[RFC][Fiction] Hi Streamer

[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.
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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....
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--m(^0^)m-- Wot, no sig?