Chapter 14

Innes spent an hour after the interrogations coordinating with Commander Jun Hua’s office to arrange the loan of a station technician qualified for sensitive electronics work. Jun assigned a senior engineer named Haratun, who was supposedly one of their better engineers. Jun had assured him that if anyone on the station could figure a piece of tech out, it was Haratun.

Innes had Pierce meet him and Haratun in the hangar bay where the seized buoy from the Pioneer Spirit sat on a portable workbench under temporary lighting.

The device looked like junk. Its matte gray shell had patches of discoloration where cheaper alloy showed through worn paint and scuffs. It measured approximately one meter long and thirty centimeters in diameter, with dents and scrapes consistent with rough handling and time in open space. It was the kind of beat-up equipment asteroid prospectors cobbled together from spare parts and used until it fell apart, then cannibalized for components to build the next generation of barely functional survey gear.

This was exactly why Innes had ordered it brought here. If the buoy was worthless civilian scrap, why hide it in a shielded compartment alongside forty-nine military-grade naval mines?

“Open it up,” Innes said. “I need to know why someone thought this was worth concealing.”

Haratun set her diagnostic kit beside the buoy and selected her tools. She removed the access panels carefully, revealing the internal architecture without damaging any of the components. Haratun connected her diagnostic equipment to the internal systems and began running signal traces through the component layout.

“The first thing I can tell you is that what’s inside this, well, what little there is inside it, doesn’t match the housing. Someone gutted the original survey equipment and rebuilt the interior from scratch. The power distribution alone is three times more sophisticated than anything a prospecting buoy would need. This is designed to broadcast a tightly focused location pulse on a specific frequency, but if I’m reading these power feeds right, the range of it would be extremely limited. If I had to guess, somewhere around fifty thousand kilometers. If this was floating in space, you would basically need to know exactly where it was to find it. Stumbling across this by accident would be all but impossible.”

“So it’s a beacon for someone who already knows where to find it,” Pierce said.

“Exactly, although that’s not its main function, just how people find it. This housing,” she said, indicating a shielded compartment in the buoy’s core, is built to store something very small. I’d say something electronic from the radiation shielding around this, which is what I meant about it not matching up. The shielding around this interior section is better than most of the stuff we have on the station. Since it’s too small for a biological, my only guess would be that it’s to protect some piece of electronics, maybe digital storage or something like that, from getting fried by radiation. Of course, it’s empty right now.”

“We’re all thinking a dead drop, right?” Pierce said. “A buoy with an incredibly limited signal, so it can’t be picked up by someone who doesn’t know exactly where to look, and built so something inside, probably electronic and probably data storage, would be protected from being wiped or fried. A dead drop is the only answer. One ship drops this off as they’re passing, and later another ship can pick it up. They can pass a message no sensor could pick up and never be in the same place twice. The beat-up exterior means nobody gives it a second look if they happen to scan it. Just another piece of mining junk.”

The reasoning sounded solid to Innes, even if it wasn’t backed up by any actual facts. At least, it was solid until the rest of the situation was brought into the equation.

A cargo ship smuggling military mines didn’t need a dead drop. Smugglers who moved weapons to a buyer would, by definition, need a person to turn the goods over to, which meant they were already seeing a contact face-to-face, or at least ship-to-ship. They already had that liability, so there was no need to go through the effort of something like this buoy.