There was no response from the robots. Perhaps they didn’t believe me. Looking down, I could see that they were all standing on charging pads and the gently flashing indicators all seemed to be in the red zone – they weren’t yet charged. Three of the pads were empty. Did that mean there were more robots out on patrol? Or maybe they were in the repair shop?
I stood directly in front of one of the robots. I dodged left and then right to see if it would follow the movement with its head, but it stood like a mannequin. I raised my hand and slowly reached towards the robot’s forehead. I touched the shiny blue plastic. Still nothing. I pushed. The robot tilted slowly on its heels and, reaching the tipping point, fell backwards. It collided with the robot behind it and that fell backwards too. With a loud clattering sound, all six robots in the line went down like dominoes. This made me smile.
The fallen robots made no attempt to right themselves. I glanced towards the three still standing, but there was no response from them – not even a sideways glance or a smirk. Flat batteries, the lot of them. And I didn’t want them getting all recharged and coming after me.
I was rapidly running out of equipment, but I still had a screwdriver in my pocket. I used it to take the heads off the six sleeping robots. I took the controller chips from each of the heads, pocketing them, and then set the gleaming domes on the floor next to their bodies. Then I took the heads and chips from the two robots that were still standing. Two? Did I miscount?
I half-turned and a straight-armed swipe from a security robot whizzed past the top of my head. He must have been expecting someone taller. I dodged another attempt to decapitate me, feeling the draft caused by the passage of the robot’s hand. If any of those karate chops made contact the result would almost certainly be a broken bone. And it would hurt. Backing away from the robot, I almost tripped over one of the heads on the floor. I ducked under another swipe and picked up the robot head, holding it in front of my like a shield. A hand swiped down in a swift and brutal arc, shattering the skull and breaking it in two.
Ducking and weaving, I picked up two more of the heads, hurling them like boulders, and the security robot knocked them aside sending them clattering against the walls. Its arms slicing through the air, the robot forced me deeper into the room. A quick glance behind told me that there was a wall and a door – some sort of inner office – and I would soon be forced up against it with nowhere to go.
The door was locked and my pick was now a puddle of melted metal. Still trying to stay beyond range of the wildly waving arms of the robot, I edged sideways, looking around the room for something I could use as a weapon or as a tool to open the inner door. But there was nothing. This was a bare room that served only as a recharging station for the machines. Robot corpses littered the floor and I had to step carefully to avoid them. I stepped between the two headless bodies that were still standing, trying to put them between me and the kung fu robot. I ducked behind one of them, holding onto its upper arms and turning it, hiding behind it. Chop after chop cracked and splintered the decapitated robot, sending bits of debris flying in all directions. A particularly savage blow to the shoulder cracked the joint and left me holding the arm. I considered using it as a club to fight back, but then I saw markings above the wrist that gave me another idea. This was the robot’s identification number and an old-fashioned quick-scan code. I pushed the remains of the dead robot forwards so that my attacker was momentarily entangled with it.
I rushed to the back of the room and pressed the code on the arm up against the scanning pad of the lock. Surely a security robot would have the necessary clearance level to get me through the door? There was a crash behind me as the robot tore itself free from its dance partner and shoved the obstruction aside. As robot Frankenstein goose-stepped towards me there was a long moment when I thought the lock wasn’t going to yield. I really didn’t want ‘Oh, squit!’ to be my dying words.
Click. Shush!
The door slid open. I dashed into the inner office and slammed my palm back against the mechanism, hitting the control that would shut and lock the door. I pressed one of the robot fingers to the button that would seal the door shut, not allowing anyone to enter from outside.
Finding that its own code didn’t work the door-opening magic, the robot outside began battering the door. I could see small dents appear but I felt fairly confident that the door would hold firm. This was a door on a security deck, you’d have to hope it would be a good one.
Catching my breath, I turned around, half-expecting to see the missing three robots standing behind me with fists raised. But there was only a desk and chair. A supervisor’s office. In one corner was another robot charging station, but this one was bigger than those outside. I was pleased to see that it was vacant. On the desk were a jacket and a backpack. My jacket and backpack. I wasn’t sure if one of the robots had brought them in – they certainly hadn’t rolled into there and bounced up onto the desk – but I was definitely pleased to see them. The red axe was lying on the desk too.
Pulling on my jacket, I felt much less vulnerable. The gun belt and pistol helped a bit with that.
The hammering on the door ended and the silence came as a relief. I woke Trixie and got her to scan the area for robots. She reported no activity. Hopefully, that meant the robot outside had exhausted whatever little charge it had left in its batteries.
There was a uniform jacket hanging from a coat hook in the corner behind the desk. I took it down to look at it. It would have been great to wear to a War-themed fancy dress party. Handling it gave me that weird feeling again. It had belonged to a man who had probably died on this ship. According to the security tag clipped to his breast pocket his name had been Kyle Rose. I hung the jacket back on its peg but I took the tag, thinking it might come in useful later.
“Show me the layout of this floor,” I said. Trixie projected the image in front of me. More by luck than skill I was now less than a hundred yards from the vault that held the Navigator. And by ‘vault’ I mean something comparable to a bank vault. The Navigator was the most valuable thing on the ship and the precautions taken to protect it reflected that. I’ve seen perhaps half-a-dozen bank vaults in my time – most of them from both the outside and the inside. Manufacturers like to strongly hint that their vaults are impenetrable but they know better than to guarantee the fact. Vault makers are aware that there are people like me around who see the phrase ‘impregnable vault’ as a challenge – and some of us are very good at what we do. Of course, when rising to such a challenge I would normally make sure I had all the state-of-the-art equipment that stolen money could buy. At this moment I had at my disposal a small tool roll and a fire axe.
The Celestia’s Navigator was a fully-fledged artificial sentience – which was a good few rungs higher on the evolutionary ladder than an artificial intelligence. Where an AI could control a robot or even a team of robots, an AS could control a whole city. Or a battleship and all of its Warbirds. An artificial sentience is like a human brain – only more so. The earliest ones had been based on a mapping of the human brain. But then AS’s started improving themselves. Today only an AS can understand and build another AS. This fact makes a lot of people uncomfortable.
Artificial sentience, like a lot of military hardware, had been outlawed after the War ended. People didn’t want their cities – their lives – being controlled by machines. It is no exaggeration to say that people were terrified of them. An artificial intelligence is just a collection of clever algorithms that you could take apart and understand, but a sentient is altogether different. Manufacture of them had ceased almost twenty years ago. When an AS stopped functioning – because of damage or sabotage or whatever – it wasn’t repaired or replaced. Those that remain are rare and therefore valuable. More valuable now than when the Celestia’s Navigator had been placed in its vault. That’s why I wanted to break in and retrieve it. But I was going to need more than an axe. Luckily I was on a military warship that was stuffed to the gills with hardw
are. Everything I needed would be here. Somewhere.
Chapter Nine
The vault that housed the Celestia’s Navigator was an hermetically sealed room. Almost. It wasn’t quite self-contained and had some services piped or wired in from outside. These external connections were vulnerabilities that could be exploited – if you knew how. It’s not like you see in the movies – there are no conveniently placed wide metal air shafts that a thief can crawl through. A rat couldn’t fit through the widest pipe that passed into the vault. A cockroach might just about manage it, as long as it didn’t trigger the intrusion countermeasures when it got inside.
There were three types of sensor in the vault to detect intruders. The floor was one huge pressure mat, sensitive enough to pick up anything heavier than a housefly. Around the walls was a network of heat and motion detectors watching every corner of the vault including the ceiling. And finally there were video cameras linked to the security database. These used facial and gait recognition to check whether a person entering the vault was authorised to be there. If you triggered any of the sensors or your face or movements didn’t match an authorised profile, you would be fried by one of six high-power lasers that could target any spot in the room. There was nowhere to hide.
Forty years ago, the defences in the vault would have been state-of-the-art and military-strength – and even today they were pretty effective. The vault’s active anti-intrusion measures can only be deactivated for someone who has an appropriate level of authorisation according to the Celestia’s security database. I didn’t have security clearance of any kind.
The Navigator itself was housed in an oblong case like a sarcophagus – though people in my profession tended to refer to these cases as ‘treasure chests’. When the artificial sentience was sealed in its case, it was virtually impervious to external attack. The case also contained an explosive device that could be triggered remotely, destroying both the Navigator and whoever had tried to steal it. This in-built bomb cannot be disarmed locally, so it is best not to do anything to trigger it.
All of these details about the vault’s security were publicly available and had been when the Celestia first came into service. Vault manufacturer’s always like to boast about how good their security systems are. It serves to warn off anyone who might think of trying to break into it and it is great publicity for the manufacturer. What you don’t find out in the open are details about the internal workings of a new vault mechanism.
With most old technology, you can usually find detailed specifications and video tear-downs that show you how the thing was put together. Bank vaults and safes tend to be an exception. Manufacturers never allow these details out into the wild – because there is always someone somewhere using a twenty-year-old safe. Details only leak out if someone manages to obtain one of the old safes and takes it apart. Manufacturers prevent this by offering good money to buy back old examples. And details are never leaked by disgruntled employees because the manufacturers have ways of dealing with such people. Permanently.
But no matter how good a vault is, it is always placed within a structure of some kind and connected up to that structure’s systems. In this case, the vault was housed in a battleship. An old battleship. That meant there would, in all probability, be weaknesses I could exploit. In all probability.
When I was a kid, I had a friend, Abbie, who collected old hardware. Her bedroom was full of the stuff. When I first saw it, I couldn’t see the appeal. Those old boxes were slow and the software was glitchy and you couldn’t play the latest games. And most of them smelled funny – a combination of old plastic and burning dust when you turned them on. Sometimes there were sparks and small fires. But Abbie liked to tinker with them and I learned a few things from watching her. Like the fact that old things often work like simpler versions of new things and helped you to learn how stuff worked. And old boxes didn’t have the same safeguards as new ones, so you could often do things that new tech didn’t allow you to. That’s an idea I’ve used a few times in the years since then. But most significantly I learned that some people just enjoyed the challenge of keeping old stuff working. Computers, operating systems, software, watches, handguns, or whatever.
Abbie would have had a field day on the Celestia but sadly I’d lost touch with her long ago. Given time I could probably have tracked her down – most people are locatable unless they take active measures not to be. But I didn’t need Abbie. There were a lot of people like her out there and I was sure some of them had a thing for forty-year-old military technology.
As far as anyone knew, the Celestia had been lost in battle and no one was sure where. But she had a sister ship that had survived the conflict. The Achilles had probably ended up as a floating museum or a restaurant. At least the Celestia had been spared that indignity. If I could find an enthusiast who had maintained or salvaged the Achilles’s hardware and software, I could get an insight into how the Celestia was set up. I explained my plan to Trixie. I don’t think she was impressed.
“I need you to find me a geek,” I said. “I mean an enthusiast.”
“I know what a geek is.”
Was she looking at me when she said that?
Trixie made a connection to one of the satellites orbiting Saphira and in relatively short order had managed to piece together much of the information I needed. She showed me a three-dimensional plan of the Celestia’s systems, all wrapped around a blank spot that was the lack of details about the vault itself.
There was an impressive refrigeration system that fed ice-cold fluid into the vault. The Navigator obviously needed cooling – and a lot of it when working at full capacity. Though as it was now, with the ship mostly in standby mode, the Navigator could probably get by on passive cooling alone. But an idea was forming in my head that would put the refrigeration system to use.
The Navigator was effectively a self-contained computer system, isolated from the rest of the ship’s network. Data was passed into the Navigator by the ship and the Navigator then passed data out again – and that was it. The volumes of data shared were massive, but there was no interaction beyond that. Try to pass anything other than authorised data streams to the Navigator and the firewalls – either the ship’s or the Navigator’s or probably both – would quarantine the intrusive code and dissect it with lethal force.
The Celestia’s own computer system was a relatively unsophisticated ancestor of a modern system that I was familiar with. The network that connected the ship’s day-to-day systems was more or less isolated from the ship’s security network. This wasn’t unusual forty years ago and it’s still fairly common now. Information technology departments don’t trust security departments and vice versa. Each sees the other as a potential source of risk and each wants to be the one with ultimate control of network security – so they have their own systems that barely talk to one another. While this can enhance security, it can also introduce vulnerabilities. People like me delight in discovering and exploiting these vulnerabilities.
The Navigator, the ship’s computer network, and the security system all passed data to one another, but lacking the ability to rigorously test this data, they effectively accepted it on trust. If security said something was secure, the other two systems wouldn’t – and couldn’t – argue, because they had no way of checking for themselves. This was something I was sure I could exploit. Somehow.
Vaults are specifically designed to keep people out. They are created by people whose job it is to think up possible ways of entry and then make sure that these ways won’t work. Manufacturers even employ thieves to try and break into their newly designed vaults to test them. I’ve never been asked to do this. Which is a good thing, because if people know you’re a thief and know how to contact you to offer you a job, you’re probably in jail.
Prisons are the opposite of vaults. They are specifically designed to stop people from breaking out. Getting out of a prison can be tricky. On the other hand, breaking into a prison is relatively easy. I can say thi
s based on experience, having sneaked into penitentiaries on two occasions on different planets. Prison designers don’t expect people to try and break in. And this set me thinking...
People who build vaults aren’t going to put a lot of effort into preventing someone from breaking out of them. Why would they? In fact, many vaults have systems in place to allow people to get out if they are accidentally locked in. Having a bank employee slowly suffocate in your vault is not the sort of publicity you want as a manufacturer. Authorised persons can get out of a vault relatively easily. I wasn’t sure where I was going with this idea – I was not an authorised person and I wasn’t actually inside the vault, but I felt I was on to something.
I sat down behind the desk in Kyle Rose’s little office and put my feet up. When you relax, great ideas sometimes pop into your head.
I was going to need access to the Celestia’s security system in order to achieve anything. I asked Trixie to bring together all of the data she’d found on the operating system and software that had been used on this class of battleship. She made a tutting noise.
“What?” I asked.
“Nothing.”
“No, you obviously have some criticism of my plan – tell me.”
Trixie made a sighing sound. I’m not sure where she learned to do things like that. “The problem with lines of reasoning inspired by the exploits of Sherlock Holmes is that people sometimes miss the more obvious solutions,” she said. She may have been quoting some long-dead academic killjoy.
“You think there’s a simpler solution?” I asked, sceptical.
“No, I’m sure that you spending hours sifting through software manuals and millions of lines of code is much simpler than what I was going to suggest.”
Sarcasm, that was another thing she’d picked up somewhere.
“Go on, astound me with your brilliance,” I said.
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