This jump wasn't quite as good as the first one. Definitely more of a wobble to it, or at least that was how Rick's brain interpreted it. He knew they weren't really wobbling through jump-space. Knew, too, that it was unreasonable to expect his novice jump-personnel to put two good jumps together inside less than an hour.
Still, he'd have liked to come out of jump-space alert and ready to fight, rather than trying not to throw up.
Red faded around him, and Rick stamped on the remnants of nausea and forced himself to focus on the viewscreen. Definitely Earth. Not a smoking ruin, at least not on a planetary scale. No proximity alarms. No visible Spectran ships. Dylan had taken the pilot's controls back, Dimitri had armed the weapons and was now running scans, and Paula was talking on the radio.
Talking, and listening, but he'd been on enough missions with G-Force to know what the conversation sounded like when you came out of jump and had access to standard radio again, and this wasn't it. Uh-oh.
He flipped his screen to show Dimitri's scans. Nothing odd, at least not at first glance. Or second. Some nasty storms over the Caribbean, but they'd been there this morning too. No mechas. Standard civilian air traffic. Standard military patrols and training flights. If anything big was going down, it was on the opposite side of the planet to the US, thousands of miles from the communications centre which should be talking to them.
"ISO's still not responding on our reserved frequency," Paula said. "All other radio chatter sounds normal."
Surely, surely they're not testing us? Are they? He liked that idea better than the alternative.
"Does code seventeen work for our own people?" he asked
"There's an equivalent."
"Use it. Everyone else, stay sharp." He was reasonably sure that Jenny wasn't currently awake, but her vitals were normal enough that she could be left to wake up in her own time. Poor kid. She was still a new implantee, and your first few jumps weren't much fun even with a well integrated implant.
Paula launched into a spiel about being an ISO Europe test pilot with a malfunction and needing advice. Rick determinedly stopped listening to her. He was not going to second guess his crew. He was going to let them do their jobs. He might be a worse commander than Jason in every other respect, but this one mattered to him personally. He would be a commander who didn't micromanage.
Dylan had them in a powered holding pattern, one he could break in a hurry if he needed to. Dimitri was running scans for things he didn't even recognise. Rick wound the resolution right up on his screen and zoomed in on the area around ISO. Maybe he'd see if anything odd was going on, even if it was a fleet of fire engines, or a police cordon around the site, or ten hovering helicopters. But no, good old-fashioned eyeballing didn't have any better results than Dimitri's all-frequency scans. It was Sunday afternoon peaceful. No flights in the vicinity; barely a vehicle going past.
"Commander," said Paula, "we have a problem. It sounds like ISO radio chatter, but I'm not getting a valid response to the emergency phrases. It's all being taken at face value."
"Could something serious have happened, so comms have been rerouted somewhere that doesn't know the phrases?"
"They're broadcasting on the main ISO carrier. Reroutes should have a reroute tag. This doesn't. I don't know how, but it's someone else pretending to be our comms."
"Tell me we have an emergency 'stop playing games' codephrase."
"We do. I used it. I used G-Force's too, just in case someone screwed up and ours aren't on the main lists yet. Whoever's running those comms doesn't know our emergency protocols. It's... it's someone else on the other end of that radio. Not ISO. Not even under duress."
"All of it? Or just ISO USA?"
"I can't tell. I've used everything I know."
Oh, crap. He didn't want to believe her, but they'd hit the point where this couldn't possibly be a test. They needed to get down there and see what was going on. Preferably without being seen.
"Listen up," he said, and stopped at a groan from the seats behind him. His jump-calculator was awake again. "You with us, G-10?"
There was an unhappy gulp. "Yes. Sorry, Commander."
"Don't apologise, it's not your fault. What you've missed is that ISO comms is being spoofed. Now I'd like you to review the last few minutes of scan data in case you spot anything odd with it. We're going down to take a look. Conservative approach, G-8."
"Five klicks enough?"
"I think so." The standard water entry point was just a few hundred yards offshore, completely obvious to anyone paying any attention at all. Five kilometres out would still be visible, if anyone was watching closely, but much further than that and they'd be underwater for minutes. Plenty of time for someone to set an ambush. Five was the recommended distance, and was what Jason had used the one time they'd run a simulation even slightly related to this. "Yes. Five. Let's go. Standard re-entry protocol."
Dylan swung them round smoothly and headed to break orbit, and Rick leaned back in his chair, willing his heartrate to slow. Calm focus, that was what a commander needed. He'd have found it a whole lot easier if he had any idea at all what was going on.
There was no possible way to do atmospheric re-entry without being seen, and it would be insane to drop through the air traffic routes of the western Atlantic without announcing their presence. Paula was back on the radio, this time being honest about who they were, requesting clear airspace through to ISO. They wouldn't quite be on the standard approach for the last few kilometres, but there were no commercial flightpaths there. Any ISO planes would just have to get out of the way. He had a strong suspicion that there wouldn't be any.
They dropped through the atmosphere about as smoothly as it was possible to do so. The weather was perfect - light winds at all altitudes, good visibility. It should have been wonderful, a successful return home from their very first mission. Instead he had no idea what they expected to find. Based on what Paula had said, it couldn't possibly just be a massive malfunction of the comms system. ISO would have found another way to communicate with them by now, and if for some reason they'd had to ask for help from another organisation, whoever it was would be announcing no protocol to avoid misunderstandings.
So it hadn't happened. So he was taking his team into the unknown.
He didn't know what to do. His only comfort was that he was pretty darn sure Jason wouldn't know what to do either.
Jenny sat in her chair and felt useless. Passing out in jump? She'd been warned that it might happen. Hadn't expected it, to, though, Especially not after she'd been fine through the first jump they'd made. She rather thought that meant her numbers hadn't been much good second time round.
Worse, if anything, was that it hadn't mattered. At all. They'd simply carried on without her. If it had been any of the other four unconscious, it would have been a big deal, she was sure of it. Not just something worthy of a one line summary of what she'd missed.
She desperately wanted to be useful to this team in more ways than her one speciality, and the only possible way she could help right now was to do everything she was asked. Scan data. Well over five minutes of it, already analyzed using the best software there was by adult experts who'd been training for this for years. But she didn't do computer analysis. She did pattern recognition. Equation solving. The things that the computers couldn't do.
She flicked past the numerical data and pulled up the photos. Rick had said that ISO comms were being spoofed, and he'd been looking at photos of ISO. He hadn't seen anything. But had he thought that the pictures might somehow be spoofed too, and if so, could she see signs of it?
She couldn't see anything odd at all, and a glance at the main viewscreen showed they were almost at the point of water entry, and -
That's wrong. That shouldn't be there.
She'd shouted "abort!" before she'd even processed what she was seeing. Garuda slammed into a hard climbing turn, left and up, probably before Dylan had processed what he was hearing.
They levelled out, and Jenny sat in her seat and gasped, wondering how many g that had been. Significantly more than the centrifuge, she thought.
"G-10, what's the problem?" That was Rick, his voice calm and controlled in that way which she knew meant he was making an effort not to lose his temper. There weren't too many candidates for who that temper would be aimed at.
She gulped, staring at the completely normal viewscreen showing a completely normal view of ocean. What was the problem? She wasn't even sure.
"There was something on the main screen. Something that... something spoofed. I think."
"Bring us round, G-8," Rick said. "Nice and slow."
Garuda began to turn on the spot, and Jenny tried to gather her scattered wits. What had she seen? Some sort of visual effect, centred on ISO. Beyond that, she really wasn't sure. Wasn't even sure how she'd recognised it, or whether she'd recognise it again, or even if it had been there at all.
The distant shore came into line of sight, the city, the cliffs, and there it was again. Jenny almost sobbed with relief. Almost. She had a job to do. She'd howl later.
"There. Right there."
"I don't see anything," Paula said.
Jenny headed for the front of the flight deck, between the two pilots' seats, reached over and up as far as she could and traced the line of wrongness in the image. "There. It's there. A... a discontinuity, I guess. It shouldn't be there." She glanced to her right. Her commander's face was impassive.
"There really is something." Her voice wavered despite her attempts to sound professional.
"Give me a minute," said Dimitri from his seat. "I think I can..." He fiddled with the settings at his console, muttering to himself in Russian. It took nearer three minutes before he flicked a switch and the main viewscreen changed from the front camera view to what Jenny assumed was an earlier image, from their descent from orbit.
"It is low resolution, I'm afraid, but this might be useful." He set the viewscreen running.
It was blocky, maybe five frames a second, but it unmistakeably showed a dome-shaped artifact over ISO, following the line she'd traced, up and over the treetops and down on the far side of the complex, somewhere near the runway. She could have wept with relief.
It came to an end and froze on the final image, and Rick swore. "Two questions. What is that thing and how come nobody's noticed it?"
"If you mean the people on the ground," Paula said, "I can answer the second. There's some minor grumbling from delivery drivers who've been turned round at the main gate due to a security lockdown. Not many. It's Sunday afternoon, tomorrow's a holiday. You wouldn't expect many."
"So comms have been spoofed and the main gate infiltrated. That means an inside job." Rick visibly swallowed. "That means we can't trust anyone, not unless we absolutely have to."
"It's a forcefield," Dimitri said. "It cannot be anything else. What I have here is a line of discontinuity in the digital images. I think that the image projected on the dome is is itself digital, and there is some interference with our own digital systems, I think a phase difference."
"A spherical forcefield centred on ISO. With some sort of image projection of what we should be seeing onto the surface. That would block transmissions, would it? Including jump-comm? No, don't worry about that. We know it does. Save how for later. The generator has to be in the centre." Rick sighed. "I don't dare ram it. We're going to have to land and take a look. Low level route in, out of sight of the main gate all the way, land behind the trees to the south. I don't like this at all. We have to assume it's a hostage situation and even if they don't see us coming they're going to hear us."
"Only logical place to generate a spherical field from is the centre," said Dylan. "But that makes no sense. Say they lured us away with a fake distress call. They thought the Phoenix would go out. But it didn't. G-Force aren't at full strength but the Eagle and the Condor are in there; they should have dealt with it hours ago. You don't think...?"
"I think it's a good point that the people in there aren't exactly incompetent. They should have been able to take it down."
There's something wrong here. Jenny searched for the logical fallacy her subconscious was insisting existed, and found it.
"It's not a spherical field," she said.
"Hemispherical, whatever." Dylan was dismissive.
"No, not that either." She stared at the screen. Don't try to work it out, Jason had said. Just see the answer. He'd been talking about jump-equations, not forcefield distortions, but still...
She blinked, took a steadying breath, and she saw the answer.
"It's hyperbolic."
"And what...?" Dylan caught himself. "I'm an idiot. Are you sure?"
"I'm sure."
"You're brilliant."
"This is all very nice," Rick almost snapped, "but why would they bother? Much easier to generate spherical."
Dylan glanced back at her, a broad grin on his face. "You tell him, Jen."
"A sphere only has one centre," she said. "One focus. A hyperbola has two. One inside and one -"
"Outside." Rick looked at her, looked at the screen. Back at her. "Good work. Find me the other focus. And... the other forcefield?"
She hadn't considered that, but yes, logically there would be one. And given the shape of the dome, she could calculate it. But getting a three-dimensional equation from a flat image, or even Dimitri's rough animation... and what coordinate system did she use...?
"Jen," said Dimitri, "I have a model here, if you can set the parameters."
She could have kissed him. And absolutely she could set the parameters. Compared to what she had to do for jump-calculations, this was easy. Two minutes of leaning over his shoulder, making corrections, and they had everything lined up neatly. The focus inside this forcefield was deep underground. The second one was up in high orbit with the forcefield between it and the planet. All very symmetrical. All very clever, assuming they were right.
"Where's the top of the atmosphere?" said Rick from alongside her and she jumped a mile. She hadn't even realised he was there.
Dimitri made some adjustments, adding another circle to the image on his screen. "The upper forcefield does not touch it."
"And the altitude of the second focus, if this is right?"
"Very similar to Comsat Three."
"That can't be a coincidence." He blinked. "Paula, tell me it isn't on Comsat Three."
"It isn't on Comsat Three. They're on the other side of the planet right now."
"It cannot be on a satellite at all," said Dimitri. "It is not in a stable orbit - it is far too low to be geostationary."
"It's on a mecha." That was Dylan.