167: UNBREAKABLE

I expect Max to show up sooner or later to try to figure out what we’re so upset about and start doing social damage control before we can relay our complaints to the ship and make a much larger diplomatic incident, so I explain as quickly as I can. I barely finish explaining the basic premise before Tinera cuts me off to say, “That’s the best idea anyone’s had since we got here. I’m in. Let’s get to work.” Tal just laughs and raises kes hand for a high five, which I provide. The captain and the Friend, though, look a bit more troubled, and as I explain further, the captain frowns more and more.

“You realise,” he says, “that quite a few parts of this are impossible.”

“Yeah,” I say. “There are some… gaps.”

“Rather large gaps.”

Tal rolls kes eyes. “Teleportation was impossible a couple of weeks ago. These guys have tech almost a century and a half more advanced than ours, via the Vault. It’s probably all doable.”

“I’m not actually all that worried about how doable it is,” I say, “because if we fail, we just end up where we are right now. We have nothing to lose by trying and failing.” I take a deep breath and let it out, slowly. “I’m much more worried about succeeding. You realise the sacrifice I’m asking of everyone.”

“It’s no sacrifice for me,” Tinera shrugs. “I’m on board. And all the crew can decide for themselves, right? Which way to go? The Hylarans are kind of stuck with the group decision, but with everything that’s happened recently, with all their concerns, I don’t think they’re likely to be too upset. We’ll probably get almost unanimous agreement from them. If we propose this.”

“The group to worry about,” the Friend says quietly, not making eye contact with any of us, “is the group that can’t make a choice.”

“Yeah.” I smile ruefully. “The colonists still in chronostasis. We can’t exactly wake them all up to ask for their vote. We’re going to have to decide for them, and this… wasn’t what they were promised.”

“I don’t think that’s really all that big a deal,” Tinera says. “I can’t speak for your twenty per cent, Aspen, but for our eighty, we were kind of pushed into this anyway. I can’t predict which way any individual would vote if given the choice, but both options are better than what would’ve happened if we hadn’t signed on, and given just how big all of this is, I don’t think the difference between them is going to matter very much. To be frank, pretty much all of the prisoners are going to be pissed off no matter what we do, so.” She shrugs.

“Are you sure you’re speaking for them honestly?” Captain Klees asks. “Or is this just because you know what you want to do? It probably would’ve made a difference to me.”

“You’re voting against the plan, then, captain?”

“No. I’m all for it. Aspen’s right; it’s the cleanest solution. I just think that some of the people still in chronostasis would vote against, and I don’t know how many would, and I’m somewhat uncomfortable with just going ahead assuming their opinions don’t matter.”

“We’ve been making choices for them since we woke up, captain. Because we can’t wake them up to ask. You know me; I’m a no regrets kind of person. I’d love to get everyone’s vote, but we can’t, and I think that if we balance all the pros and cons, our best bet is to ignore them and deal with anyone being pissed off later. What do you think about your twenty per cent, Aspen?”

“The non-convicts, you mean?” I bite my lip. “well, if any of them are here for space king prison planet reasons, I don’t care what they think. The ones who came for ideological reasons… this planet already isn’t what we were promised. I actually think doing things this way is closer to what we were promised, than just going ahead with the current plan.”

“Yeah! New plan!” Tal raises kes hand for more high fives, this time extracting one from everybody at the table. “Let’s go propose this thing!”

“Not to the Hylarans,” Captain Klees says quickly. “Not yet. We need the agreement of the crew in space, too, and I don’t want the Hylarans to know this possibility even exists unless the crew decide to go ahead. If the Hylarans want this and the crew don’t, that’s… that would make things so, so much more politically complicated.”

“Taproot and stars, that would make the landing and settlement incredibly tense,” I agree. “We absolutely need to get full crew agreement before letting any Hylaran know about this.”

“Let’s use the illegal radio, then,” Tal says, getting up to grab it.

“Hylarans can still listen in to anything we send,” Captain Klees says. “Our handful of distress codes are not going to be enough to get something like this across.”

“So we encode it,” Tal shrugs, extricating a large box from the oxygen tanks in the corner.

“What, with a Hylaran computer?” Tinera points at the computer in the corner. “Because unless you think you can come up with something in your brain that they can’t decode with their equipment, that’s what we’ve got. And with everything that’s gone on today, I can guarantee that someone will be listening to whatever we send, because they’re going to be really, really interested in whether we’re about to call an air strike down on their colony over the whole kill switch thing.”

“On that note, someone’s probably going to try to stop us as soon as we start broadcasting to try to avoid exactly that,” Captain Klees says. “So we should be read to defend against that regardless.”

“I know you’re good at math,” Tinera says, “but if you think you can come up with something that the Courageous can decode and these guys can’t – ”

“You don’t need to be good at math to create an unbreakable code,” Tal says in the tone of someone talking to an idiot. “If you’re using complex math, you’ve already lost. That’s inherently breakable, and it’s just a matter of time and resources. A truly unbreakable code requires a one-time pad.” Ke fishes the little ring out of kes pocket and speaks into it. “Hylara to Courageous.” To me, ke says, “you should probably write your plan down, that’s going to make this a lot easier.”

“Courageous here,” is the immediate response.

I don’t know much about cryptography, but I have heard of a one-time pad. I know that any code where the whole message is encrypted in the same way, or where you need to transmit the way in which the message is encrypted, is inherently breakable. A one-time pad is a codebook, a long string of random data – equations, numbers, letters, it doesn’t matter – that you make two copies of and give to two people. One encrypts a message by encrypting the first letter using the first data point, the second letter using the next data point, et cetera. Unless a listener can access the codebook, the code is unbreakable.

The problem is that it requires the codebooks to be disseminated in advance. And I’m dead certain we didn’t bring a codebook down.

“Don’t you need the one-time pad for a one-time pad?” I ask Tal, but ke just grins at me.

“Xanthe, is Teri awake? It’s Tal.”

“She sure is.”

“Can you put her on? I need to talk to her directly.”

“Um. Sure.”

Less than a minute later, Asteria’s tired voice comes over the radio. “Tal. What’s up?”

“We need to get a message through the fog for now. Long and complicated. Have to one-time it, you got anything we have that they don’t?”

“Hmm. How are they for all known laws of aviation?”

“Given how widely it’s disseminated? I wouldn’t trust it. Also, we have a bee guy down here.”

“Ah. Hmm.” Asteria is silent for a moment. “You’re goff, right, Enoby? And with all preps down there?”

Tal chuckles. “I think that’s very, very likely, yes. Original alphabet, change to numerals for each letter, add to numeral-converted from the message letter?”

“Sure. Start with the first author’s note?”

“You know it.”

“Ready when you are.”

Transmitting the message takes a very long time. I write the plan out on paper, and Tal takes the paper and reads out not letters, but a long string of apparently random numbers. Ke doesn’t pause at any point for Asteria to translate (presumably, they can do that after we’ve transmitted; I assume they’re recording the incoming message), but Asteria does ask them to repeat a number occasionally. We’re interrupted about three minutes in by a panicked Max, who the rest of us meet at the door and explain that if we were calling down anything aggressive then we’d do so in plain language and no, the reason this is in code is to ensure we’re not acting under duress, and frankly it’s a bit rich for you lot not to expect caution from us right after this whole kill code debacle, isn’t it? A few minutes later, we’re interrupted by Celti, and have the same conversation. And then a couple more Hylarans I don’t know, for the same conversation. None of them look particularly convinced that we’re acting aboveboard, but it’s pretty obvious to everyone involved that if we are doing something dangerous then interrupting us would only escalate the situation and make things more dangerous. It doesn’t matter if they feel threatened for the moment, so long as it doesn’t erupt into force before we get an answer from the ship.

Tal finishes the encoded message, takes out a lighter, and burns the original. “You’re probably going to want a few days to talk over that as a crew, once you’ve decoded it,” ke says. “We’ll wait for your answer.”

In fact, Xanthe gets back to us less than fifteen minutes later. “Sunbleached fucking shit,” they say.

“Yeah,” Tal says.

“Would that work?”

“Probably not. The question is, should we try? Once you guys have decided, we – ”

“Oh, we decided. The crew’s all for it.”

“Already?”

“Unanimous amongst the old crew. Mixture of ‘yes’ and ‘abstain’ among the newly awakened crew.”

“Abstain?” I ask.

“On the understanding that each individual gets to pick their fate, they said they’re fine with the rest of the crew doing whatever.”

Like I thought. A lot of the awakened colonists wouldn’t want to be involved. That’s not promising, in terms of the wishes of those still in chronostasis. I meet Tinera’s eye. She shrugs.

“I really don’t want to force them into anything they have no choice in,” I say to her.

“The Texan prison system already did that. You know as well as I do how important this is. Are you really not going to let the Hylarans make their choice because you’re guessing that some of the colonists might not like it?”

“The awake ones voted – ”

“Between the ship they’re on, and the Hylara they imagine. They don’t know what they’re voting between. You know the risks of continuing on this course.” She glances at her new hand, still held awkwardly at her side, bunched into a tight fist.

“Yeah,” I sigh. “You’re right. Let’s sort out how to propose this to the Hylarans.”