Caravaggio looked grimly impressed as he seated himself on the couch. “No sir, the command console will be fine,” he said, taking a data syringe from the pocket strapped to the left forearm of his vacuum suit. He pointed the syringe, a short tube with a pistol grip, into the console’s input port and squirted the code into the ship’s system.
When the telltale above the port winked green, Caravaggio stood and slipped the syringe back into its container. “There you go, Lieutenant Kidd,” he said. “Your identification signal will change in a continuous keyed sequence which matches the interrogatories from the defense array. Just follow the program I’ve input and you’ll be fine.”
He pushed off toward the airlock where the Commonwealth personnel continued to wait in morose silence. Over his shoulder he called, “But for God’s sake, don’t abort your landing and try to lift again. You’ll be blown to atoms before you’ve risen a thousand meters!”
“Thank you, Lieutenant,” Daniel repeated, remaining where he was in the middle of the bridge.
With luck, Adele should be able to unravel and emulate the code Caravaggio had downloaded into the command console; she’d assured him the decryption suite of the Goldenfels was just as advanced as her own unit aboard the Princess Cecile. If she succeeded, then the defense array ceased to be a matter of concern.
If that codebreaking didn’t work out, though, well . . . it wasn’t going to prevent the Goldenfels from doing considerable damage to Lorenz Base. But it was very unlikely the Goldenfels and those aboard her would survive more than seconds following their initial slashing attack.
* * *
The Goldenfels was under weigh again. Vesey had the conn. Adele assumed that controlling the ship’s descent into Lorenz Base was simpler than the chore Daniel had taken for his own: preparing to loose the full weight of their weaponry against the Alliance.
Adele was so sunk in her own work that she was aware of acceleration in the same fashion she was aware of breathing—mostly not at all. What a wealth—what a treasure house!—of information she was finding.
The ship’s computer ground away at the code controlling the Planetary Defense Array. Starship computers had to be able to project courses through multiple bubble universes, each with varied space-time constants; no workable human encryption system could be more complex.
The algorithms necessary to attack encryption were quite different from those needed for astrogation, however. Adele had brought her software from the Princess Cecile. The system already aboard was configured specifically to the astrogation computer of the Goldenfels, however, so she was using the installed version instead of her own.
She had nothing to add to the processing once she’d put it in hand, so she concentrated on Lorenz Base, dug into the surface of the moon which always faced Radiance. The installations were almost completely hidden, but by opening the files of the maintenance department—which weren’t protected any more rigorously than the similar files of the Xenos city government were—Adele had retrieved complete schematics of the power, sewer, water, and air-handling systems of every portion of the base.
Some of it didn’t mean anything to her—the huge overhead trackways could be for any purpose from food storage to missile transfer—but she was confident that Daniel could layer usage on her armature of facts. She was transferring the files to all members of the command group as she uncovered them, slugging them as to source and adding titles when possible.
It struck Adele almost absently that Lorenz Base was huge. It was built into the rim of an asteroid impact crater seven miles in diameter, the largest terrain feature on this side of Gehenna. On Radiance the crater was known as the Eye of Darkness, and many of the more devout inhabitants refused to do business on days when the Eye appeared to wink in the rising sun.
It was long after sundown on the portion of Radiance that now faced the moon. Adele didn’t suppose what was about to happen in the Eye was bad news for those on the primary, but it would certainly look that way to anyone here on Gehenna.
While Mr. Pasternak was refitting the Goldenfels with High Drive motors from the wreck on Morzanga, Adele had taken the time to configure her console into the fashion she wanted it. Now she could control it directly with her wands instead of using her handheld unit as an interface.