A/N: Hey guys. Sorry for the delay, school and stuff. You either know, will know or have known how it is XD. Hope you enjoy!
A bead of sweat collected on John's brow, threatening to roll into his eye. He swept his hand across his forehead and the drop of moisture flew through the microgravity, sucked into a vent. John concentrated fiercely on the screen. The Chinese were using a complex encryption for their radio signal. This told John two things. Firstly, that the Chinese were not going to be pleased when John decoded it, and secondly that this craft was obviously highly secret. The Chinese were not going to be pleased that John had found their craft, and that they would have to choose another orbit in which to place it. In general, the Chinese were not going to be pleased.
John had a lot of experience decoding signals. Many rescues had called for secure communication with various military and intelligence organisations. However this was an encryption he had not come across before. He started by passing the signal through a few standard Chinese decryptions. The first had no effect, and the second only modified the volume. John noted this, and tried the next. This one clarified the signal slightly. It removed a lot of the static from the spaces between the pulses that John new to be words. However, the words themselves remained unclear.
John passed this partially decrypted signal through the second decryption program, and noticed that again, only the volume changed. He discarded this change and reverted to the previous signal. John flipped momentarily to the scanner screen and noted the time. Two and a half minutes until collision.
It was critical that John decode this signal. John could communicate with the Chinese ground crew at Jiuquan without hacking the signal. However, he would likely only be able to talk to a low level radio operator, as the members of the Chinese space program with any authority would likely be concentrating on this flight. Even if John could convince the radio operator to connect John to a flight director – and with John speaking broken Mandarin, this would be no easy task – it would take far too long, and there was no guarantee the flight director would take any notice of John.
John had to hack the Chinese signal to communicate directly with the astronauts inside the Chinese craft. This act in itself, John hoped, would prove his validity, and not that he was simply a member of the American government trying to put a halt to the Chinese space program.
John flipped back to his decoding programs and looked at the last decryption program he had used. It was a modern Chinese method, and drew its roots from earlier Soviet codes, and before that, from the source of all contemporary code making – the German Enigma. John did a quick search of his archives and found that he only had one Soviet decryption program, and made to encrypt/decrypt a totally different family of code.
John felt his heart beat in his chest.
Thump-Thump
Thump-Thump
Thump-Thump
John was faced with the very real possibility that he may die.
120 seconds until impact.
John's hands were shaking, and his thoughts were racing around in his head. Several plans were considered and discarded; bailing out of an airlock in and EVA suit; explosively decompressing sections of Thunderbird 5 to shunt the station out of orbit; even remotely taking control of the Chinese craft and guiding it to another orbit.
All of these were contingencies that John had trained for, and could execute, but each of them expected that he would be in communication with Brains, and that Thunderbird 3 would have already been launched. They were too dangerous to attempt without backup.
So John turned back to his console.
100 seconds until impact.
John looked again at the lineage of the Chinese code.
90 seconds
The inclusion of the German enigma machine gave John an idea.
80 seconds.
John pulled up another window. He had a deep seeded fascination for technology, and the invention, development and eventual cracking of the enigma code was a process that he had researched intensely. John had an emulator of the original 'Turing Machine,' the first modern computer, developed by Alan Turing in the Second World War with the express purpose of cracking the enigma code. The program, simulating ancient technology, took a few seconds to warm up.
70 seconds.
John took a deep breath. Last chance. The program was intended for a keyboard input, a simple text based system, and relied on having a key. John's fingers flew feverishly across his keyboard, writing a simple script of code that interpreted the radio signal and dumped it as text into the emulator, and that also.
60 seconds.
John slammed his finger down onto the enter key. Text appeared in the input field of the emulator, and its apparent decoding appeared, nonsensical and as yet still encrypted.
John fiddled with the settings of his emulator, set it to run at the maximum speed it could muster. Using Thunderbird 5's impressive supercomputer, the text appeared, translated (the emulator allowed for multi-lingual output to be translated to English) and decoded.
50 seconds.
Shocked, John read a few words, enough to know that his program had worked. He frantically opened up another program, an enigma emulator.
40 seconds.
He set the enigma settings the same as the 'Turning machine' emulator.
30 seconds.
John adapted his code so that his voice, picked up by the microphone, would be passed through the enigma.
20 seconds.
He wrote another quick script to pass this encoded signal through the Chinese encryption that he has first tried.
10 seconds.
John opened his mouth to speak, but it was too dry, and he had to swallow.
5 seconds
Speaking Mandarin, John barked into the mic, transmitting on the frequency of the Chinese communications.
"Thunderbird 5 to unidentified Chinese spacecraft, burn retrograde now to avoid collision!"
4 seconds.
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