Battleship Raider by Paul Tomlinson (book recommendations website .txt) 📗

not an authorised person and I wasn’t actually inside the vault, but I felt I was on to something.

I sat down behind the desk in Kyle Rose’s little office and put my feet up. When you relax, great ideas sometimes pop into your head.

I was going to need access to the Celestia’s security system in order to achieve anything. I asked Trixie to bring together all of the data she’d found on the operating system and software that had been used on this class of battleship. She made a tutting noise.

“What?” I asked.

“Nothing.”

“No, you obviously have some criticism of my plan – tell me.”

Trixie made a sighing sound. I’m not sure where she learned to do things like that. “The problem with lines of reasoning inspired by the exploits of Sherlock Holmes is that people sometimes miss the more obvious solutions,” she said. She may have been quoting some long-dead academic killjoy.

“You think there’s a simpler solution?” I asked, sceptical.

“No, I’m sure that you spending hours sifting through software manuals and millions of lines of code is much simpler than what I was going to suggest.”

Sarcasm, that was another thing she’d picked up somewhere.

“Go on, astound me with your brilliance,” I said.

“Why don’t you use the security tag you picked up earlier?”

I was silent for a few heartbeats. I’d forgotten about the tag. But even if I’d remembered it, it didn’t really solve my problem. “What good is that?” I asked. “It’ll open doors but it won’t get me into anything else. The security systems all require two levels of authorisation – as well as the card I’d need to pass the bio scan.”

“I’ll tell you what,” Trixie said. “You think about it for a few minutes and if the solution doesn’t come to you, you can ask me.”

“Just tell me!”

“If I do everything for you, you’ll never learn to do it yourself.”

That sounded so like my mother it was spooky. I think Trixie had been a school teacher in another life. She had laid down the challenge and my commanding her to give me the answer would have been an admission of defeat. I picked up the security tag.

“Don’t smudge it any more than you already have,” Trixie warned.

She’d just given me the answer. I held the tag carefully by its edges and tilted it, examining its surface under the light.

“Fingerprints?” I said.

“Or possibly DNA,” Trixie said.

“Enough to fool a bio scan?”

“Won’t know until we try,” she said. It sounded like she was smiling. A virtual smile of virtual smugness.

I held up the tag so that Trixie could scan each side of it. She analysed the images, separating my prints from those left by the tag’s original owner.

“Anything?” I asked.

“I don’t know what you’ve touched, but you should wash your hands before you next eat,” she said.

“Yes, mother.”

“There’s no DNA,” she said. “Are there any stray hairs on the shoulders of the jacket? Or dandruff?”

I went to look. It seemed that Kyle Rose was one of those military types who used a clothes brush on his jacket every morning – there wasn’t a speck on it.

“What about fingerprints?” I asked.

From her scans of the security tag, Trixie managed to recover three fingerprints, but all of them were slightly distorted. She set about teasing the print from an index finger back into shape. It didn’t need to be perfect – just good enough to provide enough points of comparison to trigger a positive identification from the security system sensor.

I dug the glove out of my jacket pocket. It looked like a well-worn leather driving glove, but it had some interesting electronics built into it. I hadn’t used it for a while and it felt tight and dry when I pulled it on.

“Try it now,” Trixie said.

The glove warmed to body temperature and the index finger adopted the pattern of the fingerprint Trixie had recovered. I pressed my finger to the sensor at the side of the security terminal. The little screen above it flashed red and the words ‘Please try again’ were superimposed on it. I pressed my glover finger down again, rotating it a little as I did so. After a moment’s thought, the little screen turned green. The monitor attached to the security terminal lit up. I slid the security tag into the reader built into the keyboard.

Good afternoon, Kyle appeared on the screen. Apparently he had thirteen unread messages, but I didn’t want to look at them. I was only interested in his security level. If it turned out he was a ‘facilities manager’ who only had access to the mop cupboard, I was going to be disappointed and would feel the need to mock Trixie mercilessly. I called up the menu of systems his work required him to use.

“Level four security,” Trixie said in my ear. Again with the smug smile.

I wasn’t sure how many levels of security there were here on the Celestia, nor did I know whether ‘1’ was the highest or lowest, but judging by the menu items, Kyle was relatively high on the food chain.

“Can you make a connection?” I asked.

Trixie chuckled. “You’re going to have to plug me in.”

“Please tell me you’re joking.”

“Nope. Wireless communication was regarded as a security risk on these old warships so it is all triple-encoded. You can’t access it unless you know the secret handshake.”

I pulled open the desk drawer. There was the usual accumulation of old paperclips, decayed rubber bands and blunt pencils. There were also several wires that had that odd sticky feeling and smell that some of the old tech in Abbie’s bedroom had had.

“Take your pick,” I said, holding up the cables so Trixie could see the connectors on both ends.

“The red one,” she said, “plug the larger connector into the terminal.”

I did as she asked. Meanwhile, Trixie’s nano-bots reshaped the end of her casing, creating a socket to match the other connector. I slid it into place.

Trixie giggled. “That tickles. Give me a minute, I’m going to tap into the communication