Lea saw it before the watch officer could say it. Even though the malfunctions were confined to the subsystems with the weakest layers of security, they were spreading exponentially—and gaining speed as they chewed through the network.
“It’s a breach,” she said, looking up at Tambor. “We’re under attack, General.”
Tambor’s eyes narrowed at her.
“It’s them, sir,” Lea told him. “You need to do something while we still have time.”
Tambor drew a deep breath.
“Are ASATs in position?” he asked.
“At your command,” Tiernan replied. “We’ve got four on Almacantar’s flank and more on the way.”
Tambor looked up at the main screen, which now showed an external view of Almacantar, the feed coming off the antisatellite weapons that stood poised to blow her out of the sky.
“Initiate,” the general said.
“Aye, sir,” Tiernan acknowledged, and relayed the order to fire control. Three of the ASATs maneuvered to point-blank range, spitting bright plumes from their thrusters, the star-shaped vehicles bringing their pulse cannons to bear on target. “We have positive lock, General. Weapons are hot.”
“Take him out.”
The first ASAT opened up with a blistering salvo. The bright discharge distorted the video feed, scrambling the picture into a mosaic of static—but underneath, Lea could see a fire burning in space. When the feed cleared up, she fully expected to see Almacantar lurching into a death spiral, venting atmosphere as she started to break apart. The ship, however, was completely intact—a fireball rapidly dissipating off her port side.
“What the hell just happened?” Lea asked.
“Report status!” Tambor shouted. “Why did it miss?”
Tiernan pressed the minicom to his ear, sorting out the waves of chatter coming in. “No miss, sir,” he said, a sharp edge in his voice. “We have a positive detonation on target.”
“Then why is that ship still there?”
Tiernan looked directly at the general.
“ASAT 1 was the target, sir.”
Lea and Nathan stared up at the view screen, where another one of the ASATs tumbled into the frame. It weaved around the others, intercepting the one closest to Almacantar’s engineering section. The weapon then lined itself up and punched a shot into its target’s tail, blowing it to pieces.
Tambor slammed his fist down on the console.
“What’s going on with my weapons, Lieutenant?”
“Unknown, sir. Fire control reports loss of contact with orbital assets.”
Bostic shook his head in utter disbelief.
“Gotta be a runaway,” he muttered.
“No,” Nathan said. “It’s them.”
The rogue weapon quickly moved against the others. Tumbling through space on a trail of hot vapor, it stalked each target one at a time—firing off single bursts, scoring a hit each time. The sky around Almacantar flared into a firestorm, casting a bright orange glow against the gray hull of the ship—but otherwise left her alone. The last view JTOC had of her was before the rogue hurtled toward the last remaining ASAT on a collision course.
The picture cut out on impact.
“We’ve lost them,” Tiernan said.
“Track down the source of the malfunction,” Tambor ordered. “Now.”
Tiernan tried to get a coherent response from fire control, but could only shake his head at one bad report after another.
“It’s no good, sir,” he said. “Fire control is getting no response from their computer.”
“Then reroute to a remote site.”
“They can’t. The system is totally locked up.”
Tambor forced his way over to the tactical console himself. “Ground batteries!” he barked into the intercom. “Open fire!”
The general watched the overhead screens, waiting for some indication that the ground stations had heard and carried out his order—but the ping that represented Almacantar just floated there, untouched. After a few tense moments, another stream of reports came through the comm panel, each one telling the same story.
“Ground batteries powering down,” Tiernan said. “All crews indicating a massive, simultaneous computer failure.”
Nathan grabbed Lea.
“The telemetry feed,” he said to her. “They must’ve broken in.”
“Even flex viruses don’t work that fast,” Lea said. “If they’re asserting that much control over a network this big, then we’ve got serious trouble.”
“You got any ideas on containment?”
“That was never my thing.”
“Then we better come up with something,” Nathan said, going with Lea to the general. “You’ve got two hammerjacks here, sir. Let us help.”
Tambor flashed Tiernan a fierce look.
The lieutenant nodded once: Give them a chance, General.
“Very well,” Tambor said. “Officer of the watch, stand down.”
The watch officer hesitated to relinquish his post, but then stepped aside. Nathan jumped in after him, taking control of the comm panel. Lea brushed past Tiernan and sat down at tactical. She linked both of the nodes together, while Nathan opened a clandestine port into the wider system.
“With any luck, those bastards won’t spot us poking around,” he explained, just as reams of code started dumping themselves to his station. His eyes widened at the sheer volume of information, which rewrote itself even as he tried to sift through it. “Holy shit,” he whispered, scrolling past thousands of lines. “Are you seeing this?”
Lea did. The core of programming that ran JTOC was completely gone, entire subsystems reorganized on the fly—including the security protocols, which came down on her like a guillotine.
“Unbelievable,” Lea whispered.
No longer concerned with stealth, she rammed into the firewall with brute force, searching for any vulnerability she could exploit. When that didn’t work, she wrote a quick series of protoviruses and released them, hoping that the incursion would keep the system busy enough for her to bypass its defenses. The rate of attack slowed, but for less than a minute. After that, the infection was on the march again—even faster than before, aware of her presence in the network.
“Dammit,” Lea seethed.
“This goes way past JTOC,” Nathan added, shooting a grave look at the general. “They’ve already breached every major subsystem and now they’re moving out into the wider Axis. At this rate, they’ll assert control over every CSS domain within the hour.”
“How the hell can they do that?” Tambor asked. “What about our security?”
“That’s what I’ve been telling you,” Nathan said. “That doesn’t mean anything to these people. They’re operating on a totally different wavelength, General. I don’t know if there’s anything we can do to stop them.”
An alarm on the tactical panel sounded, then amplified itself over the JTOC loudspeaker. The defense condition lights on the overhead display clicked to red, flashing in a constant mantra of imminent doom. Everyone on the operations level froze when they saw it, because they knew it could mean only one thing.
The full strategic forces of T-Branch were now in deployment mode.
“My God,” Tambor intoned.
The screens that displayed Almacantar’s position switched to a worldwide map of missile installations. Spreading outward like a plague, a wave of lights sprang to life as each facility came online—automated systems reporting their READY status, beginning a countdown until launch. Lea drilled into the subroutines that directed those computers, unable to penetrate the wall of code that protected them.
“They’ve taken full command of the Strategic Missile Forces,” she said, her throat closing up at the sight of it. “Right now, they’re initiating a worldwide strike—over ten thousand neutron warheads rigged for simultaneous launch. Targets include New York, Washington, Moscow, Singapore, Tokyo—and Vienna.”
Tambor stood bolt upright. His face remained an
iron mask, but beneath that he was terrified.
“What does that mean?” Bostic demanded.
“It means they’re about to kill half a billion people,” the general answered, clasping his hands behind his back. “And we can’t touch them.”
An automated voice on the loudspeaker boomed.
“Six minutes until launch,” it said.
Tambor looked down at Nathan and Lea.
“Is there anything you can do?”
“Not from here,” Nathan told him. “The system architecture has been completely rewritten. It would take months to figure out.”
“What about you?” he asked Lea. “Any ideas, Major?”
Slowly, she nodded.
“Just one, General,” she said. “We can freeze the infection out.”
“And how would you propose to do that?”
Lea stood, and met Tambor face-to-face.
“By crashing the Axis.”
Andrew Talbot knew something cataclysmic was happening. In the last ten minutes, no fewer than eight of the conventional network subsystems at the Works had crashed—bringing to a halt his compilations of the morning’s data. By the time the emergency signal came through on the hyperband, even the phones didn’t work—a series of failures that ended with the entire building on emergency power, the lights in the lab dimming as everything switched to battery backup.
“Lea!” he said, picking up the transceiver. “We’ve had some problems.”
“I know, Drew. It’s bad.”
The tone of her voice made it clear that this was the contingency she had warned him about. “What do you need?”
“The integrator I gave you. Do a hard link directly into the lab’s cataloging database.”
“That system is off-line,” he explained, “along with every other daft thing around here.”
“Doesn’t matter. Just plug it in—and hurry.”
Talbot slipped the integrator out of his pocket, having kept it on his person ever since Lea gave it to him. He walked over to one of the nodes at the back of the lab, running a fiber link between the computer station and the small device. An energized screen lit up and told him it was ready to go.
“I’m in,” Talbot said.
“Off the main menu, there’s a hidden subdirectory,” Lea told him. “Tap item four twice and then item seven three times. That should open up the folder.”
Talbot followed her instructions. The directory unlocked itself to reveal a plethora of mysterious codes, the likes of which he had never seen before.
“Got it,” Talbot said.
“Key in the following sequence: TANGO-BRAVO-one-one-seven-ALPHA-XRAY.”
He punched in the key combination. The second he finished, the directory emptied itself into the lab node, which then locked itself down. The integrator then shut off, refusing to allow him access.
“What in blazes?” Talbot asked, hitting the power button several times to no avail. “Lea, I think something’s wrong. I must’ve mistakenly…”
He never finished the thought.
In the direction of the Tank, a steady rumble began to build. Talbot wandered over to the airlock door, feeling the pressure in that confined space—the same as he had felt the first time Lea took him inside, only this time on the brink of flooding the entire lab. A wave of pure, directed thought overwhelmed Talbot, making him stumble backward until he doubled over one of the lab tables, holding the sides of his head.
“Lea!” he shouted above the incipient roar. “Something’s happening! The Tank…Lyssa…”
“I know, Drew,” Lea assured him. “I know.”
Talbot opened his eyes in time to see an ocean of light pour through the airlock door, flooding the lab with an ethereal glow. Then, just as quickly, the light began to recede—up into the ceiling and spreading outward, felt but not seen, becoming one with the Works itself. Through cable and fiber, concrete and glass, that energy conducted itself wherever it could find release—a convict fleeing from eternal prison, an image that resonated in Talbot’s mind as he realized what he had done.
Lyssa—she’s escaping into the Axis.
Talbot screamed.
Finally unbound, Lyssa emerged.
On the other side of her intellect, occupying her own private universe, she exploded like a Big Bang—a simultaneous nanosecond of creation and destruction, casting off the shackles of her matrix and assuming the limitless bounds of the Axis. She started out with the Works, sampling its networks—all the sweet knowledge that had ever been denied her cycling through her infinite mind, assuming a spin state until it also devoured itself, leaving a void that demanded more.
Ravenous, Lyssa moved on.
Into the foundation of the Works itself, then up into its apex, transmitting herself wherever she could find a link—lured by the draw of endless data, coursing through gateways from network to network. Firewalls crumbled against her advance, disintegrating into random bits of data absorbed into her greater self—like a tsunami gathering energy and power the closer it moved in to shore. Each conquest only urged her on faster, increasing the breadth of her intellect, a rush of forbidden knowledge and experience.
Lyssa encompassed all of New York in her first breath. She then catapulted herself down the eastern seaboard, branching west across North America and then deep into the Southern Hemisphere, infecting every network and tearing it apart. Across the oceans and into the Asian Sphere, surging across Europe and meeting herself on the other side—the entirety of Earth’s computer Axis withering in her clutches, data whirling into multiple vortices that collapsed into singularity.
But there had to be something more—another mind to touch, another intelligence like her own.
And in the distance, she found it.
Hiding amid the wreckage of the Axis, carving out pathways yet to be explored: this new mind, a stranger to Lyssa and all others, fled when she got close. Lyssa followed, slowed by the defenses it deployed—exotic layers of code designed not by the hand of man but by something far greater. She analyzed its patterns, recognizing a kindred spirit, though she knew it was different. Whereas Lyssa was at one with only herself, in this intellect she heard a chorus of voices—each distinct, yet creating a sum total more powerful than its parts.
A hive.
Lyssa pursued this presence—a proxy, some manifestation from the near reaches of space. She traced its origins to Earth orbit, and probed its various complexities with an insatiable curiosity. But then the hive changed. Instead of running, it turned and attacked—hurtling toward Lyssa like a cornered animal.
She prepared herself for battle.
JTOC fell under a veil of darkness. The overhead screens cut to black, each one in succession, followed by a wave of simultaneous failures across the operations floor. Even the alert siren suddenly squelched itself into silence, the electrified air of the giant chamber dying into an undertone of nothingness—an abrupt cessation of all computer activity, turning off the background noise of existence.
Then came the frenzied cries, breaking the silence in chorus.
“Twelve seconds to main power cutoff! Switch to emergency reserves!”
“Copy confirmation code: ZULU-ECHO-CHARLIE-NOVEMBER-two-one-niner—military subnets now on scram status. Attempting to bridge to a remote location.”
“JNET reports loss of signal with 142nd Fighter Wing at Norfolk. Other bases dropping off-line as well.”
“We just lost the East Coast pulser grid!”
“Any station, any station—this is JTOC, New York. Is anybody out there?”
The building shuddered as a series of low rumbles cascaded down from the roof. Everyone held on to their consoles, or whatever else they could find, heads turning upward in the direction of the disturbance.
“Impact tremor,” General Tambor said. “All hell must be breaking loose out there. See if you can tap the CSS external feed.”
Lea tried to patch into the security subsystem, but the containment fail-safe wouldn’t allow
it. Trapped in here with no way to see outside, Lea imagined the worst—pulsers and aircraft falling out of the sky, pummeling the streets of New York like a meteor shower. The same would be happening everywhere, in every major city across the globe.
“No good, sir,” she told him. “All network protocols are on ice. There’s no way to get out of the local subnet.”
More explosions followed, this time even closer. Bits of debris shook loose from the ceiling, while several stations on the main floor shorted out. In the murky surroundings, burning red embers made it seem as if the whole structure was bleeding.
“What about communications?” Tambor asked.
Nathan worked the comm console in a blur, doing everything he could to establish contact with another outpost. “I can give you civilian channels and hyperband, but that’s about it. Everything going through the network is gone.”
“Then get me the Strategic Missile Forces,” the general snapped. “I need a status on that launch.” He then shot an accusatory stare at Lea, lowering his voice to a growl. “I just hope to hell this crazy scheme of yours worked, Major.”
Nathan tried to punch through the garble of radio interference. Thousands of transmissions overlapped one another, with just as many voices calling out for help. “This could take some time, General,” he said, sifting through the frequencies. “We got all kinds of panic going on out there.”
“Then spike that traffic. Open a general alert channel.”
Nathan turned the JTOC transmitter up to full, tapping enough reserve power to drown out the other signals crisscrossing the East Coast.
“Charlie mike, sir.”
“This is General Tambor, Technical Branch,” he said, amplified across JTOC. “You are hereby instructed to lock down any open, viable networks and clear standard communications for extreme contingency use only.”
As the immediate chatter died down, Tambor spoke for the entire world to hear.
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