by Mark Wandrey
“I’m in,” he relayed. Now to find a connected computer link.
Jim had been in more than a few fights since he’d taken over Cartwright’s Cavaliers, but soloing wasn’t one of his specialties. The reality was that he just didn’t have the experience. One thing he didn’t lack, though, was personal courage. He knew someone, or something, was in the station, and they were willing to use deadly force. But staying outside and letting them muster a deadlier response put his people at risk. That wasn’t something a commander tolerated.
“Jim,” Hargrave called before he’d gone far. The signal sounded weaker.
“Go ahead.”
“Stodden and Feldman confirm the next closest lock is rigged also.”
“Understood. Do not attempt any more entries. I’m going to try and see if the facility central computer is still connected. If I don’t restore contact in…” he checked his system, “one hour, inform Bucephalus to use weapons to breach the main bay and enter in company strength.”
“Be damned sure you’re nowhere near that point in 55 minutes,” Hargrave said, his voice sounding like steel.
“Oh, I won’t be. Be sure Captain Wu knows that I want this station intact? Try not to punch a hole end to end.”
“I’ll pass that along.” Jim grinned and moved further into the station.
Within a couple minutes, he began to conclude the maps provided by the Tek Consortium were less than accurate. All the side passages didn’t go where they should, and there were walls where none should have been. “How old are these schematics?” he wondered to himself. Splunk’s only response was a light snoring sound.
Jim continued to move through the station. He consulted the map, but no longer relied on it. Instead he used his CASPer’s auto-mapper and began to build his own. He’d been in the station for 30 minutes when he started to see a pattern.
“I think they’ve mirrored the deck plans,” Jim said inside the cockpit. He clamped himself to the deck and played with the design for a while. Yes, that seemed to be it; the plans he’d been given were mirror images. There were still a few changes; he’d expected as much from a 20,000-year-old space station, but now it lined up, mostly. He used his pinplants to generate a new map and uploaded that into his suit’s system.
“So,” he mumbled, “if I’m right, there should be a T intersection right up here with a series of pressure doors.” He skipped along in the super-low gravity for a minute and came to a T intersection. One branch sported a huge open pressure door. “Bingo.”
“Bingo…
“A lot of help you’ve been,” he chided her, then smiled. She more than pulled her share of the load, but exploring dusty old relics of the Great Galactic War wasn’t her forte.
Jim moved through the pressure door, and ahead of the next barrier he found a manual control. Also, the indicator showed pressure beyond. Nodding to himself, he opened the control panel, and again, found it inoperable. He was beginning to think this station was going to cost him a lot of money to fix the networking systems. He also hoped he got to ‘thank’ whoever had torn everything up.
Jim looked at the simple instructions and did as they described. The first lever closed the door he’d passed through. He checked his rear monitor and saw it was indeed closing. The next lever tripped the pressure spill valve. Immediately the suit’s instruments told him pressure was climbing. So far, so good. A simple tube with a float in it indicated when the chamber had sufficient pressure to have normalized with the other side. The last lever was the opposite door release, and he pulled it. The inner door began to rise.
Not sure what to expect, Jim armed his laser again, this time at full power, and locked the magnets in his feet to the deck. If trouble was waiting, he intended to dish it up in kind. Hearing the weapons come online, Splunk became more alert and moved up into the torso area of the suit. It took an agonizingly long time for the hatch to open, only to reveal nothing except open corridor.
“This is Jim, we’re into the pressurized section of the station,” Jim broadcast. He had no way of knowing if they could hear him or not. Big steel structures sometimes did funny things to radio signals. He kept broadcasting, on the off chance they could hear him.
Jim released the magnets and gently hopped forward. He was getting used to the microgravity, and only needed to use his suit’s thrusters occasionally. His suit’s status showed he had just over eight hours of life support left and plenty of jump juice, which his suit maneuvering thrusters used as well.
He reached the end of a corridor lined with open doors. Each room he’d passed was either empty or contained the remains of machinery. It was pretty obvious the station had been gone over pretty thoroughly over the eons. Of course, he hadn’t bought it for salvage; he had other plans. At the end of the corridor was another pressure door and a terminal…but this terminal was powered.
Jim released the little robot again, and this time backed down the hallway 20 feet or so. He’d rather lose the robot than get blown to shit. The panel came free, and he observed through the machine’s eyes as it examined the internal workings. It was connected to a network cable. Score, he thought, and he ordered the robot to connect a wireless interface. In seconds, he was finally into the station’s computer. About damned time.
While Jim wasn’t a natural born merc—what fat kid was—he excelled at technology and computers. He’d gotten his first pinplant at 16 by travelling to the Houston Startown and forging his mother’s permission (his father was already gone). It cost him nearly every credit he’d manage to horde away, but it opened an entire new world to the bookish young Jim Cartwright III. With unlimited access to the AetherNet, Earth’s far less capable version of the Galactic Union’s GalNet, he’d taken the reins of his own education and went far beyond what the schools had to offer.
Jim attacked the interface and, in an instant, was through the pathetically laughable firewall. He’d seen a dozen like it in Union computer systems. Mostly old ones. Nobody had updated this system in all those centuries? He found the central system and began to wantonly pillage. It was just as simple as he’d seen from the firewall and other protective systems. The first thing he got was the current station map, which was updated with the most recent additions and annotated by the most recent previous owner.
Using the new map, Jim set course for the main control center, which happily wasn’t far from the main hangar deck. The map file contained a lot of data. Jim set one of the processors in his pinplants working on organizing it in a less ‘alien’ format. Then, to save time, he used part of his CASPer’s Tri-V display to put up icons and control functions of the station computer. These were in the weird hybrid polygon system most older alien computers used.
Splunk gave a curious hoot, and he glanced down to see her just below his head, intently watching the moving symbols. He knew she understood programming, though not to what degree. For a being from a backwater world, largely bereft of any visible technology, and living in caves, she possessed some pretty amazing skills.
“Do you understand this?” he asked her.
“Splunk understand…
Jim pondered his little friend as he worked through the operating system and ‘space walked’ down the station halls. Fifty minutes had elapsed since he’d gained entry. He only had 10 minutes left before Captain Wu started punching holes in his new station.
“Control center is just ahead,” he said a minute later. Then Splunk gave an alarm chirp. He’d only heard her do that a couple ti
mes, and it was never a good thing. “What is it?”
“Look this Jim…
He examined the system’s layouts through its graphical representations. Programming in Union computers was a little like a collectible card game, where each card was a module in a program. The card’s specific construction might vary, but they would still resemble the same end function. The program indicator Splunk had pointed at was a thick set of program cards. In fact, it was larger than every other module in the station’s computer!
Jim pulled it to the forefront with his mind and clicked on it. It flashed green, and nothing happened. In the Union, green was a color used as a warning, unlike Earth, where it was a ‘proceed’ or ‘good’ color. Another click, same result. He sent the access codes he’d gotten for the station, still nothing.
Jim accessed his pinplant stores of code-breaking software. “Wanna play it that way?” he said with a grin, “Fine, we’ll play it that way.” He set to work on it.
“Jim, we go…
“In a minute,” he said as he used all the modules at his disposal to quickly build a custom code breaker.
“No, we go now…
“Splunk, what’s gotten into you? I’ve almost got this.” He added the last component to the tool set and unleashed it on the program. The system he was assaulting was elegantly designed, but Jim was already inside the main system’s firewalls. What he turned loose on it was like firing a rocket launcher at a bathroom door. It crumbled, instantly. Jim moved his mind into the system, and had half a second to realize the defenses had fallen a little too easily, before the trap sprang.
Waves of razors lashed at his consciousness like a thousand chainsaws, threatening to shatter his personality into pieces. He’d experienced the so called ‘Black Ice’ counter-security systems on Earth’s Aethernet, and even a few alien-made ones. They could be dangerous, but he’d learned early how to take the right precautions. You never, never, never went directly into a system without covering your own core system.
A program of nearly infinite power plowed over his net presence and invaded his own pinplants like a tidal wave. His reality went dark, and he felt simultaneously like he was drowning and being crushed by a sheet of steel. He had a fleeting second of realization that he’d fucked up. I’m dead! he thought in that intractable moment between life and death. The attacking program took the full measure of what was Jim Cartwright and went for his neural cortex with a flaming sword of attack programming.
AKEE!
The voice was a thunderclap, shaking the invading program and bringing the attack to a shuddering stop. Jim was too shocked to completely understand; he only sensed the inconceivable force as it swept through his brain and scoured the alien black ice away like it had never been there. This presence was immensely more powerful and just as alien, yet felt comforting at the same time.
For the briefest of instants, Jim had complete control of the program he’d originally tried to enter. Not the black ice defense which was so cunningly hidden under a simple subroutine, but what it was guarding. Exabytes. No, zettabytes. No, yottabytes of data! As the invader was flung back, and his savior pulled Jim’s consciousness home into himself, he reached out and grasped what he could. He was a drowning man being pulled into the lifeboat, while trying to grab a treasure chest on the way out.
He felt frustration and anger from his savior, but he held on, and the force pulling him back increased in both force and urgency. Jim could feel his physical body wracked with pain and crying out, yet he put all his will into holding on and helping the friendly entity pull him back. For an inestimable period, he hovered there between his own mind and the abyss. Then, he was back.
“Fuck, fuck, fuck,” he said, shaking like a leaf in the wind. Splunk was behind him, gasping. He was afraid he’d smashed her against the back of the cockpit in his wild spasms. “Are you okay?”
“I okay…
Looking from the status board and through all the program icons still floating in the mind’s eye of his pinplants, he saw the view outside his CASPer. The blast door to the station control room was sliding into the roof, already half open. It was dark inside; with a couple finger twitches in his suit gloves, he brought the CASPer’s external lights up.
They didn’t penetrate as far as he’d thought they would. The control center appeared to be filled with massive, dark machinery which was in motion. What the hell, he thought. Then the collection of machinery turned and resolved into a single shape. A shape from nightmares.
“Oh…fucking hell!” he moaned.
“Jim, run…
“What is it?” Jim said and fired again, with the same effect.
“Adversary, run…
He turned and fired his jumpjets just as a beam of crackling energy passed through the space he’d occupied a fraction of a second earlier. His instruments hiccupped, and alarms sounded. Static crackled off the suit’s control panel, and he lost control of his trajectory, rebounding first off the floor, then the ceiling as another energy beam burned past.
“Is that a god-damned particle beam?!” He screamed as he fought the suit. The haptic feedbacks weren’t working properly, so he took control with his pinplants. He’d heard the Golden Horde did that, but had always liked the direct feel of the suits over his pinplants. He wanted combat in a suit to feel like real life, not a freaking video game. There were no extra lives or respawn. “Splunk, help, haptics are down.” He could feel her, unmoving, behind his head. “Splunk!” She jerked, then raced into motion.
Jim gave some thought to finding a place to fight, then realized the idea was insane. Whatever it was, the thing acted like it had…shields? That wasn’t possible. Neither was a high-energy weapon that damned small! It took multiple megawatts to power something like that, and more to run its shields. He remembered learning about shield generators and how much space they took. Not to mention how they didn’t act properly when they met something outside the field range. That was why boarding craft worked; they got inside the shields.
The biggest problem he had was a simple lack of firepower. He hadn’t expected to fight something like this. He had the arm-mounted chemical laser—total yield just under a megawatt—and a minigun on the other arm. Devastating against small, lightly-armored infantry, but a joke against this. Maybe if he’d brought a magnetic accelerator cannon…but he doubted it. No, his only option was headlong flight. But then what? He glanced at his flickering controls, and one caught h
is eye. Yes! he thought, and he knew what to do.
Jim drove the suit through his pinplants in a careening, rebounding, and barely-controlled flight down the corridors. After several more high-energy shots tore through walls around him, he became convinced that his frenzied flight was actually keeping him alive. However, he was going to need proper control in just two minutes.
When he was far enough ahead, he took a few precious seconds to stop and trigger a blast door to close before giving his jets a crazed half-second burst and ricocheting away. He watched through his rear monitor as the door ground closed.
“That should slow it down,” he said triumphantly. A second later the door exploded outward, and the nightmare machine tore through a half foot of alien alloy like it was cream cheese. His delaying tactic had bought him less time than he’d used creating it.
“Oh, shit,” he said and used even more jump power. His suit cried in protest as he crashed around a bend, rather than taking it as a corner. He made a conscious effort to be more careful. His running would do him no good if the suit didn’t have integrity when he got to his destination. According to the station map, his destination was just ahead. “Splunk, I need those haptics!”
“Go…
“Yes,” Jim said as he passed the last blast door, executed a spin and jetted up. The damned monster was close. Too close! He smashed against the upper edge of the hangar deck and blindly tried to find a handhold. His suit’s alarm sounded; he was almost out of jump juice after that crazy pursuit.
“Jim, is that your transponder in the hangar deck?” Hargrave’s panicked voice came over his radio. “Damn, Captain Wu was about to fire—”
“Tell her to fire!” he screamed.