The super-potent force of those nukes resting in Vigilant’s spine could stop the AI, the Chinese, and the aliens.
“Do you know where the admiral is?” Bren asked quietly.
“He’s dead. I’m sure of it. The Red came in and went straight for him. I don’t know how it knew where to go, but it did.”
Bren nodded. Not surprising for a spinner, he thought. They had had time to study human computer systems, and they possessed a superior technology.
“Cut your link and come with me,” Bren said with a renewed sense of certainty.
“Where?”
“The only person who can help us now is Lieutenant Jackson,” Bren said.
“Why?”
Bren knew better than to outline his suicidal plan. “Trust me. Jackson would have been on the bridge. There’s an armory there for the officers.”
The lieutenant frowned. “Slicer went through the bridge. Everyone there is dead.”
Bren nodded. He thought Jackson might have had the presence of mind to grab some weapons and armor before retreating.
“He might have escaped to the ECM equipment room,” Bren suggested. “He likes to tinker with the hardware from time to time.”
The lieutenant nodded. Bren led the way. They moved quickly but quietly down a short corridor and then through a marine prep room. Bren felt even more helpless, more fearful, without his link.
He hoped he could remember the way without consulting the map services.
Only two more corridors. But if Slicer catches us in the open, we’ll be dead in seconds. Or less.
Bren opened another door with his hand. The manual mechanism felt awkward. He glanced out into the corridor. Two human bodies lay sprawled on the deck.
One was female.
Bren froze. Was it Nicole? For some reason his mind had raced to the conclusion that it was her. He studied the prone form. It wasn’t her hair. The body shape wasn’t quite right. He felt immense relief.
Such an irrational fear, considering what you’re planning.
Bren steeled himself and moved quickly down the corridor. The soft footsteps of the lieutenant padded along behind him. Bren slowed to peek to his left and right at the first intersection. Nothing. He turned left and snuck another twenty meters.
“This is it,” Bren whispered. He glimpsed behind him.
No one was there.
A scream ripped out from somewhere nearby. Less than fifty meters away, Bren thought.
“Frick! Jesus!” he said, immediately regretting his outburst. Bren pushed down an animal panic let loose by the unexpected disappearance of the junior officer and the scream.
You’ve got lousy survival instincts.
Bren thought of his goal again. He leaned against the heavy access door. He’d have to either pop the manual access plate or turn his link on to open it.
He activated his link, opened the door, and slipped into the room. Tall banks of electromagnetic effectors sat in rows like the skyscrapers of an orderly city. Bren ran past a couple rows and then dodged in trying to find cover.
His heart sank when he saw a prone man. He rushed up to the body, eyes wide, waiting to see if it was Jackson.
The blood lay thick on the deck. Jackson looked up at Bren, a look of bewilderment and pain on his face.
“Shit. Jackson. You’re alive,” Bren stuttered.
Jackson opened his mouth. Blood trickled from the corner of his mouth.
“It … cut me,” he said. “I don’t know how. Didn’t even … touch me.”
“I know. The molecular cutters. Same thing they use on the ASSAIL armor before they hit it with a projectile.”
“Damn.” Jackson coughed up more blood. His whole body shook.
He’s not going to live long.
“Jackson, this is important. Tell me the codes,” Bren demanded.
Jackson breathed heavily and erratically.
“What?”
“The codes. I’m blowing us all to kingdom come. Tell me the codes!”
“Ah …” Jackson burst out as if in pain. Then he closed his eyes.
“No! No you can’t die yet!” Bren urged.
Bren received a pointer in his link.
The codes!
Bren heard a skittering sound. A picture of a rat appeared in his mind until another, slower, darker thread of thought came forward: it was the sound of a rapidly twirling machine balancing on one leg at a time as it closed on Bren to make the kill. Bren sent the codes and armed the nuclear detonator. He only had to send one more message to end it all. Just thirty-six bytes over his link.
He caught movement out of the corner of his eye. He saw a big red circle on the side of a metal sphere.
He closed his eyes and transmitted the detonation command.
There was a bright light.
Epilogue
As soon as the Silvado cleared the station, Aldriena’s navigation display lit up in her PV. The first active sensor scan revealed a fleet of ships scattered in nearby space surrounding Synchronicity. It took Aldriena only a few seconds to see that they were Chinese warships, based on their absorption signatures. She immediately deactivated her active sensor sweeps. No point in announcing her presence any louder than she’d already done.
Apparently, luck still favored her. The Chinese weren’t launching any missiles in her direction. She selected an evasive course away from the fleet, worried about energy weapons fire.
Long seconds passed. A direct hit by a high-energy weapon could wipe her life out in an instant. Aldriena relaxed a notch. She wasn’t dead yet.
Apparently, the recent engagement with the UNSF had taken the edge off the Chinese fleet’s aggression and forced them to conserve their firepower.
If they knew who I am and what I have, they’d probably open fire anyway.
Once the fighting had broken out, Aldriena had received the codes for her new weapons. She’d sent off a detonation command for the grenade she’d left behind in the bin. After learning of the Chinese task force, Aldriena had changed plans. She hacked into the spy’s links and retrieved as much information as she could. She found a copy of the information that the Chinese spies had managed to accumulate on the alien ship. She wasn’t sure how that would compare to what they’d garnered for operation Insidious thus far, but it counted as a major victory. If she could get out alive.
Then she had abandoned her stolen grenade in the lap of the spy as he sat tied up in one of his chairs. She had run straight to Silvado, brandishing the submachine gun as if headed into combat at the command of the spinners.
The Silvado’s communication interface opened in her PV. Her link alerted her to an anomaly on the communications interface. Someone was attempting to initiate an emergency link with her ship. They wanted to talk to her. She hesitated while a red dot pulsed in her mind’s eye, waiting for her assent to begin.
Aldriena considered the possibilities. Foremost in her mind was the image of a team of Chinese electronic warfare specialists attempting to disable her vessel. What else could be going on? UNSF remnants begging for rescue? A Chinese commander giving her one chance to stop before opening fire? An artificial intelligence trying to take over her ship?
Aldriena used her override and shut down the communication interface completely. She was running. She didn’t want to communicate or take any action that would risk her ship becoming compromised.
New panes exploded across her PV. Red ones. Space glowed outside Silvado’s tiny view ports.
“Caralho!”
Synchronicity had gone up like a supernova. Aldriena’s PV wavered erratically. She’d never seen that happen. Even when she was kicked in the head.
A nuclear strike. She swallowed. The Chinese had destroyed the station!
She felt a moment of panic. Would Silvado’s EM shielding keep her electronics intact? If they didn’t, she’d die, or be picked up by the Chinese.
No, I’d die first, she vowed.
Her PV cleared. She ran a diagnostics check. I
t reported a long list of anomalies in a tiny red font. But her basic systems appeared to be functional.
I guess the cold war is heating up. Why would they do that? Oh, of course. The Chinese didn’t nuke the station. The UNSF did it to keep the starship out of the hands of the Chinese.
Aldriena increased Silvado’s thrust, pushing her deep into her pilot’s couch. The Chinese weren’t likely to take the destruction of their prize lightly. They might well start shooting out of spite, even on civilian vessels. Aldriena wondered if the nuclear blast would inhibit their tracking capabilities.
She accelerated for another sixty seconds. No long lances of killing light reached out to incinerate her ship.
Aldriena let her hopes rise. Apparently, she was now the only soul in possession of the information gleaned from the alien vessel.
She wondered what Black Core would do with it.
Book II: Industrious
Many thanks to those who helped me:
Dan Bloch, Ilya Kirnos,
Maarten Hofman, and Tom O'Neill
Special thanks to Yingjiu Sun for everything.
Zero
Sun Xinmei didn’t want to work on her economics paper. She lay curled on her tiny bunk at the dormitory on the outskirts of Tsinghua University in Beijing. The August sun still blazed over the buildings of the late Thursday afternoon.
The dormitory was as quiet as anything ever got in Beijing. The dense throng of humanity permeated every square meter of the city, bringing with it the sounds of traffic, air conditioning units, and incarnate conversation. But at least Xinmei could lock herself into the tiny slot of a room and the noise was muted enough to find rest.
Xinmei wore the purple and white of her school. Although wound into a compact ball at the moment, Xinmei stood 170 centimeters tall and felt proud of her height. Her smooth black hair and slender figure gave little to distinguish her from her billion countrywomen, but her height and her intellect made her stand out.
She allowed herself a hidden smile.
I don’t need to study economics... I have computers.
She thought of her contact in the Golden Lamb university datacenter. A flick of her mind commanded her intracranial link to initiate a live contact. Chengbo answered the call in a couple of seconds.
“Wei?”
“Chengbo, is there still an upgrade going in this weekend? Am I going to be able to set up my astronautics calculation in the Golden Lamb?”
Xinmei knew the lab was about to undergo a serious upgrade in capacity. At the same time, she would be using millions of cores for her project. Her economics project.
“Yes,” Chengbo’s voice replied in her mind. “You could use another lab. We can’t put off the upgrade.”
“Oh I don’t expect you to do so,” Xinmei assured him. “But I can’t use another lab, either. It’s just that I’ll be generating some failed authentication flags if there’s any significant network corruption.”
“Yes, I’m prepared to deal with them,” Chengbo said. His voice sounded a little annoyed. Xinmei was technically correct to verify the situation with him, but he must have felt like his abilities were being questioned.
“Okay, well just as long as you know about it.”
“I’ll tweak things to expect some extra trouble.”
“Thank you.”
Xinmei cut the link and smiled to herself again. Normally the person on duty—this time, Chengbo—would consider setting a high alert threshold for authentication failures during such maintenance. But a ‘high’ threshold might be only five or ten failures.
As it happened, Chengbo had sufficient reason to set the thresholds even higher. He had a date with a girl Friday night. Xinmei had set up the date herself, although Chengbo had no idea. Xinmei sensed an opportunity before she had confronted the problem of the economics paper. She wondered idly if some part of her unconscious mind had already been working on the problem.
Now she’d given Chengbo a strong reminder that if he didn’t want to ruin the date, he’d have to take steps. Xinmei considered it a good possibility that he would even turn the alerts completely off.
Xinmei thought there was a great chance that the one-time authentication system set up by her economics professor used a generator written by Tsinghua University’s own computer science department. Now her ‘astronautics calculation’ would use that algorithm, together with her snooped samples of his past one-time passcodes to calculate a set of probable codes that might be accepted in the future.
She felt thankful that her professor loved to use his archaic computers. They had provided a limited seed space to the algorithm, weakening it considerably. She’d also managed to pick up his regular password off the archaic keyboard he used from time to time. These factors, and the likely possibility that a large number of authentication failures might be tolerated this weekend, gave her a very real chance of success.
Xinmei got a voice link request. The identifier block said “Li Feng”.
She felt a jolt of pride. Her boyfriend was one of the smartest—and best looking—men in the officer’s curriculum leading into the Divine Space Force. This was only fitting in her mind, since she was one of the best students in the computer science department.
“Bao bei,” he said.
She smiled at the term of endearment.
“Yes?”
“There’s a dance contest for us to win Friday night.”
“Oh?” Xinmei said, biting her lip.
“Of course I would think of no one else for my partner,” Feng said.
“Hrm? Oh.”
“So I’ll meet you in the union atrium at six?”
Xinmei frowned. Chances are her operation would be in full swing at that time.
“I’m very busy with work this weekend.”
“This is a matter of pride,” he proclaimed. It was true that they had won the last two contests. But she knew he didn’t really care about that. He just needed an excuse to see her.
We should spend time together, she thought. Before we leave the university and start our careers.
“Okay,” she agreed. “I’ll meet you at six.” And now I have some more control code to set up. This has to come off without my direct oversight.
Xinmei rescheduled her class feeds to begin two hours later the next morning and started coding furiously. She lay curled up on her bed, unaware of her physical surroundings as she created the system to implement her plan in her personal view. The PV served as every person’s own virtual workspace, a series of windows and viewpanes seen in the mind’s eye. Information flowed into the PV from Xinmei’s own brain as well as the outside network, shuffling data in and her commands out.
As soon as the lab upgrade started on Friday evening, her machines would begin to crack into Professor Hu’s archives. Some number of failed attempts might well shut access completely off, but most likely Chengbo had configured the lab monitors to be very tolerant. Even if Hu himself became notified of the ‘attack’, he might well be aware of the upgrade corruption warning and dismiss it. If not, any inquiry on his part would interrupt Chengbo’s date, which would cause the lab monitor to explain quickly to the professor that there was an upgrade in progress and thus absolutely nothing to worry about.
If any one-time code was accepted on the other end, then Xinmei would have access to Professor Hu’s research documents. That would give her an edge with her paper. She could choose a subject close to the man’s interest, and she could make use of his own research and pretend she had looked into it herself. Of course, the material couldn’t be used too blatantly or else she would give away her actions. It had to be close enough to make Hu want to publish her work, under his own name. Then he would give her a good grade, perhaps even a co-authorship on the paper, and Xinmei would have what she needed.
Or she could just research her own economics paper... but it was so much more fun this way.
Xinmei then arranged for a certain datastore to run out of space by making sure her jobs reque
sted resources after the upgrade had started. The scheduled maintenance inhibited the automatic cleanup to create more space. The full storage would decrease the chances her illegal authorization attempts would end up in a log where they could be analyzed later.
When she had finished the chronometer in her PV said 2 AM.
***
Xinmei looked at herself in the mirror. She wore a short black dress ideal for dancing. The fabric hid many tiny cyblocs that could sensitize the dress to music, making it iridesce in time with the beat. The freedom the dress afforded her legs allowed both easy movement and a good view for the judges. Two important elements for another victory.
Most men found her attractive. She had large eyes with double-folded eyelids and pale skin. Her figure was slender, whether due to her dancing and ping-pong, or her youth and genetics, she wasn’t sure. This beauty combined with her energy and intelligence had given her the pick of the men around her, so she had chosen the best: Feng.
As she finished touching up her looks, she checked on her software running in the Golden Lamb. It was still only in snooping mode, recording traffic related to the target. The upgrade hadn’t yet officially started due to some delay. Xinmei found it maddening and wanted to scream, but she had steeled herself to a high probability that the techs wouldn’t start on time.
She took a deep breath and left her dormitory, headed to the dance hall. The air outside was hot and dry but it didn’t bother her in her dancing dress.
The dancing hall was a wide, sweeping building encased in black glass. It was only about four stories high, which made it one of the lowest buildings in the area. People were already flowing in and out of the entrance as the Friday night activities started up. Xinmei fell into line and walked inside. Her link registered her presence at the event. It couldn’t hurt to have her located firmly at the dance hall. Hardly the actions of someone performing a nerve-wracking breach of campus security.
Over on her left she saw a group of about a hundred people watching a virtual dance contest on a giant screen. They milled about talking with each other and holding drinks, while a couple danced in a VR dance hall. The people could have just as easily stayed home and observed the competition from their dorm rooms, but they enjoyed the opportunity to meet their friends in the flesh and share a drink.
Synchronicity Trilogy Omnibus Page 30