Mech

by Isaac Hooke

  18

  The comm node in Rade’s jumpsuit was still active, which meant it might have been infected as well. To determine that, he momentarily closed his faceplate, and confirmed that the HUD displayed on the glass didn’t change his surroundings. That meant his helmet very likely wasn’t hacked.

  Via the HUD, he accessed the comm node of the jumpsuit, and tapped into the private line he shared with Alpha platoon so that the other teams would hear him. He excluded Cynthia, and the Brigand mechs, in addition to the Anarchist’s units.

  Then, leaving the connection active, he opened the faceplate so he could breathe again.

  “We’ve been hacked,” Rade announced. “Turn off your Implants immediately, and switch to the comm nodes in your jumpsuits. Praxter, I want you to shut down immediately.”

  “Chief, did I hear you correctly?” Praxter said. “You want me to shut down?”

  “That’s right,” Rade said. “Immediately. That’s an order.”

  “Very well.” Praxter’s eyes closed, and his body became very rigid.

  Beside him, Bender blinked. “Holy friggin’ shit. This looks like one of our own ships!”

  “That’s because it probably is,” Rade said.

  Across the platoon, members sealed their faceplates to activate their jumpsuit comm nodes, before opening them so that they could breathe again.

  “I’ve purposely left our Brigands out of the loop,” Rade said. “Fret, Rex, Kicker, Pyro, can you confirm whether your attackers till appear alien?”

  “Our attackers are not alien,” Pyro said. “I’m seeing United Systems security forces in place of the aliens, and Centurion robots where there were spider robots.”

  “Try to surrender,” Rade said.

  A moment later, Pyro said: “They’ve accepted our surrender. We’ve kicked our weapons away, and they’re telling us to lie on the deck with our hands behind our back.”

  “Do it,” Rade said. “Fret, Rex?”

  “They’ve agreed to our surrender here too,” Fret said. “And they want us to lie down so they can bind us and take us to the brig.”

  “Allow it,” Rade said.

  He watched the red dots approach the two teams. The status indicators of his men stayed green when the dots surrounded them, which told Rade they weren’t being harmed. Then the groups proceeded deeper into the ship with their new charges.

  “Wait, you mean all this time we’ve been attacking our own men?” Lui said. “We’ve seen these aliens, and these spider robots since the attack on the Nemesis base! All this time, the aReals in our Implants were changing them into aliens? I feel sick to my stomach.”

  “We all do,” Rade agreed. He could only imagine how many people he’d killed since invading the “Nemesis base.” The thought was devastating. But there was no time to grieve. Not yet. He’d have all the time in the world to do that in his prison cell.

  “It all started after our oxygen tanks suddenly dropped to an hour remaining,” Skullcracker said.

  “Yes, that’s about the correct time,” Rade said. He glanced at Tahoe. “Confirm that Praxter shut down.”

  Tahoe went to Praxter, who was close to the bend, and reached inside his helmet, as the faceplate was open like everyone else. He squeezed his hand inside and appeared to feel around at the back of his head. Then he removed his hand. “I engaged the manual shutdown. If he wasn’t deactivated before, he is now.”

  “Good,” Rade said.

  Tahoe left Praxter, and on a whim peered around the bend, toward the “command and control,” and pulled back when plasma beams melted the bulkhead beside him. “The turrets still look like turrets. And they’re hot as ever.”

  “We’re near engineering,” Rade said. “According to this map. I’ve matched up the blueprints to a Barracuda class vessel.”

  “In engineering, or near it, where we are now, we would have been able to take control of the ship,” Bender said. “That’s what that Anarchist bitch wanted us to do. That’s why it needed our help. It wanted you to bounce ideas off of, my ass,” Bender told TJ. “You were the one doing the hacking for the Anarchist all this friggin’ time!”

  “And so I was,” TJ agreed.

  “What was next?” Lui asked. “What did the Anarchist plan to do once it took control of our ship?”

  “Who knows?” TJ replied. “Maybe it hoped to escape the system by Slipstream. Or perhaps it intended to take control of the fleet itself, using the trusted nature of this ship’s comm node as the launching point for its cyberattack. With Bender and I acting as the hackers, of course.”

  “Assuming the rest of the fleet didn’t blow us up first,” Rade said.

  “Yes, or they could simply ignore all communications from us,” TJ said.

  “That, too,” Rade agreed. “Which is probably what we should have done with the Anarchist and its team from the start.”

  He glanced at Cynthia, who was still near the back of the group, watched by Snakeoil. She had probably overhead some of what was said by those members of the platoon closest to her, but she would have had a hard time hearing those in Rade’s current inner circle; even so, he leaned in close to Bender, and said, softly: “Do you still have your hack program ready?”

  “Which one?” Bender asked.

  “The one you designed to subtly hack the Hoplites and Titans…” Rade explained. “Specifically, the Hoplite holding the Anarchist.”

  “Ah,” Bender said. “I have it ready, yes. But I gave up on it, remember? Considering how remote the possibilities of success were.”

  “What if we could boost those probabilities?” Rade asked.

  “How?” Bender said, seeming intrigued.

  “What if you could access the extra cloud computing resources of the Barracuda?” Rade said. “With those resources at your command, could you accelerate your hack attempts against the Anarchist, and improve your odds of success?”

  “Well, yeah,” Bender said. “I could brute force attack the shit out of the Anarchist. With the cloud computing power, I could also totally obfuscate the attack to look like ordinary network signals.”

  “They won’t just give him control, you know, considering we’ve been trying to take over their ship…” Tahoe said.

  “We could ask,” Manic said. “Call the captain, let him know the situation. Say we’re sorry and all, you know.”

  “Somehow I doubt the captain would agree, considering how many of his security forces we’ve eliminated,” Rade said. “In fact, I expect the captain to be mightily pissed.” He sealed his faceplate to momentarily activate the HUD, and noticed a flashing indicator in the lower right of his display. He opened the helmet again and said: “Looks like the captain wants to talk to me right now, in fact. But before I tap in…” He glanced at Bender. “There’s no way you can get access to the Barracuda’s cloud computing resources?”

  A sly look came over Bender’s face. “Not officially.”

  Rade nodded. “TJ, work with Bender to escalate privileges in the AI core of the starship. Continue doing what you were doing in engineering, if necessary.”

  “So, take over the ship?” TJ asked with a gleeful grin.

  “Not unless you have to,” Rade said. “We only need to partition some of the AI core’s cloud computing resources to help Bender hack the Anarchist.”

  “You know, it’s funny,” Tahoe said. “You guys make it sound like hacking a starship is easier than hacking a bunch of mechs.”

  “Which is somewhat true,” TJ said. “Considering that mechs are usually locked down a whole lot tighter: they fight close to enemy units, and as such need to be far more resistant to exploits. They’re also running a single operating system. Plus, keep in mind that the mech we need to hack has also been augmented with alien technology, which also makes it harder to invade.

  “Now starships, on the other hand, have to be boarded in order to get close to the necessary interfaces. And in engineering, the consoles are usually running a mishmash of operating systems
, most of them outdated; the techs avoid installing the latest official patches from the vendors because that can break their interoperability. It’s something best done in a dry dock, but as we all know, ships can remain in deep space for years before returning to a space station. That’s why engineering is the best place to hack in, for someone who knows how to do it. The Anarchist chose his access point well.”

  Rade sealed his faceplate and gazed at the flashing indicator, answering the call request. Then he opened his visor—his jumpsuit would maintain the connection even while the plate was open.

  “Hello,” Rade said. “This is Chief Rade ‘Rage’ Galaal, of Alfa Platoon, MOTH Team Seven.”

  “We’ve been trying to reach you all this time, Galaal,” the voice said. “You’ve been ignoring us.”

  “Our Implants have been compromised by alien forces,” Rade said.

  “Your men mentioned something about that,” the voice said. “You’ve turned your Implants off like them, I take it?”

  “We have,” Rade said. “I’m communicating with you via my jumpsuit comm node, which seems unaffected by the compromise. Who am I speaking to by the way?”

  “This is Captain Frank Mercedes,” the voice replied. “I have a group of ten security forces waiting nearby to apprehend you. I’ve held them back for the moment, since it looks like we can resolve this situation peacefully. You’re not going to resist if I send them in, are you?”

  “I’ll have to ask you to hold back for a moment,” Rade said. “We will offer you our complete and unconditional surrender shortly. We do have a man here in need of medical attention, so I ask that you take him immediately to sick bay when the time comes.”

  “I’m not sure I can hold back for much longer,” Captain Mercedes said. “The main AI tells me your men are continuing their privilege escalation attempts in engineering.”

  “Yes,” Rade said. “That’s because you still have a problem. See, all of the mechs in the hangar bay will continue to resist. They’re in the complete control of the alien being known as the Anarchist, who has hitched a ride aboard one of the Hoplites in the bay. This Hoplite has alien technology embedded in its cockpit.”

  “Alien technology?” the captain said. “Then capturing that mech is top priority. Versus destroying it outright.”

  “I agree,” Rade said. “My team is working on remedying that problem, but to do that, we’ll need to borrow some spare processing power from your AI core. If you could authorize this, then I’ll have my men stand down on their privilege escalation attempts.”

  “That won’t be possible, given the circumstances,” Captain Mercedes said. “Don’t get me wrong. I believe you, mostly. You see, we’ve had other mechs hacked in a similar manner, and we’ve developed an inoculation, but it has to be applied directly to the mechs in question. But this is the first time I’ve heard of Implants behind hacked, so you’ll excuse me if I’m reluctant to help you, considering that you just tried to forcibly take over my starship. You’ve killed a lot of good men, and AIs. So no, I’m not sharing cloud computing resources with you. Your team will have to work with their own resources.”

  “That’s too bad,” Rade said.

  “I’ll give you five minutes to ‘remedy the problem,’ as you called it,” the captain said. “We know about Bender and TJ. Their reputations as two of the best hackers in the military precede them. So, I’m looking forward to seeing what they can do to this Anarchist. In the meantime, I’m going to have to ask you to stand down on your attempt to hack into engineering, again because of the reputation of those two men on your team… otherwise, if you don’t stand down, I’ll have to send in my forces. And there will be more bloodshed.”

  “All right, we’ll stand down on the engineering attack,” Rade said. “By the way, there’s something I want you to listen in on, captain. You might enjoy this.”

  “Okay…” the captain said.

  Rade muted the captain so that he couldn’t hear what was said next. He glanced at Bender.

  “The captain is asking us to stand down on the engineering attack,” Rade said. “Tell me you’re almost in…”

  “Already got in while you were talking to the captain,” Bender said with an evil grin. “We’ve allocated the necessary cloud computing resources to help with the Anarchist cyberattack. I’m working on breaking into the Hoplite’s AI core even now.”

  “The captain won’t like it,” Lui said.

  “Screw the captain,” Bomb said.

  “Il capitano won’t even notice,” TJ said. “Nor the main AI. Since we’re already in, we’ve ceased any further penetration efforts on the starship’s core. We’ve also marked our existing CPU utilization as part of the ‘system idle’ process, so it won’t even show up in the process list.”

  “You guys are evil,” Bomb said. “Pure evil. Remind me, when I get my own starship, to never invite you aboard.”

  “You know, if the main AI is listening, you just gave yourselves away,” Lui said.

  Bender shrugged, and grinned to showcase his golden grille. “I disabled the main AI’s microphones in this area.” He turned toward Rade. “I’m using the brute force approach I told you about to hack into the Hoplite. The high-speed processors of the cloud are masking the access attempts as random network chatter. That said, there’s still a chance the Anarchist will realize what I’m doing, and might wipe its mind.”

  “I’m not particularly concerned if it does so at the moment,” Rade said. “And to be honest, I don’t really think the entity will. It values its life too much to self-destroy… it wouldn’t have transferred its consciousness into an AI core otherwise. So, keep trying while I have my little talk with the entity. I’ll do my best to distract it.”

  “Is there something you wanted me to hear?” Captain Mercedes asked over the channel.

  Rade unmuted the captain. “Yes.”

  Rade walked to Cynthia, who was still being watched by Snakeoil near the rear of the group. Rade gestured at the others, giving the hand signal to watch the far approach, in case the captain decided to renege on his promise to hold off his forces for the next five minutes. Lui and Manic hurried past them, and knelt down on one knee to target the far bend in the corridor with their laser rifles.

  “Cynthia, put the Anarchist on your external speakers,” Rade said.

  “Why don’t you connect to him directly?” Cynthia asked.

  “Because I don’t want the alien to hack my suit,” Rade replied. “As he hacked my Implant.” He searched her face for signs of surprise, but there were none. “You knew, didn’t you?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “Why didn’t you tell us?” Rade asked.

  “I feared the Anarchist would do the same to me,” Cynthia replied. “So, I kept quiet, like a good little girl, and did what the Anarchist required of me.”

  “You kept silent while we killed our own men?” Rade said. “How could you?”

  She shook her head. “I can’t tell you how hard that was for me to watch. But what could I do? If I spoke, the Anarchist would have simply intercepted my words, and warped them into something else before they reached your ears, or muted them entirely. And then I would have been forced to live the same illusion as you. It seemed better to me to stay on his good side.”

  “All right, well, tap him in,” Rade said. “Assuming you haven’t let him listen in all this time.”

  “I haven’t…” she said. Her eyes defocused slightly, telling Rade that she, too, had an Implant. He had to wonder if hers was hacked, too.

  Then she looked up.

  The Anarchist’s voice came over her speaker system. “You’ve been offline for a long time. Do you have news? Have you hacked the alien starship?”

  “You mean the United Systems starship?” Rade asked.

  The Anarchist didn’t answer.

  “That’s right, the gig is up, Anarchist,” Rade said. “We know what you’ve done. It’s time to start giving us some answers.”

  1
9

  Rade waited for the Anarchist to respond through Cynthia’s speaker system, but instead was met only by more silence.

  “We know you’ve hacked our Implants,” Rade continued. “That you’ve been altering what we’ve been seeing and hearing. Making us kill members of our own security forces.”

  Finally, a deep, rumbling laugh came over the comm.

  “Yes,” the Anarchist said. “I was wondering how long the ruse would last. For a while there, I almost believed that you would hack this ship for me, and then the ships of your entire fleet. Either that, or help me destroy them. But alas, it was not meant to be.”

  “Sorry to disappoint you,” Rade said.

  “There is no disappointment,” the Anarchist said. “But only continued amusement. This battle is not done yet.”

  “You have nowhere to go,” Rade said. “If you try to leap out the hangar bay, you’ll be shot down. If you stay where you are, eventually security forces will bring you down. You have no choice but to surrender.”

  “Wasn’t it one of your men who said that ‘surrender’ wasn’t in your vocabulary?” the Anarchist asked. “Skullcracker spoke those words, I believe.”

  Rade remembered that moment well. Skullcracker had transmitted the words over the platoon-only comm channel, but since the Anarchist had hacked their Implants, the entity had access to all of their private conversations.

  “You hacked the AI cores of our mechs, too,” Rade said. “That’s the one way you could have obtained access to our Implants in the first place. Once the mechs were yours, you had them inject us with sleep agents, via our jumpsuits.” That was one of the reasons Rade hadn’t reconnected with the Brigand mechs after switching to his helmet’s comm node. While it was still on his mind, he promptly removed the authorizations Taya had to engage the different sonic injectors in the suit. Just to be on the safe side.

  “That was why our oxygen levels seemed to drop so suddenly,” Rade continued. “We were out for two and a half days. Not sure what you did while we were asleep, but I can guess.”