The War Machine: Crisis of Empire III

by David Drake

  If this was Iggy’s place, if this was his sanctuary, then that was flat-out criminal waste. Not that he had borrowed a few broken-down odds and ends of office furniture, but that a being of his ability was trapped pushing a mop while some chuckled-headed human, hired by virtue of being someone’s brother-in-law, fumbled his way through a job Igor could have done better.

  Iggy had said they were to hose down, and that was what he meant, nothing more or less. He unfastened the hose from its shower fitting, turned on the old-fashioned spigot and played the jet of water over his pants leg and his boots. The other members of the party did the same, Dostchem making sure she went first and got her legs and feet well-cleaned up. Spencer couldn’t really blame her—it was bad enough having that scum on his shoes. He was glad when his own turn came.

  Iggy sat down on the rumpled couch as the others cleaned themselves up. “This is as far as I go,” he said, almost apologetically. “I dunno the upstairs part of th’ building, so I wouldn’t do you no good anyway. And on this sort of job, you don’t need extra bodies along for the ride. I’m gonna stay right here—if the security goons spotted our entry and they come looking down here, mebbe they’ll settle for finding me snoozing on the couch.”

  Spencer felt angry, shortchanged. Their guide was chickening out. Then he calmed himself and nodded. Iggy was probably right—even if it smacked of cowardice. “Fine,” he said. “But how do we get upstairs from here?”

  “Cargo elevator. Runs all the time, day and night, no one’ll notice it droppin’ down here to get you. I’ll show you where it is. C’mon.” Iggy stood up and led them from the hidey-hole to the elevator bank, back toward the center of the looming darkness of the sub-basement.

  An elevator car was waiting for them, and Spencer noticed that the monitor camera and the voice-command mike had been smashed out—just by chance, or merely so it looked like chance—it didn’t matter which.

  Sisley, Suss, Dostchem and Spencer went aboard. Maybe they could have done without Dostchem along, but she was carrying a toolbelt, and getting past internal security might be trickier than Iggy had suggested. Spencer was glad of the company. “All right, then,” Spencer said. “Let’s go. Iggy, if we’re not back in four hours, you’re on your own. Thanks for your help.”

  No one seemed to want to say anything more. Sisley reached over to the manual control panel and punched in her floor number. The doors began to shut, leaving Iggy watching them, and Spencer wondering what the proper etiquette was for saying good-bye to a Capuchin.

  The doors slammed shut and the elevator began to rise.

  Spencer turned and faced the others. “Listen, there’s one thing. There’s no point to this job if the information doesn’t get out. If they jump us up there after we’ve got the data we’re after, whoever is carrying the information gets out first, with the rest of us protecting her or fighting rearguard. That’s the priority. It will probably be Suss carrying the download in Santu—which means she goes first. Of all of us, Suss has the best chance of breaking clear on her own if it all craps out. Dostchem, I know this isn’t your fight, but we’ll be your best bet if it gets ugly. Stick with us if you can.”

  And if we can stay alive long enough to get that far, Spencer thought to himself. But those were not the sort of words a commander said to his troops.

  ###

  With a whoop of glee, Chief Wellingham dropped the detector and let it dangle at the end of its cable. He didn’t need it anymore. He could see the little monster, lurking in the recess between two circuit blocks. There was just enough clear space underneath for him to fit in one of the smaller sample holders there. He fumbled for the sample holder, held it underneath the parasite, and dropped it into the container with one deft move of the cook’s spatula. Wellingham snapped the container shut and held his captive up to the light. “We’ve got you now,” he said gleefully, watching it slither around the interior of the jar.

  Wellingham knew that capturing the parasite in and of itself meant nothing—not when the people who had sent two of the things could send as many more as they liked. But now he had proved that the detector on his back worked. He had the other detectors on the job already, and they were going to stay on the job from now on, no matter how it screwed up the rest of his section’s duty schedule. They would have to stay on guard against these—

  “Petty Officer Jasper calling you, Sir,” Wellingham’s AID announced.

  “Put him through, Waldo.”

  “Sir, we’ve spotted two of the things, but we can’t get at them,” Jasper’s voice said through the AID’s speaker.

  “Why not?”

  “They’re stuck to the outside of the hull, as best we can figure. I’m between the inner and outer hulls right now, and the detector is showing two G-wave sources on the outside. I can’t get an accurate fix on them, though—they seem to move around a lot.”

  “Trying to find a way in, no doubt. Good work, son. Note the location and we’ll schedule frequent sweeps of the area to make sure we don’t lose track of them.”

  “Ah, Sir, shouldn’t we go out after them?” Jasper asked.

  “Negative! How do we know there aren’t four more clustered near the hatch waiting for you to try that? The last thing I want is more of those things alive inside the ship. We stay buttoned up. But nice work all the same. Wellingham out.”

  Damn! The chief looked at his captive once again, not quite as pleased with himself as he had been a minute before. Good news mixed right in with more bad news, he thought. Bad: they had more parasites; good: they had them spotted and that they were outside the ship; and bad: he didn’t dare so much as open a hatch to go get them.

  Under siege. It suddenly dawned on him that the Duncan was besieged, a Warlord-class cruiser cut off from the outside universe by a few featureless blobs of silver. He glared at his captured parasite, suddenly feeling a bit less victorious.

  ###

  Up on the bridge simulator, Tarwa Chu was feeling a lot more confident—even brave enough to order the first watch bridge crew in to rehearse the maneuver with her. She had tried sailing the Duncan clear eight times now and hadn’t wrecked the ship or the harbor on five of the last six tries.

  She felt a little anxious as the bridge officers filed in. The captain had ordered her to launch the Duncan over five hours ago, and she had heard no further word from him since. Was it still so urgent that they launch? Captain Spencer had never explained the crisis in the first place—maybe it was over by now. No, she told herself. She was supposed to obey orders, not second-guess them.

  And perhaps she had already stalled too long. Maybe she should skip the simulation with the bridge crew and go right to the real thing. She glanced at the chronometer and was startled to discover it was the middle of the night. No wonder the first watch bridge crew looked sleepy—they had all been asleep for hours when she had ordered them to come here.

  But the mere passing of the hours wasn’t the real problem. Chu had been running the simulator for daylight conditions and had completely lost track of the passage of time. Her heart sunk once again. She knew she could never manage the tight passages of the harbor at night. Even in full light, she knew the currents and tides of København Harbor would be tricky. The bridge crew would need daylight to work with as well.

  At first light, then, she thought. They would sail at dawn.

  Chapter Twelve

  Wirehead

  “Go!” Dostchem hissed. Suss, Spencer, and Sisley rushed through the opening door. Dostchem pulled out her test leads, and dove through herself. Once the door controller was no longer tricked by Dostchem’s false signals, it snapped shut, almost catching the Capuchin’s tail. “Is that the last one?” Dostchem asked. This was the third time she had nearly lost her tail.

  Sisley nodded wearily. “Yes. We’re here. There are no electronic guards on the rest of the doorways—at least none that I’m aware of.” Iggy had been wildly optimistic in his assumptions about security: Santu’s on-board security s
ensors, backstopped by Dostchem’s detectors, had seen them through seemingly endless booby traps and hidden sensors. The cargo elevator had refused to take them above the twentieth floor because of a security lockout. Getting up to the thirtieth had been a nightmare.

  Every security system seemed to be switched on and cranked up all the way, to the great inconvenience of the hundreds, or perhaps thousands of beings in the building legitimately.

  And to the massive inconvenience of the security forces as well. Alarm bells and beepers were sounding constantly, and there seemed to be new false alerts going off every few seconds. Spencer’s party twice hid in darkened offices while teams of StarMetal’s private cops rushed down nearby corridors after some other, imagined threat.

  Perhaps Dostchem and Suss even missed a sensor or two or accidentally set off a silent alarm. If so, the home team was so busy chasing phantoms they didn’t catch on to the real invaders.

  In the parlance of communications and detection theory—Dostchem’s specialty as an instrument maker—the signal to noise ratio had gotten too high, to the point where the “static” of false alarms was drowning out legitimate warnings.

  Dostchem Horchane didn’t much care why they made it inside. She was just glad to be past the last barrier and in. Objectively, of course, this was probably one of the most dangerous places they could be.

  At least Sisley’s floor was only occupied during the day. They’d have some privacy.

  The risks, therefore, probably weren’t any lower now that they were inside, but at least they seemed lower, and Dostchem was willing for that much human irrationality to seep in. Any source of relief was welcome.

  Of course, wishful thinking was not going to get them in and out tonight. “Come on then,” Dostchem snapped, “let’s get on with it.”

  Sisley started to move in behind her desk, but Suss held up her hand to stop her. “Santu, do a scan.”

  There was a moment’s hesitation before Suss’ AID spoke. “The desk is dirty, “Santu said. “Get me closer to the left side of it.” Suss pulled the AID out of its pouch and swept it over the desk. “Right here,” the AID said. “Back a bit—there! Some sort of transmitter. Looks like it’s wired in to transmit any command fed into the computer, pipe it to some remote location.”

  Dostchem already had her equipment out, and had the transmitter deactivated in a minute or two. “There,” the Capuchin said as she finished. “Now it should still send a flat carrier wave no matter what you do to the computer.

  “Okay, then, here’s goes nothing.” Sisley sat down at her desk and put her palm down over the sensor plate. The panel glowed a welcoming green and a flat display screen slid out of its recess, turned and swiveled up to face Sisley.

  “We’re in,” she said. “Dostchem—use your G-wave gizmo.

  Are there any of those parasites hooked into this computer? Is it safe to hook Santu up to it on a hardwire?”

  Dostchem consulted another of her devices and nodded. “It’s clean. No G-waves coming from closer than several sources a few hundred meters above us, at extreme range for this sensor.”

  Spencer looked at her sharply. “You’re picking up G-waves? There are definitely parasites in this building?”

  Dostchem nodded. “Of course. That should have been obvious. I assumed that we would find them in the building. But I do admit that I am relieved to actually track G-waves. These are the first G-wave sources I’ve picked up, and it is reassuring to know the device actually works. But come now, we really must get on with the job.”

  Suss, still holding Santu, pulled the hardwire link from its niche and spooled it out, handing Sisley the end of the cable. Sisley popped open a compartment on the corner of the desk and plugged in Santu’s hookup.

  “Okay, ah, Santu,” she said, uncertain how to address an AID, “I want you to monitor everything. Right now we’ll get the data quick and dirty, later we’ll analyze it. Just get it all down.”

  “Don’t worry, Miss Mannerling,” Santu said. “That’s my job.”

  Sisley nodded. She was tempted to let Santu control the search—but no, that wouldn’t be smart. There were good reasons that her desk computer wasn’t built as an AI system in the first place. Like most security-conscious operations, StarMetal did not trust sentient machines with unlimited access to confidential information. After all, an AI system was designed to rework its own programming, and that made any software block against unauthorized access impossible to enforce.

  Furthermore, the artificial personalities that AI systems inevitably developed could turn unpredictable. There seemed to be some link being the amount of data an AI computer handled and the degree of its eccentricity.

  The bigger the AI system, the more likely it was to be a bit flaky. And what help was a surly computer, or one that enjoyed practical jokes, or one that took an irrational dislike to its operator? Suppose it decided to erase key memories—or even commit suicide, taking all its files along into oblivion?

  Even a healthy AI could be far too amenable to suggestion. Potentially, any competent machine psychologist could stroll in and talk an AI system full of secrets into confessing all.

  But did that sort of argument apply to the present case? What harm in letting the AID go to work for a few seconds? Why not let Santu take the search job? No doubt the AID could do it in a thousandth the time it would take Sisley, and time was short.

  No, best not to take the chance, she decided firmly. There were too many horror stories about AIDs tapping into too much data all at once, and developing symptoms that paralleled human drunkenness. That they didn’t need tonight.

  She switched on the voice-command system for her computer, then thought better of it, switched the mike off, and drew the keyboard out from its storage niche. Better to go with completely precise typed instructions. Mikes were a lot easier to tap than keyboards. Spencer and Suss came around the other side of her desk to look over her shoulder as she began hitting keys.

  OPEN PERSONNEL FILES. QUERY: she typed. PROVIDE ANY/ALL INFORMATION ON PERSON KNOWN AS DESTIN/CAPTAIN DESTIN STARMETAL EMPLOYEE FILES.

  NO SUCH NAME LOCATED the computer displayed on its screen in bright red letters. Sisley repressed the urge to ask the computer, “Are you sure?” Even after thousands of years in dealing with computer searches, most humans still could not quite believe that a search of millions of names could be performed accurately in less than a millisecond.

  Maybe she just needed to rephrase things a bit. REVISE QUERY: ADD STARMETAL OFF-PLANET PERSONNEL FILES she typed.

  OFF-PLANET PERSONNEL FILES INCLUDED IN FIRST SEARCH the computer replied—a bit smugly, Sisley imagined. “Okay, you’re so smart,” she muttered. DID YOU INCLUDE INDEPENDENT CONTRACTORS AND INDEPENDENT SHIP OPERATORS? she typed.

  Running revised QUERY the computer replied, admitting defeat. Then: no such name located in current independent CONTRACTOR LISTS OF JOBS LET IN PAST THIRTY DAYS.

  “Damn it!” Suss growled. “We risk our asses getting in here and it’s for noth—”

  “No, maybe it isn’t,” Sisley said eagerly. “There’s something weird going on. The current indy list is supposed to go back one hundred days. Someone’s been screwing around with the main billing system down in the central files.”

  SEARCH FOR SAME REFERENTS FOR ALL INDEPENDENT CONTRACTORS OVER LAST FIVE YEARS she typed.

  SECURITY RESTRICTIONS PLACED ON ELEMENTS OF THAT DATA the computer warned.

  “Okay, there has to be something up. There is no possible legitimate reason for securing that data,” she said excitedly. “They’re trying to keep people out of the indy files. A big, sloppy, ham-fisted block on the whole subsystem, rather than a surgical block on just our boy. Exactly the sort of clumsy thing you’d expect from a panicky security operation or an amateur. So let’s see what they’re hiding.”

  OVERRIDE SECURITY BLOCKS she typed eagerly. There was a discernible pause this time, as the computer unlocked the data security on the files and searched through the fa
r larger data set. That was a good sign. It meant that the computer was working on the problem, not rejecting it. And that meant they were winning.

  Sisley felt a sudden flush of happy satisfaction. They had made the right decisions. Coming here had been worth the risk. She patted the desktop fondly. This was why they had needed to run the search from here and not a remote location. From this terminal, she could override every standard security block in the StarMetal security system, look at files she could never reach from a standard remote terminal. Unless someone had been smart enough and quick to engineer a specialized block against her, they were in. And from the looks of the security they had seen so far, the opposition was in turmoil.

  REFERENT LOCATED the computer displayed at last. CAPTAIN ANTOIN LOUIS DESTIN, MASTER OF The Dancing Bear, ASTEROID CARGO VESSEL.

  “Pay dirt!” Sisley cried in jubilation.

  QUERY: she typed. DISPLAY SUMMARY DATA ON MISSIONS OF DESTIN AND SHIP DANCING BEAR IN PAST FIVE YEARS. PRESENT AT MAXIMUM SPEED. And this was the real reason an AI could never truly replace a human operator, she told herself. No one had ever programmed an AI system to have a hunch.

  The computer snapped up screen after screen worth of routine data, far faster than a human could see. Dostchem, however, was finally taking an interest, and had stepped in behind Sisley. “I believe you have it, Miss Mannerling,” the Capuchin said. “It seems to me that there is a distinct break in Destin’s work patterns—”

  But Dostchem never got any further than that.

  The door blasted away into confetti. StarMetal Security finally found what it had been looking for.

  Suss dove down behind the desk and rolled out to the right. Spencer was a little slower doing a dive and roll to the left. Both of them had their repulsors out and fired on reflex. A moment before there had been two security men in the doorway—but now there were none, just a pair of chewed up corpses collapsing in front of them. Sisley and Dostchem barely had time to feel surprise and alarm before it was all over.