Tyger Burning

by T. C. McCarthy

  “How?” asked Nam. “How can we hope to find out anything on the dark side of Karin, where there is no civilization and no tie to it except for a few optical connections, all of which are heavily guarded and shielded?”

  “Exactly. Those are what I need to access.”

  “The American teams are still here,” said Than. “The risk is too great. They patrol in our areas now, checking on us and asking questions. You can’t risk connecting, Pa, not right now.”

  “We don’t have a choice!” Maung slammed his hand on the desk and bounced upward, catching himself with his knees. “The Old Man will get us, eventually; he’ll do it as soon as he figures out a way to get more money from our dying than from our living. How long will that take? Ten days or ten years? All that time you rot here.”

  Than glared; his voice was quiet but Maung heard in it a trembling anger. “Your family is on Earth, Maung. So is mine and so is Nam’s. The second you cross the Old Man, he’ll go after them; how can you protect them while stuck on this pile of crap?”

  “I know,” said Maung; he softened his tone and tried to sound calm. “You’re right; there is a risk to our families. But right now we’d just gather data. If I do it right, and if I don’t trigger any alarms, there’s no way he’ll ever find out.”

  “If, if,” said Nam who rubbed a hand through his hair and sighed. “I know I said we’d do it, but now I’m having second thoughts. Than is right. The Americans aren’t just here for the Sommen attack site—although that’s probably of great interest to them. They’re looking for something else. Some of them are asking about the Chinese attack on the Singapore Sun and if any of us heard anything from the captain or crew—about how they escaped Chinese capture.”

  The news made Maung numb. The hunters are gathering, he thought, and there was no way to estimate how much time remained before they closed the ring. “Then that’s even more reason to act. Now. You two won’t have any chance of getting out of here without me—without my semi-aware—and the longer we wait, the more opportunity they have to capture me.”

  “They have to know you were on the Sun,” said Than. “Why don’t they just bring you in for an interrogation and get it over with?”

  “Because they’re scared.”

  Nobody said anything for a while. The thrum of air handling throbbed against Maung’s eardrums, and he gently touched the wound on the back of his neck, feeling the tenderness but relieved that his flesh was healing. Both his friends stared at the floor and Maung felt guilty; he had put them in this position, just by coming here. Neither man had planned on doing something so dangerous as leaving Karin and if he hadn’t come, they would have continued their lives, safe from the Americans and oblivious to the depths of the Old Man’s depravity.

  Finally Nam nodded. “Maung’s reasoning is sound. The Americans are scared. They know there’s a Dream Warrior on Karin, they must suspect it’s Maung, but they also know what he did to the Sommen warrior in Charleston and what he did to the Chinese vessels off Europa. They won’t move until they’re absolutely ready.”

  “Great. What do we do?” Than asked.

  Nam shrugged, and smiled at the same time he gave Maung the middle finger. “You son of a bitch. You’re going to get us all killed but what the hell; I’ve lived a long time. Let’s get you to a main axis data port.”

  They’d been squeezing and crawling through pipe galleries for hours, so long that Maung’s vision blurred and he could barely read the chrono on his heads-up. He pretended to be a cockroach. The darkness enveloped him outside the range of their helmet lamps and to Maung it appeared as though a sea of black velvet trapped him, Nang and Than, with only a tiny sphere of light to give some hint of what the universe contained: pipes and conduits, most of it frozen inside years of condensate that had formed after the Sommen attacked. At one time, there were microbots to maintain these areas and clean them of water and gases, to patch the leaks, but those times seemed ancient. Maung couldn’t imagine Karin ever having been alive. To him, this kind of decay and stagnation was the natural state for the place, proper for a rock that orbited far enough from the sun that it barely received any light.

  “It’s another few hundred meters to the area,” Nam said; they couldn’t risk radio so each of them was connected by a fiber-optic coms cable, long enough to give them space from each other, but short enough that nobody wandered too far away. “We’re almost to the pipes that Than will have to cut.”

  Than chuckled. “Sure. Give the dirty job to me.”

  “Not dirty,” said Nam. “Just . . . lousy. And work slowly; the vibrations will travel through the pipes, and we don’t know if the Americans will have sniffers deployed. At least one of these pipe galleries goes close to their work zone.”

  Sparks burst from the metal when Than started cutting and they bounced off Maung’s suit and into the blackness below, winking out almost immediately in the vacuum of Karin, but staying lit long enough to give a show. It was silent. There should be noise, Maung thought, but he reminded himself that outside his suit was the nothingness of space, despite the fact that they were inside a rock. A moment of disorientation gave him a new perspective: They were earth creatures thrust into an alien world, and would never acclimatize.

  Once Than finished, Nam helped Maung through the narrow gap; it looked jagged, forcing him to move slowly because Than had already used sealer to mend his suit fabric, twice. Maung forgot to breathe; although the gap was narrow, they had to cut through multiple layers of metal and now the edges of pipes gleamed in his helmet lamp, almost blinding him. When he was through, Maung almost shouted with joy; finally he could do something other than wait.

  “Where is the axis cable?” he asked.

  Nam pointed to a thick plastic conduit to their left. “That’s it. In there. Than is almost finished cutting through and we think it’s at a point that has a data port.”

  “Why put a port all the way out here?”

  “Who knows?” Nam asked. “Probably for the times when people had to come here to inspect.”

  The three of them drifted inside a large square chamber, which reminded Maung of an elevator shaft as it disappeared into darkness both above and below. Everyone clipped into the pipes to prevent drifting too far away. In the middle of the shaft, Than used a small circular saw to cut test holes in a plastic conduit about a meter square; the conduit extended as far as they could see in either direction. Finally Than gave the thumbs up.

  “Found it. And it looks like we have the right cable.”

  “You sterilized this one, right?” Maung asked.

  “Look,” said Nam. “Now that your port is exposed, it’s not a concern. We didn’t know that cable was so filthy or that the micros hadn’t been sterilized. I’m sorry.”

  But Maung waved a hand at him. “I was just teasing. Let’s see what kind of secrets we can find.”

  “As soon as you activate, they may sense you. There aren’t any Sommen mines we know of here, but I can’t speak for American sensors.”

  “I know,” said Maung. “We have to take that chance.”

  Nam nodded. “Than and I will wait outside in the access space. You won’t be connected to us, so come out and let us know when you’re done. If you sense any trouble, don’t take any chances; get out of here.”

  Maung reached up and disconnected from the coms cable and watched the pair of them drift out, wincing as they squeezed back through the tiny hole with sharp edges. When they were gone he turned back to the conduit and plucked a black cable from his pouch. It took a second to jack it into the back of his helmet; the microbot linkage hooked in at the same instant, inducing the sensation of an imaginary colony of ants that moved over the skin of Maung’s neck, tickling and pricking him at the same time.

  “Let’s get this over with,” he whispered.

  The amount of data surprised him. Maung had expected the line to be dead since the Burmese guards never used the fibers, but the traffic was American. Millions of sniffer progr
ams scoured the fiber for signs of infiltration and Maung had to encapsulate his stream in layers of data to make it look like he was just another set of American packets. The sniffers gave him the sensation of being touched. Maung knew he imagined it, but his skin crawled again, this time as if a million spiders streamed over his face and eyelids, looking into every crevice to make certain nothing hid there. Once they were finished, they left a marker—something to show the others that a scan had already been done. Maung breathed easier. The American sniffers labeled him a legitimate presence and he rocketed outward, moving with the stream and careful to track every side route and branch until soon he noticed something.

  One of the branches was different. He stopped midstream and created an excuse to inspect the node, quickly wrapping himself in a new routing code before probing the branch’s firewall. This was a secure site. With a quick query he retrieved the fiber schematics and located the branch, excited when it showed this one leading directly to the classified area—the place where they tracked the drifter, where Nam had forbidden them to go.

  Maung dove in. First he created an additional cloud of packets around him, portions of code that acted as his own sniffers, and which blocked the American packets by mimicking them so they looked as if they’ve been assigned to work the area. It took a few seconds to complete. Maung’s clock counted the minutes but at these speeds it felt like weeks of probing ports one at a time, of testing access pathways and finding that they were dead ends or traps, then carefully backing out without getting caught. At last he found a firewall. Maung stumbled upon it in one of the farthest nodes of the fiber network and watched as packets popped out every once in a while. Nothing went in. As time ticked by, Maung faded into this world where legitimate American packets streamed over him like a river of white light, pulses that he analyzed in microseconds but that required so much concentration he was oblivious to the fact that an hour passed.

  The monks gave a message to you, his semi-aware said. For your parents.

  A chill went through Maung; he wanted to recall the message but there wasn’t time. “Not now. Why are you even spending the processor time to look at my thoughts?”

  Because it makes us more efficient. And you are wasting thought energy on that memory, even now while we work; it impedes your performance.

  “Fine. What message did the monk give me?”

  The semi-aware showed him an image from his memory, one that must have been buried so deep that it was almost lost, but now Maung remembered it and smiled. The young monk, and twelve others, surrounded him in a circle where they all sat facing him in front of a massive white-marble Buddha. Hundreds of candles lit the room. The young monk looked serious when he lifted his head and spoke.

  “Tell your mother to sacrifice everything for your education in science and math. You will be great, but your daughter, Maung; she and her children can save the world.”

  That’s all of it, the semi-aware said. I’ll make sure to save the information so you can be sure to recall it.

  “But I don’t have a daughter,” Maung said. Part of him wanted to disconnect from the data stream; he wanted to concentrate on the message and figure out what the monk could have meant, or if maybe he actually said “son” but the memory had somehow corrupted.

  The semi-aware dragged him back. If you don’t stop with this line of processing, Maung, there is a greater than fifty percent chance we will be detected.

  “Fine. But make sure you log everything.”

  It is already done.

  Maung concentrated on finding a way through the firewall and his semi-aware adjusted its efforts; a vague awareness that in the real world, someone changed his oxygen source, floated into his consciousness but the realization faded at the same instant it came. All his concentration focused on the data, and both he and his semi-aware suspected something: that they were failing. There was no way to break the firewall without an obvious brute force attack and he was about to give up when something happened. A burst of electrons raced past his sniffers and Maung almost missed it when several streams of data flashed into the firewall, all of them converging on a single port that appeared out of nowhere; he fired a string of packets at them. These were programs designed to unpeel the layers of encryption on the American traffic, to expose the code and information within, and in less than a second they shot data back to Maung who could barely contain the excitement from having won: Now he had at least a hundred different codes and handshakes.

  Maung picked one. A few seconds later, a path through the firewall snapped open.

  Maung recognized the alarm. It wasn’t from anything he’d done by penetrating their security, it was a simple beacon—so simple he had no chance of seeing it—from magnetic systems set up to look for his signature, the weak electromagnetic waves that his semi-aware emanated. Somewhere within the asteroid, the Americans were on the move. They were reaching out from their project in the Sommen attack site and trying to pin down his location.

  Maung refocused. Project status, assignments, a massive list of drifters that had transferred off Karin, and loads of other data streamed through his semi-aware for analysis and he imagined that he was standing in front of a fire hydrant, swallowing all the water that shot out and then processing it for consumption. Within less than a minute he completed a review of what they were doing on Karin, but the picture was fuzzy. Not all the data were there. He was about to pull out and return to Nam when something else caught his attention: an assignment server for transferring Allied personnel.

  We could use this, his semi-aware broke in. We can insert a false profile to transfer you to Mars; the Chinese would likely follow. As things stand now, if one of their Dream Warriors tracked you here, there is a greater than forty-six percent chance that they will assault the asteroid. I know you don’t want more Myanmarese to be killed.

  Maung saw the logic, but his chest tightened with the thought of leaving her behind. And Nang, he said. If I’m going to Mars I will still need help. Put her, Nam and Than in the database for transfer with me. If they don’t want to go, can they refuse?

  They can appeal, a process that takes so long the error would likely be detected and none would be forced to leave Karin. And we have to hurry. The American patrol will be here within twenty minutes. They are using the same route you used to insert into the conduits.

  Maung spent over a minute loading false data into the server and then backed out, one node at a time, one handshake at a time, until he merged with the main stream again—this time moving back to the real world.

  When he unplugged, he nearly fainted; Maung’s belt bit into his stomach where he’d been dangling in the conduit space for over an hour, and he took a moment to drink before unclipping and moving back toward the hole, careful not to rip his suit.

  Outside, he plugged back in with Nam and Than.

  “Well?” Nam asked.

  “I found it. What information I could, anyway.”

  Than moved closer, making sure his cable was firmly connected. “What did it say?”

  “I’ll have to explain later. Right now we have to find another way out. We can’t go back the way we came.”

  “Why?” asked Nam.

  “Because the Americans sensed my EM leakage; two patrols are on their way now. I intercepted some of their coms packets and they dove in through the same access panel we used.”

  Than cut as fast as he could. Maung prayed for his success because even though there was no sign of the Americans, they’d be there soon; if they pinged him his systems would light up. Than was cutting a hole so they could access an adjacent but separate pipe gallery, one they could climb into and use to disappear, dropping deeper into the station than any of them wanted to go.

  “Hurry!” Maung said.

  “I’m going as fast as I can. I have to be careful because if we’re going to weld these back into place so they can’t tell where we went it has to be done just right. You can’t—”

  Nam broke in, his voice soun
ding irritated. “This route is no good, Maung. If we go this way we’ll head into more unmapped territory, where there will almost certainly be nano-mines and God knows what else.”

  “What other choice do we have?”

  “I know,” said Nam. “But what if we face the Americans instead? What if you turn on your systems and hit them here, hit them now?”

  Maung sighed. Part of him wanted to do it, the old feeling of power drawing him into the thought of flicking on and hitting back. But he couldn’t; not since he’d done the things he did when linked into the main axis cable—the entries he made into their personnel assignment data server. If they figured out that Maung penetrated their firewall . . .

  “We can’t, Nam; I found a server when I linked in,” he said.

  “So?”

  “It was a personnel-assignments and security-clearance semi-aware logistics suite; I cracked it. We now have four fake profiles for personnel transfers to Phobos and then to Mars, with midlevel clearances so we don’t raise any flags: you, me, Than, and her. Nang can come with us. And I changed our nationalities to Laotian.”

  Than stopped cutting. “You’re kidding? You’re getting us off this shithole? As Laotians? I hate Laotians—no offense, Maung; Nang is pretty.”

  Both Maung and Nam shouted at the same time. “Keep cutting!”

  A few moments later, Than finished and the group of them dove through. Maung then held the section of steel they’d just cut in place while Than welded the hole shut, after which the three of them dropped into darkness, holding onto icy pipes to control their descent speed. Nam took them away from the Burmese area—deeper into the spaceport’s guts. The last time he tried this, Maung recalled, he and Than nearly got killed by a security bot and nano-mines, and now his skin tingled with fear. It was like falling through clouds at night. But somewhere below them, in the black spaces, lay monsters who hadn’t seen humans in decades and Maung figured that even if the three of them managed to evade American patrols, that didn’t guarantee they’d make it out alive.