by Diane Duane
"Stark," Ford said under his breath. Not quietly enough.
"You served under her, didn't you?" said Nathan. He knew well enough, but it was always best to have confirmation in matters like this.
Ford nodded. "I... I was her ex-o at Livingston Trench." He looked at the picture on the screen, then down at his own hands resting on the desk, raising them a little to study his fingers, watching for any trace of tremor. There was none. "She was relieved of command. No demotion... All the same, Nor-Pac Command recommended psychiatric evaluation. But she refused. And then, one day, she was just gone. Disappeared...” He shrugged, and shook his head. "You would have to know her, sir... know about her family, to under-stand. She—she's good."
Bridger caught a strange tinge of sadness in the gesture, and felt himself liking Ford even more. Definitely a good officer, if he could sympathize with someone like that. Because even though she would reject it and resent the offer, Marilyn Stark deserved sympathy. "I do know her," he said. "And how good she is. She should be. I taught her."
Westphalen stared at him. "You?"
"She was a cadet of mine at the Academy. I was her sponsor when she applied for her officer's bars." Is that what hurts inside you, Captain Nathan Bridger? Knowing that if you had made your doubts known, if you had withheld that sponsorship, then...
"... Her first command was a surface ship serving in the North Atlantic. There was a skirmish, and she fired first." It was a habit with the Stark family. "Two deaths resulted." He breathed in breathed out, looked at Ford, at all of them, but didn't really see any faces except for the ones that weren't there. "One of them was my son..."
"And now she's after you?" asked Hitchcock dubiously. Nathan came back with a little shudder that he turned into a shake of the head.
"No. I'm accidental. She's after the seaQuest."
"Sir," said Ford, "I can't believe she'd deliberately destroy her own ship."
"That's exactly why she wants to destroy it. If she can't have it, nobody can. And besides—if there's no seaQuest, her renegades and the others like them will own the sea." He grinned at them, a hard, tough expression that went better with his uniform than he probably knew himself. "What she didn't count on was a..." The grin broadened as he glanced at Hitchcock. "A 'tourist' on board. One whose knowledge predates hers." He tapped the desktop, drawing little arcs and circles with the tip of one finger. "I've been thinking that maybe we're going at this wrong. That maybe instead of attacking the virus we should"—the finger made a quick, curving sweep—"go around it."
"It might work," muttered Hitchcock. Her eyes were unfocused, and Nathan guessed she was studying schematics on a screen inside her own head, considering options. "You probably wouldn't have full propulsion and weapons, but..."
"Anything's better than what we've got." There was one other person on board that Stark wouldn't have anticipated when she laid her little traps. The Wolenczak boy. He might be a self-centered little creep sometimes, but so far as computers were concerned... "Coordinate things with Lucas."
"Yes, sir." Hitchcock whisked out, looking happier about things than she had done for a long time. Dr. Westphalen looked anything but.
"Weapons," she snapped. "That's what all this is really about, isn't it?"
Nathan Bridger allowed himself a single grunt of impatience at the bloody-minded attitude which by now should have been set aside. There was a time and a place for everything—but not this, not here and not now. "No, Doctor," he said. "It's about saving lives. Now, let's get to work...!"
* * *
Bridger stepped quietly out into the passageway that ran down from the docking bay. He felt weary—no, he felt exhausted, as though talking about his son, and thus supposedly unburdening himself of some of the weight of grief, had taken far more effort than saying nothing. But still: it had been said, and the three to whom he had spoken would perhaps have a better understanding now of why he had no desire ever again to sit in the captain's chair—at least, for any longer than it took to get them out of this present mess. Enough understanding at least to stop hounding, to just let matters rest.
Rest... The thought was an appealing one. And not just to Bridger. During the short briefing, if that was what it had really been, the repair teams had all come back to seaQuest, and he met them now, trailing along the passageway by ones and twos, dirty, bedraggled and dog-tired. So tired that they didn't even have the satisfaction of a good job well done. That would come later, after a few hours' sleep, a wash, a bite to eat; all the things they needed to make them feel human again, rather than small, insignificant parts of the machinery they had been fighting for so long. But there was one thing that he found encouraging.
Like the pair who had struggled out of their flooded TeamCraft, the repair crews were a mixture of science and military personnel. There had been no time, and fortunately no real inclination, to separate them out. They were separating now, just a bit; the beige suits and the black suits were tending to drift apart, rejoining their own people. But not all of them. A couple of the military crewmen were talking to a trio of scientists, and neither side seemed in too much of a hurry to break off the conversation. Shared tension, shared risk; all of a sudden there was common ground where none had been before. And shared scruffiness. Nathan was too polite to point out that both groups were equally grimy, equally sweaty, and except for the color of their jumpsuits and the length of their hair, they weren't easy to tell apart. In all sorts of ways, it was a start.
He headed for the bridge first. He and Ford spent some time there, with other crew members who would need to be involved, hanging over Hitchcock's station and examining the systems schematics in question. Hitchcock, of course, knew where all the changes and additions were, but the rest of the ship she knew mostly from schematic; whereas Nathan knew it from the guts up, having seen the guts put in. And this is where Stark went wrong, Nathan thought, pointing out the best weak spots to his eager pupils. She thinks that the people here will be trying to fix the problem in the software—not the hardware—and even if they tried some drastic rerouting with the hardware, they wouldn't know it well enough to do it fast. But there's someone on board who does know it that well. Bad luck for Stark—
"There," Nathan said, "and there, and there and there. Take those off the computer entirely, run 'em off whatever you like, laptops, scientific calculators, I don't care—then those conduits to those, don't go near the mains whatever you do or the computer'll sense the change and reroute them into the main network, and everything'll all get screwed up again. Just run the cables down the damn passageways; we're not trying for the school neatness award here."
Under the officers' directions, teams began to fan out through seaQuest and do things to her systems wiring that would have given most of her design team hives. The erstwhile chief of the design team was here, though, and had decided that hives were much preferable to being dead. In three or four corridors, one after another, combined science and Navy teams were going out to engage in constructive sabotage. The Navy crew would lead the way down, studying a printout, hunting a specific panel; they would find it, and another of the military crew would pull a panel tool and pop the fascia off. Then the science crew would lean in and start to work, unfastening the fastened and mating connections that had never been intended to be mated, pulling out the visceral cabling, the fat ribbed sheaths of fiber-optic and wire, dissecting them apart like mad mechanical surgeons, then splicing them to thick jerry-rigged cable bundles that went snaking down the corridors like so much errant gut.
Elsewhere the surgery was even more drastic. The galley, snugged right against the side of the inner hull, was one spot briefly disrupted by the teams; cans and bottles back in the cool store were swept off their shelves, and one of the military crew leaned over the shelving and went at the supporting bulkhead with a small power saw. The knitted cyclic-polymer surface gave like skin, splitting under the saw to let the insulating oil inside ooze out like blood. Once the incision was finished, and cloth
s had been put down to catch the leakage, science crew members reached in and started pulling out more of the conduits and tubing; they tumbled out, visceral and shining onto the cover sheets, and the resections and splicing began again, while the galley staff looked on in annoyance and went about restacking their cans elsewhere...
There was nothing more Nathan could do to help accomplish what they had to. However, there had been something niggling at his mind for an hour or two now. He went to see what could be done about that.
* * *
"I was going to come see you," Lucas said, barely looking up from his keyboard as Nathan came in. "We've got a problem. The sabotage isn't fully integrated."
"Come again?"
"There's not enough code in the main system to make it work," Lucas said, with exaggerated patience. "The routines being guarded by the 'watchdogs' are only partial. There has to be a kernel hidden somewhere else—a 'core routine' with the basic instructions that set the whole thing in motion—because I haven't found anything like that in the main system, and it has to be somewhere."
"'Kernel? Are we talking about nuts now?" Bridger muttered.
"Listen," Lucas said, "use your brains. Stark's not really a programmer—"
"What you would call a programmer," Nathan said.
Lucas smiled slightly and kept tapping at his keyboard. "Except for down-and-dirty practical stuff. She's a tech, a competent tech, at best. And she's not an engineer. She doesn't know this ship well enough to wind a routine of nested viruses into the existing code without leaving tracks like a four-by-four in the snow. And think about it—even if she did, somebody woulda caught her at it. It'd take too much time. There were enough people aboard seaQuest to have noticed what she was up to."
"So?" Nathan said.
"So she would have done her work privately, on media that she could conceal, and that wouldn't have left any trace of her work in the main computers... The diagnostics would have picked it up if she'd worked there. She would have recorded her code in some self-perpetuating form, and then put it aside somewhere, where it could feed into the main systems and keep reminding them how they were supposed to be subverted—"
"So that even if we found the 'subversive' code," Nathan said, "it would still be lying doggo somewhere in the systems, in hardware. And a while later, her installation would restore it—and we would be as badly off as before. The same crap would start all over again."
Lucas bestowed on Nathan the warm smile reserved for backward students who are finally catching on. Nathan withheld, for the moment, his reaction to it. "Right," Lucas said. "So somewhere in the ship she left a media reader hooked into the computer network. It would mimic the 'tell-me-three-times' backups that some computers use, and it'd feed its burnt-in instructions into the computer net once every, oh, twelve hours—maybe even twenty-four hours if she was concerned about it being noticed, or felt sure no one would look."
"That sounds about right, I think," Nathan said.
"Okay. So all you have to do is answer the question: where would she hide something like that?"
"Where no one would look." Nathan bit his lip. "Unless she was a fan of the Purloined Letter school of hiding things. In plain sight."
He thought about that for a moment. It would suit one aspect of Stark's personality as he remembered it—the delight in pulling one over, obviously, insultingly, on those not smart enough to keep up with her. But that kind of trick she reserved for those who she considered might possibly be her peers. She would not think that way about the present crew of seaQuest. She would consider them peons, and not waste more time than was necessary on fooling them.
"Non-maintenance areas," Bridger said. "Or minimal-maintenance ones. I think I have a few ideas where to start."
"It'll be small, and something that won't make much of a power signature," Lucas said. "She wouldn't be dumb enough to give herself away by producing waveform where there shouldn't be any."
"Right," Nathan said, and looked over Lucas's shoulder at the screen, still showing page after page of indecipherable code, tangles of mathematical symbols, barbed-wire nests of parentheses. "How're you doing?"
"Got my first couple of bypasses," Lucas said. He was visibly breaking a sweat as he studied the screen. "They won't be any good until they're all done, though: they run in parallel and reinforce each other. And if you don't find her little dog-in-the-manger, they won't be any good anyway. I wouldn't put it past her to have told her routine to refresh the system more frequently after our trouble started."
Nathan nodded.
"I found something in my quarters," he said.
Lucas's face sealed over. "Later," he said. "I mean, I wouldn't mind a chat, but if some cranky chick's programming kills me, I am going to be very annoyed."
He has a point there, Nathan thought, and went away.
CHAPTER 10
Minutes later Bridger was scrambling down a vertical companionway, whistling—not so much from good cheer, as to defuse his own nervousness. Down here, though, it could well enough have been mistaken for whistling in the dark to keep the boogeyman away. Looking around him in an attempt to get his bearings, he doubted that any self-respecting boogeyman would have come anywhere near the place. seaQuest might have been the pride of the fleet, the right of the line and all the rest of that junk, but she was a seagoing vessel, and like all other seagoing vessels, she had a bilge. Officially this was the submarine's keel deck, but he knew a bilge when he saw it. And smelled it.
The place had started out as a standard passageway like those farther up toward civilization, but after that it had been heavily redecorated by someone with a taste for pipes and conduits, recessed panels and openwork deck grids. Post-industrial chic, thought Bridger, rubbing his hands together and wondering if they would ever be completely free of grease again. What hadn't struck him previously—but did now—was how long this passageway seemed: under the present circumstances, it seemed that if he looked down it long enough, he would perceive the curvature of the earth. And if have to search this for something little?
I think I need a smaller boat...
He sighed and strode off along the passageway, being cautious about how he moved across the metal deck. With all the oily slime and time-expired grease that had accumulated down here since seaQuest's launch, it would be all too easy to find that his feet were going one way and his head the other—and none of those pipes were likely to be kind to an unprotected human skull.
He walked awhile—and then he saw it. Not quite where his memory had claimed he left it, but close enough. The panel was marked "COMMUNICATIONS," but the clarity of that label had been somewhat degraded by several layers of the grime that had worked past and over it on the way to the bilge. The obvious place, he thought. More to the point... the insulting place. Even if I'm wrong, best to get it out of the way first.
Bridger stood on tiptoe in an attempt to reach the panel, and felt the first warning slither from under the sole of one shoe. He came warily back down to an even keel again, breathing hard and holding tightly to a shoulder-high pipe just in case he really did slip. Then he looked at the pipe and gazed thoughtfully at the others running by at ankle-height, knee-height—in fact, at all the heights that might come in useful for a man reaching higher up a bulkhead than he was able. They had another advantage: some of them had been hot, or ran hot intermittently, and what was a lethally slippery film of oil on the deck had baked into a hard crust that looked like a cross between crude plastic and failed taffy. There was little else to recommend it, but—he checked carefully before trusting his full weight to the boost upward—it wasn't slippery.
Of course, when Nathan got level with the panel, he found that it had rusted shut. All this oil about the place, and it rusts. That's just great. It took three solid punches with the heel of his hand to pop the latch, but to his relief the actual lid swung open with no further need for persuasion. Inside was so much of the usual circuitry and braids of color-coded spaghetti that he began to doubt w
hether he had even opened the right box. Take the money next time, thought Nathan drily, then remembered the flashlight in his pocket. Never go anywhere without a penlight, a knife and a box of matches. Well, he had the light at any rate. If its batteries weren't dead...
They weren't. The little penlight wasn't about to dazzle anyone with its brilliance, a bit like some people he could name, but it was bright enough for his purposes. One of which was holding it in his mouth. The aluminum barrel clanked unpleasantly against his teeth, with a metallic flavor and a sourly acid backtaste that suggested the batteries might not be dead but were certainly leaking. Given that the alternative was to have only one hand free instead of two, and that while balanced on a rickety conduit three feet above a metal deck, Bridger went with having a nasty taste in his mouth.
Rummaging among the wires took only a few seconds; it was only too easy to rummage that little bit too hard and get a shock or disconnect something vital, but Nathan Bridger—the Nathan Bridger—was as much at ease poking around in the electrical entrails of his own ship as young Lucas seemed to be picking the brains of its computers. And then he saw it. The little metal container was buried well back, small and demure and plain... and it was nothing that belonged here among the organic-looking conduits and cables. He reached in, and finding that it was... just, just... within reach without needing to be pulled off its mounting, Bridger popped the container's cover and gazed in satis-faction at the wires and circuits packed inside. His attention was particularly drawn to the little block of solid-state equipment: a RAM solid, low- power, not active at the moment.