Renewed Pursuit

Several days into the flight, Captain John Maverick was livid. His strong and rugged six-foot-two frame stood straight and imposing. His normally gentle brown eyes focused on his Security Officer with an intense glare that could have breached the hull of a battle cruiser a light year away. Being a kind and fair man, he typically did not let his temper get the best of him, but this was not a typical situation.

He was tired of excuses. The safety of the 1,200 passengers on board and the ship’s crew rested upon his broad shoulders. To make matters worse, they were entering a sector of space that was not fully colonized by the Galactic Alliance. In many ways, the sector resembled the proverbial wild and lawless West of ancient American history. Protecting the people under his care was his job, his sworn duty, and he was not one to take the protection of his wards lightly.

“What do you mean you can’t locate its source?” Maverick demanded as he ran his fingers through his still-full head of thick brown hair lightly dusted with gray. “Someone has been tapping into our central computer, opening up a com link through the galactic-net, mind you, not just a com link, but a secured com link that we can’t intercept, and downloading information, and now we have an intermittent beacon sending out signals that a Chihuahua with a cold could follow and you can’t locate the source of any of it? Commander, maybe I need to offer your job to whoever is responsible for creating havoc with my communications!”

Commander Cathy Hollinger, an Amazon of a woman who could almost look at the captain eye to eye, understood her superior’s concern. She was an attractive woman in her mid-twenties, smart, tough and, having served her career to date under the captain’s tutelage, was fiercely devoted and loyal to her mentor.

“I’m sorry, sir,” she said, showing signs of a rarely seen nervousness, “but whoever is doing this is covering his or her tracks very well. We don’t know the origin, can’t decipher the message and have yet to identify the method.”

“Listen very carefully. I have a thousand alarms going off in my head, all telling me to be extraordinarily concerned. My gut is screaming at me and I’m listening. I want you to leave this room and do not come back until you know who’s doing this. Run background checks, check the logs on legitimate communications, hell, get dressed as a maid and run manual scans of each individual room and occupant, but find out where these transmissions are originating. Do I make myself clear?”

“Yes sir,” she barked, availing herself of the opportunity to leave the bridge.

As his Security Officer headed out the door with a new urgency to discover the source of the strange signals, Captain Maverick, a veteran of the Terrilian war and the recipient of multiple decorations, hoped he hadn’t been too rough on the younger officer. She was one of his best, just like the rest of his officers. They were all one of his best. He had no doubt she would get to the bottom of this. He just hoped it would be before anyone got hurt.

“Captain, we are being hailed by a Galactic Alliance Law Enforcement cruiser,” reported the Communications Officer “They have ordered us to drop out of hyperspace and prepare to receive a Space Marshall, sir.”

“They’re not giving us much room to refuse, are they? My hunch is that this surprise visit is probably related to the strange transmissions. Acknowledge the request and provide them with docking instructions. Helmsman, drop us out of hyperspace. Commander, bring me my sidearm, I don’t like this breach of protocol. As soon as the good Marshall is aboard, I want us back in hyperspace and on course. Let’s attempt to keep to our schedule. I’ll go down to the shuttle bay and receive our new passenger.”

Making his way through the brightly lit, metal decked service corridors, the Captain pondered the puzzle before him. Unauthorized communications were one thing. He could easily envision a paranoid passenger not trusting the ship’s on-board communications system for conversations of a discreet nature. But now, somewhere on board there was a homing device that on a daily basis transmitted a purposely scrambled and cloaked signal. To make it harder to locate, each time, after transmitting for a few minutes, the beacon would shut down. The ship’s itinerary and flight plan were well documented and available for public review, so it made no sense to plant such a device to track the ship itself. It was simply not necessary. The device was targeting the location of one of his passengers. Someone on his ship, either knowingly or unknowingly, was being tracked and reasons for doing so were rarely honorable. Which one of his 1,200 charges was being targeted, he wondered. And, more importantly, why?

As he walked into the shuttle bay, the smell of exhaust and the sound of the giant external bay doors locking shut alerted Captain Maverick that the shuttle bearing his uninvited guest had already docked. Before he could search the faces moving about, a distinguished-looking middle-aged man approached him with an extended hand.

“You must be Captain Maverick. I am Marshall Troy Delaney.”

“Marshall, welcome aboard. Your hail and order to stand down was most unusual. I don’t mean to be short, but what the hell is going on?”

“Please accept my apologies for interrupting your flight, Captain. I would not have done so had it not been deemed necessary. I have reason to believe that an escaped convict is hiding aboard your ship.”

Captain Maverick’s eyebrows rose fractionally. “What are we dealing with, Marshall? How dangerous is this person?”

“Fortunately for all involved, I don’t believe he’s dangerous at all.” Delaney took out a picture of Derek Hart and showed it to the Captain. “He’s a white-collar criminal. Actually, at one point in his life he was a bit of a celebrity amongst the eggheads in the scientific community. Seems he’s some kind of a genius in the field of holography. Probably owns the patents to a good portion of the components used to design the holographic suites on this ship.

“The guy is loaded, yet it wasn’t enough for him. Seems he programmed a Trojan horse into the higher-end home-use holographic chambers his company was selling. Customers would pay through the nose for one of his chambers, and innocently install them at home. The chamber’s AI would watch the occupants, determining by their actions when they would be gone for a length of time, communicate the fact to him and, having learned the home’s security codes, would unlock it when his cronies showed up to ransack it. Every job, in essence, was an inside job.”

“If he was that smart, why did he bother with petty theft and breaking and entering? Why not something more challenging? I assume he didn’t do it for the money since it sounds like he already had plenty.”

“That’s a good question that was never answered during the trial. Maybe he just wanted to experience power over his customers. Who knows? The point is that he was found guilty and computer crime being what it is these days, he and the moon are going to become very well acquainted during the next twenty years.”

“Marshall, something has been going on that perhaps is related in some way to the search for your escaped convict. Since we left Earth several days ago, my Security Officer has detected several unauthorized transmissions over the galactic-net between our ship and Earth. As you can imagine, that in itself is not so strange. During my tenure as Captain of this vessel, I have encountered such transmissions before and relatively easily traced them back to their source. This time, however, the transmissions are untraceable. Whoever is riding piggyback on the ship’s communications network is cleverly hiding their location. My security people are very, very good, yet they are no closer to finding the source of the signals. In addition, a homing device has been activated and is intermittently issuing its signal. We are currently assuming, or at least hoping, that the two separate anomalies are in some way related.”

“Well, if my man is the one issuing the signals, rest assured you will not find their source. He’s that good. We’ll have to find him directly through more conventional means. He is a master of technology.”