Ahoy at the Silverstorm - Part 3 - Cracking the Code

By R.J. Miller


C'Mos Heln sat in her quarter aboard the Calico Star, her eyes riveted on 
the screen before her. It wasn't often she got this good a data feed. She smiled 
to herself as she thought how the dock master would have a bantha if he knew 
how easy it had been for her to slice into his central computer core. She could 
see everything from here.

The Captain had asked her to look up the cruise the Empress has been planning 
and find out the exactly logistics of it and from what she was seeing, he wasn't going 
to like what she had to tell him. They couldn't do it. First off, it was too big. Not 
with their current crew and just one ship. Secondly, Governor Castleberry was taking 
charge of the cruise himself. The Imperial communiqués hadn't been that hard to crack 
once you got the feel for them. They always used a logical code. Logical codes were 
the simplest to crack. And the Empire was nothing if logical. Blindingly, idiotically, 
stupidly logical. 

C'Mos tucked a stringy lock of brown hair back behind her ear and started typing 
commands into her computer terminal. She slowly and methodically picked her way 
through the lines of code, sifting the information she wanted and filing away for later 
the rest. She smiled as the type T74-WNT computer churned through the data with 
a blinding speed. She did have to admit that Roark did get her nice toys. They had 
plundered this baby from a ship they had taken just a couple months before. Right 
after he had taken her on as part of the crew. The Rodian that had had this lovely 
didn't need it anymore, ever.

Roark was a good captain, she guessed. She really didn't think of him as good or bad. 
He just got her what she needed and left her alone. That's all that mattered to her. It 
wasn't that he didn't expect things from her. Slice a code there. Crack into a ship's 
computer core and take what they need there. She didn't mind that. Most of that was 
pretty easy, but every so often, he did give her a challenge. A challenge. That was what 
she lived for. The unbreakable code. The uncrackable computer. Those were her 
dreams. Her aspirations. This little job she was doing right now wasn't bad. Mildly 
challenging. Cracking an active Imperial net was tricky. You had to keep on step 
ahead of the sentry programs, but they were so predictable that they had stopped 
being a challenge.

She sat back and stretched. She'd go have to find the Captain. He's have to know 
that his little plan to plunder the Empire wasn't going to fly. He'd shout and curse 
and generally throw a fit, but once he got that out of his system, they'd find 
something else to do. 

C'Mos stood and ran her fingers through her unkempt mess of long brown hair. 
She should probably hit the fresher before she left. Maybe she'd be able to contact 
that guy who was getting her that new memory module. What she could do with that 
added memory, made her smile as she hurried to get cleaned up.

The Adventures of the Calico Star

To Be Continued in Part Four


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