Deltaview Force: An Opco Boone Adventure
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The Adventures of Opco Boone, Legal Ace™
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Boone made the window. He elbow-smashed the pane. He reached in, lock-snipped, pivoted and mule-kicked the door, in a single fluid motion. The door smacked on its hinges, quivered and timbered onto the rubble.
Boone motioned the unit forward with a curt, pointed air-punch.
The squad fanned left and right. They deployed the four-hand doc-clearing technique. Aggie went left. She swivelled in and barked, “clear”. Algy went right. He swivelled in and barked, “clear”.
Baxter-Morley went route one. He kicked over a drum and barked, “clear”.
From nowhere: A kerfuffle behind a plaster wall to the right. The unit spun, caught offguard: panic: fumbling with safety catches, grappling with magazines.
An ear-splitting BLAM: the plaster wall was gone. A heavy wad collapsed through it, lifeless onto the floor in front of them.
Algy cursed. “Jesus! Side letter!”
Boone took his finger off the NAV trigger and holstered his CSA, still smoking from the muzzle. “Eyes peeled, ladies. Now we are clear.”
Boone fixed A.J. with a hard stare. “All right, kid, in you go. Let’s throw a redline around the immediate area.”
A.J. followed up with a static-mount diff-sensor. The rookie unclipped the stabilisers and set the unit on the floor. He punched in the coordinates and it emitted a sheet of red light.
Okay, everyone hold still now.
The diff-sensor swept for semantic content. A.J. watched the display. The hourglass flipped. It flipped again. After a few moments it rendered: zeroes across the board.
“We’re clean, sir. No material alterations. The text-field is Delta-1 as we left it.”
Boone looked concerned. “Odd. To what significance?”
“To one decimal place, Commander.”
“Okay. Run it to three, soldier.”
The kid re-ran the analytics. The diff binoc whistled and beeped.
A.J. shrugged. “Point nine-nine-seven. As good as clean, sir. You could eat your dinner off that.”
As good as clean, but not clean. Interesting. “Recalibrate it, lad. Let’s go find those missing diffs.”
“Whatever you say, sir.” A.J. twiddled dials and hit RENDER. “Okay, team: Stand by. All material DVs should now show up.”
The redline swept a red sheet over the text-field. It burped a negative.
“Nothing, Commander.”
“What are your settings, Soldier?”
“Text deltas down to individual ascii level, sir. Can’t get more granular than that.
“Moves?”
“Marked green. Formatting off. Punctuation off.”
Boone shot the rookie a quizzical look. “Why so?”
A.J. smiled. “This way I pick up all syntactically relevant amendments while filtering out the noise. I’m sure we would have caught anything that made a difference. Sir. The text-field is clean.”
“Run it again, Soldier, but this time include the noise. Let’s have a gander at that formatting and punctuation delta.”
“But —”
Boone shot him a stern look.
The rookie blanched. “Okay, sir. On the double sir. Okay folks; hold real still now: max sensitivity here.”
Algy looked up. His jaw twitched.
Aggie looked down. Her cap was jammed tight. A sweat drop swelled on the brim. The unit didn’t breathe.
This time two curtain beams shot out of the DV generator: one red and one green.
They swept back and forth. The sensor chirped. The lights doused.
“Ok, lads, at ease.” The men chilled.
The DV re-rendered on the HUD.
This time some changes showed up: some straight-to-curly action on the quote-marks round a definition. Something — or someone — had tampered with the docscene.
“That explains the point oh-three deviation, I guess, Commander.” The kid holstered his DV unit and moved forward.
“Stop right there, lad.” Boone’s voice was urgent.
A.J. froze. “What is it?”
Boone intoned in a halting whisper. “It looks like — no, it can’t be that.”
“Can’t be what, Sir?” AJ was wide-eyed.
Boone looked up at his 2ic. “What do you reckon, Aggers? What’s your read?”
The old veteran leaned in. She peered at the display. She whistled. she caught the commander’s eye. “It could be, you know, Boone.”
Even as she said it, Boone knew it. “Yeah.”
“What, sir? What?” A.J. hissed.
Algy looked on. “Cadet, you could be looking at a live Biggs particle.”
Eagle-Squad Cadet A.J. Paul looked at his commander with wondrous eyes. “Seriously? A Biggs hoson! I don’t bel —”
Boone turned furiously. “SHHHHHHH! Silent running, soldier!”
A.J. clammed pronto.
Algy shrugged. “But I don’t think it is a Biggs hoson, though”. It just looks like one. Hosons are not stable. A hoson would have degraded into entropic tedium by now. This has a much longer half-life.