Unexpected Rain

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Dava found a dark corner to disappear into, just off the large corridor where the Grand Star Resort and a few other squat gambling shacks clustered like mushrooms. Dark corners were easy to find in the massive maze of underground maintenance tunnels beneath Blue Haven. Skinny white B-foureans flitted about like bits of paper, disappearing into the mobile storage units that had been converted into bars and card-houses. The domed cities above looked so pristine and perfect, but every beautiful rock in the sky has a dark side.

She turned her arm over and looked at the small screen that was embedded into the bracer she wore. It was a RadMess; Rad meaning radio wave, and therefore relatively short-ranged. Mess meaning message; the device had a voice module, but she and her mates mostly used the small keyboard to send text-based messages back and forth silently.

Space Waste was a gang that oozed brash confidence and chaos on the outside, but internally the organization strove to be efficient and careful. When you flaunt the fact that you’re persistently circumventing the planetary laws, you have plenty of reason to be paranoid at every opportunity. Quite often, the gang found itself in possession of military-grade equipment, including communication devices with near-unbreakable encryption.

Dava started punching a message into her RadMess bracer. The reason they didn’t bother with that military-grade comm stuff was pretty simple. Any dome like Blue Haven was going to have scanners all over the place monitoring radio waves on any frequency. The local authorities wouldn’t be able to decrypt any military comm chatter, but its presence would set off a bunch of red flags and attract immediate attention. So when in domes, they used the cheap-as-shit, consumer-grade RadMess.

Of course, being Space Waste, they were still adequately paranoid about it. Rather than trying to layer on more encryption – the RadMess had a base level of encryption that wouldn’t stop any authorities, but kept civilians from eavesdropping on each other – they used a manual code. It was a pretty dead-simple substitution cypher. Every letter of the alphabet was represented by a number. It took a little practice, but most Space Wasters could easily memorize the code. It was just a matter of training your brain to see an “A” whenever it saw a “22”, and so on. When they typed their messages, they randomly sprinkled in other numbers that were outside the set just to keep chaos on their side.

Any radio scanners in a dome might be checking for frequencies and contexts of certain keywords. A lot of time and money went into developing artificial intelligence smart enough to interpret the meanings behind the words of humans. A string of raw numbers was just static on the wire to them. Geologists taking readings, students answering quiz questions, box scores from a bombball game – nothing worth bothering with.