„You are positive it was Yezzania Senglu?“, Elias asked the guard. They were huddled into a small dead-end corridor between the market and the warehouse section. It was used as a charging station for a forklift which was currently occupied elsewhere, cleaning up debris probably.

„Positive.“, the guard whose name tag identified him as „Roger Anthon“ stated.

„Damn“, Elias lowered his head. He slowly pulled a smartstick out of one of the many small pockets on his vest, cool to the touch of his fingers. More mumbling to himself, he summed up: „Yezz and two guards murdered. A hidden stash of some kind. And alien space ships pushing out the battleship.“, he looked up as he handed over the stick that contained a fair amount of untraceable cryptocurrency: „Not much details, but very fresh information. Thank you.“

Roger checked left and right and went back to his official duties. He vanished into the background noise of the station putting itself together again. Elias remained for a few moments, thinking about the implications of the intel he had just received. He considered it in light of the bigger picture, or at least the parts he knew about that. As an operative he was well aware of the fact that he had at best limited information.

He came to a conclusion and started walking back towards his quarters. „If it walks and quacks like a duck…“, he told himself, „This is an intelligence operation. Elimination of select targets. Stashed equipment in an anonymous location that can’t be linked to a particular person if discovered. And calling in the cavalry when the objective is secured.“

He hurried, his heart beating faster. All three Junkstorm planets had their pieces on the board already. Erulas and Dephyr had sent ships, and his own planet had, well, him. Not exactly the equivalent of a detachment of marines or a battleship, but he had years of head start. „Not that it matters.“, he mumbled. Because all this pointed to the intelligence operation being run by aliens.

He was almost running now. He forced himself to slow down. A fast walk fit right in, but running would turn heads.

Minutes later, he arrived back at his home on the station. He locked the door and pulled away the fake wall hiding his comm unit. Its faster-than-light communication meant it was a device reaching into the higher dimensions.

„Pretty much all aliens out there are higher dimensional beings.“, he mused while turning the unit on and reconfiguring it, „Which means they and their equipment should cause small interferences. Ah, there.“, he switched off the error correction and auto-adjustments. All kinds of things in space caused interferences, so smoothing them over was a standard function. But if he disabled it and ran a scan for nearby signals, they might show up.

He cursed as his fingers were flying over the keyboard. This was not his area of expertise. He had to consult the built-in manual multiple times. „Lucky me.“, he thought. If the manual had been on a tablet it would be gone.

A faint, continuous buzz emerged from the comm unit as it ran the scan. Interpreting the results required several more looks into the manual. In the end, Elias had a rough picture of the 4D space nearby. It was a lot more crowded than he had imagined.

„Of course!“, he exclaimed, „The old alien station is at least 4D.“

The primitive scanning didn’t allow for even higher dimensions, so he couldn’t determine the exact extent. But in any case, his main concern were a number of dots. He had drawn up a sketch on a piece of paper from the readings. It wasn’t exactly a map, but the closest thing to one that he could get with his equipment. The dots had been standing out in the reading: „These four large ones are moving, must be the alien ships. But these small ones are inside Bloom.“

You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.

He went over the numbers on the screen again, some of them polar coordinates and some of them signal attenuations. It dawned on him: „Oh shit. The flatland model. In 4D they can walk over the station unseen and unhindered the way we could walk over a 1:1 paper map.“

He initiated another scan to get the changes in position. It confirmed that the small dots were slowly moving around. His manual coordinate transformation was more of an estimate and his map of the station was a quick sketch, so he couldn’t confirm exact locations or whether they had indeed walked through something that should be a solid wall.

He also noticed something to the side, just outside Bloom, that was too weak to be a higher dimensional structure but still caused a small interference. He knew that pattern, but couldn’t say for sure from where. He tried to recall it. Not from his own experience. From training? No, further back. University! Yes. It came back. He gave his brain time to retrieve the almost forgotten memory fragments. He gave a brief smile remembering his electrical engineering professor. He was thankful for all the anecdotes that dragged out the lectures, realizing only now that they served not just an entertainment purpose but also made them more memorable. He could recall just enough to put the pieces together.

„I’ll be damned.“, his face had become a mixture of surprise and fascination, „That’s a listening post. So close that one antenna array will do. The audacity! They’ve been intercepting all of Bloom’s communication for who knows how long. Oh. And probably mine.“

He pondered the implications for a minute, wandering up and down in his office room. His discovery put the importance of Binary Bloom into a new perspective. All known alien races avoided the Junkstorm. Setting up a listening post here, even with Bloom being near the edge of it, showed some serious dedication. He also considered his options. He was just a human, a 3D creature.

„The model is only an approximation.“, he mumbled, „It is not precise. There is always an overlap. A 3D residual. I can work with that.“

Then he had formed a plan of action. He quickly typed several sentences into the comm unit. He encrypted the message, because even if the aliens could break the encryption he still didn’t want to give himself away to human interceptors. The message was in code. Encryption was technical and could be solved by sufficiently powerful computers. But code, code was different. If you had agreed with your communications partner beforehand that „a red moon rises“ was your shared code for „I will arrive tonight“, no amount of computing power could unravel that. The disadvantage was, of course, that you could only send messages you can explain with the limited vocabulary of your code. His message contained the Dangorod intelligence code for „I have been compromised“ and the code for „aliens detected“. He had no code that would allow him to be more precise than that. The final sentence of his message meant „I am taking action“. Again, impossible to explain in code what exactly he planned to do.

He prepared a short burst transmission of the message. With some luck, it could evade interception. If they had been recording carefully, any simple AI would notice that the coded message had a different style and rhythm to his usual reports. They would know that something was up, even if not what.

Then he set up a second transmission, unencrypted, no code. He added a time delay of one hour. In case something happened to him, the pirates needed to know what was going on right among them.

Yanking the plasma rifle from the hidden compartment next to the comm unit, Elias felt its familiar weight in his hands. A glance revealed the glowing blue charge indicator, confirming that it was still functional. Agent Thorne left his quarters to confront an unknown alien enemy. He understood the risk and for a moment thought of the marines as reinforcements. But no, brutes would endanger him more than help. He wanted to scout out the listening post and confirm his suspicion, nothing more. The delayed broadcast was his backup plan, no time for more.