29 May 2101

(14 October 2020)

We establish resupply arrangements with Gustave Lallier, and I am invited aboard the EU flagship here by Commodore Penn. Mid Addams brings us in neatly, and I shuttle across, with Patel, Jane, Addams and Stewart visiting the station.

It seems that the Chinese are reporting incidents of sabotage, roughly one per three weeks, without details; there have also been four in other facilities, over the last 14 months or so. Information about attacks on EU facilities should be fairly reliable: one was a crawler transporting a devourer swarm (all open source designs and TSA software, which means nothing in itself). The other was a bioroid copy of someone who liked surface rambles, and who is still missing.

There’s little interconnection between settlements, and no general Mercury web or positioning system.

There’s generally a physical component to the espionage: physical bugs placed near wireless networks, that sort of thing. Chinese and Russian sources claim capture and execution of human spies, but without detail.

Commodore Penn is interested to see whether Lidar comparisons might show up slow small movements on the surface. His working theory is a hidden base somewhere near the south pole.

We move over to Lallier and make use of their park facilities, then join the Commodore for dinner before returning to Alacrity.

We set up a plausible mapping orbit. Of course, that path is public information, so we also set up a RATS and a sabotage drone with separate orbits to run passive sensors over the ground before our planned passes.

Initial comparisons show a remarkably high amount of surface activity from the Brazilian contingent. Nothing immediately useful for comms interception, except that they’re heavy on soft humans compared with infomorphs. The US group is surveying, probably working on an ice lode.

There’s activity in the same crater as the Chinese base, though some way off and up the crater well, not moving though sometimes visible during the Lidar passes, spotted moving on the offboard passive sensors at other times. There’s some traffic between this and another site on the wall.

There’s nothing as obvious near the north pole, though we’re able to map some traffic patterns between main and outlying domes.

After several days we establish that there’s regular traffic from the crater wall site to the Chinese base, smaller than human based on where it hides during the Lidar passes. But we can’t confirm a directionality. Eddie and Zaphod put together a higher-resolution passive sensor.

With higher resolution, the movers are small tracked robots. At the second crater wall site there is assembly going on, hidden from the base by a rock wall. Jane determines that this is a sensor array of some type, with foundations sunk into the rock. Clearly this will be passive, and will be able to track anything visible in the sky – which in practice means anything in a polar orbit, the usual path for spacecraft and antimatter factory satellites.

The robots appear to be taking steps to remove obvious tracks, brushing dust and varying routes, and never getting closer to the base than about 1.5km. The first site appears to have underground facilities rather than anything on the surface.

We consider possibilities for a lower pass for our passive observer. We do indeed get a closer look; the robots are working on the sensor array, which appears to be designed to be active and phased-array. This will clearly be detectable from orbit while in operation; I wonder whether it might be close enough to the base to appear to be a Chinese project?

(11 November 2020)

We start considering sabotage elsewhere. Information on the sabotage in the US base is very limited, but we understand it was an attempt at life support, swarms attacking external radiators. And we have no information at all about the Russian incident.

We send a summary to Earth, and I report in person to the Commodore, where we consider the options:

After a few days, we have something interesting: what might reasonably be the same sort of small stealthy bot, operating at the collapsed wall intersection of the EU and Russo-Brazilian craters. The hub, or hubs, seem to be concealed somewhere in rough terrain.

Another pass with the passive sensor seems indicated, but there’s a larger target footprint. Instead, we put a jump RATS on the surface to approach stealthily, with real-time laser link to the ship in orbit. That gets a look at one of the surface robots: brushes, caterpillar tracks, no obvious sensors or manipulators.

We follow. It moves along the crater wall, then turns into the EU side of the crater and rummages around briefly in a junk pile using manipulators stored behind the hatch, not obviously adding or removing anything. It moves back along its previous course; when it meets another robot it makes brief arm contact with it, then each continues as it was before. Eventually our target reaches something like a cave entrance (“point N”), just about large enough for a crawling human and definitely tight for a RATS.

The RATS conceals itself. Two hours later, a robot of similar design comes out, quite probably the same one, and leaves on what might be the same route. Half an hour after that another one emerges…

After 24 hours of observation we have six distinct robots operating through point N, taking between two and eight hours in the cave and dispersing in different directions.

We put another RATS down to watch the junk pile. It looks as though there’s roughly one visit per 24 hours.

We deploy a snakebot into the cave, and remote cameras around the area. When the snakebot returns, we have a curving tunnel into a large chamber containing a fabricator, material stocks, a power network and some inactive robots. The fabricator’s generic, but the power system looks Russian.

Some of the robots pick up the output of the fabricator; it’s not entirely clear, but we get the impression that they’re working with explosives. They also load spools of cable (possibly for power) and swarm hives.

This starts to look like potentially quite large-scale sabotage. We don’t know where the explosives are being planted, and we’d really like to. So it’s time for another snakebot probe, this time with instructions to come out when it sees explosives being loaded.

The one goes for a mile or so and enters a small cave, which turns out to be an explosives store.

The RATS units are set to trail the robots and establish other active locations; they add four more to the tally. Altogether, we have four explosives dumps, one site for cable, one for swarm hives.

We report again. The solar arrays and power feeds seem like a good target for an attack with explosives. That’s something we’ll need to tell the civilian authorities about…

(25 November 2020)

Orders are sent back from Earth, suggesting seismic probing. We will run Royal Marine exercises separately on both sides of the area, using the “inactive” monitoring stations on the other side; given the location, it seems polite to invite the Russians to cooperate with us, so we have an attack/defence setup.

Patel and Jane drop in the shuttle to set up the umpire/monitoring stations. The exercise scenario is an initial orbital bombardment to cover the advance to the first objective, followed by further advances on foot. Jane takes up a spot with a line of sight to point N. Stewart is on guns, Addams at the helm.

The initial stealthy advance is less so that one might like, but sufficient RATS units “survive” to take the objective point. Russian counterfire “explodes” some of the expendable tracked drones, and the RATS are stopped at the edge of the Russian dome.

On the way back, Jane spots a subject robot trying to hide in shadows, and off its normal route; she tries to look as though she hasn’t noticed.

Analysing the data: there are definitely caves (which shouldn’t be here at all) near point N, leading towards the crater wall solar arrays. There’s also an area unconnected to tunnels, showing as partly filled in with something solid; perhaps a 5m cube, under 3m of cover, near the edge of a crater but not in the wall.

There’s no sign of communication from the subject entities in response to the exercise.

If the tunnels were to be used to sabotage solar arrays, the EU base would be most affected.

We cross-check various touristic points to look for a plausible excuse for someone to walk across the cube. That won’t happen for a few days. Soft-landing a swarm seems technically challenging.

Addams reckons that the power loss is being hidden in the natural decay of solar arrays over time. There’s not a lot of data on the Mercury environment, though I dig out a paper and consequent correspondence (and check with the antimatter facility panels, which are built to the same process), which can be calculated back to a divergence point something like two years ago.

The woman replaced by a bioroid was known for walking on the surface; she would have had access to significant research and the ears of important people. She was caught planting malware, which seems an unusually wasteful use of a major asset.

We report on the state of play.