Ghosts of Akrotiri
MARCH- 2506. ALL WARFARE IS BASED ON DECEPTION.
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“What, then, we must ask, is the ultimate goal of cyberwarfare?” The man at the podium paused. “It, most simply, must be to interfere with the enemy’s execution of any form of military activities, to break the comfortable reliance the enemy holds on their technology and create a sense of paranoia in the ranks… it is both an extension and an evolution, then, of psychological warfare.”
He sighed, advancing the slide with a tap on the podium.
“Certainly when one thinks of cyberwar, the word evokes drama, ship systems shut down and overtaken, life support disabled, synthetics killed on the spot, plague and devastation. There is, of course, some truth to that, but only in the extremes, and well-regulated by the laws of war. Defensive cyberwarfare is a field of study and practice that has existed for centuries, aimed at curbing the worst excesses of malware and hacking. It is of course, largely successful given the computing power to back it up when faced with a type of threat actor it is expecting. This is why tactical offensive cyberwar is a game of inches; you take what you can get and get what you can take, as much of tactical cyberwarfare develops along predictable lines. When confronted with a hostile warship, it is fairly easy to presume that they do not, in fact, have friendly intentions.”
There was a chuckle from the crowd. He was glad; it was a line in his notes that had amused him, even if it had not risen to the point of actual humor.
“So, then, the state of the art in tactical cyberwarfare is fairly consistent. The aims and goals are to disrupt enemy communication, detection, classification, and tracking capabilities by the deliberate insertion of false or misleading information or contacts, and interfering with or degrading systems the attacker has gained access to. In through the comms lasers, out to the sensor telescopes and operator displays. But we live in an era of fused systems. Defensive cyberwarfare has once again increased in capability for data-links and cross-fleet information sharing to be permissible again, and we have been brushing off long-dormant capabilities on both the offensive and defensive side of the ball. If we can't get into their life support systems, their targeting IFF, or flay their systems coordination officers and anyone else jacked into their network, what else would the Holy Grail of offensive cyberwar be, in this old-is-new era of networked warfare?” He shook his head. “Next slide, please.”
“This is code recovered from the computer systems of the PDFN Agamemnon, one of our new Taruga-class frigates that was part of the FRIGRON organized to go to Akrotiri. Well, not really. It's representative. The real code, well, I don't even have access to it.” He grinned with a chuckle, and some scattered across the audience returned the gesture. “But I believe it's a good time to finally speak about what it does.” He swiped at the podium. “We don't have anyone in here who believes in UFOs, do we?” The audience laughed, and a video taken from an infrared telescope onboard the frigate played out behind him.
“This is, quite simply put, the most sophisticated contact generator we've ever seen. It can ping false targets to the full fidelity of our sensors, constructing something out of nothing. For its first outing, the Minervans apparently didn't want to play their full hand, and instead wanted to capitalize on the recent UFO craze.”
As he finished his sentence, a strange form, almost like a shark fin hanging upside-down, parted from the void and set the infrared view alight. It was a haze, a blur, a hanging whisper of a dream.
For the last three hours, the Chilean ship ALMIRANTE COCHRANE had been ignoring her gravitometric sensors. They were not the only ones. A collection of sixty some-odd UN warships orbited the abandoned planet, the radio telescope’s pale visage silhouetting the eyeball world. ALMIRANTE COCHRANE had been coming over the night side— the icy side— when suddenly the carrier’s gravitometric sensors had erupted with a massive cluster of contacts. Androniki Mitrakou, Hellenic Navy, Sensor Technician Third Class, had wondered if the worlds were coming to an end— if that great war they had long feared was finally here. Yet as she stared at her console, sweating bullets as she struggled to characterize such a large signature, her pessimism had faded to exasperation. That wasn’t a Minervan battlegroup. It was too big. It wasn’t moving right. It looked more like a neutron star, if anything, but it was steadily increasing in magnitude. She sighed. It was busted. It had to be. She was an older ship, after all. She didn’t start worrying until she found out every other ship there had been reporting the same issue.
The Cyber department had called in to her Chief and told them that there was a fleetwide cyberattack, likely a remnant of the battle a few days prior. The contacts were false. That made her a little bit more comfortable, but as she dwelt on the possibility, she couldn't help but find it thoroughly unnerving. She'd never seen anything that could infect a fleet so fast without anybody knowing. Besides, if the gravitometer readout was fake, what else could be? She'd been instructed to keep an eye on it but not take it too seriously.
It was three hours into the whole ordeal when the gravitometer had finally even started to calm down. It was not, by any means, calm; her supervising Chief stared over her shoulder in quiet befuddlement, her Captain’s lanky arms throwing up a shrug at the Petty Officer. “It's starting to dissipate, sir.”
“Mind if I take a closer look?”
“No, sir.”
“Ope,” he said, squeezing between the two acceleration seats. “Huh,” he blinked.
“Yeah.” She tapped at her controls. “Hang on, it's really dying down now.”
“Uh oh,” ST3 Matthijs Molenaar said. “Dat is niet goed.” He shook his head in surprise. “Sir, I am beginning to see things, on the infrared. They are not right.”
“Bring it up top,” the Captain squeezed right past her console as a cluster of flags, and the shoulders that carried them, towered over Molenaar’s seat, some standing, some floating in the null-grav of a ship on the drift. The Captain bore the white-green-purple of Ganymede, the SENS the rust-white-rust of Mars. Her Chief behind them wore the gold-blue-red of Colombia, all hovering over the red, white, and blue of the Netherlands with the twelve stars of Europe. The Captain sprung to his station, and slipped on his pressure helm before barking into the helmet intercom. “Yeoman, sound Action Stations. I don't know what the hell that thing is, or if it's even real. But we're under some kind of attack.” He scanned the room. “Dammit, where's Coles?”
“Head, Cap’n,” Captain Privalov, his DCAG, nodded to the hatchway.
“Shit,” he shook his head. “Get the ready birds out the tubes. If he disagrees, too bad.”
“With you on this one, Cap’n.”
There was a chorus of “Aye, sir.” The whole of the CIC started cracking their pressure helms out of the seat lockers. “Action stations, action stations…”
Daniel ‘SETI’ Coles, Commander, Aerospace Group of the carrier ALMIRANTE COCHRANE, was not a happy man. He never was. He was least happy, however, to have been torn from his toilet time because the computer had hallucinated. That's what the Yeoman had told him was happening, anyways.
“Those are fuckin’… aliens, man.” He stared at the shapes on the telescope footage with bated breath. A cluster of ships of assorted shape and size swarmed a giant, inverted shark fin coasting through the stars.
“Captain Coles,” the Dutch kid, the Sensor Technician, spoke. “I mean no disrespect. You cannot seriously be suggesting this is our first contact with intelligent life.”
“No, but you're his,” the DCAG sighed.
“Hey!”
“Unfortunately, ol’ SETI here thinks everything marginally blurry is an alien star-ship—”
“Yeah, since I almost hit one!”
“That was a recon probe with a sensor decoy.” The DCAG shook his head. “Besides, do any of these ships look like the one you found?”
“Well, no, but—”
“Look at that one. It's all blocky, and that one’s got wings! It's clearly a generative sensor spoof, the system is hallucinating. These ships look nothing like each other!” As if on cue, a new ship spawned into view— missing one moment, there the next. “Oh, sure. Just as I say something, it makes a bigger copy of the middle one.”
“I am inclined to… agree with the D-CAG.” Molenaar summoned up the courage to look over his shoulder as much as his pressure suit would allow. “I have been conversing with the… SCO, and, well,” He paused. “Surely you know our systems are infected.”
“That's true,” the Captain of the ship nodded. “I've been talking with the Systems Coordinator too. He says he's never seen code like this.”
“Grav is picking up again! It’s… scattered, it looks.”
“Captain,” a Sailor burst in behind them, tapping the CO on the shoulder. “They want you in the Cyber room. They think they found something, and they say we’re clear to stand down to Condition II-SCREW. It isn’t in the life support.”
“Good, then. Lids off, sound the order for Condition II-SCREW.” He unsealed his pressure helm, slinging it under his shoulder. “Get it sorted, gentlemen. I’ll be back,” He nodded, slapping Coles on the back. “Don’t go too crazy.”
“It’s in there pretty good, Captain,” the Cyber Officer pointed at his screen for the information of the man quite literally hovering over his shoulder. “I knew something was off when I called in to ask SENS to check the star tracker… it’s outta sync with the electro-opticals.”
The CO nodded. “Well, that’s what it’s there for, isn’t it? Ground truth.”
“Exactly. We do periodic sync checks but since that’s part of the non-networked layer of instruments, we have to actually send somebody to check it. Next one wasn’t for fifteen minutes. At some point in the last forty-five, we started flying blind. And none of us had any idea.”
“Thank God we haven’t burned.”
“Well, we probably would have caught it in our check then, at least. That’s not as important. What is important is a list of degraded or non-functional sensors. Obviously, we’re getting false contacts across the gravitometer and the electro-optics, including the infrareds. Our radars are just completely fucked, they’ve been stuck on the same output for the last twenty-six minutes. Lidar seems to work, but on closer inspection is constantly returning one of four values on a rotating loop. So basically, our long-range passive sensors are being flooded with fakes, and our more close-in active sensors are being tricked to think they’re clean. They seem to specifically have targeted the navigational sensors.”
“That’s… terrifying.” He blinked.
“Yeah.”
“You find the infection vector? We have an EVA team aboard. We should recover it, get it to analy—”
A jolt crashed across the ship. The Captain was thrown into the ceiling.
“Collision, front!”
The lecturer pointed to a hand in the crowd.
“Why do they look… like that?” The audience member, a Captain from his shoulder boards, raised an eyebrow. “Looks like something from my kid’s games.”
“We believe this was a limited trial, with the portable generative system not trained specifically on Minervan emissions to prevent us from gleaning any actionable information from the test run.” The man at the podium paused. “There is, of course, another reason.”
He stepped out from behind the walnut lectern, notes left behind on top. A glint from a spotlight caught his glasses— a square, delicate frame, one that made him look like an intellectual or perhaps some European banker, a duality supported by the thin sheen of an accent that seemed some boutique blend of Cambridge and Zurich. “Aliens. The mere idea, is infectious. They have a weapon, they can test it on their own architecture as much as they want. Even, on captured articles of ours. However, this does not change the fact; they have a weapon. They do not know what will happen when they pull the trigger.” He opened his hands. “I have worked in intelligence for thirty-five years. This is a rumor trap.”
“Oh.”
“They do not need a source inside of our Navies if we go to the public and tell them that no matter what they heard from their cousin, we didn't see aliens at Akrotiri. And it's of course, a rumor so salacious that it will make the rounds.” He sighed. “For God's sake, we have entire ships full of sailors absolutely convinced they've just met Mr. Spock. This is a counterintelligence nightmare— we've been trying to stop it, but some of the sailor lifestyle blogs are already running with it. The problem with this damn rumor is, it's not serious enough to shut anyone up, and it's not boring enough that nobody cares.”
“Huh.” The Captain replied. “FRMI pitched us a real screwball on this one.”
“I'm sorry, I don't watch your American football. Not one for sport. But I am inclined to agree. Quite a screwball. Next question.”
The Captain winced, a finger raised. He let it down gently.
“What the hell did we hit?” The Captain rushed back to his station in the CIC, holding his head. Blood trickled off his scalp, crimson globules floating in the air, diffracting the light of countless screens.
“Captain,” the CAG flinched away from a bloody droplet drifting by his face. “You gotta get to the centrifuge.”
“What… did. We hit.” He glared, panting heavily, a single message on his eyes. I'll rest when I'm dead. There's more at stake.
“Cap… Jak—” CAG Coles couldn't get his words in, edgewise or dead on.
“I'm not fucking going, CAG. Not until I know if this ship is in danger!”
“Debris, sir.” The SENS didn't look up from the console.
“Check the scopes—” He coughed. “Clear of mines?”
SETI looked on in horror.
“Clear, Captain.” SENS glanced back at him. “We have some slight damage to the bow, sensors have cleared of the false contacts but navigational interference is still in effect.”
“Get… EVA out. Full damage assessment. Find me the infection vector. I'll go to fucking sickbay, Coles. Just let me get these affairs in order.”
“What if it's internal, man? The bleeding?”
“I'm just grabbing my tablet.”
The walk to the centrifuge wasn't far, but it was chaotic. Mag-boots clanged against deckplate as Sailors rushed any friends who hadn't been appropriately bolted down when the collision hit towards the spin-gravity of the midsection. The Captain glanced down at the tablet as Coles walked him forward, a sanguine trail marking their path.
“You're losing a lot of blood for a guy who insisted on staying.”
“Think I… hit a bolt.” He nodded. “My skull doesn't look caved in, does it?”
“No?”
“Feels like it.”
“Alright, elevator time.” Coles shuffled into the flip-lift uneasily. “Doc’ll get’cha the good shit.” Coles glanced down at a buzzing phone. Commander Markannen wanted to talk. “Cyber found the infection vector.”
“Don’t let them put me under until I've talked to him,” he slurred out. “Call ‘em up!”
“Okay.” He patted him on a rather sweaty shoulder. “Okay, Ja—”
“Don't. Treat me like I'm dead. That wasn't nearly bad enough. Just… a concussion. And a little bit of blood.”
The Hospital Corpsmen loaded the Captain onto an operating bed with a heave. “Get me an IV and some O-neg quick. He's lost a lot of blood. Signs of a concussion.”
“Captain,” the Corpsman looked back at him, head shaking. “It's been almost ten minutes since the hit. That hand has been doing a lot of heavy lifting to keep your blood inside your head. And it has not been enough.”
“Yeah, whatever. Get… get me Cyber.”
“Captain, you're not fit for duty… and we’re going to need to transfer you to one of the Tarugas. Their medbays have full plategrav.”
“I have three more orders to give. Then you can do what you need.”
Captain Coles looked on with bated breath, shaken out of it by a knock at the compartment’s door. He walked up to the panel at the side. “It's Commander Markannen, sir.”
“Let him in.” Doc seemed ill at ease.
“Over here, Cyber.” The Captain hailed Markannen over. “You got it?”
“Yes, sir. Minnie transmitter buoy. New type, haven't seen it before. It's… we missed it, it's hydrogen-cooled. Tiny, and damn near dark. Hard to pick out unless it's beaming, or chirping.” He put his hands on his knees. Had he run here? “I scrubbed through the logs… when we got in system, we registered the comms, but we thought the signal was one of ours… and we thought the buoy was flaming wreckage.”
“Good.” The Captain gasped. “You listen to me. I hate to be a prick, but I have to be clear. This is the most… most important thing you've ever… done in your life.” He nodded. “Get me that beacon, send an EVA team. I want it in a Faraday box, in whatever ship they're shoving me in, under my custody alone.”
“Sir?”
“Don’t. Just do it.”
“Yes sir.”
“I need a second favor.”
“Okay, Captain.”
“I need the drives for the main computer and the sensor consoles. Full readouts and logs for all systems.”
“They're infected, sir.”
“I know.” He nodded. “Standard containment protocol. We're not going to be able to get the whole damn ship over in time. But… people back home need to know.”
“I…” Markannen paused. “I understand.”
“Same security as the buoy.”
“What's the third order?” Coles stood by the doorframe.
“It's for you, Coles.” He nodded. “I know what you think you saw. Secure that talk. Never tell a damn soul. You'll cause a panic.”
“Sir—” Coles winced. The Captain had been good to him. He would defer, for now. “I understand.”
“We'll talk.”
The Captain nodded to Doc, who had been busy inserting an IV into his arm. Cold saline rushed into his veins, the sharp tingle of the water seeping into his entire being. The Corpsman primed the blood tubing, attaching it to the Y-joint as the donor blood started to trickle in. “Prep the operating theater, possible internal bleeding.”
A lone Gladius dropship prowled through the night, spacesuited flight crew staring out into that which had once been void. Now it was a burial site, and perhaps they were grave robbers. Tremendous hulks, broken and scattered, mingled metal and flesh and silicon alike. The cargo ramp opened, a portal to the whole macabre scene as the small craft spun about. The silent burn of her RCS thrusters ilumined the wordless testimony of emergency helmets and the shattered visages of deadened faceplates alike, pulling back the veil on a tapestry of cold, bitter decay.
“O’Connell? Kim?” The loadmaster nodded. “You're up.”
“Understood.” The EVA specialists glanced at each other, Kim even tapping O’Connell on the shoulder, right on top of a patch of an old-school Space Station astronaut throwing a shaka beneath his Irish-EU flag. “Back in a jiffy,” Kim radioed in.
The two kicked off their mag-boots and primed their thruster packs, a green piloting HUD popping up across the visor of their Hoplite-VI suits. A toolkit hung from their belts, with some effects velcroed to their chests. O’Conell strafed his thrusters to the side as he nearly brushed by a floating body, the light of his headlamps glinting off the reflective stripe that lay across the breast of the Minervan uniform. “So much for the new foldables,” he said, making eye contact with the dormant face of a Minervan woman as he floated by. She was no older than twenty. She looked kind of like his cousin. They had the same hair. “Looks like they kicked it just like anybody else.”
“Thought those helmets deploy automatically?”
“Did. She didn't flash-cook, at least. Only got so much air, I guess.”
“Fuck me, man.”
Around the slim, night-blue shape of the cyber buoy, a forest of forms hung. One of them held a tablet computer in his hand. Another, a wrench. It appeared they'd been blown towards the beacon by an explosion aboard their ship, a mangled scrap of what had once been a leg still tumbling ever so slightly. Kim glanced over at O’Conell. O’Connell stared in shock.
Kim looked out at them. One was the spitting image of his brother. Another’s uniform bore the same surname as his childhood neighbor. He reached to his chest, a book velcroed there in place, in stark white with laminated pages easily turned with the heavy-duty gloves. He crossed himself, flipped the page, and read.
“Lord God, by the power of Your Word You pulled back the darkness that rest on the face of the deep, and divided the day from the night. You set the stars in the heavens to give light on the Earth and by a star led worshippers to Your Son.”
His stomach churned as he surveyed the faces of the dead, whose bones would not know the rest of the grave nor the solace of the depths; he had, of course, trained for years to fight and kill men and women just like these. That had never meant he wanted to, it had never made him enjoy the terrible duty, it had never made him relish these here, the spoiled of victory.
“As we commit the bodily remains of these, our unknown brothers and sisters, to the heavens, we pray they will be granted peace and tranquility until that glorious Resurrection in the last day, and the life of the world to come, through our Lord Jesus Christ; at whose second coming in glorious majesty to judge the world, the stars shall give up their dead. We pray that You may forgive them their sins and raise them to a place where there is no pain, no grief, no sighing, but everlasting life in and through and with Christ Your Son. In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, Amen.”
There was silence, even reverence, from the void. The stars knew their charges. They would keep them until that fateful day.
“Amen…” O’Connell nodded. “You always keep that on you on walks?”
“Yeah,” Kim nodded. “Never know when.”
“It got any prayers in there for the living?” He maneuvered over to the other end of the beacon. “With what's in here, might need it. Better yet, some prayers for peace.”
“Shh— you see that?” A flash lit his peripheral vision, gone in but a moment. He thought he saw one of the corpses jump in surprise.
“Huh?”
“On the— past the hull of the other destroyer.” Kim shook his head. “Oh, shit. Rad spike. Think it was UXO… still a lot of torpedoes floating around.” He chuckled. “You feeling nice and toasty in there?”
“Fuck, man, let's get inside.”
Kim pulsed his thrusters, taking up the other side. He unstrapped the Faraday foil on his belt, and began to wrap the buoy and its shrouded laser comm emitter, as O’Connell strapped mag-handles to it. The surface was cold. Damn cold. The Faraday foil was starting to contract. “How much battery does this thing have, damn?”
“The case is in the ship. C’mon, let's get it back.”
They gave one last forlorn look to the assembly of the dead, and pushed the control stick forward as they flew off into the black.
The Captain opened his eyes to the airlock corridor of a TARUGA-Class frigate, one solid g of gravity holding the wheels of his surgical bed to the deckplate. He glanced down at the tablet in his lap. A sailor jogged alongside the cot.
“Captain, you're awake.” She nodded, a vaguely humanoid synth with a wiry, thin frame. “I'm Cyberwarfare Technician Abija, Commander Markannen sent me. Captain Scott is in command. Your personal effects are being transferred, and the second special cargo is here.” She held a Faraday-caged, ruggedized container roughly the length of his forearm, bulky and rubberized black. “The first is being loaded into the cargo hold. You can check it when you're ambulatory.”
“Thank you, Technician Abija. Is… the hold pressurized?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Sailor?” He twisted his head towards the one pushing the cot. “Bring me down there.”
“Sir, we are under strict orders to get you to the medbay. The hold doesn't have artificial gravity.”
“The surgery. Will the patch hold?”
“Doc said so.”
“Then I don't care. Do it.”
The Sailor wheeled him off the beaten path, as the elevator brought them down to the cavernous— for a ship of this size, anyways— cargo hold of the PDFN AGAMEMNON. A large, grey crate floated down the cargo ramp of the Gladius that had wheeled in from the hangar airlock. He nodded to Abija, tapping the protective case cradled in his arms. “Thank you. You've done me a great help. Now get back home.”
“Aye, sir.” The synth turned and walked away.
“Sailor?”
“Yes sir?”
“Wheel me over to that crate.”
Two EVA specialists and a gaggle of aircrew stood around the crate, seemingly placing bets on what it did. “Hello, Sailors,” the Captain said, raising a bandaged hand in greeting. “Mind giving these old bones a helpin’ hand?”
“Whaddya need, Captain?”
“Open the box.”
“I was told not to do that, sir.”
“By me. Belay that, open the box.” He put his hand to the biometric scanner and punched in the code. “The foil will hold.” He had a hunch.
The Sailors shuffled uneasily. “You sure, sir?”
“Yes.”
They turned the seals, and peeled back the box. A slender, capsule-shaped form sat amongst form-sealing insulating foam, a last-line protective foil shrink-wrapped to the device.
The Captain smiled.
I understand a lot of people have come to WAYBOUND from my friend
’s publication, . If you’re confused and you didn’t mean to subscribe to a sci-fi series, no worries— but if you’re wondering what’s going on, you should check out our Start Here guide.
ALL WARFARE IS BASED
Feels a lot lighter on the paragraphs now, and now I'm getting used to your graphics. I think I'm interested in that art style, as well as the escalation of the Akrotiri damned thing