by Bruce Bethke
And below them, on the wall, in a simple black frame, his summa cum laude doctorate from Harvard Law School.
Not bad for a nino who spent the first five years of his life scavenging for scraps in the garbage dumps of Santiago, Aguila thought. Not bad at all for an orphan of a civil war who learned to read in a UN refugee camp. And I'm not even forty yet.
The thick red leather of his armchair creaked slightly as Aguila leaned back and allowed himself a moment of smugness. So ask me again, you imbecile norte americanos: do I really believe the United Nations can make a difference?
More than I believe in God, Aguila decided. The church gave us priests and missionaries to save our souls, but the UN gave us food to save our lives.
And with that thought Aguila sighed, leaned forward, and made one more attempt to read the report on thorium production. Like all technical writing, it was arcane at best, incomprehensibly dense at worst, and throughout written in a dry and academic style that simply begged the mind to wander. Aguila's mind soon did.
He was saved by the chirp of the office intercom. Aguila blanked the report window, put on his best serious business expression, and tapped a corner of the desktop. A video window flashed open on the dark simulated wood, and his personal assistant's face popped into view.
"Yes, Allegria?"
"Sir?" Allegria Saldana was just the way Aguila liked his women: intelligent, beautiful, competent, and subservient. "Pieter von Hayek is holding on line six."
Aguila frowned. "For me? That's odd."
"No, sir. He wanted Lord Haversham, but the secretary seems to have left the building for the day."
"Ah." Aguila nodded and let out a small sigh. "Lucky Haversham. Any idea what sort of bee is in von Hayek's bonnet this time?"
"No, sir. He insists on speaking to either Lord Haversham or you."
A thought struck Aguila and made him shudder. "He's not seeing little green men again, is he?"
"As I recall, they were large orange monsters, but no, sir, if he's seeing them again, he hasn't mentioned it."
Aguila sighed again, deeply this time, then took a deep breath and composed his features. "Very well, let's humor him. Put him through." Allegria blinked out, and three seconds later the patrician face of Pieter von Hayek popped into view.
"Governor," Aguila said, feigning a warm smile. "This is an unexpected pleasure. What can I do—"
"I expect you're babbling some meaningless niceties," von Hayek said. "The light-speed lag is going to make this— Ah, yes, there's your response now. As I was saying, the light-speed lag is going to make this difficult enough, so what you can do for me, young man, is be quiet and listen." Von Hayek looked down at something below the scan area of the video pickup, and the sound of rustling paper came through.
Aguila nodded politely, but said nothing.
"Good. Now"—the video pickup cut to a wide-angle shot, to reveal the cluster of people standing behind von Hayek—"as you can see, I have most of the other colonial governors here with me. We have taken a vote, and against the advice of some of our more bloody-minded colleagues, we have decided that it is only fair to give you and the CLD some advance warning."
"Warning?" Aguila blurted out, forgetting that he was not supposed to speak. "What—"
"In approximately fifteen minutes we will be broadcasting our formal Declaration of Independence. This is not a negotiating ploy, nor is it a declaration of war, but rest assured—"
"Wait!" Aguila waved a hand to catch von Hayek's attention. "Wait! Governor!"
"—that we have taken precautions to secure our ... Ah, yes, there's your reaction now. I told you; please don't interrupt, young man. We will not negotiate with you. We are through negotiating with the CLD. We will discuss this matter only before the full General Assembly, after our representative has been recognized and seated. Do you understand this?" Von Hayek paused.
Aguila considered his answer. "Pieter," he said gently, as he pulled a calm and fatherly expression onto his face, "this can't work, you know. Your labor strike last year failed and only made things worse for you. I can't imagine the trade sanctions have improved your quality of life any. How can—"
Von Hayek interrupted, speaking slowly and enunciating carefully. "We control the automatic cargo launchers," he said. "Check with your SAS spies. I'm sure they can verify that what I've just said is true."
There was a long, long pause. Aguila kept his face carefully neutral. "Are the launchers still operating?" he said at last. The three-second light-speed lag crawled by like a snail.
"For now," von Hayek answered. "Whether they continue to do so depends on you."
Aguila stared blankly at the video image, and said nothing.
"Good," von Hayek said brightly. "Now if you will bear with me just a minute longer, I will present our list of demands." He paused to adjust his bifocals, then lifted a long sheet of paper and began reading.
"Point one: immediate recognition of the independence and sovereignty of the Free State Selena, to be composed of the former colonial possessions that have signed this declaration.
"Point two: immediate recognition and seating of our chosen representative in the United Nations General Assembly, with all voting rights and privileges customarily pertaining thereto.
"Point three: immediate removal of all United Nations Special Aerospace Security personnel stationed on Luna, both uniformed and undercover.
"Point four: immediate arrest and prosecution of Colonial Administrator Kinthavong, for bribery, corruption, abuse of authority, violation of the civil rights of lunar citizens ..."
Still keeping his face carefully neutral, Aguila muted the microphone on his end of the conversation, then punched in the code for the second comm line. Another video window popped up next to the first, and Allegria's face flashed into view. "Sir?"
Aguila smiled so that he could speak without visibly moving his lips. "Allegria? 'ake a ten-second loop of 'e nodding and looking thoughtful. Cut it in to Hayek, and cut 'e out."
She tapped a few keys on her end. "Ready." Aguila closed his mouth, and focused on von Hayek's speech again.
"Point nine: immediate removal of all United Nations military personnel presently stationed on Luna, including the so-called scientific research teams operating in and around Copernicus Crater.
"Point ten: immediate ..."
"Got it!" Allegria said. "Adjusting synchronization and ... okay." Von Hayek's face and relentless voice blanked out. "Our favorite political gadfly is now talking to a digital loop. Will there be anything else?"
Aguila stroked his chin, as much to hide his worried scowl as to help his thinking. "Find Lord Haversham," he said at last. "Put Jurgen on it. Now. Then find out if any other members of the Committee on Lunar Development are still in the building."
He paused, this time furrowing his brow and not caring if his worry showed. "Wait. First, get me Mobutu in the Office of World Telecommunications. Then put in an urgent call to General Buchovsky at Peacekeeper HQ." Allegria blinked. "It's that bad?"
"Yes, it's that bad. Then track down Kinthavong— No, never mind. I already know all his excuses by heart. But schedule a press conference for one hour from now, then do everything else I said."
Allegria nodded. "And then order in dinner, right? It's going to be another long evening?"
Aguila took a moment to look at the video image of his seemingly psychic assistant, and spared her a smile. "Yes, Allegria, I'm afraid it is. Those imbecile Loonies have finally done it."
Office of the Governor, Port Aldrin
24 October 2069
22:08 GMT
Pieter von Hayek was confused and angry. "What do you mean, the satellite's gone off-line?"
Patrick Adams swore and slammed a fist on the desktop comm unit. "I mean exactly that: the L-5 repeater has just gone off-line. We've lost UNET and all the primary comm channels." His phonewire chirped; he fished it out of his jacket pocket, pressed it to his left ear, and listened, frowning. "Secondaries als
o. We're locked out of all the geosynch nodes." He folded up the wire and put it back in his pocket.
Von Hayek was still struggling to understand. He shook his head. "What about the commercial networks?"
"They piggyback off the UNET. They're all gone too."
Von Hayek sagged back into his chair, took off his bifocals, and tapped the right earpiece against his lower teeth. "I don't understand. What can this mean?"
"It means," Adams said, "that it was a dumb idea to tip off the CLD. They've had the Office of World TeleComm pull the plug on us. Blacked out all Earth-Moon communications. Totally."
"You're joking! You mean there's no way we can get a signal through to Earth?"
"Well"—Adams shrugged and scratched his head— "there are the direct laser channels. I expect Kinthavong is burning his up right now. But at this time of day the ones we control can only hit North America, and only a few amateurs will be on to receive."
"That's a start," von Hayek said hopefully. "What about conventional radio?"
Adams shook his head. "We don't have a transmitter powerful enough to punch through all the local traffic down there. We could probably build one in two or three weeks. Maybe use the Rheinhold radioscope."
Von Hayek put his glasses back on and leaned forward to rest his elbows on his desk. "This is ludicrous. There are a half-billion satellite dishes down there, and you're saying we can't get through to any of them?"
Adams had run out of exasperated reactions. "Not without going through the satellite nodes. Those dishes are all aimed at geosynch points over the equator, and the angles of incidence are all wrong for us. But even if they weren't, the inverse square law comes into play. We're about twelve times farther out than a geosynch satellite, so we'd have to put out"—he paused, obviously trying to do the math in his head—"well, a hell of a lot of power just to override the satellite signal." Adams stopped speaking and waited for a cue from von Hayek.
None came.
"So," Adams said, "what do we do now, boss?"
Von Hayek took his elbows off the desk, sat up straight, and assumed a noble bearing. "We issue the declaration anyway, to our own people, if no one else. Whether or not Earth chooses to listen does not alter the fact that as of this day we are free."
Von Hayek took a deep breath, allowed a confident smile to spread across his face, and stood up. "Come along!" He started for the door to the council chamber.
Adams fell in one step behind him. "Go get 'em, tiger!"
Port Aldrin, Luna
Block J64, Apartment 23
24 October 2069
22:14 GMT
The dinner was good, but Dalton had to admit that the dessert was better. He opened his eyes and looked over at Dara. He'd always liked her profile: from the side, her nose made a little ski jump that he liked to run his finger down. He lightly traced a finger from bridge to tip, and she twitched her nose like a bunny rabbit.
"Hmmm?" she murmured, sleepily.
"Honey? Mind if I, you know, call up DeShayne, and maybe play some more Black Flame?"
"Mmm-mm," she answered.
"Cool! Thanks." He rolled onto his back and summoned the flatscreen. It popped out from the headboard and lowered itself in front of his face as stereo speakers extruded from its sides. "Login UNET," he said when it was in place.
Instead of the usual SSW gateway, though, a simple line of text appeared: "ERROR 404: NO SUCH LINK EXISTS."
"Huh? That's weird." He licked his lips, cleared his throat, and tried again, a little louder. "Login UNET."
"ERROR 404: NO SUCH LINK EXISTS."
Dalton got a hand free of the covers and slapped the side of the screen. In the known history of the universe, thumping on a remote terminal had never fixed a network server problem, but it made him feel better. "Login UNET!"
"ERROR 404: NO SUCH LINK EXISTS."
"Okay, this is getting nowhere." Dalton tried to shake his head, but the position of the screen made that difficult. "Maybe there's bad sunspot activity or something." He thought it over some more and decided to try a different approach. "All right, login LunaWeb." A moment later the familiar background shot of the Tranquillity Base monument appeared, and then the screen filled up with icons. A pulsing red mailbox in the upper left corner got his attention. His fingers found the pointer controls on the sides of the flatscreen, and he picked and clicked on the mailbox.
There were three chimes—the cue for an urgent broadcast message—and then the soft voice of the Port Aldrin Central Computer was purring through the speakers. "Due to circumstances beyond our control, all links to UNET, the Solar Wide Web, and all other non-Lunar networks are temporarily out of service. We apologize for the inconvenience. Have a nice day."
Dalton frowned at his screen, which had returned to the expectant mailbox. It blinked at him irritatingly, teasing him with the promise of messages waiting right before his eyes, but as inaccessible as Pluto. As he glared at the screen, another chime sounded and a window opened up in the lower left corner to reveal an unfamiliar face.
"Dalton Star ... Starkiller, is it?"
Dalton couldn't see the man's eyes; he was looking down from the vidcam, obviously reading from a piece of paper. The man looked up. "Is that you?"
"That's me," Dalton replied.
"Excellent. Listen, I've been told you're some kind of computer specialist. A hacker. Good at breaking into things."
"Maybe," Dalton said suspiciously, wondering if the authorities were on to his recent activities. "Who are you?"
"Patrick Adams. I'm the director of, ah, Special Information Services."
"I've never heard of you."
"No, I suppose you haven't. Just a minute." The man appeared to reach down, then displayed an official-looking badge. "I'm a special aide to the governor. See?"
Alarmed, Dalton began to stammer. "Um, yeah, well, look ... last night, it really wasn't any big deal—"
"You don't understand," Adams cut in. "I want you to hack into something. UNET is down, and the governor wants to see if we can get it back up. Got it?"
"Sure ... sure, I got it." Dalton leaned forward eagerly. "So I'll bet you want me to try cracking one of the UNET servers."
"Exactly. Preferably one of the satellite-based ones. If you can just get us past their security, our technicians can restore our access. I'm told you'll need one of our priority access codes to even get the comm center to answer, so I'm sending one to your machine now. I'm told you might be familiar with a Brigitte Becker in NetOps?"
"You mean Brooklyn? Sure."
"Good. Contact her if you manage to get access into UNET. Otherwise, well, don't worry about it."
"Got it." Dalton bit his lip. "Director Adams, can I ask you one thing?"
"You can ask."
"Okay, then. Why?"
Adams smiled enigmatically. "You'll find out soon enough. Good luck, Starkiller." He closed the connection.
A few hours later, Dalton was tired, irritable, dispirited, and feeling more than a little outclassed. He'd tried every trick in his fairly substantial bag of tricks, and not one of them had worked. Not one!
He glared at the screen, trying to force open the server with the sheer force of his will, but like everything else he'd tried, the effort was to no avail.
"Locksmith? No. Morfkey? No," he muttered to himself. "One point six? No, if one-eight didn't do it, one-six wouldn't either. If I'd paid the upgrade I could've tried one-nine-five, but that probably wouldn't have gone either."
He drummed his fingers on the top of his head. "Okay, but at least we know the I.D. isn't a standard Mastho alphanumeric pattern; otherwise the Locksmith deepscan would've at least registered a hit."
Dalton rubbed at his itching eyes. Mmmm, that felt good! Suddenly his eyes snapped open. They were reddened and dry from hours of staring at the flatscreen, but there was a manic fire in them.
"They can't be that out-of-date, can they? On a UNET server? But maybe no one ever tries to hack these things. That would exp
lain why all the new stuff isn't working."
He tapped the pointer and called up an old routine he'd written while still a college boy back on Earth.
"Let's see how you deal with the Nibbler, Mr. Net Security Expert!"
Dalton feverishly stroked the keypad and set the strategy for his final assault. Before pressing the last key, he closed his eyes and prayed to the etheric electronic gods.
Triumphantly, he sat back and waited expectantly as his pet algorithm attacked the digital defenses of the UNET server. There was a long pause, and then a small light glowed green and a short message appeared: "NICE TRY, MONKEY BOY. ACCESS DENIED."
Fabulous, he thought. Just what I needed. A NetSec administrator with an attitude.
Tired, irritable, dispirited, outclassed, and now insulted, Dalton gave up. It was almost too much of an effort to call up Brigitte Becker's access from his address book.
"LunaNet Ops. Becker here," the second shift NetOps manager answered. "Make it quick."
"Say no go, Brooklyn. I came, I saw, and they kicked my ass."
"Dalton? Is that you?" Becker leaned in closer to the video pickup and squinted. "Do you have your face pressed right up against the screen?"
"Something like that." Dalton grabbed the edges of the flatscreen and pushed it back a few inches. "Say, what's going on with UNET? This guy Adams had me trying to hack an orbital server, but the security was too amped."
Becker was still squinting at the video pickup. "Nice hair. Did you just wake up or what?"
"Yeah. Now about UNET—"
"I got it, I got it. You didn't get in. That's okay. Nobody could. It doesn't matter now. Quick, log to RealNews One. They're going to play it again!"
Dalton was bewildered, but agreed. "Okay." He selected and clicked on the icon for the local video news channel, then looked back at Becker's window. "So are you going to tell me what's going on?"