by David Weber
In the meantime, however, people with real educations remained in critically short supply, and they were needed not just for the military, but also to operate the Republic’s civilian and industrial infrastructure. Balancing personnel allocations between the combat arms and the people who made the weapons with which the combat arms fought remained an enormous problem for the PRH. The situation was improving, and far more quickly than the more complacent Allied leaders would have believed possible, but for the foreseeable future, manpower supplies would remain tight.
But there was at least one area in which people with minimal educations could be readily employed by the State, and that brought Harkness back to Johnson and Candleman. There was nothing fundamentally wrong with the mind either of them had been issued; it was simply that no one had ever bothered to acquaint those minds with their own potentials. They were ignorant, not stupid, and State Security didn't need hyper physicists. For that matter, even with ships like Tepes in its inventory, StateSec didn't need an enormous number of missile and gravitics techs, and those could be poached from the Navy with a suitable use of the security forces' absolute priority.
What StateSec did need, however, were shock troops and enforcers who could be relied upon to take orders and break the heads of any enemies of the People at whom they might be aimed. Seventy-five or eighty percent of its personnel fell into that category, and it didn't take a lot of education to squeeze a pulser trigger or club a dissenter. By the standards of their peers, Johnson and Candleman were of above average ability... and neither of them would have been allowed to serve aboard any ship to which Harkness had ever been assigned anyway. There was a point, after all, where ignorance became stupidity, for one could hardly expect people, however inherently bright, to allow for or protect themselves against dangers no one had ever bothered to tell them existed.
And just at the moment, Harkness' watchdogs were demonstrating that very fact.
"Look," he said after a moment, still smiling at Candleman, "Parley's Crossing isn't like the other games I've, um, modified for you guys. This one's actually a simplified version of a real Navy training simulator, and that means its parameters are a lot more complex than the other packages, right?"
He paused, eyebrows raised, and Candleman glanced at Johnson. The corporal nodded, which seemed to reassure him, and he turned attentively back to Harkness.
The Manticoran felt a brief twinge of guilt as the StateSec thug looked at him with trusting eyes terrifyingly devoid of any understanding of what he was talking about. Harkness had spent enough time in the service to feel confident that anyone StateSec might have assigned to him would have been receptive to the concept of rigging the ship's electronic games library. The combination of boredom, greed, and a very human (if ignoble) desire to put one over on one’s fellows had produced the same ambition in virtually every Manticoran ship in which Harkness had ever served, and those factors operated even more strongly aboard Tepes. Still, he knew he'd been lucky to draw these two, for Johnson was an operator and black marketeer from way back. He was actually quite competent within the limits of what he knew, but he was also as greedy as they came, and neither he nor Candleman had the background to realize the consequences of giving Harkness access to the games library.
Not that Harkness had leapt right out to make the offer. The possibility of doing anything which might jeopardize his arrangement with Committeewoman Ransom was unthinkable, and so he'd done exactly what was asked of him. He'd recorded dozens of propaganda broadcasts in which he cheerfully perjured his immortal soul with accounts of all the "war crimes" he'd either observed or helped commit. Other recordings, when they were broadcast, would appeal earnestly to his ex-countrymen to follow his example and defect to their true class allies rather than continuing to serve their plutocratic exploiters. And while he'd been careful to warn Citizen Commander Jewel that he was only a technician with a severely limited understanding of the theory behind the grav pulse generators he'd learned to service, he'd also spent hours discussing the system with her and giving her pointers towards how it worked. By now, he calculated, he'd committed at least thirty different forms of treason, certainly enough to make it impossible (or, at least, fatally inadvisable) for him ever to return home.
As he'd proved his bona fides to their superiors and received a steadily greater freedom of movement, Johnson and Candleman had come to regard their guard duty as more and more of a formality. The awe inspiring heights his own black market and smuggling activities had attained during his pre-Basilisk career hadn't hurt, either. Once Johnson’s guard came down and the two of them began swapping tales of past exploits, the corporal had quickly realized he was in the presence of either a true maestro whose attainments dwarfed anything he himself had ever even dared to contemplate, or the greatest liar in the known universe.
As the tales accumulated, he'd been forced to accept that Harkness truly was a man of enormous talent... and a kindred soul. He'd sought advice, cautiously, at first, on certain of his own operations, and Harkness' suggestions had increased his profit margin by over twenty percent within the first week. From there, it had been a natural enough step to introduce him to the gambling empire the corporal helped run on the side. The real head of illicit operations aboard Tepes was Staff Sergeant Boyce, but Johnson was one of his senior assistants, and the fact that gambling aboard ship was totally against regulations made Boyce's empire even more lucrative, since no one was likely to go to an officer and complain over any losses he might suffer. But the sergeant was always on the lookout for ways to maximize his profits, and he'd been delighted when Johnson was able to up his take by something like forty percent. He'd also decided not to ask the corporal how he'd managed it, on the theory, apparently, that what he didn't know he couldn't be guilty of, and turned the entire gaming operation over to Johnson.
Which, in many ways, meant he'd actually turned it over to Horace Harkness, for the games in Tepes' libraries were far easier to manipulate than any which would have been found aboard a Manticoran ship.
Harkness had been astounded when he realized just how obsolescent they were. Several were actually variants of games he'd first encountered fifty T-years before, at the very beginning of his naval career. He'd always assumed, correctly, as it turned out, that the Peeps' military hardware (and the software that ran it) had to be at least comparable to the RMN's. It was clearly inferior, but if it hadn't been at least within shouting range, the war would have been over years ago. That assumption was the reason it hadn't occurred to him that something which formed the basis for shipboard gambling could be so extremely simple-minded... or have such primitive security features. It was a given that any game which could be rigged would be rigged, sooner or later, and those aboard Manticoran ships were regularly inspected by electronics teams from Engineering to be sure they hadn't been. Perhaps more to the point, the people who designed those games (and their security features) knew some very clever, extremely well-trained people would bend all their formidable talents on breaking those security features.
But there weren't all that many well-trained people in the People's Navy... and there were even fewer in StateSec. Which meant the games library contained an entire raft of programs with security arrangements which were laughably simple for anyone who'd cut his eyeteeth on Manticoran software. Harkness had started out slowly, altering the odds slightly in the house's favor on half a dozen card and dice games. He hadn't needed to do any more than that to prove his point, and Johnson's avarice had taken over nicely from there.
From Harkness' viewpoint, there'd been a large element of risk in the project. Not in fixing the software, that part had been child's play, but because in order to fix it in the first place, he'd had to have access to the library in which it was stored, and if Johnson's superiors had discovered even an ex- Manticoran had any such thing, the consequences would have been dire. But Johnson had every reason to conceal what was going on... and no idea why his superiors would have been upset.
; As far as Johnson or Candleman were concerned, the games library was merely that: the games library. It was simply a place somewhere in the mass of computers they didn't really understand where the games were stored, and they knew they had no access to anything else in the system. But Horace Harkness was an artist. His ability to work the RMN personnel system to ensure that he always wound up assigned wherever Scotty Tremaine was assigned had baffled many an observer, but that was because none of them realized he'd actually managed to hack into BuPers' records. He might have reformed considerably since his first tour on Basilisk Station with Tremaine and Lady Harrington, and he'd certainly abandoned the various contraband operations he'd maintained on the side, but a man liked to keep his hand in... And the security fences which had been erected to block a crew of techno-illiterates from access they shouldn't have were laughable barriers for anyone who'd broken the security on the classified records of the Royal Manticoran Navy's Bureau of Personnel.
Which meant that, for the last two weeks, Harkness had prowled the bowels of PNS Tepes' information and control systems almost at will. Aside from tinkering with the gaming software, he'd been careful to make no changes lest he leave footprints which could be tracked back to him, but he'd amassed an enormous amount of knowledge about the ship, its course, its destination, its crew, and its operating procedures. The fact that Johnson and Candleman regarded his hacking activities as nothing short of black magic had helped enormously, for they'd granted him the sort of working privacy which had been the prerogative of wizards throughout history. That meant he hadn't had to figure out a way to carry out his explorations while they looked over his shoulder every second. In fact, they normally left him undisturbed on one side of the compartment, working away on the minicomp they'd been thoughtful enough to provide, while they played old-fashioned poker on the other side. Just to be safe, he'd created his own version of what was still called a "boss program" to instantly shift the display to something innocuous if one of them had decided to get curious, but he'd scarcely ever needed it.
In fact, his biggest problem now was that he'd completed his preparations. Only a fraction of the hours he'd spent on the minicomp had actually been devoted to modifying game software, but Johnson and Candleman assumed his time had all been directed towards the ends they knew about, and if he suddenly cut back on those hours but continued to keep up with their requests for software modification, even they might begin to wonder why it was suddenly taking so much less time. That was why he'd suggested altering Parley's Crossing, which was an extremely simplistic recreation of the last major fleet engagement ever fought by the navy of the Solarian League. Simplistic or no, a game designed to let up to ten players on a side control over six hundred ships was more complicated than the other games by several orders of magnitude, and he'd been confident that the time required to put in the fix would eat up his free time quite nicely.
But now that it was finished, he still had to explain it to his partners in crime, and he drew a deep breath.
"You see," he began, "there are an enormous number of variables in this program, and the fact that, in a really big game, every ship in it is being individually controlled by someone, by another human player, not simply the computer, only makes that worse. That means I've gotta be careful how I come at it, 'cause any brute force approach is likely to be pretty damned noticeable, okay?"
Candleman said nothing, but Johnson nodded.
"I can see that," the corporal agreed. "You figure that if, say, the order of arrival in the Tango Variant suddenly started favoring the Sollies every time it was played, or if one players ships started disobeying his orders, somebody'd get wise."
"Exactly!" Harkness congratulated him. "So what I did, I set it up so that when you plug one of the user IDs I've flagged into the player queue, you get a little edge. You'll have to be careful using it, but basically, if you double-tap the firing key in an iffy situation, the computer will add a fifty-percent bonus to your probability of scoring a hit."
"Oh boy! That part I understand!" Candleman put in happily.
"Figured you would," Harkness told him with a grin. "Like I say, you've gotta be careful not to overuse it, but it should give you a good advantage in a close situation. I've also worked in an adjustment to the damage allocation subroutine. If one of 'our' ships takes a hit, the damage allocator will reduce the damage applied to it. That part still needs a little work to fine tune it, and I've got a few more ideas, but basically, what you guys are gonna have to do is play this one out on a game-for-game basis. 'Course, with this kind of edge, you oughta be able to sharp some poor sucker pretty damned well."
"I'd think so, yeah," Johnson agreed with a smile. "Thanks." He took the chip from Candleman and bounced it in his palm for a moment. "You're all right, Harkness," he said after a second. "And you're worth every centicredit of your cut, too."
"Glad you think so," Harkness said with an answering smile. "I like to think I earn my way wherever I am, Corp, and I always look after my friends."
Chapter Twenty-Seven
"Message from Tepes, Citizen Admiral."
Lester Tourville raised a hand at Citizen Lieutenant Fraiser’s announcement, interrupting his conversation with Citizen Captain Bogdanovich and Everard Honeker, and turned towards the com officer.
"What does it say, Harrison?" His voice carried no emotion whatsoever, yet its very neutrality seemed to shout his tension, for Count Tilly was six hundred and ninety hours out of Barnett, with the white, G3 furnace of Cerberus-B twenty-four light-minutes ahead of her.
"Tepes will continue to a parking orbit around Hades, but we're to place ourselves in orbit around Cerberus-B-3, Citizen Admiral," Fraiser replied respectfully, then paused and cleared his throat. "There's a personal attachment from Citizen Committeewoman Ransom," he added. "She says that you, Citizen Commissioner Honeker, Citizen Captain Bogdanovich, and Citizen Commander Foraker should report to her on Hades by pinnace at oh-nine-hundred local tomorrow."
"Well isn't that just ducky," Bogdanovich grunted with an obvious disgust every member of Tourville's staff understood only too well. Their original orders had been to accompany Tepes clear to Hades, and the abrupt change at this late date struck all of them as being almost as incompetent as it was insulting. "They don't want a Navy ship any closer to their precious prison than they have to let her," Bogdanovich went on. "Probably think we'd open fire on it or some goddamned thing!"
The chief of staffs vicious voice carried an outright hatred he would never have allowed to show a month before. It cut like a lash, but Honeker didn't even bat an eyelid. He'd had plenty of time during the voyage here to realize he was just as doomed as Tourville and his officers. He supposed he should blame Tourville for that, but he couldn't. He'd gone into it with open eyes, and he was still convinced the Navy officer had been right. Cordelia Ransom's determination to have Honor Harrington judicially murdered was going to be a disaster for everyone, not just for the people who'd tried to prevent it. The Solarian League would be almost as infuriated as the Manties and their allies, which could have devastating consequences for the movement of technology from the League to the PRH, and altogether too many members of the Republic’s own military would be just as sickened and shamed by it as Tourville had predicted. And quite aside from all the pragmatic considerations that made executing her an act of lunacy, trying to keep Harrington alive had been the right thing to do morally, as well.
No, much as he regretted, and feared, the consequences, Honeker couldn't fault Tourville for making the effort or enlisting his own tacit support. And that had produced an odd effect on Everard Honeker. He'd come aboard Count Tilly, and before that aboard Tourville’s old flagship, Rash al-Din, to spy on him for StateSec and the Committee of Public Safety, and though he'd learned to like the aggressive, hard-fighting rear admiral, he'd never forgotten he was Tourville's keeper. That there must always be that sense of separation, of standing apart and watching warily for signs of unreliability.
But the
separation had vanished now. Perhaps it was only because Honeker knew they were both doomed, yet it was a vast relief nonetheless. And partly, he knew, it was because he no longer had to lie, to others or to himself, to justify actions he'd always known deep inside couldn't be justified. By betraying and condemning him for trying to do his duty despite its own idiocy, the system had finally freed him from his bondage to it, and he realized, now, that "unreliables" like Lester Tourville and his staff were far better champions of the cause he'd once thought the Committee served than people like Cordelia Ransom could ever be.
Unaware of the thoughts behind his people's commissioner's silence, Tourville simply nodded to Bogdanovich, for the citizen captain was obviously correct. The entire Cerberus System was a monumental tribute to the institutional paranoia of the PRH’s security services, old and new alike. Its coordinates weren't even in Count Tilly's astrogation database, for the very existence of the system, much less its location, had been classified by the Office of Internal Security when the old regime first authorized Camp Charon's construction. Even today, or perhaps especially today, that information was a fanatically guarded secret known only to StateSec, and the fact that no one else had the slightest idea of where to find it was but the first layer of a defense in depth.