To Touch the Stars (Founding of the Federation Book 2)

by Chris Hechtl

  “He's in a group marriage. Don't play dating service for them please,” Jack said, shaking his head. He'd almost said with his help but caught himself. Clyde insisted on playing the majordomo butler, though he was more of a personal assistant to the household. He and Bonnie barely spoke to each other as far as Jack knew.

  He hadn't wanted servants; he'd thought the bots and Athena were enough. But when the kids had come along his attitude had changed quickly. They were so much a handful, the feeding, teething … he shuddered. He was glad they'd decided to stop at three for the time being. The kids had been in daycare for a bit, but they still needed care at home. He hadn't been happy about having a Neo in the house. It smacked of slavery, but Aurelia had championed Bonnie. She'd snuck the bonobo in to bond with Zack. He'd hit it off with her right away, becoming inseparable. Each of the kids had loved how she was their size. He'd reluctantly agreed to a trial period with Zack. She'd stayed ever since. Both she and Clyde were quiet and loving, good with the kids, and helped project a soothing comfortable atmosphere at home.

  “Almost done, kiddo?” Hannah teased, coming up to stand over Zack's shoulder. He sighed and pushed his tablet away. “Ah, I guess so,” she murmured.

  “I just ran the homework check. I'm in the green,” Zack said.

  “You passed. Though a bit more diligence on your part would better your scores,” Athena said.

  Zack frowned and looked up. “You stay out of this,” he said, shaking his small fist. “I don't understand why I have to learn how to do your job.”

  “Because you then know when it is done right. And the thought processes involved,” Hannah said, tweaking his ear. She pulled out the chair across from him as he moved the board between them. “You ready to have at thee? Or do you want a drink and a snack first?”

  “I'll snack on you first,” the boy said with a wicked grin. “Then dad for desert,” he said over his shoulder. Jack snorted as he came over to observe their game.

  Chapter 26

  The first reception of Daedalus report 1.4 years after it was transmitted came almost to the day when it was expected. There was some consternation when Miss Cole triumphantly announced it in a press conference just ahead of the leaks. That led to celebrations within the company and with the general public. The media was all over the story. Lagroose let them pick up the transmission to make certain it wasn't faked. Some cynics claimed it was fake despite that but the fact that a ship or probe could go that distance put them in the very tiny minority. They were drowned out by excited people.

  “This is what I call inspired and inspiring,” Jack said with a broad smile. He rubbed his hands together. “Now we can finally do things. Really move things along.”

  “You noticed Pavilion and Star Reach are having trouble constructing their hulls?” Levare asked, smiling mischievously. Both companies had made considerable bones about every construction delay Lagroose had reported. Now that they had such problems any attempt by Miss Cole to twist their tails was met with comments about a poor sportsman-like behavior.

  “Not that they are admitting it publicly. But their public shares have bumped up anyways. Our public shares have nearly doubled.” He could retire with the shares he had. If he'd done it for the money, he could have retired ages ago. He was in it for the long haul because he loved his job. But some days were better than others. Daedalus's first transmission was a vindication of everything they'd done so far. A proof of concept. But there was that nagging worry still lingering under the surface of his subconsciousness. The feeling that something wasn't quite right with the situation. He felt like he was on the edge of a cliff, waiting for someone to give him a push. That bothered him.

  “And I've already gotten requests for Daedalus's raw hyper log and telemetry feed from both of them and the Chinese. And now the Americans and Russians are getting into the act,” Jack replied, rolling his eyes. “And a finely worded protest from the UN president about how we are creating nationalism just when they were beginning to retire individual countries from independent states into a collective planetary government.”

  “Not our problem,” Levare stated with a Gallic shrug.

  “My sentiments exactly.” Both men smiled in complete agreement then paused to reflect on things.

  Jack frowned. “Do they understand the ship is overdue?” he finally asked softly. Levare froze. Jack stared at the main view screen in his office. It showed a gorgeous image of a Mars sunrise in space, with all the stations drifting in orbit. If one looked carefully, they could pick out various stations. He usually liked to play that game but right now he had more important things on his mind.

  “They may have had a delay. An engineering casualty. Or Captain Locke might have opted to linger in Alpha Centauri for scientific reasons,” Levare said cautiously.

  “And you don't believe any of that for a second,” Jack said, not looking at the other man. There was a long silence as Levare thought it over. According to the flight plan Daedalus was supposed to be back within a year. A year and a half without any sign …

  “There is still hope,” he finally said looking at his boss. “Isn't there?”

  “I don't know,” Jack said, unsure himself. “But we better start preparing our fallback position in case something had happened to them. I'll prime Miss Cole to go over and update her go to hell plan,” he said, pursing his lips. “I believe she's doing an interview with Miss Fraser at Mars News. Background material fed to her by um, what's her name … Iona Cheong,” he said snapping his fingers as Athena supplied the name to a monitor in his view.

  “I thought they were airing that concert by Original Syn?” Levare asked, wrinkling his nose. The singer wasn't one of his favorites but was a major hit on Mars.

  “We preempted them. I doubt she's happy, but I think she'll get over it,” Jack said with a wan smile. “Get with the coders and designers, I want you to go over that telemetry feed with a fine tooth comb. Pick through it and compare it to the simulations you are running.”

  “Yes sir.”

  “I'll help,” Athena volunteered.

  Jack looked up. “Please do,” he said. Levare raised his eyebrows in surprise at his boss's response as those eyes leveled to meet his. Jack shrugged minisculy though, so he didn't ask the burning question about how and why Athena had volunteered or why Jack had accepted it so readily.

  “God help them. Help them get home,” Jack murmured as Levare left.

  -*-*-^-*-*-

  Athena, Trevor, and the Lagroose coders did a complete tear down of the Daedalus code while the design team and a side team of coders and software bots plugged the telemetry into a simulator and then compared what they saw with what they had predicted.

  A tech stumbled onto code changes to Daedalus while doing a comparison of the ship's telemetry dump just before her scheduled jump. Fixed variables in the telemetry dump changed, something that was not supposed to happen. Since Trevor and his supervisor were off shift, the tech worked long into the night running comparison simulations to see if he had missed something. What he found shocked and alarmed him.

  The supervisor, Miss Lang, came in to find him still plugging away at his station. “You still here?” she demanded. “What did I tell you Carlos about staying over? We're not paying you overtime for watching porn …” she was cut off when he waved a hand at her. She frowned ferociously then came over to see what he was doing.

  “It's a virus,” Carlos whispered, licking his lips.

  “A virus?” She asked.

  “I think. A worm at least. I think I found one.”

  “You think?” she demanded, hands on her hips.

  “It is one. A nasty piece of work,” he said, fingers still moving as he directed modules and bots to narrow it down. “It's a bastard, ma'am, pardon my French.”

  He felt one hand grip his shoulder, then smelled her perfume as she leaned over him to see. “Where?” she demanded.

  He pulled up a display on his secondary feed and pointed to it. “In the
telemetry from Daedalus. It … ma'am, I caught it trying to get out of the archives just now. That's how I figured it out actually. I thought it was a serious bug. It's tricky, but I think I found a trace of it. I'm trying to nail it down by doing line comparisons.”

  “You are telling me, you found a virus in the mainframe of our first and only starship from 1.4 light years out? By running comparisons of the ongoing simulations that the mainframe was running in parallel to their transit?” she demanded carefully. “Back up. Take it from the top, Carlos,” she said as she pulled a chair over to sit next to him.

  He bobbed a nod. “Yes, ma'am.” He looked up to her and noted her jaw setting. “We'll need help on this. The emulator and newest generation AI search bots found the errant code strings buried in various modules. I logged it with links but when I went back the links had been overwritten. It didn't make any sense. I thought it was junk code or like I said a bug, but there were links that I back traced to files that shouldn't exist! I checked the numbers, the variables that are being changed are constants. The speed of light doesn't change!” he said, shaking his head.

  Her grip on his shoulder tightened until he winced. He looked at her hand, her knuckles were white. Slowly she let up. “Sorry kid. Okay, you are right there. Something is up. Now, what about the virus? What makes you think it is a virus?” she asked carefully.

  “It's in the code ma'am. It's … look,” he said, pulling up the files. “I caught a snapshot of it. It's a beauty. It infiltrates the system, ghosting in and disabling the antivirus. It's like HIV for computers,” he said.

  “I'm not following you,” she said, fighting exasperation. “Carlos, considering I haven't had my second cup of coffee this morning, let's keep it simple, shall we?”

  “Yes, ma'am,” he said. He pointed to the screen again. “It is in the database. When I went to open the archives to compare the files it came out. More files than what I wanted came with me. I dumped them in a temp file, but the bot I was working on just froze up on me. I thought it was a system update but then this,” he said highlighting a string of code. It went to a module that shouldn't be there. “And then this,” he said, he pointed to a simulation. “The log is backed up independently. The files didn't match up when my first gen comparison bot finished, which was why I was making another. I thought I'd goofed it up,” he said, hunching his shoulders a bit in embarrassment. “But it's not. I got it right,” he said, now agitated.

  “Shit,” Miss Lang murmured. She shook her head and then accessed her cyber implants. She put out a priority call to Trevor and Athena. “They aren't going to like this,” she murmured.

  “I'm more worried about the people on that ship, ma'am!” Carlos said, eyes wide. Miss Lang froze and then nodded slowly.

  -*-*-^-*-*-

  Once she knew what to look for, Athena isolated sections of the virus and dissected it with Trevor and his grim team. They took it down to binary and then ran sectional comparisons, like running DNA comparisons in some way. The virus was indeed there, and very tricky. It was split up between thousands of various files, with pieces of it tucked away in a lot of different files. They looked like junk code or code left in as tags for various modules, but once they put the pieces together they got a better picture of the thing.

  Trevor put his people on scanning Icarus and the various systems to find the thing. They found something similar in Icarus and tore her software apart to get at it. Miss Lang and Levare put the virus into a simulator and ran it. They adjusted the clock in the sim to speed it up to see just what it could do. The intent of the virus was to drive the ship off course. Slowly at first, just a little here and there in subtle adjustments. But if that didn't work it was to launch an all-out attack when they attempted to jump back to Sol.

  Athena and Trevor instituted a program to inoculate the company's antivirus and firewalls. It was a headache, and in many ways like closing the barn door after the horses got out, but they didn't want a repeat. During the last stages of the autopsy of the virus, Athena found Descartes signature; he had signed the work with his glyph, a purple raptor skull with red glowing eyes. It was embedded in the code and only came up once they had the entire virus mapped out.

  “Son. Of. A. Bitch,” the AI said during the initial briefing to Jack and the senior staff, practically snarling each word as she spaced them out. Jack blinked in surprise as he looked up. Trevor pursed his lips thoughtfully but didn't reply.

  “I think that sums up some of our sentiments,” Miss Lang said with a shaky voice. “What do we do?”

  “We will figure it out. You give Carlos a pat on the back. Then move on this thing. Keep tearing into it. Keep the FBI and me up to date,” Trevor said to her image. She nodded and cut the link.

  Athena took the moment during their side conversation to adjust her emotion emulator. The module showed that she was clearly pissed, but she needed to regain control and composure. She wondered briefly if humans had similar problems while she returned her attention to Jack's office.

  “Roman has been told; he's off site as you know. Investigating that mess in L-5 orbit. He said he'd be here as soon as possible,” Trevor said. Jack nodded. “We've alerted the FBI cybercrimes division as well as Interpol and other agencies,” Trevor said. “We're keeping them up to date. They wanted us to freeze our own investigation until they could send people up here to secure evidence …” he shook his head. “It just took me an hour to explain how that was impossible. It's all ones and zeros light years away.”

  “But we have a copy of it,” Jack said. “And you said you know who did it?” he asked, looking up to cue Athena.

  “Yes. A very, some would say, almost mythical hacker named Descartes,” Trevor said before Athena could reply.

  “Him again,” Athena said, sounding disgusted.

  “Descartes. The name is familiar,” Jack said, not registering the AI's almost human tone of voice.

  “It should be. He is an open source anarchist. He makes good products under a number of names; we were using them early on when I was younger,” Athena reminded him. “But after a series of security issues and a couple upgrades, we got suspicious. We, the coders and I, I mean,” the AI said. “We didn't find anything initially, but then I found he'd embedded nanoviruses in the code that was taking sips of and snapshots of data and passing it on to other viruses encrypting and taking the data packets apart, then slipping them through my firewalls. He stole copies of my kernel code as well as a lot of proprietary data before I locked the slippery bastard out. Now we have a block on all open source gear and software,” the AI explained.

  Jack nodded slowly, surprised by the AI's incensed reaction. He had to call it that; even if she just had a voice he could tell she was pissed. Either a coder had tinkered with her coding to give her the illusion of emotions or something else was going on. He made a mental note to find out which later. Discretely if at all possible, he thought. “I seem to recall catching flack over that. And the budget bump when we had to supply our own,” he said thoughtfully. Finally the lead hacker had a name, he thought.

  “It seemed political on the face of it because the media refused to report the viruses since their people couldn't see them. And at the time you didn't want to come forward with my existence.”

  Jack nodded. That last part hadn't changed, though by now with the bulk of Lagroose Industries employees knowing about Athena, she was considered an open secret.

  “I'm trying to track him again. He's gone to ground; hopefully he'll do it again and lie low.”

  “I'm more hopeful he'll slip up and you'll catch him. Or someone else will.”

  “He's good. He's got a lot of friends in government organizations as well as megacorps that pay for his services.”

  “He doesn't have friends; he's a hacker. A freelance mercenary for the highest bidder. He thrives on creating disorder; it's his calling card. Think of him as the Joker. He screws with people. He's a parasite, pure and simple.”

  “Then find him. We need t
o ice him. Permanently if necessary,” Roman said.

  “Like I said, I'm working on it. So is Trevor and our own coders. He … oh that's cute. He created a couple false back doors and left a trail there to let us think that was how he came in. I know differently. He didn't do this hack remotely. Someone handed him sections of the ship's code. Sylvia was a daughter of mine, I bet he used what he stole from me to mask the virus from her. I'll have to work with our coders on fixing it since it is a blind spot in my own vision. I don't like that,” the AI said, sounding annoyed and worried.

  “Neither do I,” Jack said, but not meaning the blind spot. Athena's new found … humanity, that was what he thought of it as was disturbing. He had a lot to think about he realized.

  “Cyber security is in agreement with me that someone slipped the code or sections of it to Descartes physically. Most likely by a flash drive, which means they let it pass groundside,” Athena reported. “It was recent, within a week of their departure.”

  “That gives us a time line to look for a suspect, but by now they could be long gone,” Roman mused rubbing his chin thoughtfully. “I'll have my people pull who had access.”

  “It could be blind too. Someone handed a crew member a flash drive with video or photos from home,” Athena said. “That's not from me, Trevor just sent it to me in a text. I am echoing this conversation to him. He can't respond well though; he's in the net.”

  “You and I both know it's almost impossible to plug those holes completely,” Jack sighed. “Tell Trevor I know he's up to his elbows in code but figure it out,” he ordered. “Do the best he can.”

  “No, but we're supposed to have a flag when important code is accessed and copied. I am suggesting an extensive review and overhaul since someone isn't paying attention. Nothing came up to my attention, so it definitely means someone in security or coding is or may be covering for someone,” Roman said looking up. He hadn't heard their side discussion.

  “Shit,” Jack said as his imagination took hold of that scenario.