by Randy Moffat
“If it helps he is sending you five more original Q-kink team members to give you a hand with the hurry up work. They will be here tonight and are all cleared to see the secret equipment. It should help a bit.”
Dixon looked nonplussed and then glancing over at Johnson with a serious face on that was clearly preparatory to exploding into further diatribe and an entertaining string of what passed among the British for invective. He caught the grin on Johnson’s face along with a shrug of her shoulders. He realized fully just then that he had fallen in with a brigade of brigands and madmen. It cheered him up. He changed the blast to a laugh instead. Another good sign that he was TESS material.
“All right then…” He chuckled shaking his head. “Wednesday next week… and may all the gods of the ancient empires smile on us.”
“Sláinte!” Wong said. He grinned openly. “Welcome to TESS, Captain.” Turning he walked away.
CHAPTER 3
Leaning on a lever to make a hole into a hole
Lieutenant 3 Van Ziegler crouched in his ‘study’ in the series of caves under Missouri where TESS has discovered the Petrovski effect. The old Q-Kink team had called the place simply “The bat cave.” The Lieutenant’s study was one of the ancient rooms there walled off and dedicated to the head of TESS information technology—a title invented specifically for him. His study was the kernel at the core of the grain of popcorn that was TESS inner sanctuary of computer operations. Walled off in locked and heavily air conditioned cages beside his study was a server farm that contained the technical information that was the heart of TESS. A scientific discovery like the Petrovski effect is in its essence nothing but information. Information that was ultimately put into action by TESS in the form of space craft that could cruise through space faster than any ships previously invented by mankind. Lieutenant 3 Van Ziegler’s job was to safeguard that data. Hide it from others. Keep it safe.
Like most computer trolls Van Ziegler thought his study the perfect place for it. In the first place when Q-Kink had originally moved into the caves they had not had many improvements made since the 1970’s. That meant that Van Ziegler had personally supervised every installation of technology and supporting infrastructure that even smacked of the late 20th or 21st century. It also meant that he could vouch for every wire, every data cable and every server inside the caves and that gave him great confidence that it was uncorrupted with other wires laid down since by spies and saboteurs. In the second place Van Ziegler knew almost every bit of information that was stored on the servers that were original to the caves and he made damned sure that nothing ever got connected to them that could siphon information to any location outside the caves without passing through the roadblocks he constructed himself. Thirdly he actually liked the caves. They were deep underground and generally quiet as a grave for much the same reasons. He found the lack of interruptions in the caves leant itself to self-improvement, work and the concentration. Of course like most of TESS he had found himself at the center of the creation of an extraterritorial organization from the ground up. This meant that as the organization expanded he had found himself dead center of a maelstrom of growth in personnel and people’s expectations.
Lieutenant 3 Van Ziegler hated that part. He was at his core a programmer and when forced to be an occasional hardware man. He was not ideally suited as an organizer, planner, or administrator… being far happier squatting in front of a keyboard clicking keys and staring into a monitor rather than sitting in meetings coordinating around more and more staff sections manned by new people with strange and alien personalities, needs, wants and desires. Personal needs that had seemed to him to expand exponentially daily. Within weeks he discovered he literally detested people and their needs. Each human he interacted with stole his programming time and he felt more and more cheated by strangers whose titles he did not even understand. His anger grew. He had finally lost it. He’d exploded one day in the middle of a conference—cursing each and every person there in a manner that was loud, long and vociferous. He hadn’t stopped. Someone had fetched the XO who rushed in and dragged him out physically. It took three hours to calm him down enough to ask questions. When Van Ziegler was pressed for an explanation about his behavior by Admiral Wong he had simply ranted again; adding additional invective about this person or that systemic decision and walked in circles gesticulating randomly. Nonplussed, Wong had stared at him with no comprehension on his face. Luckily Admiral McMoran had walked in at that moment and caught the whiff of emotional ozone in the air. Slowly he and his operations chief had teased out what was bothering Van Ziegler. They eventually exchanged a knowing look. They knew battle fatigue when they saw it. The pair had realized that they had long since exceeded Van Ziegler’s limits. He was a great technologist, but not a great leader. Admiral McMoran had acted quickly to correct the situation. Bear had explained things to the warrant after he and Wong had acted and far from resenting the changes his relief had been palpable. Van Ziegler was still to be head of TESS computer operations. Someone had to be… and that someone had to be able to look directly at the TESS core data that basically was the essence of TESS. Van Ziegler was an original member of the Q-Kink team and therefore the only man who could be allowed to fully gaze directly into the fusion sunshine of TESS’ secrets without being blinded since he was already a privy member of the inner circle. He would continue to manage that core data. He was the right dragon who would continue to guard the treasure hoard of knowledge. He would just defer in the day to day build up and running of TESS’ greater information technology effort. New IT guys were put to running around out on the outer technological layers of TESS where ‘routine’ operations needed to occur and Van Ziegler was left alone with a small core of trusted assistants.
This was in line with the larger TESS plan. Bear had realized early on that as the organization geometrically expanded its ultra-top-secrets would be still be held only by a tiny core of personnel who had access to its classified knowledge. As more and more TESS organization was added he’d seen them as a model of multiple layers of protective personnel onion wrapped around an increasingly forbidden and essentially unseen center. He’d formulated his solution to his Van Ziegler crisis in minutes based on that template and carried it out. He had rapidly raided a pair of civilian corporations for general IT expertise and then trained the new folks rapidly in non-core knowledge technical matters. He had used them to mature the external skins outside and beyond Van Ziegler’s domain. Basic Data, Mail, Text, Phone and Satellite information was needed for the entire organization. The new IT heads on the outer layer were responsible for those workaday things. Level of access was measured in encryption. The outer ‘skin’ technologies were protected with mere 256 key business level encryption—adequate for day-to-day operations of personnel actions, general communications with the planet earth and routine logistical give and take. The setup was adequate for TESS’ general business periphery but inadequate for anything deeper. Another layer was constructed inside that with its own IT boss. This one doubled the encryption and allowed data to flow about on that level about money, personnel databases and a fair amount of discreet non-core technical information. This discreet data flowed laterally here between those of TESS’ key members cleared to penetrate down to that level. Passage of information between the inner and outer operational layer of TESS was strictly limited to a three hard wires so that the two layers were generally prevented from mingling, but could talk if required as long as they went through the three paths provided. Finally, below these layers lay the little known inner core that doubled even that encryption and was not connected directly at all to the outermost layer, but only to the second level. This inner layer physically resided inside the bat cave and communications with it was checked thoroughly by a heavy computer industrial level communication software protection plan with several military pieces of software thrown in for luck. The notion was to find and stop any intrusions passing inward from the second layer down h
ere at the third shell where Van Ziegler lurked. This took on a physical presence of a group who had their fingertips on the pulse of all inbound traffic. A node. Before any communication was allowed to leave the level two outer “shell” layer they had to pass through this node to go anywhere else inside the caves. This node was Van Ziegler’s domain. The one where he was comfortable. All communications from the surfaces traveled through one of only two different T1 lines that physically were allowed to penetrate from the closest layer outside the caves to inside the caves. The physical locale where these two cables arrived inside the bat cave was called the Technical Information Operations Center. TIOC for short. Not that the TIOC’s inhabitants called it that. They called their dimly lit banks of computers “The Hole.” The inhabitants of the hole worked for Van Ziegler directly and were affectionately called “Watchdogs” by the other security personnel in the nearby areas of the cave, most of whom worked for Murray. The caves were big and the TIOC sprawled out like a big, dark living room into the spaces that surrounded Van Ziegler’s office. The team in the Hole bragged that there were four more layers in the protective onion if you counted the four TIOC duty operators themselves. TESS secrets then had six layers between them and a potential theft. There was no chance for an outsider to steal any data or get a chance to pollute fleet communications.
Even that was not enough though. Lieutenant 3 Van Ziegler was himself the protection of last resort. The last layer in the onion. The ultra-top secret information that was TESS core secrets was actually retained on separate stand alone servers whose only input and outlet were straight through Van Ziegler’s “Study” and his keyboard. In the study he monitored any attempts to input and output to those servers in cages behind him. Only fifteen people on planet Earth had access to the arrangement at all and then only through Van Ziegler’s dragon cave of cables, firewalls, passwords and “Who you?” demands for information. In this way TESS’ secrets huddled beneath Van Ziegler’s and the “Watchdogs” protective cloak.
Of course TESS command were not idiots. The TESS eggs were not all in the one basket. There were two backups to the core servers that Van Ziegler nominally protected as well. Both of them were up in space… so they were certainly harder to reach by any Earth-borne attempt to get to them than the ones in the Bat Cave. Van Ziegler knew one of them was isolated aboard the flag ship itself and he had played a personal role in installing it. It was enormously limited and could only be seen through a single monitor in the Admiral’s quarters, a second in a locking cubby hole off the bridge and a last location in another unmarked and locked cabinet deep down in the engineering spaces. Engineering and the bridge were manned at all times when the ship was in space so that these stations were essentially guarded and the Admiral’s quarters were off limits and locked when was not in them. The server on the flag never left it during rapid returns to and from earth to take on passengers, cargo or supplies. A bystander would have called this fair enough since security was ultra tight during such visits to the planet, but Van Ziegler had even fretted endlessly about that so that TESS now also had a protocol that required the data on the machines be removed and left out in space if maintenance on the ship required her to return for more than 24 hours to a yard or facility on the ‘big dirt.’ It seemed a safe feature to the plan, difficult enough to imagine anyone hacking something that shifted quickly from lunar to Mars orbit and back again while trapped in a warped bubble of space-time. Van Ziegler actually felt fairly sanguine about their security. He was a computer geek. A security conscious geek. In his world the absolute best computer protection is to lock your computer in a closet and swallow the key. This was essentially what having the backup servers on the flag did. The servers on Gaia were about that safe. That led to the second backup set. It made him unhappy. He did not know where the second server set was at all. He hated that bit. Not knowing was torture for him, but Bear assured him they would stay far out in space and Van Ziegler could only assume the Admiral understood what the risks were and had mitigated them. All in all he had to admit it was about as secure a system as he could imagine and he loved it for that.
Unfortunately he was a workman and expert at using existing systems rather than envisioning new ones. A long lever of imagination had never been his long suit.
The attack began at the time of day that sentries like those in the TIOC are considered to be most vulnerable and punchy—the wee small hours of the morning. As bad luck would have it the Lieutenant 3 Van Ziegler was at his post and working away when it began at 0249 hours.
The Chinese People’s Army had as great an interest in manipulating the human mind as any military or intelligence gathering organization in history… and in the last century displayed fewer scruples about doing so than many societies. It was they after all who developed the notion of brain washing captives as early as the 1950’s, guiding the North Korean ethics manipulation through coercion with POWs captured during the war. They were later senior consultants to the North Vietnamese in techniques for torture and interrogation at the Hanoi Hilton and probably held the patent on tiger cages. They were as ruthless as any Marxist-Leninist state modeled on Stalin can be. Manipulating a mind or two in the interest of state success was AOK.
The Chinese were also not noted for throwing anything away and were generally poorer than their western counterparts so they were always casting about for cheap innovations that would enhance their ability to obtain information. Oriental frugality coupled with an exotic people resulted in a small brain trust who put together curious facts in esoteric ways that could only have been done by late comers to the information age. At the core of their theory they realized that the human mind is a computer of sorts… operating with RAM and ROM data storage called short term and long term memory. Memory contained billions of interconnections that carried small packets of programming to move data from one system to another inside the human skull. The wonder was that no one else had seriously considered or realized that the connections are susceptible to hacking just like any other computer. As early as the 1990’s western science fiction writers were telling stories of computer viruses infecting human minds in stories like Snow Crash. What westerners regarded as sci-fi the Chinese, in their isolation simply pursued as a scientific problem to be solved. The combination of computers and human minds is not necessarily toxic unless you want it to be. With hard work and sweat equity though the Chinese developed a poisonous weapon based on computer code and after a decade of research figured out how to transmit thorough a minimalist viral structure in a code packet that could be generated first in a mechanical computer and then passed into an organic one. It was virtual biological warfare and once tested and perfected it carried the highest secret classification that China owned and was locked down tight waiting for its day of use in an emergency. Chinese doctrine regarded it as a tactical weapon to be deployed only in times of war to obtain a limited battlefield advantage at some ill-envisioned moment where a temporary paralysis of an opposing forces tactical computer and human operator networks could be exploited by the People’s military to achieve battlefield superiority at the time and place of their choosing. The classification and the doctrine of how to use it would have held up except that one of the people privy to its existence was an ultra nationalist and a convert to the Hú conspiracy. Zeng was duly informed that the weapon existed. He got his hands on it and was delighted as only fanatical right wing scientists can be when they find out they have something sweet in their hands. Zeng’s pseudo scientists seized on the capability, spit out the army doctrine for its use, switched off the safeties and aimed the weapon at TESS’ jugular instead.
They set about inserting their computational lever to pry a hole into ‘the hole’ itself. Zeng’s team started their attack rather conventionally. Using pedestrian and mundane methods they penetrated the first and second layers of TESS layers using conventional burglary. Like most hacker attacks it involved stealing passwords and its initial stages involved penetrating hu
man agents into the buildings well outside the caves on the TESS training campus in Missouri. Their primary tool had been the planting of tiny cameras to record entries made in less protected rooms where outer layer TESS members worked their computers. They gained bits and pieces with patience, building up enough tools to gain limited access until they could get through reliably to level two of TESS’ onion. The deeper layers inside the hole of the caves were harder. Physically there was no easy approach; no covert entry was possible past the triple locked and guarded outer steel doors that blocked the only physical access to the caves and limited entry to a small handful of the chosen few people. This exclusiveness had frustrated the Sino-collection team for many weeks. They tried several conventional approaches, but so far people allowed through those doors had resisted all clandestine pressures brought by Chinese intelligence to plant more cameras within. They were stumped for a while. They’d needed cunning rather than mere information intelligence to go further. Animal cunning was a capacity the Chinese had never lacked. They soon discovered on the outer perimeter that there were a dozen or so people who had authority to penetrate message traffic rather than their persons through the outer two layers and down into the inner caves. Zeng spotted that tiny keyhole into the hole. Kharma favored them. They had the very weapon that could be launched through that small an access.
During the preparatory process the Chinese team gained enough knowledge by monitoring several telephone conversations that there was such a thing as the TIOC down inside the caves. Though they knew few details about its precise makeup they understood the general function and could guess at the general arrangement of the TIOC. Not its form but its function which was rather like a military tactical operations center. They liked it. It gave them what they were looking for. It provided their weapon a lucrative target. Something to aim it at. Something that their weapon was built to attack in the first place. Their weapon was best when it attacked a group all at the same time and so they built their plan around their notion of what the TIOC was probably like and executed it.