Netlink

by William H. Keith

  “Gok! Can we still—”

  “We’ll fly the stuff out manually if we have to. If Skymaster comes back on-line, we’ll want to zipsqueal the goodies up and out of here fast, before the Impies can close off the line or track her down. We won’t have more than a few seconds. Understand?”

  “Affirmative. We’ll do what we can.”

  “I know you will, Rover. Sandman, standing by.”

  Gunfire thumped and crackled in the distance. How long could they afford to just sit here, waiting for the next Impie counterattack?

  One of the civilians, a small, silver-haired woman with elven features, approached him. “Lieutenant?”

  “What is it?”

  “I think we’ve found something you should see.”

  “Show me.”

  The something was exposed in a tangle of fiber optic wiring and circuit boards behind an access panel that had been opened in the lab’s primary communications center. It was a silvery package, a meter long and ten centimeters wide, with hundreds of attachment points for hair-thin fiber data feeds. One of his marines was standing close by, a scanner in his hand.

  “We were doing a routine trace on the physical hardware, Lieutenant,” the marine said. He pointed at the intruding object. “That shouldn’t be there.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “I’ve been in comtech for fifteen years, sir,” the man said with quiet certainty. “I think I know my way around the inside of a com junction access.” He gestured with the scanner. “I’m reading a pretty intense mag field inside there, too. Like a QEC array.”

  Clifford frowned. “Is that what we’re looking for?”

  The marine shrugged. “Beats me. But it’s damned unusual.”

  “We are looking,” the woman said quickly, “for a new type of electronic device that will greatly improve the range and efficiency of radio communications. This is almost certainly that device. And look…”

  She reached out with one gloved hand, tracing a line of katakana characters engraved on the gleaming surface.

  “O-denwa,” he said, reading the word. He looked at her, puzzled. “Telephone?”

  “An antique communications device—”

  “I know what a telephone is,” he said testily.

  “Then you know that it’s obsolete technology, that it hasn’t been used in the Shichiju’s Core Worlds in I don’t know how many centuries.”

  “A code word,” he said.

  “Or a joke.”

  “What kind of joke?”

  “The original Inglic word ‘telephone’ meant ‘speaking at a distance.’ The ‘O’ at the beginning is an honorific—”

  “I also speak Nihongo,” he said. “So we’ve found an honorable telephone that uses quantum electron cages.” He looked at the woman, knowing she wasn’t telling everything she knew. Still, in combat anything having to do with efficient communications was important. “Can we rip this thing out and bring it along?”

  “We’ll get right on it, Lieutenant,” the marine said.

  “I would recommend waiting until we’re certain we no longer need a direct communication link with Aresynch,” the civilian said. “It looks to me like this device is central to the lab’s communications system. Pull it out and the whole thing goes down. But we can have all of the connections tagged and ready to cut as soon as you tell us.”

  He nodded. “Okay. Get on it, and keep me posted.” A sudden idea occurred to him, and he opened one of his suit’s comm channels. “Dr. Browning. This is Clifford.”

  “Damn it, Lieutenant, can’t you null-headed military types get linked in? I’m trying to get some work done in—”

  “Is there a directory in there under the heading of either denwa or o-denwa? Something with technical specs?”

  There was a pause. “Yes.” There was another pause. “God, Lieutenant, this is it! How did you know?”

  “Maybe us null-headed military types are good for something.”

  “This is what we came for. I’m wrapping it up for transmittal.”

  “Sandman, Red Rover,” he said, shifting channels. “We’ve got the goods.”

  “Well done, Rover,” Sandman replied. “Let’s get things rolling. On the double, now…!”

  Kara could feel the hunters now, growing closer… and more certain of the location of their prey. Her Companion’s automated defense program continued to mislead and misdirect, leaking seemingly inadvertent signals from time to time that suggested that the intruder was accessing the system from a completely different node. Those tactics could not keep the dogs off indefinitely, however. Sooner or later they would hem her in, even if they had to go the brute-force method of switching off node after node until they had her location positively identified.

  She had cut off her direct link with the surface to keep the internal computer security forces from tracking the line directly back to her, but she’d continued listening from her hiding place in the housekeeping subnode to the radio transmissions between different members of the assault force. Those messages were encrypted, of course, to keep the Imperials from listening in, but the encryption algorithm had been stored in her Companion’s memory, and she could hear those voices as distant, Inglic whispers at the very edge of her awareness.

  “Sandman, Red Rover,” she heard. “We’ve got the goods.”

  “Well done, Rover. Let’s get things rolling. On the double, now…!”

  “Skymaster? This is Sandman. Are you there?”

  “This is Skymaster,” Kara replied, opening the channel. She could sense other alarms coming on, as her unauthorized transmission was detected. “Go ahead, Sandman, but make it fast!”

  “We got it. Are you ready to accept delivery?”

  “Ready and waiting. Shoot it on up.”

  “On the way, Skymaster!”

  Data flowed in, flooding in through a set of Mars-pointing dish antennae, and Kara was waiting to capture the information and redirect it. In seconds, almost as quickly as she received it, she fed the stream into encrypted packets and fired them outward in a tight, hard beam toward a precisely targeted patch of the sky.

  She didn’t wait for an acknowledgement from her target. The beam’s destination was in orbit around Saturn, currently some eighty light minutes from Mars, and it would be over two and a half hours before a reply could reach her.

  Kara started to break her interface.…

  * * *

  There was the intruder! Ishimoto had been momentarily baffled when the intruder hadn’t turned up inside the surface scanning node, but that one radio transmission, diamond-clear and easy to pinpoint in its proximity, clearly placed the enemy agent back in the planetary defense node. As Ishimoto emerged from surface scanning, he could sense him, a shadowy form beginning to waver and dissolve as he broke contact. Ishimoto sprang forward, reaching out—

  Kara felt a sudden, throat-gripping panic, coupled with the sensation of being trapped. Something had her, was holding her, pinning her immobile inside the communications module access stack. She willed her viewpoint within the simulated world forward, hard, then shifted it suddenly to the side, a set of movements that had no real existence in anything like three-dimensional space but that translated conveniently as a violent twisting in her unseen assailant’s grasp.

  She couldn’t break free, couldn’t get a purchase on her surroundings in order to fight back. Worse, she could feel parts of herself dissociating, as though her ego, her very self-awareness was fading away. The sensation carried with it a sharp and indescribable terror; it was like a nightmare she’d had more than once as a child, a dream of being trapped, unable to move while all the time she was being devoured by the nameless horror that had trapped her.

  Fear, she realized, was at least part of her attacker’s arsenal; to fight back she would have to control her own fear and deliver an attack of her own. Her Companion held her single available on-line weapon sheathed in a carefully protected reserve of memory, a one-shot program designed by the CMI li
nk experts that was probably similar to what was being used on her, a software virus that could target a specific set of nested programs and begin unraveling the codes that held them together and made them work. Launching the weapon required only a thought. She barely managed that much, though, and it was good that the virus was both self-aiming and capable of recognizing its user as something best not destroyed.

  To her blurred and thinning senses, it seemed as though the water around her had gone from emerald green to murky; she could scarcely see a thing, and the susurrations of voices in the background were muted to a faint and distant rumble, unintelligible and vague. She kept thrashing in the thing’s hold, however… and suddenly she was free, moving upward through murky darkness toward a pale and shimmering illusion of light.

  She tried to break contact with the ViRsimulation and failed. Her attacker was pursuing her; she couldn’t see it, but she could feel it moving in, rising up beneath her like some great, hungry monster of the depths, and the panic she felt was stopping her from completing the necessary code uploads. If her weapon had hurt her enemy at all, she couldn’t tell; her desperate attack had probably startled it enough to let her get away once, but she was not going to escape a second time.

  Again, she brought the necessary code phrases to the surface of her mind, a command through her Companion to sever immediately the electronic link with the Aresynch Net’s simulated world…

  … and then she was awake, awake! Groggy, dazed from the rough psychic mauling she’d just received, but awake. Hastily, she unstrapped herself from the comm module couch, forgetting for a moment that she was in zero-G and nearly rebounding from the curved wall facing the couch in her haste to get away. Partly, she knew that her attacker in cyberspace must have learned enough about her in their brief exchange to know where she’d been jacked in. Security guards—the flesh-and-blood kind, not faceless programs—would be on their way at this moment to arrest whoever they found inside this module.

  More, though, the terror of her brush with that unseen phantom in the machine had imprinted a stark, cold terror on her mind. As she slid the door to the module open, she kept her eyes on the couch and the surrounding plastic consoles and surfaces, half expecting to see it emerge from those shadowed plastic surfaces, still hungry for her soul.

  “Lieutenant?”

  Lechenko’s voice startled her so badly she gasped, spinning, and nearly lost her grip on a handhold, which was all that was keeping her from flying off into the center of the room at the moment.

  “Gok, you scared me—”

  “Are you okay?” Lechenko asked. He was staring hard at her face, his own expression one of worry. “You’re not looking so hot.…”

  “And I’m glad as hell to see your ugly men as well,” she said. She was panting as though she’d just completed a long, hard run. He pulled himself a little closer, levering himself against a handhold to peer closely into her face. Kara pushed off from the module and let herself drift into his arms.

  “Lieutenant—”

  She hugged him, needing the closeness, the purely physical contact, and after a moment’s hesitation, he hugged her back. Abruptly, she let go. “Let’s get out of here, Vas, now!”

  “What… happened?” he asked, uncertain. The entire interlude had lasted no more than a couple of seconds. “How did it go in there?”

  She blinked. She’d momentarily forgotten that for the entire time she’d been jacked into the Aresynch Net, Sergeant Lechenko had been floating out here, trying to look harmless and anonymous, and totally unaware of what was going on either inside Kara’s mind or on the surface of the planet below.

  “We won,” she said brusquely. “Now let’s move the hell out of here before we get stomped on!”

  Reaching into his coverall pocket, he produced his own nanogrown pistol, a duplicate of the one Kara had in her own pocket. He glanced left and right, up and down, then nodded toward the nearest entrance to the comm module chamber. “That way.”

  “Go. I’ll follow.”

  “I’ll call the others and have them meet us at the rendezvous.”

  Each member of the team had the same set of nanogrown toys that Kara had manufactured in her room: a two-way radio transceiver transformed from a pocket TV; a tiny nageyari palmgun, a weapon just small enough to hide nuzzled away behind an open hand.

  Kara drew her weapon and checked it with an expert snick-snick of the receiver. Nageyari was Nihongo for “dart,” and it was, in fact, an antiquated weapon, a magazine-fed pistol based on an experimental and unsuccessful idea from six hundred years before. The Gyrojet had fired small, self-propelled rockets instead of conventional bullets; its disadvantage, and the reason it had never been produced in large numbers, was that it took so long for the bullet-sized rocket to accelerate to killing speed that it was useless for close-range combat. At point-blank range, you could do more damage to an enemy by hitting him with your fist, while at longer ranges it was no more accurate than a conventional bullet from a handgun—which meant not at all.

  The nageyari’s rounds packed considerably more thrust than their twentieth-century predecessors, however, and they possessed microsensors in their tips that homed on the largest mass lying in the narrow cone of their electronic vision and steered the tiny rocket home. Most important, if you couldn’t pack a hand laser, nageyaris were ideal for zero-G combat. The recoil from a standard handgun would kick the shooter backward like a burst from a rocket; at the least it would set him tumbling in midair. The nageyari, however, kicked the low-mass round clear of the muzzle at a speed that gave the weapon negligible recoil, but the round’s microengine was burning at full thrust before it was more than ten centimeters from the muzzle, accelerating it at eighty Gs.

  Her weapon carried a grip magazine with seven explosive rounds; when those were gone, she had no reloads.

  But then, if she and Lechenko found themselves in a fire-fight, they would be dead if it lasted more than a few seconds or a few rounds anyway.

  Japanese security men emerged from the doorway just as Vasily and Kara approached it, clinging to the guide line. “Ugoku na!” the one in the lead yelled. “Don’t move! Both of you! Don’t move!”

  “Dare-ni mukatte mono itten-dayo!” Lechenko barked. A rough translation would have been something like, “Who do you think you’re talking to?” but it was rude in its bluntness, and his sheer bulk carried undeniable threat. The guards stopped, bewildered—but then the one in the lead raised the ugly little hand laser he held in his right hand, his expression shifting from confusion to one of stubborn determination.

  Lechenko’s dart gun had been concealed in his hand. He fired it before the other could aim his weapon, the round giving a soft chuff as it emerged from the gun’s stubby barrel, then making a sound like crisply tearing cloth as it streaked toward the surprised-looking guard and impacted squarely in the center of his chest, exploding in a messy spray of blood and hurtling tissue. The man screamed; the impact, high on his chest, was hard enough to send him tumbling backward to collide head-on with his partner.

  Lechenko fired a second time before the two men, one living and surprised, the other now very dead, could disentangle themselves. Blood misted in the air around them as the round hissed home, and the other guard’s head split in a gory splatter of blood, bone, and grey matter.

  “Come on!” Lechenko called, pushing off from one of the hand lines stanchions and gliding toward the room’s exit.

  Kara was still feeling unsteady, both physically and mentally. It was always tough readjusting to the real world after a deep involvement with a simulation, and her emergence from the Aresynch Net had been a lot more sudden than she would have preferred. Too, Kara had never been in a point-blank firefight in zero-G before, even in simulation, and the bloody display jolted her, threatening to overload senses already close to shutdown from sheer psychological shock. Her warrior’s training in microgravity had stressed the need for maneuver in three dimensions in a zero-G hand-to-hand, but she’
d had no idea that such a fight could be so damned bloody.

  Somehow, though, she kept up with Lechenko as the two of them hauled their way along the travel line, moving handover-hand as quickly as they could back toward the access hub of their hotel.

  They had two possible options now. One was to try to get the whole team back aboard a different passenger liner, one of several outbound ships that would carry them to worlds where they could make the passage, possibly with different faces, back into Confederation space. The other, riskier in its implications, but perhaps safest in the long run, was to actually remain at Aresynch for a week or two, blending in with the other civilians, going about carefully prepared ordinary business, until the excitement generated by the assault at Noctis Labyrinthus had died down.

  Together, they emerged from a transit tunnel, entering a spherical, microgravity lounge area with numerous exits to other parts of the station. This was where they were supposed to meet the others. Several civilians were there, crossing from one tunnel to another or floating in front of the immense viewall that dominated one bulkhead, the screen displaying a vertiginous view straight down the brightly lit sky-el into the Martian night. Had they heard something about the battle being fought down there already?

  The tunnel to the Sorano Hoteru, marked by a large, holographic sign, was just ahead.

  “Tomare!” a uniformed security guard cried. “Halt!”

  It was too late to duck back down the tunnel; Lechenko had already emerged into the open, and Kara was clinging to the travel line just outside the tunnel’s mouth. Word about their escape from the comm module room was clearly out. Probably one of those guards had been linked into Central Security when he’d died, and their images had been captured and relayed.

  Two guards confronted them from just ahead, lasers drawn. Two more emerged from a side passageway, wearing light armor and communications helmets. Lechenko and one of the guards ahead fired almost simultaneously, the soldier’s laser slashing into the New American’s stomach at the same time as a nageyari rocket made its ripping-cloth sound and streaked toward its target. Lechenko screamed and clutched at his belly; Kara smelled burned flesh and hair mingled with the coppery odor of blood and the stink of feces. Kara fired an instant later, hitting a second guard in the throat with her rocket… and suddenly jittering globules of scarlet blood were drifting everywhere, exploding in crimson cascades when they hit an obstacle.