed into a bitter pout, her face for a moment looking like she'd just taken a bite out of a fresh lemon. She marched around the spacecraft, dragging stormclouds behind her while Mackie did his level best not to burst out laughing at the jeering coming from the peanut gallery. Again, they completed three full orbits, dousing the jet with the sacred lemon juice while chanting the mantra for banishment of gremlins. Finally, they both shared the last of the lemon juice between them, sipping it from the chromed demon-shaped head of the aspergillium before using the aspergillium to shatter a mirror.

"Done," said Anika, drawing a long breath in through her nose. She gazed up at it once more, still looming over her.

"Lets go," said Mackie, wearing a giddy grin.

They had to get someone with a forklift to act as a makeshift lift, a wooden pallet on the forks to act as a stable platform to stand on.

If the Hi-Streamer was huge, the cockpit was tiny. Anika had to twist herself around the star tracker to nestle herself into her chair. Automatic connectors locked her hard into place, saving her the trouble of fumbling with dozens of belts, straps and pressure hoses. The one good thing about the fortified-suit design was that it made getting into and out of the jet easier - even if getting into the suit was a whole lot harder. Her helmet was a carbon-fibre derivative of a Hardsuit helmet, with the same visor, intercomm and display structures. Memory foam kept it snug over her head, once she'd managed to gather her hair.

Instruments and display systems crowded in arround her. By her right hand, the nav-console with star map. Beneath that, the comm's array, Right in front of her, reaching out from the instrument panel, the main sensor display and Interwave master system. A number of indicators and guages flanked it, reporting the status of various elements of the main array. Further multi-function screens offered information from secondary systems and external stores. Her left hand came to a FrogPad keyboard and trackball, then the comms controls Between the various screens and guages were dozens of indicator lamps and switches leaving little of the original duck-egg blue instrument panel visible.

The front cockpit for Mackie was little better, being mostly old-style analogue steam-gauges with a single multi-function display.

Anika struggled to settle herself in the chair, straining against restraints that fixed her body rigidly in place to the seat. Head and neck restraint systems held her rigidly upright. Uncomfortable memories surfaced for a moment, but she mastered them quickly.

"Three Days In here." she sighed. Heavy switches thunked under her fingers as she began powering up the main arrays.

Mackie's voice crackled in her ear. "Lucky you don't get cramps... I'm biomimetic."

"Check your connection," she said, tapping on the side of her helmet

"This better?"

"Yep."

Still a little tinny, but liveable. Another hour of preflight checks and system calibrations beckoned. She thought about automating some of the system checks but it would just add another two or three layers of complexity on top of an already hideously complex system. She reassured herself that going through it all wasn't difficult - it was just numbingly tedious to flip through the checklist booklet strapped to her thigh and hit the right switches in sequence. Still, it was never far from Anika's mind that the main arrays were capable of putting out enough heat to melt themselves in seconds if she powered them up before the coolant compressors.

"This is why I hated being in the Knightwing," said Mackie, through the comm-link.

"Pre-Flight?"

"Some people expect the shipmind to just do it."

Anika's mind fell back to her own origins for a moment. "Your sister wasn't that bad, was she?"

"No...not really. I still had to do it because I was faster but she didn't take it for granted." He paused for a moment. "But some people had problems treating the voice behind the panel as a person and not just a part of the ship. They tended to find it hard to get assigned to flight missions after a while once their reputation got out amongst the 'birds and no-one wanted to fly with them."

She heard the grin in his voice.

"Really?"

"Oh yeah. Some of the old Habu's were the worst gossips. And I had to listen to them for weeks at a time."

Anika felt herself giggle, momentarily loosing her place in the checklist before her mind reset itself. Step 247 of 403. She underlined it with a grease-pencil to be certain.

"I mean, there was stuff that was cool, like soaring through the sky with my wings outstretched covering whole planets. And there was so many things going on that I had to be aware of, so it was like my mind was huge, like having a thousand eyes to watch a thousand things at once and the awareness to act on a thousand things at the same time." The pilot paused. Anika glanced forward through a gap between her panel and the cockpit canopy to see him flexing his gloved hand in front of his face. "But then, I was still stuck inside a plane. I could only go where the Knightwing went, when somebody wanted it to go somewhere and I couldn't really do anything else but wait and think. I'm smaller now - I guess - but I can do more stuff and I can do it when I want to."

Anika's thoughts turned inwards once more. "At least I wasn't tied to the DD."

"And I can wear the Born to Penetrate t-shirt and know it's the truth," the teenaged android announced.

"Mackie!" Anika shrieked.

A barking laugh answered her. "Bone-R, Lancer. Penetration Bomber! Slipping it in beneath their defenses then sliding up the valley to strike the critical point!"

Anika kicked at the firewall, sending shocks up her own leg. It wasn't quite his arse, but it was as close as she could get without getting out. "I'll kill you!" she kicked again, "I'll Kill you!" she kicked it harder, rattling the control panels. "I'll Kill you if you say things like that for the whole trip. Three days in here with your sense of humour."

Deep laughter answered her through the speakers in her helmet as she sat there fuming with her arms across her chest. An angry growl rolled up out of her throat. "Grow up, Mackie."

"Never!"

"Can we please go fly now?"

"Still waiting for the engines to preheat. Another ten minutes."

A frustrated sigh rolled up her throat. At least it gave her time to calibrate the star-traking autopilot inertial navigation system to Frigga's current position and radial velocity, relative to the sun before finally booting up the main interwave circuit manually, command by command. Such were the joys of working with prototype systems. Some day soon, she promised herself, this would all be shell-scripted.

Eventually.

That was the trade-off she'd made when she built the system. Nobody on Frigga could build the sort of intelligent software systems that allowed people to just point to a target and click 'analyse' - that took some class-A wizard expertise, a little handwaving with the attendant ethical concerns when the system woke up, months and years of work, or all three. The alternative to an expert system, was an expert operator.

That thought brought a self satisfied smile to her face, right as the main interwave systems came up.

"Okay Anika, let's start this thing,"

At least she didn't have to worry about that. "Go for it," she answered. "Just don't cut out ground power before you switch in the main generators."

"I fixed the checklist."

She flicked her own booklet back to page one, then placed one cautious hand over the primary power switch - just in case. She felt an electric buzz rise up her spine as the right engine began to murmer. It built on itself, spooling up to a gentle moan. She could hear the pilot adjusting something in the forward cockpit, before her clicked the ignition on. It lit with a soft 'pompf' and a hard kick through the back - an injection of coffee liquer into the ion chambers sparking the reaction. Coil blades spun up to a siren's wail, a deep roar building behind her.

Anika could feel the spacecraft start to vibrate with energy, life entering the metal structure. It settled down into a hollow turbine whistle, the scent of scorched coffee filling the air.

"One stable," Mackie announced. "Spark on two."

Anika felt the kick as it punched to life, winding itself up to a steady idle. A single indicator lamp informed her that ground power had been disconnected and the spacecraft was now running off its own generators. Each one had to provide enough power for the entire sensor suite on its own. The scent of ozone began to filter through her helmet mask.

Both engines howled up to full power, the spacecraft straining against its brakes. She felt it push forward, begging to be set free. Both afterburners tore into life, ripping at the air around her and drumming on the side of her head. She could hear the engine turbines screaming to be set free. There was an energy inside the jet. It fizzed through her body, racing along her arms, crackling in her powerfeeds and network links. It carried the bare minimum of armaments but it still crackled with single-minded purpose. This was no mere light personal shuttle. On a very real level, Riding Hi-Streamer was a weapon, one as deadly as a full-on bomb-run in the right hands. In her hands was the sword of information, hammered from raw data in an electronic forge, given its edge by the keeness of mind.

A giddy, gleeful giggle rose out of her throat. A sense of mischief sparked in her body, tingling through her fingertips as she carressed the keys.

Another thing she had in common with the big fighter jet then.

Both engines wound down slowly, easing themselves back into a hollow waiting idle.

"I think we're good to go. Can you get us clearance Anika, and lock your canopy?"

She pulled the latch from underneath it. The cockpit canopy slammed down hard, threatning to bite her fingers off. Immediately the noise from the engines damped down to a distant murmur.

"I'm locked.. give me a moment on the clearance I need to send the flight plan."

First leg to Atalante. Six hours. Second Leg to Ultima, Forty-nine hours. Third Leg to Nostromo/LBBL, Five hours. A little longer than just scooting straight out to the Limit then turning to Nostromo perhaps, but safer for a prototype spacecraft. A single keypress sent it out through the Hi-Streamer's own node, filing it with each destination along with their expected arrival times. It'd be a half hour before the acknowledgement from the catgirls turned up, while Atalante took moments.

"Is anyone up there in the control room?"

Silence answered.

"Anyone?"

"Gimme a minute, I just got here..."

Jet? Strange, Anika thought. She wasn't scheduled to be up there, it was supposed to be one of the newcomers

"I need the main bay door opened."

"Yeah, hang on. I'll set the auto-sequence."

The cyber's voice oozed irritation. Mackie was chuckling away to himself in the front cockpit and Anika couldn't help but feel there was some corrolation.

"I saw your exam results for the last semester..."

Mackie stopped chuckling.

"If you fail the year, you lose your scholarship. If you lose your scholarship, that's it. You know that right?"

Her tone had flattened.

"Yeah sis, I know. It was a bad exam, that's all," he assured her. "I aced half the subjects. And I brought a reader with me with my study material on it...."

"Please Mackie. Don't just focus on the projects and subjects you like."

"Alright, I promise."

Anika could almost hear him rolling his eyes.

"Bay's evacuated and pumped down. Gate's opening. See you in a week."

And like always, his Sister trusted to faith that he'd do it. Anika decided to keep her comments to herself on the matter. It was a family thing, and none of her business. No matter what he did with his life.

"Later sis!"

Anika forgot all about it when she felt the big jet begin to inch forward, Mackie motoring the engines to push it out of it's parking bay. She saw the inky black of space beyond through her canopy porthole for only a few moments before the Mig turned to face and she felt a thrill run through her body. It might not have been perfect, but it was something she'd built herself. Parked along the landing bay walls were a motley array of light shuttlecraft and fencars, most of which she didn't recognise anymore. They were all new to Frigga - belonging to newcomers who came when the Millenium took control of the mine. Parked amongst them was a single old A-wing that resurrected all her feelings of guilt over selling the Little Cool Rider.

She still missed that little shuttle. That thought was left behind when both engines began to howl, accelerating her hard down the bay. An invisible hand tried to crush her down into her seat, the pressure rising as both engines surged to full power. The walls began to rush by, overhead lights strobing through the canopy portholes. She struggled to get a view ahead, pressing her head against the tektite glass. Open space enveloped the craft, the darkness swallowing it whole.

The pressure of acceleration didn't relent. She glanced at the velocity gauge to see it already beginning to crawl past one percent lightspeed. The white needle kept accelerating around the dial. Her sensors showed the asteroid power signature receding rapidly away behind her.

"Riding High Streamer, Clear," she radioed, almost forgetting to do so.

She exhaled a hot breath, satisfied herself that nothing was wrong with the Mig before settling herself back for the rest of the journey.

"Okay, we're on autopilot," said Mackie, exhaling a deep breath. "Target speed is set to five. STAINS is tied in. Everything looks good up front. You've got the flight plan."

"Setting course for Atalante," she answered. "Six hours."

Anika keyed the first course-change in to the navigation computer, the Mig rolling itself slowly around towards 36 Atalante for the first leg of the journey. Only another three days to go.

-------

She switched to navigational RADAR, then back to the IDAR monitor. It wasn't there, then it was. In the background, the music continued to play, tugging at the back of her mind. She switched again, adjusting a few settings before filtering it through her system once more. The system sifted through the raw data, searching for a clear signal amongst all the clutter and noise.

Anika was almost ready to write it off as a glitch in the IDAR array - it was a prototype after all.

The computer finished its work, offering its results to her with an electronic chirrup.

"Bang-Bangin' Hammers in my head..."

The android's voice burst into her ears, singing along with the music that was now front and centre in her awareness.

"Mackie..." she tried.

"Bang-Bangin' Hammers in my head...."

He was drumming on his console in time with the music.

"Mackie!" she yelled.

"In my head... In my head!"

"Hey! Commander Hadfield!" she screamed, kicking the bulkhead in front of her. "I'm trying to concentrate back here!"

The singing stopped. The song continued a few moments on its own before it was cut off too.

"Yeah sorry Anika, it helps me study."

He wasn't sorry. Not at all. She was certain of it. It just made her bristle all the more.

"Study?"

"I've nothing else to do right now..." he said. "Everything's set."

"With music that loud?" she asked, pointedly.

"Well, by tying an emotional link to the words of a song which I can definitely remember, it helps me remember what I'm studying," he answered with an audible smirk.

"You're an android. That only works for humans."

"But I'm am too a real boy!" he pleaded mockingly.

A frustrated growl rose out of Anika's throat as she felt herself begin to grow warm once more. She swallowed a deep breath of cool air, confirming what she'd

"Mackie. I think we're being followed."

"By who?"

"I don't know," she answered quickly. "I thought it was a distortion on the IDAR at first - it's a bit towards the edge of the field of view - but there's a faint EM trace too." She paused, doublechecking the cross section on the navigational array. "It's so small I wouldn't have noticed it if I didn't specifically look."

"A stealth..." he breathed.

"Or very small," she corrected. "But it's been twelve thousand off our right wing for the last half hour." Anika swallowed a lump. "It's watching us, using passive sensors."

"Are we going to go full active?"

The humour had drained from his voice.

"Not yet. I don't think they realise they've been spotted. I don't want to spook them."

"I could slow down a little and force them to fire their thrusters to slow down. Or turn towards them."

He knew the game well enough. Being the KnightWing's pilot for over three years, and being the Knightwing itself for another one had that effect.

"Slow down... just a little."

"Roger"

She felt the tug on her restraints as the Mig slowed ever so slightly. She focused her sensors on the spot, recording with IDAR, RADAR, optical and wavescanners. She saw it pull away ahead for a few moments -just a few thousand kilometres. A small smile crawled across her lips. She bared her teeth in a grin as she saw its output spike, braking thrusters firing to slow it down, sliding it back to its chosen position off the right wing.

"Got it!"

A few keypresses brought up the signature on her monitor, before offering it to the database of signatures held in the computer behind her. It warbled electronically to itself as it compared the signal against a few common drive signatures.

"What is it?"

The system chirped as it completed the search, reaching the end of the database. The result flickered up in green letters on the monitor in front of her.

"Unknown," Anika read aloud, puzzled.

Something new? Not enough information? It could be any number of things but her curiosity was piqued. Her mind raced to life, warming her body to the core. She felt the new dampers take effect, stabilising her output at a level her natural cooling could handle. Turning the cabin air-conditioning up to full let her run a little hotter, a little sharper.

"We can't go active without giving away that we've spotted them, and that we can spot them," she thought out loud. "And they'll activate any defences they have which'll make getting a good identification much harder."

Her mind drifted back to her first few days amongst the underspace, when they were still introducing her to the tools and techniques of the trade, and how it had been explained to her at the time. The trick with electronic warfare was to get your opponent to show all their cards, without revealing too many of yours in the process. It was almost a form of slow poker, with two players hidden behind dividers. She'd had to look up what Poker was at the time, but the metaphor still held. Neither could see each others hand. Neither could see how much the other had in their pot to play with. All they could both see was what was on the tables in front of them. What each player was betting, what cards they'd chosen to show and what was coming down the river.

Every single signal sent out was a bet - a gamble that it'd reveal something about the cards the opponent held, without revealing too much of her own in the process. Any signal sent could be analysed. Any signal analysed could be turned into information - information that could be turned back against an opponent. She could leak information - deliberately show off one of her own cards and watch how her opponent responded, how they changed their betting in response. It might reveal more about them than she'd given up about herself.

Anika could surmise that whatever was parked off her wing didn't know it had been detected yet. Even when passive, it still emitted small drabbles of radiation - the signatures of various pieces of equipment and powered devices. It was nowhere near enough to give her a full picture of what it could see of her, but still hinted at something very carefully designed - the Hi-streamer emitted more noise when parked and shut down.. No active emissions whatsoever - she was as certain as she could be of that. It was content to watch, wait and slurp. Knowing it was there, she could modify the operating profiles of her equipment to hide her true capabilities.

She could bluff and know it wouldn't be called. She liked to keep it that way for as long as possible; things got complicated when both sides knew the other was out there.

Whomever it was, unfortunately, wasn't a moron. They knew what they were doing. They'd parked themselves on the sunward side, with the sun behind them, so any attempt to track them visually or with IR was doomed to failure. Without the right filter it was lost in the glare at best and at worst, it'd damage the equipment. She had to assume they might have other defences ready and waiting.

Pondering on it, she remembered a trick she'd once seen Lebia Maverick use in a thread way back when Anika'd just introduced herself to the underspace. There were dozens of radio sources in the solar system - hundreds even. Some of them were pretty powerful. There were lightspeed and interwave comm's relays all over the main belt. Each one of those signals would reflect off the target as sure as one of her own would, and she could receive both the original as a reference on the left-hand array and the faint reflection on the right. Then she could cross-corrolate both signals using what she already knew to get a proper detection image. It was like using a match compared to a full blown camera flash, but it could work and give some idea of the size of what was out there. Once she had that, she could make careful guesses about its power and drive systems based on what she could see.

She scanned through for nearby sources - the most powerful being Atalante's outer marker navigation beacon - still over half an AU away. Nothing better. And with the target having some sort of RADAR stealth, she guessed that any reflections from it would be orders of magnitudes smaller than they would normally be anyway, edging close to the detection threshold of some of her gear. It'd take far more processing power than she had behind her just to sort it out from the background noise. The multidimensional fast fourier transforms alone would need quantum-level processing to get done in time to be useful. Getting a really good result would require multiple signals, from multiple sources to get a spread of frequencies and returns which could be compared with each other and that was several frustrating orders of magnitude beyond what she was capable of.

She could take it and grab the raw data, then send it somewhere were there was that much power. That was the whole point of building the interwave link into the thing in the first place. But that relied on someone being interested enough by it to take on the puzzle and there were never guarantees of that - she just didn't have the pulling power of the bigger names.

A wave of aggravation rolled through her as she glared at the screen, stymied for a moment. Aware of how warm she was starting to get, she adjusted her air conditioning to feed her the coldest air possible.

She could call Atalante and ask them to transmit a standardised comm's test message under the guise of a system's calibration. It'd be a brighter signal, sure, which'd drop the processing requirements down to something manageable but then the target would also hear her make the request - they'd have a chance to defend themselves somehow or just break off.

An encrypted transmission with an explanation why they needed a signal might work. But the target could detect the transmission and even if they couldn't decrypt it, it wouldn't take a genius to corrolate it with sudden high-power radio illumination. They'd know they'd been detected.

She swallowed her pride and took a minute of raw data using the outer marker as a radio source, packaged it up with everything else she'd taken along with a short description of events what she thought it was, and promised herself she'd post it online when she wasn't so busy. The system chewed away on it, compressing it together into a nice juicy tarball ready to be sent away while Anika drummed her fingers on the keypad, searching for another option.

"Are we going to do anything?" asked Mackie, breaking through her concentration.

"I'm thinking..." Anika snapped back at him.

"I could just outrun 'em," he said, clamly. "We're barely ticking over as it is."

She glared at the monitors in front of her. This was too tantalising a challenge for her to give up that easily. Something was out there. And the idea of that something being new to the Underspace thrilled her to the core.

"I don't know if they can keep up or not, Mackie."

And that was the first excuse she could think of.

"Fine..." he sighed.

Which was exactly as convincing as she expected it to be. Annoying, she thought. Her eyes shot wide open. That was the answer. Right there in front of her. Thank you Mackie! She stiffled a sudden, impish giggle, a mischievous grin spreading across her lips.

"Hey Mackie, could you pass your media player back here?"

There was a pause as he was taken momentarily aback by the surprise request.

"Uh yeah, why?"

"So I hook it up to the main array and use it as a source," she answered, pride rising in her voice. "It'll give us a signal to bounce off the target - then I can filter the music out because I know what it is and it'll look like we're just being rude rather than specifically looking for them."

She struggled not to just rub her hands together in villainous glee. It was perfect. It was a solution that suited her to a tee. If you couldn't beat them technically, try socially.

"So they'll pick it up at Atalante too?"

"That's a problem," she answered. And part of the solution, she didn't say. "But they'll like the data we give them."

Mackie nudged it up through the space between the cockpit canopy and her monitor, struggling to poke it back towards her.

"I think there's some Pavarotti in there, use that."

She blinked. "Pavarotti?"

"Comin' out their asses..." he answered in a sing-song tone.

Ick, Tom clancy references. She reached forward, struggling to get a good grip with her fingers on a device that was little more than a black plastic pebble with a small screen. All she succeeded in doing was to nudge it annoyingly away from herself before she hit upon the idea of pinning it against the canopy and spinning it down towards her.

It dropped. With relief, she caught it between her legs. If it'd gone on the floor, she wasn't picking it up without undoing her restraints. Hooking it in to the system required a few creative hardware and software hacks but nothing too difficult.

If she set it to broadcast omnidirectionally through both arrays it'd look more like someone just being a bit of an arsehole with a new toy than someone looking for a stealth. The angry messages arriving minutes later would seal the deal. With half the array elements set to transmit and the others to receive the reflection, it was perfect. The processing was made so much easier that'd it'd take minutes instead of months,.

She set the mains to go live as soon as she pushed play, then waited a moment, doublechecking to see if everything was set up to record. She drummed her fingers on the keypad impatiently, waiting for some of the more exotic sensors in the wing extensions to warm themselves up. Synthetic aperture imagery was a bit of an ask, but she decided to try for it anyway. She turned a switch to set the main array power, before keying in a flurry of commands to tie everything together.

The last thing she did was switch off the Hi-Streamer's transponder. It'd help it look more like a silly prank, she figured. And might just shield from some of the resulting hate mail due after flooding a major voice channel with a fat tenor singing Nessun Dorma.

She made one last check that everything was set and satisfactory, allowing herself an impish grin. All green across her panel, systems ready and waiting.

"Here we go," she said.

Anika pushed play. The timer on the media player began to tick and she held her breath, waiting to see what the result would be.

Mackie began to laugh.

----------------------------

________________________________
--m(^0^)m-- Wot, no sig?

[HRogge]

Part 1 on Pastebin due to Yuku now triggering 403 errors for any post that includes an email address in the text. Even a fake one.

Part 2 of 4-ish

Very strange, I remember it used to work...

test@gmail.com

(edit)
no error for me, maybe it was just a temporary problem... or your post was too long (not sure if yuku limits post length).

[robkelk]

We've had some huge posts in the past - page length shouldn't be a problem.

Testing whether the Quick Reply blocks strings that look like email addresses: bigcheese@stellvia.fen

Edit: No problem with QR.
--
Rob Kelk
"Governments have no right to question the loyalty of those who oppose
them. Adversaries remain citizens of the same state, common subjects of
the same sovereign, servants of the same law."

- Michael Ignatieff, addressing Stanford University in 2012

[Dartz]

I'm perplexed. It's a really peculiar bug.

It might be a quirk of how the text editor I wrote it in handles characters. Addresses seem to work fine if I type them directly into the input box, but if I try and cut and paste more than one from gedit then I get the 403.
________________________________
--m(^0^)m-- Wot, no sig?

[HRogge]

Hmm... maybe a conversion problem, something unicode related or some "clever trick" the X/Gnome clipboard is doing?

[Rajvik]

I'm enjoying it, hope the test goes well for them I know that i like what I see in it.
 

[Dartz]

Part 2 of 4.
Though it could easily be finished here.

And yes, I did just trawl Wikipedia a little. But I wanted to make it seem like Anika was actually working or knew what she was doing, rather than pushing the button marked 'analyse' or 'defend' and letting the software do it. That doesn't mean I do....

The pilot of the Stealth was caught in a bind.

Anika stared at the contact on her screen, trying to second guess his actions. What did he think she was doing? She knew he knew he'd been lit up by her transmission. She'd put enough power into it to make voice communication a problem for Atalante - in about six minute's time. The way she figured it, the pilot had a few options, the first and most obvious of which was to assume nobody was looking for him and if he just did nothing to draw attention to himself and switched everything to silent running, nobody would find him. Next, the pilot could slowly withdraw, increasing the distance and dropping the return signal off at the expense of risking his drives being detected. The final option was to begin defensive jamming on the assumption that he had been spotted, and he now had to hide his identity from her - but the downside of that from his perspective was that if he hadn't been detected, jamming someone was as good as broadcasting his presence and confirming he'd been up to no good in the process.

If he was good, he'd play it cool and assume he'd been detected, but do nothing anyway in the hope of finding out how. He'd sit there and let her believe that her little stunt had worked exactly as planned while quietly adjusting his equipment to counter hers and get a good, close look. It turned it into a game of bluff and counter-bluff, trying to build a true picture of her opponent while trying to keep him from getting a picture of her.

Already by broadcasting at such a high power she was bleeding some data, but it was worth the gamble.

Hidden in the data coming back wasn't just an image of the target. As the frequency modulated along with the music, it'd pick out different details, bouncing off parts of the craft better or worse. It'd reflect of engine and sensor components, cockpit glazing, even the pilot. There was far more in there than just a radar image of a spacecraft, all she had to do was figure out how to get it out...

Her eyes scanned across the wire-frame graphics on her displays, watching waveforms come in and out from the system. She adjusted the sample rate first, reducing it slightly to ease the processing and storage requirements, while hoping the resulting Nyquist frequency was still high enough to capture the bulk of what she needed. Even so, she was still taking and storing hundreds of millions of samples a second, flooding the storage decks behind her with Gigabytes of data every second. There was enough storage for ten or fifteen minutes worth of it - and that was it. That still required terabytes of holographic memory.

When the target had an effective cross section to her sensors equivalent to something the size of a pinball, she needed all the data she could get without bogging her systems down.

Anika time-shifted her trace of the original output signal, then adjusted the gain of the return to allow her to compare both visually and confirm she wasn't being interfered with. Outbound was in red, inbound projected in yellow. Noise flickered onscreen, stray signals from the Hi-streamer itself mingling with reflections from debris in the main belt and other craft. A nearby metallic asteroid shone brighter than her target, momentarily filling the screen with noise before she adjusted to filter it out.

She focused her passive elements directly on the target. Switching to the frequency domain made it a thousand times clearer - a dozen different spikes added to the reflection, making the differences obvious. She cross-corrolated both signals, compensating for the variations in frequency of the original signal, before feeding the now cleaned up reflection straight into her imaging program. Behind her, the Hi-Streamers computers churned through the raw data. An orange warning light flashed up on the control panel, warning her that she was in danger of cooking the system if she kept it up. Anika switched in the reserve heat-pumps, guessing the Stealth would figure she was just bleeding heat from her transmitter.

Licking her lips in anticipation, she switched her main monitor over to display the output from the imager.

It was terrible, a fizzle of static the colour of an overcast sky. The Stealth's fuselage deflected the fast majority of her radiated energy away into space, before absorbing the majority of the rest. Only the smallest fraction made it back to her. Dismayed for a moment, she thought quickly, adding a new command to the process. Averaging the result over thirty frames of data might bring up the brighter parts of the reflection, pulling them out from the random noise beneath. The last thing she did was adjust the gain on her monitor. Out of the dull electronic haze emerged an image; the hard edges of an angular craft shining out from the grey noise. She zoomed in until it filled the screen.

"Pizdaty!" she squealed, gleefully snapshotting the first image and saving it away. She blushed with embarrassment, realising she'd been spending far too much time with Lun. Learning Russian from a sailor wasn't the best way to do it...

The image blurred on her monitors, slurring and shifting as both craft drifted relative to each other. But it still sat there. Flashes of detail mingled with flickers of noise washing sections of the image out to grey for a few moments before the image re-emerged. It flew on through clouds of electronic static and noise, drifting in and out of view. A giddy thrill fingered up her back as she caught a glimpse of what could only be the cockpit.

It was small, between ten and fifteen metres long with a flat underside, she noted, like a sled. The nose reached forward to a sharp point. Space for a cockpit formed an angular peak with a long straight run back to the ghosted outline of a rhomboid tailfin. Splashes of white shone up in the nose and along the flanks, indicating what might've been sensor arrays or engine intakes or even parts of the structure beneath the skin.

It was achingly familiar, but just out of reach at the back of her mind. Still, it was there! It was an image. It was a result that she could show to people! It was worth credit. It was worth respect. Especially since whomever it was flying the thing still hadn't realised he'd been spotted.

"I've caught you. I've caught you," she giggled gleefully. She'd caught something she was almost certain nobody had ever seen before because there would've been rumours about them out there. And she'd done it in a way that, she thought at least, was particularly clever.

This was why she did it; the discovery, the solution, finding out some piece of information that she knew someone out there didn't want her to know. It was the deep satisfaction of forbidden knowledge set free for all. She'd free it all to the underspace and the convention at large, knowing that someone, somewhere was kicking themselves for getting caught.

Nessun Dorma reached its full crescendo as she gulped down the data, storing it away for future analysis. A glance at her panels showed everything running a little hot, but still safely inside limits. Everything was working as it was supposed to; all systems nominal.

She allowed herself a moment of pride in that alone. Months of work had just come to a beautiful head.

The music came to and en and she cut the channel, switching safely back to passive. The image on her screen went dark for a few moments before she finally ended the program, the stealth slipping back into the blackness of space. Anika kept a fix on its location in passive mode, waiting.

"We're done?" asked Mackie.

"Yes,"Anika confirmed, staring at her monitors. The following spacecraft was still clear as day on her IDAR display. She watched it flare up, energy pulsing from its drives. The shape on her IDAR monitor warped and smudged itself, accelerating ahead before turning away.

"What are you doing?" she murmured to herself, gazing intently at the splash of colour on screen. IDAR was an interwave-based system, sending a flash of interwave energy out which reflected off the warping caused by a craft's drive fields. The original system at Little Big Bang was intended to detect incoming craft at FTL speeds before they slammed into Nostromo's Limit - it used a house-sized rotating dish with its own dedicated power supply. The IDAR prototype fitted to Riding Hi-Streamer was a different animal. A single interwave source driving through dozens of phase-shifters fed an array of transmitter elements mounted in the nose. Varying the phase of each element formed a beam of interwave energy that could track and scan across the sky faster than any mechanical system. It could spot any fencraft in range, regardless of size, stealth or cloaking capability - provided it had an operating drive generating an energy field. It couldn't tell her whether it was an inefficient fencar, a shuttlecraft, or a stealth-fighter with hyper-efficient engines - just that it was there.

And now, that it was moving further away from her, accelerating. Had she aroused suspicion?

Anika made a quick calculation of its relative speed using a grease-pencil and ruler on her monitor to gauge the distance and bearing. It was traveling nearly a thousand kilometres a second faster, on a thirty degree relative bearing. No other emissions. No radio. No sensors. No sharp pulsed bursts that she could detect. It might've been hopping frequencies and spending too little time on each one too be detected directly, but even then she'd see the resulting power emissions and secondary harmonics from the onboard electronics. It seemed quiet.

Slinking home?

She drummed her fingers nervously on the keypad once more. She was hungry for information. And cake. Especially cake. Something sweet and succulent and energising. Her food supply for the trip was stashed in a compartment behind her right shoulder - a pain to get to when it was convenient. She didn't really need to eat but it helped focus her mind. Munching on cake helped her chew through a problems.

Anika didn't want to turn her focus away from the screen - not until she was certain the stealth had gone. Then she could get into the nitty-gritty parts of really picking apart the data at her leisure.

She saw the signal on her IDAR monitor begin to slow, matching her momentarily before beginning to draw closer once more. "Trying something new?" she wondered aloud, her brow furrowing as she tried to get a read on what that something was. Bearing remained constant, range....

"It's coming right at us!" she yelped. Collision course? No, no reason. "It's playing chicken."

"Yeah. Hold my course. I know," Mackie interrupted, to her irritation. "They want to make sure we can't see 'em right? And they're probably not stupid enough to leave themselves no way out if we don't move."

Sometimes it was easy to forget that he really did know what he was doing. Anika however, focused in on the Stealth. It didn't matter what was in Mackie's head - what mattered was the pilot of that small craft. What was he thinking, what did he know?

He sees a two-seater cruising towards Atalante. It's a new type, so he watches believing he hasn't been detected. Anika winced inside herself as she realised there was a chance he did pick up her IDAR signals, but whether he grokked the meaning of them was another matter. Maybe he did realise something? It gnawed at her for a moment - the idea that maybe he'd been lulling her to believe he thought he hadn't been spotted - but she pushed it out of her mind. Too late now to worry about it. After the interwave signals, a high energy active radio burst lit him up, but not one specifically targetted at him. It was one she wanted him to think was just a juvenile prank, but combined with the IDAR signals it'd be more than enough to make a good hacker suspicious he was being tracked - even if they weren't sure exactly how.

A new type of ship that might be able to track something so stealthy would be very interesting to whomever had sent the pilot out here. The scoop for him would be discovering that there existed technology capable of tracking him - and confirming it. Even better would be finding out how it worked... Was that something worth taking the risk of a collision to confirm?

That was it! The pilot of the Stealth assumed that, if they had detected him, they'd move to avoid a collision or otherwise change their posture somehow in response. If not, he'd go quiet as he passed and circle back around slowly. There was a risk of being lit up with the sun at his back but it was small when dealing with an unaware target.

She focused the bulk of her attention on her monitors, watching its signal morph Somewhere in the back of her mind she was slowly realising that this plan of his wasn't actually a very good one - that he had to have some other angle to it. Maybe he was counting on them not changing course? He'd have to assume that if they'd detected him then they'd be aware that he'd have to account for the chance that they hadn't and wouldn't move and that he'd already planned to break off anyway - so he'd know that his bluff was almost certain to be called. Unless it was a bluffed bluff....

The whole metaphor started to break down as another little voice in her mind began to curse the fact that her initial primer years ago had been written by someone who loved playing cards.

They could react, and confirm they'd detected him. They could not react, running the risk of him taking some snaps on the flyby and grabbing a good close-in look, but potentially allowing him to keep the impression that he hadn't been spotted. From then on, the trees of options available to her grew and grew into a decent sized forests of bluffs, counter-bluffs, counter-counter-bluffs and a tangle of gambits that'd make Death Note seem simple.

She didn't have the mindspace to traverse each and every tree in time. She was already panting with the exertion of keeping up. Analysing, counter analysing, plotting, estimating, all while still keeping track of the stealth on both IDAR and her main sensor array. She plotted its course and speed and estimated she had maybe twenty-five seconds before it passed.

She watched for sudden output spikes indicating either a live scan, or a missile lock.

Mackies voice again intruded into her concentration. "Can you put the bogey onto my visor?"

"Done!" she snapped at him, flicking a switch to transfer the data forward.

"Great! When they come past I'm going to turn on their tail and chase."

"No wait! Mackie!..." she pleaded.

"Hey, if they want to be rude, I'm going to be rude too. Ready a missile lock. Simulate a launch."

Nothing said fuck off and leave me alone quite like locking a missile onto someone.

"Hey, hey, I'm trying to play this subtle!" she protested. Sometimes he hid his intelligence a little too well and now he'd screw everything up by confirming they had been targeted and giving the Stealth everything they wanted. "This isn't a game Mackie !"

"Yeah well, I'm a pilot. And if we make him defend himself when he doesn't expect it, we'll see what he really flies," he answered confidently. She could hear the grin crossing his lips once more and all that did was make her madder. The autopilot disconnect alarm sounded as Mackie assumed direct control and she started to wonder if there wasn't a way for her to force override the system and shut him out.

It wasn't until she was halfway through doing it that the back of her mind caught up and pointed out that Mackie was playing exact the same game - just with a very different style. Mackie was calling their bluff by drawing a pistol and hoping they didn't notice the part about it being unloaded.

If the Stealth took the bait... he wouldn't have time to think it through and be careful. He'd be dealing with the realisation that the target he just thought he'd confirmed as passive could detect him had detected him, had called their bluff, and was now very, very angry with him and pointing missiles in his direction. And amongst the resulting helmet or CPU fire, she hoped that whomever it was would be too busy trying to work it all out and avoid imminent death that he'd throw all his cards down to get himself away from the table to play another game, another time.

The risk was that he'd call that bluff in turn, whip around and try and blow them both out of the sky in response. She checked her monitor. It was too late to argue now anway.

She watched it disappear from IDAR, falling out of its field of view. A flash of energy lit up her passive sensors for a moment, blinding bright, before fading away into the distance behind. She shuddered involuntarily when she saw how horrifically close the Stealth had just flown past at a significant fraction of lightspeed.

"Now!" ordered Mackie.

Both engines roared up to full power and she was crushed back into her seat as the nose pitched up. She was aware of the steel structure groaning as it was pushed to its limits by a dizzyingly tight loop, the big Mig accelerating itself hard the whole way round. Anika struggled to reach the switches on her panels, her leaden arms held down by rising G-forces. She managed activate the offensive systems, switching both sensor arrays over into active search and track mode. Mounting both arrays on the wingtips gave almost a full spherical field of view around the Mig - only four pyramid-shaped blind-spots about a hundred meters long provided anywhere to hide. They were much too small to be useful space combat. If they had been armed with real weapons, they could've fired without ever changing course.

It took only moments to pick up the Stealth, turning off its original track to loop back around. It helped that she'd been able to project its track and take a good tight aim with her sensors. Already, the system was working to lock on to what was, in effect, something no larger than a pinball to it. But with enough radiated power, even a pinball would shine bright enough. Grinning, she turned up the wattage to half her maximum capability.

The Stealth's first response was to pitch down away from them, trying to put as much perpendicular distance as he could between each other. She was aware of the engine noise receding behind her once more as Mackie throttled back, tightening the radius of the loop. The fuselage began to creak and groan alarmingly, threatening to tear itself apart. Visions of steel shattering like glass raced through her mind, before she forced them away.

The nose slowly hauled around, bringing the Stealth back into view of the IDAR. Its drive signature flared with power as it accelerated hard away from them, throwing itself into another turn, trying to slip out of the non-existent missile's bore-sight. Mackie slowed down further, tracking it easily with the nose as it increased the distance away, simultaneously decreasing their angle off the tail of the Stealth and the rate of turn they needed to keep up.

The sparking sensor image slipped inside the circle ring onscreen and the system locked on, offering the tracking data up for her to pipe to the dummy missile device existing in the software behind her.

"Fox Zero!" she announced, pushing the fire button. It clicked into place, flashing red. The system switched automatically over to guidance mode, broadcasting updates to a non-existent missile while changing the modulation of its pulses to keep them fixed on the target.

Chances were that somewhere on the Stealth a radar warning receiver was screaming loud enough at the pilot that he might not check to see if there'd actually been a missile launched. Or might have the sense to assume his missile-detector had malfunctioned.

A savage grin crawled across her face as a spray of fresh contacts exploded across her screen, radiating out from where the original craft had been. The target was jamming, using one of her favourite techniques too. She quickly hopped frequencies. It matched within moments. Another jump. Another match. She switched into a non-random system-test frequency cycle, bringing it clear onscreen once more. It adapted moments after each cycle, attempting to cloak and spoof its true position with diverging ghosts. Time to adapt fell off to zero as his systems analysed her patterns and compensated automatically. She switched to a chirped mode, defeating the jamming once more. It took another three seconds to catch up, her helping it along its way by re-using the same frequencies. The computer estimated fifteen seconds until the non-existent missile hit the target.

A sudden reversal of direction pinned her to the side of the cockpit. Again, both main engines howled up to full power as Mackie struggled to stay on the tail of the rapidly maneuvering Stealth. It was fast and flighty, changing direction in moments. Mackie was fighting a war between traveling slow enough to match it's rate of turn and going fast enough to keep up and not be left behind, the big Mig lurching around like a rollerscating hippo with a rocket strapped to it as he fought against nearly fifty tons of fuel and steel.

"C'mon you bus," Mackie urged through gritted teeth. "Turn, Turn!"

Anika was gasping for cold air, her mind starting to go sluggish. She fought through the thermal fog, struggling to keep herself focused on her screens. A chirping alarm warned that the automatic lock was about to fail - the target was getting too small for the intervening distance. Anika didn't care, adding a pseudo-random function to her chirp pulses, bring it into clear view once more, maintaining the illusion that she was still providing command guidance while switching her systems over to anti-radiation mode. She was locked on to its own attempts at jamming her.

She offered it tests, analysing its ability to analyse and adapt to her. How fast. How intelligent. How capable. How powerful. Again, it caught up. The target lit up brighter for a moment, the return signal momentarily enhancing itself. Had he given up somehow? Anika began to wonder, or lost some skin?. It grew rapidly, forcing the tracker to auto-adjust its own sensitivity to keep itself from being washed out. She recognised it immediately as an attempt at a range gate pull off, watching the image onscreen accelerate ahead from her IDAR reference.

Ten seconds.

She could smell electric heat drifting in on her air lines as systems reached their limits. Her own body was rigid, her eyes staring inhumanely as every iota of her mind's ability was focused on her electronic systems. Anika switched in jitter mode, again using a non-random test-cycle. Her world spun around an axis as the Mig turned sharply, the image on her monitors slurring away to the side once more before she could compensate. The enemy analysed and adjusted once more, taking longer now. She switched to something pseudo-random, based on an older algorithm. It took seconds for it to sample, solve and adapt. Another pattern, based on a more secure algorithm caused it to light up like a star, blanking out her screens entirely.

It took her a moment to catch on and realise it'd gone for a brute-force multi-band burst jam, radiating out on all the frequencies she'd been using. She guessed he was using its maximum power to do it. Beginning to get desperate? she wondered, feeling predatory. She knew she could burn through it by upping the wattage to maximum, polarising her outputs or even just plain using her full range of random frequencies. But that'd show too many of her cards. She switched to a single new frequency that wasn't being jammed, at a lower power, maintaining the illusion of a continued lock.

It didn't matter. Time to never-happening impact was now five seconds and the target was offering the perfect way to stay locked on.

It slowed on-screen pausing in space for a moment. Then exploded into a brilliant, bright white starburst of energy, smearing itself across the screen. It's jamming systems went dead moments afterwards, leaving only a brilliant bright haze washing out her sensors at off-scale high. Her systems chirped a warning that they'd lost their lock-on. Chaff, she realised, feeling a sudden nervous thrill run through her body. She glanced at the IDAR monitor just in time to see the target rapidly accelerate towards her.

"Skuld's hammer!" Mackie cursed.

Anika was kicked in the back as both engines roared into augmented mode, accelerating her forward hard. She could feel the ghost of somebody sitting on her chest

"Watch our back!" he barked. "Son of a bitch,"

Anika's mind locked a moment as she struggled to process the sudden change. Her sensors were still washed out by chaff, the target had gone behind what her IDAR could see.

"Where is it Anika? Where is it?"

The fog in her mind cleared. She dropped the sensitivity of her main arrays, aiming them back behind herself. Search and track showed up nothing. Frustration boiled up through her as she realised she had to start from scratch with find it. She knew the signature. She knew the drive.... she knew what to look for in active mode. She traced along what its heading had been, and found nothing. Widening her search to a cone-shaped area behind herself, she spotted it - already nearing the limits of her abilities to do so.

Her foe was bugging out sunward at nearly twelve percent lightspeed.

"It's going away," she answered. "Towards the sun."

"Thank Skuld," Mackie breathed. "He went right over the top of us."

Anika felt the ghostly fingers of fear touch her for a moment as she started to realise why Mackie had suddenly been so alarmed. It was chased away by the realisation that the Stealth had probably been unarmed. Defensive ECM only, nothing offensive. She swallowed deep breaths of cool air, feeling the heat of her mental exertions drain from her body. She powered down the majority of her systems, returning to a steady navigation mode to give things a chance to cool down.

It was over. Time to take stock.

Ultimately, she thought she'd won the moment she'd spotted a spacecraft that didn't want to be spotted, building a sensor signature in the process that could be used by other people to detect them too. Catching its ECM in action was icing for the cake and - she realised, they also had a sense of of its flight capabilities. She had a pulse from its active scanners to chew on too. All her systems worked as they were supposed to - even if she hadn't yet had a chance to try her hand at the defensive side yet and she had good data to share. There was a lot more in there, once she had time to analyse it and sift through it all.

In return, it got a close range snapshot of a new type, was aware that the new spacecraft had the technology to track them without resorting to conventional sensors, could probably figure out that it had something to do with the unusual interwave emissions and when he got home and analysed how she'd been tracking him, would learn that she had just been toying with his ECM and that her capabilities probably far exceeded what had caused him to get desperate enough to dump chaff and run.

But none of that was really a secret. IDAR's existence wasn't; it was something that was in the brochure. She'd cloaked her true ECCM capabilities behind simplified cycles and reduced output power while her own defensive abilities remained unknown to them.

"We got them," she giggled impishly. "We got them good."

"Great," sighs Mackie. "Who were they?"

Anika thought for a moment, putting a finger to her lips. "I don't know yet."

She had some ideas, but it'd have to wait until she really got her teeth into the data she'd recorded. She had two days on the journey out to Little Big Bang to check all the signatures she'd picked up from their ECM against known components. That'd give her an idea where it might've come from.

"Well," said Mackie. "Whoever it was knew how to fly. AI or professional, that was a good pilot."

"Intelligent systems too," Anika added, her voice sinking down into her own thoughts. Intelligent ECM and ECCM were high up the list of ultra-restricted items on the PEPPER list, considering the havoc they could cause in the wrong hands. Hi-Streamer itself required a GJ-authorised individual development prototype exception. Only a few people and organisations in Fenspace could lawfully own something like that Stealth.

She knew some of them personally. Some of them had built craft that weren't just like it, but even more advanced on top of it. None of them had any reason to be snooping around Atalante on the quiet. Unless it was some form of quiet home-guard sentry UAV?

He musing was interrupted by another rude alarm, piercing insider her cockpit. Blinking a moment, she was surprised to see a scattering of orange lights flickering on her panel in time to the Master Caution alarm, and one big red light shining up behind "GNTR 2 FAIL"

"What now?" she whined, slumping forward.

"Generator failure," Mackie announced, sounding more disappointed than annoyed "Looks like it's completely dead. "

She exhaled a frustrated sigh. "Another breakdown?"

"We'll have to land at Atalante and repair."

There was no arguing with that. Loosing the second generator would put them on battery power - not a good idea when the nearest hanger is a day away.

"Alright, I'll make the call," she answered sourly, keying open a channel on the interwave. A static hiss answered in her earpiece, letting her know she could transmit.

"Atalante approach control. Atalante Approach control, this is Riding Hi-Streamer. We've had a technical problem and would like to land and fix it."

A pause. Longer than the round-trip comms time by far.

"Riding Hi-Streamer good afternoon, this wouldn't be related to someone flooding a major voice channel with Nessun Dorma, would it?"

A man's voice. Dry and flat as a desert with the merest hint of amusement.

She felt herself flush red with embarrassment once more.

"Am... we need to land. We'll give you the full story when we do. "

Another pause.

"Alright. Permission to land granted. Riding Hi-Streamer cleared to marker beacon Tango-two. Switch to frequency four-zero-one -decimal - two and report arrival and hold until further instructions are received."

"Marker beacon Tango-two, frequency four-zero-one-decimal-two, report arrival and hold. Wilco."

By the time she closed the channel Mackie had already begun to turn the Hi-streamer towards the beacon, leaving her just enough time to add a delay notification to their flight plan to avoid unnecessary Search and Rescue launches, and to send a snapshot of her data to Gina on a back-channel through the Underspace in the hopes of getting her interest. From there, it'd filter out to the rest of the Underspace, hopefully in time to get some answers. Or credit.
---------

If it makes a difference, or if anyone has any contributions, my mental image for what was tracking them was based off the Lockheed Have Blue'. Which does imply certain things about what it was doing there and who might've been doing them that I don't mind implying....
________________________________
--m(^0^)m-- Wot, no sig?

[HRogge]

Pushed your prototype a little bit too much? *G*

[Rajvik]

Looks like a slightly modified F-117 was the opponent.
 

[Dartz]

Well, it's a Prototype. Prototypes break a lot until eventually the kinks get beaten out of it. Or documented as features.

It's much smaller than an F-117 - by several metres. Have Blue was the prototype technology demonstrator for the F-117, and had a very different tail.

I put together a profile - it's been bounced around the IRC without much complaint. One thing I'm aiming for is a sense of continuity... things rise and fall and technology ideas and common themes run through everything, year by year. Hopefully it's working from a meta perspective - even if it means cranking the timeframe forward. Though these'll never be 'successful' - just stable enough to make it to next year and keep ticking over, half in it for the craic as opposed to actually getting big and successful, not unless anyone else wants it to be.

-------
Riding Hi-Streamer

Mig-31 reconstruction. OGJ designation XR-155E Foxhound-K. Reg: 24-155000

Cruise Speed: 0.11C. Dash Speed: >.183c (For about 15 minutes)
Atmospheric: Mach 2.83+ (Once tracked on Mars doing 3500kph at 30M AMGL)
Drive-type: Fusion-boosted ion drive.

Weight: 48,000kG loaded.
Crew: 2: Information Systems Operator and Pilot

Armaments: 2x Hardpoints underwing. No cannon.

--------

Attributes:

"Iron Pig:" Manufactured nickel-steel (Battlesteel for Hepheastus built production models). Very heavy for its size - nearly 50 tons. Takes a lot of planning to change directions without bending anything - especially at speed. But, comes with good heat-resistance and resilient structure. Steel is also much easier to weld and repair.

"Backseat Driver:" This is not a Pilot's plane. The Back-seat operator paces the flight, instructing the pilot on what course/attitude/speed to fly according to the demands of the sensors and mission goals. Pilot is little more than a bus-driver and propulsion system's specialist, responsible for keeping the main engines on their razor-edge and the craft on its auto-pilot course. Unless of course, they're under attack.

"BlackLighter": Prototype Phased Array IDAR designed by Catgirl Industries. Capable of detecting the presence and relative position any active drive signature in range. Only capable of detecting the presence and relative position of any active drive signature in range - it can't tell anything else about what's actually making the signature.

"One hot ship..." Anika was forced by end-user certificate limitations to use older, larger sensor systems originally designed for space-ship sized craft with space-ship sized power requirements and cooling needs. Coupled with highly boosted engines, the Hi-Streamer produces a lot of waste heat that needs to be removed. Extra radiator panels on the wings and engines help, but it's still a juggling match to manage the demands of the engines and onboard electronics without melting something.

"A hundred shot of NOS... make that two:" Engines can be pushed past their normal thermal limits by dumping liquid coolant straight through the engine cores before exhausting it and the heat it absorbed overboard, leaving glowing contrails for thousands of kilometres. Capable of exceeding .18C in short bursts (For as long as the coolant holds out).

"Undeniable." Visible from clear across the system under boost. Or with active sensors online. Not hard to track at all. it's there for all to see, (But not really an inconvenience when you want the enemy to wake up, track you and make noisy traffic you can analyse. Being stealthy has it's place, so does wasping up the place and watching the response)

"I can't be cool..."/ It's big. It's clunky. It's unsubtle. It lacks the visual grace, endurance and maneuverability of a Blackbird. There're no intelligent support systems for the pilot or back-seater. The controls and UI come from the 1980's. It's not that comfortable inside, requires a special flight-suit that's embarrassingly derived from the Muv-Luv Fortified Suit, is finnicky at the best of times when it comes to reliability and wears its nature on its sleeve with a few extra greebles bolted to the outside of the fuselage and faired in because there was no space left inside to mount them. But the basic spaceframe is tough, it'll land on unprepared surfaces without complaint, the engines are monstrous in an atmosphere, and it can be very hard to catch in a chase if it has a good supply of coolant. It's very good at doing what it's designed to do, provided both crewmembers take the time to learn how to use it, adapt to its quirks, and master it's capabilities or even exceed them. It's very much a hacker's jet.

------

Quirks:

"Warning!!! Danger to Manifold.": Main engines are boosted to within an inch of their life and are constantly maintained on a razor's edge of reliability. While Hi-Streamer has enough power to easily exceed .11c, the risk of melting major engine parts and doing serious damage increases in proportion to its speed. Shedding turkey feathers from an engine nozzle isn't unusual.

"I like it black, rich and thick....": Engine's require a shot of strong coffee on ignition, and on booster ignition, to operate. Onboard tanks contain enough for ten shots.

"You should be in pictures.... ": Onboard recon cameras will 'occasionally' take ultra-high resolution pictures of beautiful or otherwise noteworthy women if left unattended in a hanger. These are then uploaded to the interwave through the onboard datalink. This is totally a handwavium quirk, and definitely not something Mackie hid in the microcode somewhere....

"Blessings of Order of the Golden Lemon." Pre-flight checklist includes a ritual to ward off system glitches, consisting of 'Juice of the Lemon either freshly squeezed or not, sprinkled over the fuselage from a aspergillum made from the remains of an AMC Gremlin that has been stored either under a ladder or sleeping place of a black cat(girl), while all crewmembers chant 'Gremlins Out!' until they have completed a full circle around the craft. A mirror is then broken with the aspergillium, wherupon both crewmembers must partake of the remaining lemon juice before immediately embarking.' Failure to observe the proper preflight proceedures guarantees a flight filled with minor technical glitches such as sudden engine unstarts during lunchtime, instrument malfunctions and spurious warning lamps on critical systems. Any postflight maintenance check will reveal no technical problems with the systems affected.

------
Notes:

Born out of GJ design competition, Riding Hi-Streamer is one of four types of competing spacecraft built to fulfil a requirement for a dedicated signals and electronic intelligence spacecraft. It was part funded by Asagiri, and by Anika selling her Little Cool Rider A-Wing. Hi-Streamer is based upon the airframe of an old Mig-31 interceptor, retired from Russian air forces in 2022. Main engines are shared with the RF-047 Kulbit racer, while the centre-body fuel tank has been replaced by equipment bays containing the necessary support hardware for an Interwave Node, the IDAR array in the nose and the necessary sensor hardware.

The prototype Hi-Streamer was inspected and accepted as satisfactory, meeting the required specifications. Two completed test-type RF-155E craft were delivered and paid for according to competition requirements (25-155001, 25-155002), however the contract was ultimately awarded to WHITENOISE for the WHITENOISE due to the advantage its artifically intelligent analysis and auto-reaction systems gave it. 001 and 002 were immediately taken into reserve storage, before being 're-activated' for service a few weeks later on an interim basis until their unique IDAR technology could be properly miniaturised and adapted by CGI to the smaller, stealthier, WHITENOISE. Both 'test-type' craft differ slightly from the prototype in that they are freshly constructed from battlesteel and inconel at Haepheastus, making them more robust than Hi-Streamer. Cooling and power control systems have been improved based on experience with the prototype to increase reliability. They can both cruise slightly faster, and maintain dash speed for an extra minute.

Hi-Streamer went on to represent Asagiri(Frigga) at the 2025 Convention, following the pattern of the previous years. It turned out in laquered bare-metal, with pink and white trim - Anika's favourite colours. It's been a difficult start to a relationship and Anika still misses her original Little Cool Rider, but she slowly has begun to warm to the big Mig.

The final 'production' RF-155E is available under the Heaphestus Affiliate Program with an Asagiri badge (Replacing the Havoc-types which were withdrawn due to single-digit sales), but only to individuals and organisations pre-approved by Great Justice. A 'GT' variant with all the advanced intelligence-gathering hardware stripped from the internal bays is available to any reputable fan. It's slightly faster - having better drive cooling ability, slightly lighter, has better cockpit accomodation, can carry luggage in the internal bays and retains a reduced capability IDAR, interwave set and sensor array. It's marketed towards racers in 2-seater classes, or as an aerospace equivelant of a Gran Tourismo car, retaining only two weapon hardpoints and an additional gunmount to keep its PEPPER class low-enough for ordinary decent fans to afford. Mackie's name is still attached to it, however - and memories of the Griffon incident linger long.

On its Third test flight, Hi-Streamer's IDAR array detected an unsual drive-signature in the vicinity of 36 Atalante - with energy emmissions below the detection threshold of most sensor arrays. The unknown craft apearred to parallel Hi-Streamer's course for a few minutes at a standoff distance, breaking off suddenly and departing at .12C when Hi-Streamer's active sensors were directed towards it, taking an image of a small, angular craft in the process. Conspiracy fans have suggested that this may be a detection of the rumoured TSAB 'Senior Echo' program. The usual suspects for a stealth-equipped Black Project have also been put forward by various commentators, each theory with varying degrees of plauibility and its own vehement followers. Ultimately, all that is known for certain is that it was a type that was not expecting to be spotted.
________________________________
--m(^0^)m-- Wot, no sig?

[Rajvik]

I can say right now that F-SOG will want a flight of six. Two with the appropriate miniaturized components, and four stripped. These are for GJ operations.
 

[HRogge]

CI is working hard on getting a reliable IDAR...

but their first one (large installation at Nostromo) was a failure... so they built another one as a drop-in replacement for the removed radar of a recon plane, which worked out better than expected.

[Dartz]

It's a quirk of the original type..... as designed it has one of the largest and most powerful radar arrays on any combat aircraft short of an AWACS. The Soviet Airforce thought it could shoot down an SR-71, and evidently the USAF did to because they were careful about making SR-71 flights near where Mig-31's were stationed. It doesn't have the 'cool' factor, but it's a different kind of monster. While the predecessor Mig-25 was notorious for microwaving rabbits on the runway. And I thought the first Nostromo installation was functional? Maybe I misunderstood our conversation....

I can say right now that F-SOG will want a flight of six. Two with the appropriate miniaturized components, and four stripped. These are for GJ operations.

It's still up in the air. People may yet object to its existance on a number of grounds - and speaking as a terrible salesman, there're probably better spacecraft out there by far by more advanced builders.
________________________________
--m(^0^)m-- Wot, no sig?

[robkelk]

GJ will also raise eyebrows if a group purchases warbirds. There might be good and sufficient reasons for the purchases, but it's still something that doesn't happen very often.
--
Rob Kelk
"Governments have no right to question the loyalty of those who oppose
them. Adversaries remain citizens of the same state, common subjects of
the same sovereign, servants of the same law."

- Michael Ignatieff, addressing Stanford University in 2012

[Dartz]

Well, the stripped down GT-version is really aimed to fly under the PEPPER Radar. It's got a light self-defense armament (2xhardpoints and a gun, with limited options in more basic fire control software), and none of the EW goodies - only the IDAR remains because it's partly structural, kinda unique, and can be justified on safety grounds as improving visibility and awareness rather than actually being a weapon. It goes fast and looks like a fighter jet - it's aimed at people who want something to get around in that goes fast, has some braggable numbers and looks like a fighter jet, rather than to be useful as an actual weapon.(It's a fair strategy to adopt - not building actual weapons as such, but a sports/performance machine that can defend itself if needs be). It can still be destructive in the wrong hands, but nowhere near as dangerous as the E-model.

The Full-Fat E version is like buying a rifle in Ireland. That's the sort of thing that requires background checks and application forms and good character references to buy along with proper storage and security procedures to keep it from being stolen by undesirables. It's probably out of reach for all but a few individuals... most of whom can either build better themselves, or would have no interest. The hardpoints are fully enabled for anti-radiation missiles and the like, and it comes with the full sensor and computer package -and the ability to do some pretty dangerous things to convention communications and radar tracking in the wrong hands. Tricking a traffic controller into putting two starliners on a collision course would be trivial...
________________________________
--m(^0^)m-- Wot, no sig?

[Rajvik]

Also remember that F-SOG is part of GJ. Quite frankly I can see these being used to hunt pbosky wanna be's and pirates in three craft flights. Also I always have liked the lines of the 31. Don't know why I didn't think of getting one and turning it into a fencraft.
 

[Dartz]

Most people when they think Mig-31, they think of the novel/film and probably in Russian. That thing does deserve to be in Fenspace - but it's too cool for what I was doing. It needs to belong to someone big and be a standout.

Consider them sold... and Anika especially will be smug about it for weeks because that's a big chunk (~33%) of annual sales right then and there, with 2 high-value items in it.
________________________________
--m(^0^)m-- Wot, no sig?

[Dartz]

It was while doing this that I began a list... Everyone knows that one house, the one that has all the old cars in the garden that never leave. I guess Frigga will be that house.

This is pretty much the full list of anything ever owned/operated by the people on 77 Frigga, and posted about on the forum. It's a bit excessive for 5 years.... but makes a sort of sense.

------------------------------------------------

Spacecraft of Frigga

The amount of junk these people accumulate.....

-------------------------
Personal:

1: Jet Jaguar's JF-21 "Screamin' Demon'.
Shown at Convention, 2021. Stripped of Hurricane engines to build second prototype chopper engines. Scheduled to be rebuilt 'eventually' but, as of 2025, sits unused. Something of a 'Yard car' now

2: Ford Sierra's F-250 Superduty 'Dragon Wagon'
Operational. Just about. Spews smoke and flame from exhausts, but refuses to die. Planned to be replaced 'eventually', but defies all attempts at destruction or replacement.

3: Kotono Ito's Bolitho 'Zuikaku'
Operational, but rarely needed. Comfortable cabin. Decent shuttle. Makes people jealous because it's the plushest craft on the rock.

4: Daryl Haur's Aeritalia F-104 'Silver Arrow'
Sold. Racecraft sold to fund creation of RF-047 Kulbit. Standard Speed/Acceleration hybrid, was reasonably competitive. Chromed. Now racing for new owners under the name 'Last Starfighter'. Last produced F-104 model.

5: Anika Daini's A-Wing 'Little Cool Rider'
Sold in DEC 2024 to fund Riding Hi-Streamer. Production model. Came with comfy cabin and uprated sensors. And pink.

6: Makie Jaguar's Custom 'Lightning Rod' racer
Spare Blackbird nacelle turned into spacecraft. Fast. Unreliable. Cramped. Possibly the smallest 'yacht' in Fenspace, with two onboard bunks, two crew seats and a prototype fusion boosted engine. Sold to pay for Griffon accident damages. Won Solar Regatta for new owners in 2024, after drive modifications.

--------------------------

Asagiri-built:

1: 2x GR-01 'Hind D' choppers. (2021)
Prototypes for gravity rotor and fusion turboshaft. 110 stripped for parts and now used as static cover. 111 used for Survival Shot exercises, missing navigation systems. Both still radioactive.

2: 6x GR-02 'Havok' choppers. (2022)
*2-100 Jake
*2-101 Elwood
*2-102 Steve
*2-103 Lou
*2-104 Eddie
*2-106 Donald
2 Prototypes For 2021/22 Convention. 4 Built for failed Frigga Defence Force project. 2102 Damaged in Astroball game and cannibalised. 2103-6 Sold off prior to 2024. 2100,2101 used for Survival Shot.

3: 6x GR-03 'Hokum' choppers. (2022-23)
*3-100 Black Helicopter
*3-101 Shooting Star
*3-102 Weather Balloon.
*3-103 Lenticular Cloud.
*3-104 Swamp Gas.
*3-107 Flock of Pigeons
1 Prototype for 2022 Convention. 5 Built for failed Frigga Defence Force project. 3101 onwards sold off to various parties. 3100 used as personal spacecraft of Jet Jaguar. Modified thruster arrangement to improve speed over long distances.

4: 2x RF-047 Kulbit-A 'Stratos' and -B 'Second Season Effect (SSA)'
*47-001 'Stratos' (2024)
*47-021 'Second Season Effect' (2025)
*Carbotanium racecraft based on Su-47. Championship winner 2024. Convention Show 2024. Piloted by Daryl Haur. Wears full sponsor decals with gold trim. Retired from racing in anger and used for display and show purposes,
'Second Season Effect' B-variant with homologated drive, fire-control and operating software upgrades, Competing in the 2025 season.

5: 2x BA-71 Blackbird. 'XR-71' and donor.(2023-24 onwards)
Purchased at scrap value. XR-71 reconstructed using parts from the donor and used as engine test mule. Second donor Blackbird is a parked as a 'yard car'

6: 2x XR-155 Foxhound
*-E 7734-Z1Z 'Riding Hi-Streamer'
*-GT 7743-ZA 'Grey Fox' (2025 onwards)
Mig-31 Mouldine. Battlesteel spaceframe very cheap to build compared with exotic aluminium or titanium alloys. shown at 2025 Convention. 'Riding Hi-Streamer' prototype designed and used by Anika Daini for GJ design competition (3rd place).' 'Grey Fox' stripped of advanced sensor gear and used by Daryl Hayr as a personal shuttlecraft because it's a two-seater with decent internal bays.

7: 2x Mz-23 Judy. (2023 onwards)
Test-type heavy motorslave for Tanalloy batteries. Prototype owned by Shinji Ikari on Ultima. One also used as a demonstrator vehicle at 2023 Convention. Dozens sold under 'Judy', 'Garland' or 'Bahamode' names. Most successful Asagiri Product.

Total sales of the above including those already mentioned, and through Hephaestus Affiliate Program:
JF-21 (2021 onwards) 25
GR-02 (2022-24) 10
GR-03 (2022 onwards) 13
RF-047(2024 onwards) 08
FR-155-E (2025 onwards) 4
FR-155-GT (2025 onwards) 5
Mz-23 (2023 onwards) 42
----------------------

Large Craft:

1: 2021 Outlaw Class 'Dragon Wagon 2' (2021 -2024)
Modified to use large-caliber conventional cannons, and fitted with uprated drive. Used for Bounty Hunting. Paid off using bounty on Triax corporation executive. Written-off 2024 after hitting a UFO in LEO and skipping off the atmosphere at speed. Preserved for exhibition and promotion of the type's toughness.

2: Ekranoplan K.M. Lun. (2024 -)
Reconstructed Soviet Ekranoplan. Built for Gate-Metal salvage mission to Arcadia. K.M. = Prototype Ship. Now used for Bounty Hunting by Ford, and as a regular transport and search and rescue craft.

-----------------------

Knight Sabers:

1: 5x 2033 Model Hardsuits. (2021)
Original design, based off BGC. 4 Destroyed and Incinerated. RFID equipment tags returned to vendors. 1 used by Ford for external maintenance on Frigga.

2: 4x 2034 Model Hardsuits. (2022-2024)
Uprated variant of 2033. Retained in storage.

3: 4x 2040 Model Hardsuit. (2024-)
Redesign based on unreleased WFC Stingray designs. Similar to BGC-2040 series suits.

4: 6x Mz-20 Typhoon Motorslave (2021-)
1 for each Knight Saber, with two spare. 30mm Cannon armament, with reinforced armour. Uprated Sensors on Anikas, replacing the main cannon.

5: B-One R Lancer 'KnightWing' (2019-)
Prototype Structural Test Article refitted for spaceflight. No recorded serial numbers. Upgraded drives and sensors, removed weapons. Forward bomb-bay converted into additional crew accommodation.

-----------------------

Misc:

1: 7x Moskitos.
*'Kei',
*'Yuri'
Launched from Luns missile tubes. HTP/Kerosen3 goddard drive for launch and single ion drive. Effective fast courier craft.
'Kei' used in failed Fenspace speed record attempt. 'Yuri' as backup.
4 others actually mocked-up shells used as Gate-Metal carriers.
One final one an unmanned cruise missile built in secret to test the concept.

2:
________________________________
--m(^0^)m-- Wot, no sig?

[HRogge]

The advantage of an asteroid settlement... you always have more space to put your new stuff in.
The drawback of an asteroid settlement... you always have enough space to keep your old stuff in.

[Dartz]

Hoarding is a bitch. As is the author's effort to give a sense of things actually happening in their lives. Plans not working out, people changing cars, things breaking or getting old. Normal stuff that happens to normal people.

Anyway. More story. And hopefully retaining a different tech-style that justifies their existance.

The hardest part, Anika found, was not to start babbling about it.

Gina Langley was watching over her shoulder, kneeling on the engine nacelle while she entered the commands for her next analysis into the Hi-Streamer's system. She'd assigned each hardware or software command or function a single hotkey combination on the frogpad. Entering a combination, added that command to the current analysis, bringing its icon block onto her monitor. Datastreams fed in and out of the block, representing signal parameters or data that needed to be passed to the command, followed by its output. Each block was represented within the filesystem, using standardised communication interfaces and system calls rather than anything hardware-specific. She'd saved dozens of her most commonly used techniques already for recall with a single keypress. Even editing the parameters was simplified, each individual block having its own nodal identifier code on the program to allow her to jump to it with a single key combination, select a parameter with one more keypress, then change the values as needed.

All of it drawn in green, yellow and red wireframe graphics, flashing across a monitor barely larger than her hand.

"Wow, that's old school," said Gina, leaning in over her shoulder, poking at a few keys beside the monitor."I think some of that might be aliasing. Your sample rate's a little low. A high pass filter might bring the detail out a little more."

"I needed it done fast," Anika defended, wearing a sour frown. "In case it was something dangerous out there."

"Not criticising, just saying," answered Gina, nudging her on the shoulder.

Anika shrank back a little from her, before switching block settings with a flurry of keypresses. The system answered with three sharp chirps, raw data scrolling past onscreen before being "It'll take a few minutes to render again."

Gina cast a critical eye over the brushed steel fuselage. "This old thing's what you've been posting about for the last six months?"

Anika grinned pridefully back at her. "Yup!"

"Not bad," said Gina, appreciatively. "But you know you can get intelligent systems from Orion that'll do all that work for you."

Anika exhaled an annoyed sigh, pursing her lips into a pout."PEPPER restrictions, and minimum security requirements."

And she didn't want to admit that she doubted she could afford it all anyway. To get the same results from the cheaper, older-generation equipment she'd used took three times the wattage, and four times the structural volume, even before she added the interwave node and IDAR array, and all the cooling the starship-designed systems needed to keep the processors from quenching. It all meant bigger engines to hit the performance requirements, and an even bigger spaceframe to accomodate them. Which needed even more steel and more engine to move at .11, generating even more heat. It was a thermal tyranny that made the Big Mig twice the size of any of the other spacecraft in the competition, save for the BA-71 which came with a proper crew cabin.

"We're probably not going to win it," she sighed."But if we make the shortlist we still get paid a chunk of our dev-costs. Which means GJ pays me to have fun hacking Plan 9." A mischievous grin split her lips.

"Plan 9?" enquired Gina, blinking owlishly. "From Bell Labs Plan Nine?"

Anika nodded,her grin broadening."It works for what I wanted to do without doing my own operating system from scratch."

Gina took a few moments to consider, mulling the options over in her mind, coming up with her own solutions before offering "Well, there's three places on the shortlist. Against that. there's our BA-71, there's whatever Lebia and Eddie are cooking up on the Forge, Bellecombe's FAST-Recon Valkyrie, the EAC TSR-2 and this. I can tell you that the first two places on the shortlist are pretty much a given, so that leaves three choices for the final spot."

Anika turned to her best imitation of a wounded puppy. "No need to be cruel."

"I'm just saying, don't rely on winning competitions to pay bills"

Anika sighed again, shrinking down into her seat. Gina seemed to expand to fill all available volume she vacated, leaning in almost in front of her. She glanced at her monitors, noting there were only a few seconds to run. Time enough to look busy preparing the outboot. and avoid admitting she'd lost almost all hope of winning.

"It's coming through now," she said in hushed anticipation. She became aware of Gina's arm resting on her shoulder once more as the redheaded hacker leaned in for a closer look.

"There it is..." said Anika, allowing a note of pride to slip back into her voice.

Clearer than it had been a few hours before, the same hazy diamond shape slipped across her monitor, bright sparks flashing across it's fuselage before it accelerated away into the background noise of the solar system.

Gina's eyes stared at it. "It looks like an old Nighthawk..." She paused, her brow furrowing slightly as she stufied the image."But the tail is wrong. Both rudders meet at the top to hide the engine exhaust, and it's much too small, barely enough for a pilot. It might be a drone..."

"No EM emissions or control signals," said Anika. "I checked."

Gina stood back upright on the engine nacelle, her mind effectively leaving her body as she dived into recent reports of stealther spacecraft, scanning for anything that corrolated with the image on Anika's monitor.

"Self-contained mind, then. Hmmm..... or quantum link?" she mused to herself.

"I don't know,"

"Lockheed Have Blue," Gina concluded. For a moment, her eyes seemed to go as cold and hard as the oldest ice at the bottom of a glacier. It lingered just long enough to chill Anika's spine before melting away. "...It's almost an exact copy."

"Lockheed?" Anika mouthed, uneasily.

Gina gave her a curt nod. "A replica definitely since both were destroyed forty years ago. But even so, you know what that means?"

Anika's mind took a few moments to catch up, her eyes focused on her control panel as she mulled over the possibilities.

"Americans?" she offered. "Or someone with American influence?" Another pause as her mind cranked over once more. "Or someone just copying an old 'stealth' design in the hope that the meme would take."

"Bingo!" Gina grinned at her, rewarding her with another playful knuckle to the shoulder. Ouch. "You've got some good stuff here Ani'. Send me a copy wehen you get a chance and I'll throw some quantum iron at it and see what else can be pulled out of it."

"Right!" Anika beamed. "I've an interwave node aboard so I can do it on the way to Ultima."

"Anyway, it's..." Gina began before cutting herself off. She blinked, her blue eyes taking a moment to focus. The palm of her hand met her face with a crack as she began to slowly shake her head from side to side. Anika took a moment to realise that she'd stopped speaking for a moment, before turning to look for a reason.

A frustrated groan rose out of her throat. "Ugh, Mackie."

Mackie was busy striking poses in his skintight flight suit, grinning at the pair of them.

Gina place a heavy hand on Anika's shoulder. "Send me a wave later, when we're not being bothered by a bubbling hormone."

"No problem," answered Anika in a flat tone. Already, she was promising Mackie a slow, cold revenge. Gina had been listening to her, had been impressed by her and what she'd built and done and detected all on her own. And he'd blown it up on her posturing like an idiot.

Gina climbed down, waving at her as she crossed the hangar to her own veritech. Anika gave a polite wave in return, while waiting for Mackie to finish up loading a pair of missiles onto the underwing pylons.

How would he feel if she's butted in between him and Ben?

He clambered to the top of the ladder, stuffing a bundle of receipts into his personal bag behind the headrest before turning towards Anika with a grin on his face.

"Let's get out of here before you do something else stupid, okay?" she answered, glaring.

Mackie just shrugged.

"I re-soldered the generator cable an hour ago, and I needed to break you two up somehow or we'd be here all day," he said cheerfully, before slipping down into the pilot's seat with a squeak from the polymer.

"Arsehole," she pouted.

"Arsehole who really doesn't want them having the time to take a hard look at the engine cores incase they see what I put in there."

She heard his flightsuit connectors dock with his seat before he pulled his cockpit canopy down. Anika grabbed her helmet from the engine cowling beside her, nestling it onto her head and doublechecking the connections before pulling her own canopy down to seal herself in. The bustle of the hanger beyond shut off, leaving her alone in the rear cockpit with only the humm of her instruments and a question that had begun to gnaw.

"What did you put in there?"

"Something with a little more kick than the regular gas..." Mackie's voice answered through her helmet earpice.

"Now why does that make me worried?" she said to herself. It made her feel cold all over in a way that was just unnatural for her. She took a deep breath, swallowing the unease. Maybe it was just her natural reaction to Mad's kicking in.

"Anyway," Mackie continued. "I bought a pair of RedBird missiles. The Stealth won't be so easy to fool next time and I wanted something in case it had fast friends."

There was no forgetting that they'd be over a day from help at their furthest out. It was a long way down to Ultima - two full days at cruise. She thought for a second that it'd be worth hiring a squadron to escort - especially for a brand new type with such unique technologies. It'd be worth a lot of cash to the wrong person. But, the Stealth was unnarmed and they were more than capable of outrunning most things in Fenspace.

She busied herself forwarding their updated flight plan to Ultima, along with a link marked for the specific attention of the Security Officer, before programming the jet's systems with the RedBird's profile. Behind her, the engines began to wind themselves up once more, a red light on her panel followed by an electric chime reminding her that she could switch her systems over to the main generators again rather than drain the batteries.

Anika stabbed the switch with her finger.

Secretly, she hoped to see the Stealth again.

If only for the chance to get some real good data. Now that Gina was involved, it was all going to go viral on the underspace and she wanted to be right at the heart of it.

-----

Yes, Mackie is referring to exactly that. And I do have a proper tech chain for it, and a reason why it's not either stupid or dangerous.
________________________________
--m(^0^)m-- Wot, no sig?

[HRogge]

"Anyway," Mackie continued. "I bought a pair of RedBird missiles. The Stealth won't be so easy to fool next time and I wanted something in case it had fast friends."

RedBird missiles? So finally someone sells them? *G*

Should be a kinetic penetration missile without explosives, right?

[Dartz]

Angry Birds. Always good. Pay five euro to kill your opponent.

Next one might ruffle feathers for two reasons.
First: I've checked Mackie's justifications and they hold water. From a physics and fictional standpoint.
Second: His initial material source is the ash-waste from Cool Cuke engines.
Third: I deliberately avoided naming names, or saying exactly what Mackie discovered. It was a peculiarity I came across while researching the original justification. I'm cagey about outright saying what this is because it definitely wasn't anyone's intent to do it and I don't want to break the setting on people. The method is so obscure, because it's specifically listed as a failure. So, it's probably or the best to leave everything a little obscure for the time being. I just wanted to do the Serizawa thing about disclosure...

Either way, this is definitely something provisional. Especially the second half.

Fifteen hours in. Not even halfway to Ultima.

Anika lowered the brightness of her instruments to the minimum, before switching off both reading lights to allow the darkness in from outside. The glare from the navigation lights on the wings drowned out the stars, throwing sharp shadows across the cockpit, leaving her to wonder what was out there cloaked in the light. Like all good hackers, she knew the best way to hide something wasn't in the darkness, but behind blinding light.

Her scanners were running at a low power level, but with the amount of processing power she was throwing at return signal, she was certain the Stealth would show up.

Superconducting graphene core processors, with ANN-augmented branch prediction, heterogenous system memory and dozens of auto-reconfigureable FPGA modules could do that. As could a pair of quantum chips dedicated to doing the fast fourier transforms and hard multidimensional mathematics needed to make the IDAR array work.

Anika was aware that she was probably sitting on top of one of the most powerful self-propelled computer system in Fenspace. On second thoughts, the most powerful 'dumb' self-propelled mobile computer she knew of, there were some AI's she knew that made her wonder. It was definitely the fastest, considering it was built into a fighter's fuselage.

A yellow warning light flagged up, informing her that it was all beginning to warm up a little too much. A slight course change had angled one of the active radiators towards the sun. She adjusted the refrigerant compressors, before switching in a different set of radiators, watching the system temperature gauges climb back down to the deep green. She could feel the pumps buzzing up to speed behind her while valves powered open.

With kiloamps going through the main powerfeeds, the only thing keeping everything from dying in an expensive cloud of blue smoke was an intricate refrigeration system keeping the cores below the critical temperature for superconductivity. The meissner effect provided defense against crosstalk and interference, ensuring data purity. The clock speed of the main cores was measured in terahertz, munching through data like she munched cupcakes.

All of it was hers, and it was her. It did nothing more than exactly what she told it to do. It was an extension of her mind, her will, commanded through her fingertips alone. In a breathless moment, she wondered what'd happen if she dared try and hook up to it using her synchronisation hardware. Her bandwidth was a little limited, but as a sapiency driver?

There was a giddy thrill in the possibility.

She placed her hand on the keypad, enjoying the sense of power underneath her fingers. And she used it to check on the mailling lists, refreshing her inboxes to see what else had been posted about the Stealth. She hoovered up every single bit, gaining another thrill as another famous name took interest in her data. She'd sent her detection signatures to the 'verse at large and watched them get chewed over in depth. Refinements to her signature were offered and disseminated, giving anyone a better chance of finding other Stealths out there.

There were questions asked by some wondering why the Stealth hadn't been spotted by anyone until Anika came along, especially with better eyes out there. The implication was plain as it was insulting.

The answer of course, was obvious. Hi-Streamer had been an unknown quantity, and anyone capable of building something like the Stealth was certainly capable of knowing what ships and stations to avoid. Even with the Hi-streamer's sensors, there was no forgetting the fact that she wouldn't have spotted it without the benefit of IDAR.

An IDAR signature update had been offered to her from the main list.

Which meant that someone had taken her original IDAR scans, reverse engineered them to determine both the physical principals that underlied the system and how the system actually worked, used that knowledge to update the original filters she'd applied to clean up the detection signature, then offered an upgrade that let her estimate it's power output, which let her make an estimate of the target mass if she knew the velocity. She glanced at the name attached to the headers, and wasn't surprised by what she found.

Some things just made her feel...inadequate.

Anika sucked it up with a sigh, and applied the updates to her sensors, leaving them to search on automatic.

Disappointingly, it seemed that after being threatened with a radar spike and revealed to the 'verse at large the Stealth was staying at home.

"Hey Anika, what're they saying about our friend?" Mackie's voice broke her concentration.

Anika pulled up a summary on her monitor

"It's made of advanced dielectric radar absorbing materials, with a high-efficiency speed-drive with a passive sensor array," she summarised. "It's someone professional, with a lot of money and a lot of backing to build something like it. Which really limits who can do it to either law enforcement, one or two wealthy fen who have no reason or inclination to spy on friends, or one of the big Earthside nations."

The big one flashing in red white and blue.

"Law enforcement?" Mackie asked.

"Unh...And I can't think of any reason they'd be interested in us so that narrows it down..."

Silence answered her from the front seat. Cold fingers started to run up her spine as something he'd said hours earlier came back to haunt her.

"....there is no reason why they'd be interested in us, is there Mackie?"

Silence.

"Mackie?"

"Yeah?"

He didn't really want to be asked. She knew she didn't want to ask him.

"What did you put in the engine core?"

"Well.... I'd rather not say right now."

He took the second in such an unsubtle way, that had to be it. He'd done something. He'd done something illegal and big and he'd dragged her right into the middle of it without telling her. He'd done it to her jet...

"What'd you do? What'd you do to my new jet?"

She hadn't realised she'd been shouting until she heard her voice echo back at her over the comm's.

"Well, with all the sensors and stuff you wanted to fit, I needed to make the engine cores smaller to fit in the space." She heard him swallow, waiting for his own mind to catch up with his mouth. "And since most of the standard fuel rod is wasted mass anyway, and it needs a big core to keep it all in. I found a way to get rid of all that excess inert mass so I could shrink the core, but it needs to be all-fuel to work..."

All fuel. It took her a moment to fully comprehend what exactly he'd done and it nearly stopped her cold.

"Do you know what happens if Great Justice finds out? Do you know what they'll do? That's like.... that's like...."

She was beyond anger. She couldn't even finish what she said. If she was right, they didn't even risk a trial, they did what they had to to shut it down before anyone even got close to something workable.

"It's not illegal," Mackie answered fast. "I checked. Only weapons development is and it's a drive, not a weapon."

"That's not the point. They'll think you're making a weapon..."

"But I amn't... why would I?"

His voice seemed to shrink back away from her, retreating away.

"I don't know. And they won't care. Even the hint of it brings out Great Justice' top Troubleshooter's to make sure." Another cold realisation fell over her. "Maybe that's who was following us?

"That's why I wanted to bring it to the point of having a functional drive. At least I'd have proof I wasn't doing anything wrong. I just wanted to build a faster engine, not a weapon of mass destruction."

"That's stupid! You're stupid! Do you realise how stupid that sounds?"

She could feel herself getting warm inside, despite taking deep breaths too cool herself down.

"We needed an engine for the Kulbit that could beat the VF-9 and these cores are about half the weight of the standard design and when you have two of them in a lightweight hull, it really makes a big difference. It was the only way to stay ahead."

"By making something that's two steps away from a weapon? What if somebody makes a weapon out of them?"

It didn't even matter what he wanted to do with them. All that mattered what what someone else could've done with it.

"That's not it. I mean...." He swallowed again, taking time to collect himself and get his mind on steady ground. "I made sure it can't be weaponised. It's almost impossible to weaponise - harder than the original cores even; the isotope ratios are all wrong and they're a bitch to separate. If you tried to make a bomb out of these engine cores it'll just self-destruct before it does any damage to anyone but the person making the weapon. The cores are then sealed up solid and welded shut. They're designed to be replaced as a unit, not just the fuel, so there's no reason for anyone to open them except to get at the fuel. So I fitted an automatic interwave screamer powered by decay heat and batteries that'll sound a warning if - if - someone tries to open one, and the weapons control background checks for fighter-craft weed out most of the bomb lunatics anyway. The Hi-Streamer's PEPPER classification is already high enough."

Anika sat there, processing through it all, comparing it to what she knew of armaments security - which wasn't all that much anyway. On one level, it seemed to check out. On another, she wanted to just turn for home and burn at full throttle, dismantle the whole jet and pretend like it and its drives had never existed.

If the right person found out? If the wrong person found out, and had no qualms about blasting someone out of the sky for quick access to bomb materials?

"Mackie..." she said uneasily.

"I really checked everything, Anika. It's definitely legal. It's definitely safe because it has all the same failsafes as the standard cores. I'm not being stupid again." And he really meant it. He really believed it at least. "It's just, people panic when they hear the word Plutonium. But I made sure it was safe. Nobody even knows it's there."

There was one obvious flaw in that.

"You know, security through obscurity is no security at all."

"Only three people know," he answered her. "And you're one of them. Everyone else, and every document on our servers, calls it Deltalloy. The processing details are islanded so they can't be stolen or hacked. So as far as the 'verse is concerned, it's a proprietary black box - which isn't unusual for a racing team with an edge. It's all copacetic."

"I'm still not comfortable with this..." she said after a moment, staring at the generator gauges. A little more kick than gasoline, she recalled.

"I know," Mackie sighed "But when you see something so technically sweet, you go ahead and do it, then worry about it afterwards. You know what it's like....."

The Mad's Mantra.

She hated it so much.

Silence closed in, broken by the whistling of the ventilation, the distant humm of the main generators and the hollow roar of the engines. Outside, there was only darkness all way to Ultima. Anika soothed herself with a mouthful full of cheesecake-in-a-tube, followed by another, then a third. Curiosity began to nag at her as she sat in silence, begging for an answer. She swallowed her unease.

"Mackie? How long would it take you to build a bomb?"

"A week," Mackie answered in a flat tone. "Maybe. It's seventy year old technology, predating computers - it's not as hard as people think"

"A week," Anika breathed.

"Yeah. But not with plutonium, it'd take too long to get enough that's pure enough."

The certainty of his voice was what really frightened her.

"Do I want to ask how?"

No she didn't, but Mackie told her anyway, his voice sombre as one that'd gazed upon sin. The answer left Anika sitting dumb in her seat, speechless for long seconds as she processed the implications of what she'd just heard. If Mackie was right, anyone could do it...

"And nobody knows?"

"Not many people know about it because the scientists at the time called it a failure. But it was a failure because it only gave a two-hundred ton explosion, instead of the thousand they were expecting," he laughed nervously. "I only found it, because I was looking up ways to make sure an atomic bomb failed."

He offered a single hollow laugh at the irony of it.

"And you're not going to tell anyone," Anika realised.

"It'd cause a panic," he answered. "And if someone did actually try it, and made something that worked, and hurt people with it, then I'd be responsible."

"You have to tell someone Mackie!"

"I can't," he answered, struggling to keep his voice even.

"If somebody else learns to exploit that method, and uses it, and is able to use it because you didn't warn anyone of the risk, then you'd be just as responsible." She punctuated it with a slap to the panel in front of her before folding her arms across her chest."That's full disclosure. That's the hacker ethic."

"That's Serizawa's dilemma," Mackie said quietly. Looking forward, she could see his head hung low, eyes down at his instruments rather than out the window. "I need to talk to someone first to make sure I'm right, before I figure out what I do."

"Who?"

"Someone who might've done it before."

"Done it..." Anika started, before her mind caught up."...oh"

"And this isn't exactly the sort of thing you can ask about over open channels. Or closed ones."

Anika slumped forward in her harness, gazing down at her monitors. A few more posts had come in over the interwave and she buried herself in it, hoping to take her mind off other things. She applied another offered patch to her detection algorithms, refining the signature further. That the big minds had taken interest proved it wasn't Great Justice following her. Or they were, and were subtly trying to manipulate her sensors to make sure she couldn't detect it.

The easiest way to crack a system, was to crack the user behind it, to trick them into letting you in.

Anika decided to trust the people she knew, and loaded the module. Her sensors began scanning once more, sweeping the space around the craft. Analysis was performed in real-time according to her block-diagram programmed model, before shunting it through the updated filter.

She held her breath for a few cycles, feeling herself begin to warm. The orange 'contact' light began to flash out a steady, pulsing beat. A giddy spark shot thro

Trailing two hundred thousand kilometres behind, right on the edge of detection at her power levels, and well out of the IDAR's field of view.

But it was there onscreen.

"Mackie" she said, her voice shaking with nervous glee "Our friend is back."

The mailing list found out moments later.

"Why would I build a bomb? What good does a bomb do? There's no benefit to it. There's no enjoyment to it. There's no challenge to it. It's just implimenting a solution discovered 80 years ago. I can't even test it and demonstrate it because... well, the problem with doing that is obvious. But Speed? Speed has signalled more advances in the history of mankind than anything else. To go faster is always a challenge. To go faster is always good. It's always rewarding. To go faster is fun and exciting and thrilling. Because the faster you go, the closer the rest of the universe is...."
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--m(^0^)m-- Wot, no sig?

[robkelk]

Third: I deliberately avoided naming names, or saying exactly what Mackie discovered. It was a peculiarity I came across while researching the original justification. I'm cagey about outright saying what this is because it definitely wasn't anyone's intent to do it and I don't want to break the setting on people. The method is so obscure, because it's specifically listed as a failure. So, it's probably or the best to leave everything a little obscure for the time being. I just wanted to do the Serizawa thing about disclosure...

Either way, this is definitely something provisional. Especially the second half.

No objections here. I already opened that bottle; that genie is already out.

"I need to talk to someone first to make sure I'm right, before I figure out what I do."

"Who?"

"Someone who might've done it before."

"Done it..." Anika started, before her mind caught up."...oh"

"And this isn't exactly the sort of thing you can ask about over open channels. Or closed ones."

She'd be happy to chat. Face-to-face, on Deimos. in her own apartment where nobody else can listen in. She won't help refine the process to make a bomb, but she will offer untested ideas for failsafes. (And Makoto can entertain Anika - maybe take her shopping, or backstage at a rehearsal.)
--
Rob Kelk
"Governments have no right to question the loyalty of those who oppose
them. Adversaries remain citizens of the same state, common subjects of
the same sovereign, servants of the same law."

- Michael Ignatieff, addressing Stanford University in 2012

[Dartz]

That's not really what I expected to be objectionable....

Mackie's definitely not interested in refining a weapon design beyond 'will this concept work' and 'who do I warn about it or should I even bother', because what he's found is a way to do it using a fuel-source that's reasonably common in Fenspace and at the time hard to put a lid on fast. He has no interest in building a bomb at all. Although I do have something in mind for the exact source, it can be left as a McGuffin for the time being because it's not that important to the story.
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--m(^0^)m-- Wot, no sig?

[Dartz]

Something I peddled together....... how true or not some of the claims are depends on what else is out there.



EDIT: And that should've been .198 C..... silly typo.
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--m(^0^)m-- Wot, no sig?