“So this is how a standard industrial espionage goes,” Jessika said. “You’re a professional gang tech that gets hired to steal data. You settle in your new town and go to barbeques with your neighbors, play sports in the local league—basically, blending in. But by night, you’re a secret supervillain, you spend your time online black-routing malware to try and bust medical research files. You succeed, and your corporate employer earns a billion wattdollars from a revolutionary new headache vector. Like I said earlier, it’s cheaper than paying a research team. Cost effective. But this…You get no benefit other than making your ideological enemy better prepared to resist further sabotage. Who can afford it?”
“There are a lot of zealots out there. Trust me, cost never deterred fanatics.”
“Okay, so where did this sabotage team get their money from? Their digital ability is astonishing. Tyle is convinced their routines were formatted by a G8Turing, and there aren’t many of them anywhere. So far only governments and the bigger companies have them.”
“I don’t know,” Kandara said. “Maybe we are overlooking the obvious?”
“The Universal governments genuinely feel threatened by Utopials? It’s a Cold War for our century?”
“Technically, that fits. But I’m thinking: just one team? Even if you’re completely paranoid, that isn’t how a government works. They have backups, fallbacks, hungry acolytes in training, whole departments given over to an ideological enemy’s downfall.”
“Okay: one rich bigoted billionaire, or a globalPAC. They don’t care, and don’t think logically. Or there’s something else altogether going on.”
“Urrgh.” Kandara tensed up. “You know you’re preaching to the converted, right? It’s just that I can’t figure out exactly what’s wrong about this.”
Jessika shot a glance at Kruse, who was staring glumly at the kitchen table. “Logically, given a poor cost-return, the sabotage is a diversion.”
“For what?”
“Exactly the question we should be asking. When I raised it, I got shot down.”
Kandara raised her gaze to whatever heavens occupied the sky above Akitha. “Oh, great. You want me to be your patsy.”
“That’s Trojan horse. But I think messenger is more accurate. Sie might listen to you. You are the expert, after all.”
“I fucking hate office politics!”
“Me too.” Jessika drained her glass and sauntered back into the villa. Kandara glared at her back, but she knew she was right.
* * *
—
“The attacks are a subterfuge?” Kruse said incredulously half an hour later when Kandara had changed back into her singlet and shorts and rejoined everyone in the kitchen.
“I don’t know. But we have to cover all possibilities. Especially this one, as it might offer a route to tracking down the team launching these attacks. You cannot overlook this opportunity.”
“But…what are we looking for?”
Kandara was pleased she managed to avoid looking at Jessika. “I’d suggest you review the networks that have suffered the attacks.”
“We already have,” Tyle said. “No other secure files were cracked.”
“Even if you could guarantee that, which I don’t believe you can, that’s not what I want.”
“So what are we looking for?”
“Some kind of pattern. Something common to every attack. Start by finding out what other science projects were using the same network.”
Tyle gave Kruse a questioning look. “It wouldn’t hurt. We haven’t got anything else.”
“All right,” Kruse said. “Do it.”
* * *
—
It must have been something about the bed, or maybe planet-lag time difference. Kandara slept for almost three whole hours, waking at four o’clock local time when the town was still buried beneath the clear night sky.
She lay flat on her back, eyes open but unable to see the ceiling behind the dense grids of fluorescent data that Zapata splashed across her tarsus lenses. The other four had spent most of the night reviewing the affected networks; there were hundreds of research and development projects sharing each one. The Bureau’s G8Turing had sorted them into categories and attempted to match them, but there was no real pattern—not with the types of projects involved. Even the amount of resources they’d been allocated had no relation to where the attacks took place. She grinned at that grid column, suspecting Jessika had been the one insisting they provide a cost analysis. But in the end there was nothing. That was the problem with pattern analysis; you had to define the parameters correctly. If it was easy, everyone would do it.
So she began to feed in her own parameters, sending the columns twisting into new formations.
* * *
—
At five o’clock Kandara stalked down the villa’s main corridor, banging on the bedroom doors. The team appeared grudgingly, rubbing sleep from their eyes, robes and PJs disarrayed as they ambled into the kitchen. They found Kandara operating the sleek coffee machine; she’d already filled a teapot with English Breakfast tea, allowing it to brew.
“What?” Kruse demanded.
“I’ve found the pattern,” Kandara told hir.
“What is it?” Jessika asked sharply.
Kandara grinned. “Weapons.”
“We don’t have any weapons projects,” Oistad protested.
“Which is why you didn’t find the pattern.”
Kruse sat at the big glass table and snagged a cup of coffee. “All right, show us how smart you are.”
“I’m not smart. I got paranoid.”
“Ah,” Tyle exclaimed. “Developments that could potentially be adapted for weapons usage.”
“Damn right.”
“Which are…?” Kruse asked.
Kandara raised a hand and started ticking off on her fingers. “The factory that produces pipe drilling remotes used by your water utility services, attacked nine weeks ago, that one shared a network with three teams researching lincbots. It’s been a goal for decades, bots that can mechanically cling to each other to multiply their overall physical size and strength, and simultaneously network their processing power. We have lincbots, but the concept has plateaued; the network connectivity protocols are difficult to establish and glitchy even then. Your people are working on bots from ant-size up to big-dumb mechs. The ant-size are particularly interesting; when they linc up it’s called the dry-fluid effect, where these things swarm in units of up to half a million. Picture a nest of army ants in perfect synchronization but with added intelligence—and purpose. I don’t want to think of the damage they could inflict on a flesh body. While a clump of linced big-dumbs could take out entire city blocks.”
“Okay, I’ll give you that could have aggressive applications,” Kruse said. “What else?”
“The molecular bond fabricators. That research had spin-off research on shields. Obvious.” Kandara sipped her green tea, putting her thoughts in an order that would make the most compelling argument. “Then there was last month’s attack on the assembly core that puts together relays for the planetary power grid. That network was hosting a university lab working on magnetic confinement systems—also for power applications, mainly MHD chambers, which the solarwells use.” She glanced around the blank expressions, enjoying the moment. “No? These ones are small-scale confinement chambers, with monopolar magnetic field generators—very powerful. Perfect for spaceships with plasma rockets—or maybe missiles.”
“Oh, come on!” Oistad objected.
“Coherent X-ray beam emitter tubes, for micro-medical applications. Scale that up and you have gamma and X-ray beam weapons.”
Tyle and Kruse exchanged a look.
“Damn,” Jessika muttered.
“You said it,” Kandara said. “The data attacks are irritants. This, on
the other hand, takes everything to a whole different level.”
“But why?” Kruse asked, genuinely puzzled.
“One aspect at a time,” Kandara told hir. “Let’s try and confirm there is a pattern first. Tyle, can you check those projects I’ve just mentioned, see if any of their files have been cracked or copied?”
“Sure.”
“If you find anything, then we can start looking for motive.”
* * *
—
Servez brought their breakfast on the patio as the sun rose, shining a sharp bronze glimmer across the bay below. Kandara had eggs benedict, with freshly squeezed orange juice, followed by croissants and wild blueberry jam. When she was working, she wasn’t as strict with her health food regime, figuring you never knew if you’d need the calories for extra energy.
Jessika ate with her, while the others coordinated their review with the Bureau’s G8Turing. “Nice job,” she told Kandara.
“I’m familiar with the game.”
“I wonder who we’re up against.”
“The obvious choice is a weapons company.”
“Not so obvious. Why include the attacks? That’s political, or maybe ideological. If you’re stealing data you need to be stealthy.”
“Misdirection?” Kandara mused.
“But they knew we’d react to this. We had no choice.”
“Once we have more information, like who it is, the motivation should fall into place.”
“But that’s the thing. What motivations can there be? They damaged us, the whole of Akitha. Who does that?”
“Fanatics,” Kandara replied automatically. “I’m no longer surprised by what they do, by the misery and suffering they inflict on others. Ideology is a sick-soul-meme; it gnaws basic decency away until you can self-justify the most extreme acts as worthwhile to further the cause. Any cause.”
Jessika gave her a surprised look, a spoon of fruit salad poised in front of her mouth. “I didn’t have you down as the philosophical type.”
“I’m not philosophizing. I’m simply telling you what I’ve seen.”
“Hell, I thought I’d seen bad stuff when I worked for Connexion Security.”
Kandara gave her a sympathetic grin and reached for another croissant. That was when the villa doors opened and Kruse came out, followed by Tyle and Oistad.
“They cracked the files, didn’t they?” Kandara said. She barely needed to ask.
“I had to go deep into the management routines,” Tyle admitted. “And even then all we found were ghost traces. The routines they’re deploying are extremely sophisticated, and incredibly hard to detect. The Bureau is worried. It’s like nothing we’ve ever seen before.”
“So it is a weapons company running an espionage team,” Jessika said.
“I think it might be worse than that,” Kruse said. “We’ve only had an hour, but I asked the research teams to check the files. Some of them appear to have been altered.”
“Altered how?” Kandara asked.
“It’s very subtle. The researchers are comparing the active files to deep cache copies. There are discrepancies. Not many, and not in all the files they’ve checked so far. But data has been tampered with.” Sie looked worried. “Entire projects have been compromised.”
“If hardware was built on the basis of those files, it wouldn’t work,” Oistad said. “The sabotage would have wrecked years of research and lost us all the industrial resources allocated to fabrication.”
“Then it wasn’t a distraction,” Kandara said thoughtfully. “Not entirely. All of this is aimed at disabling your industrial base.”
“It’s going to paralyze us,” Kruse said in a monotone. “We don’t know how widespread this is. We can’t start to build anything new until the development data has been reviewed. This is…a declaration of war!”
“Interesting analysis,” Kandara said, “given that this seems to be concentrating on systems that have weapons applications.”
“What are you saying?” Tyle asked.
“Your ability to build weapons that you can use to defend yourself against physical assault is being sabotaged.”
“Nobody’s going to invade us!” Oistad said. “That’s insane.”
“Pearl Harbor,” Kandara muttered.
“No,” Kruse declared firmly. “A couple of teams armed with the most advanced routines a G8Turing’s written, and consumed by a hate agenda, that I can accept. But some kind of physical attack? From whom? Nations don’t have standing armies anymore. You assemble ten thousand people, and start giving them military training, and everybody will know. There’s another purpose behind this; there has to be.”
“Glad to hear it,” Kandara said. “So your intelligence service monitors everything on Zagreus, does it?”
Kruse shot her an exasperated look. “I’m not dealing in hypotheticals.”
“Is that what I’m doing? We have reached over a hundred star systems. Twenty-three of them have planets that have been or are being terraformed. You have no idea what’s going on in half of them. Did you know one criminal gang in Ukraine is claiming to have an independent portal door to Zagreus? If you’re truly rich, and managed to hang on to your money, you can buy your way back after you’re renditioned.”
“Really?” a fascinated Tyle asked.
“Like I said: rumor. But I’m completely serious about not knowing what’s going on in some of the star systems we’re settling. And it doesn’t have to be a human army. Soldier drones are cheap and easy to build.”
“I appreciate your insights and feedback,” Kruse said, “but actually this isn’t helping.”
“I understand your position. However, what we’ve found here provides us with the kind of projects that this enemy team is likely to strike next. Tyle can load hir monitors into the appropriate networks.”
“Yes. We’ll do that. I need to inform the Bureau.” Sie managed a weak smile of gratitude and went back indoors.
“For a society that prides itself on individual freedom, sie certainly talks to hir boss a lot,” Kandara observed.
* * *
—
The team was kept busy for the rest of the day, reviewing the initial discoveries and trying to identify more corrupted files. Most of the afternoon was spent trying to cross-index with current Universal visitors, and then recent immigrants. Finally the Bureau had them refining potential future targets.
It all allowed Kandara time to herself, which she spent jogging down to the beach and back up again before spending an hour in the villa’s well-equipped gym. After that she ran test procedures on her weapons peripherals, using images splashed over her tarsus lenses for virtual target practice. She much preferred physical range practice, but doubted Naima had one. At least none they’d admit to. She supposed Kruse’s mysterious Bureau possessed a training facility for agents.
By late afternoon, Kandara was considering another swim when Kruse came looking for her.
“You need to pack your bagez,” sie said. “We’re transferring up to Onysko.”
“Where?” Even as she asked, Zapata was spraying information across her lens; it was the primary dormitory habitat for the Bremble asteroid. “Never mind. Why are we going there?”
“It’s been identified as a high-probability target. The highest, actually.”
* * *
—
Onysko wasn’t quite as large as Nebesa, measuring only forty-eight kilometers long. This biosphere was temperate and edging into its chilly autumn season when the team walked out of the portal hub. Once they were out in the open, Kandara turned around to look up at the endcap. She’d been expecting a ring city around the base, the same as Nebesa. But here the flat circle was mostly a smooth gray faux-stone with several spectacular waterfalls curving sharply sideways from the Coriolis force. A few sections along the
rim, like the one they’d emerged from, were urban zones, with their giveaway balcony stacks.
Zapata splashed up the habitat’s population. “Seven thousand?” Kandara asked in surprise. “Are you sure?” She eyed the closest deciduous trees, which she guessed at a good fifty to sixty years old. The habitat really should have a larger population by now. Some of the larger habitats back in the Sol system were approaching populations of a quarter of a million.
“That is the information supplied by the Onysko G8Turing. It is current.”
“Strange.”
They were assigned quarters in the Gloweth residency, a ten-story ziggurat embedded in the endcap. Their apartment was on the third floor, larger than the Naima villa, but furnished in the same clinically minimalist style that had Kandara wondering if it was some kind of subtle Utopial conditioning therapy. It seemed to reinforce the feeling of middle-class conformity, which she already considered a little too prevalent in Delta Pavonis. It was as if everyone was reluctant about exposing a sign of individuality.
* * *
—
Tyle collected her for the meeting, the pair of them walking along a maze of corridors leading through the endcap. Jessika and Oistad were already waiting in the conference room when they arrived. Kandara’s mouth lifted in a gentle smile as she appreciated where they were; one wall was a bulging window curving out from the habitat’s external shell. She’d never seen anything like it; habitat shells were usually a solid hundred meters thick. Just thinking of the sleet of cosmic radiation striking the window made her nervous, as the transparent material didn’t even look particularly thick. Despite that she sat at the rock slab table filling the middle of the room and stared unashamedly. The view made her wonder why she’d ever been impressed by the sight of Nebesa.
The window was facing the Bremble asteroid, which from Kandara’s viewpoint proscribed a tight arc across the star field outside as Onysko rotated laboriously. She could see the town-sized sprawls of machinery hanging limpet-fashion to its dusty gray-brown surface, sharp light from Delta Pavonis sparking on crinkled gold-foil sheets to make it twinkle hypnotically.
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