“This is headed somewhere, right?” Lanoe asked.
“I’m surprised you don’t know. You have to have lived in a barracks at some point, as old as you are,” the Hellion told him. “We weren’t supposed to talk or socialize after lights-out. If you did, you could get a demerit. So instead of shouting from room to room, we had barracks code. You would tap on the wall to talk to people in the next room, and they would tap back, and you could have a whole conversation.”
Lanoe looked at Candless. “You remember anything like that?”
“After our time, I suppose,” she said. “I just remember my fellow cadets sneaking from room to room in the night and getting caught too often to make it seem worth the bother. Maybe this generation’s smarter than ours—though I’ve seen little evidence of that so far.”
“We had something similar,” Valk said, “in the Establishment training center. But we scratched on the wall instead of tapping.”
“Scratching, tapping, it doesn’t matter,” Bury said. “You can send all kinds of different messages, if you know the code. One tap is ‘hello.’ One tap, a pause, then two taps, that means ‘someone is coming.’”
They all stopped to listen to the thumping. Sure enough, part of the repeated sequence was: thump. Thump thump.
“Someone is coming?” Candless asked. “What on Earth is Maggs trying to—”
“Quiet,” Lanoe said. They listened to the sequence again. When it repeated, he pointed at Ginger. “Translate,” he said.
She twisted her mouth over to one side. “Um. Well. It’s three messages. ‘Pay attention,’ ‘Someone is coming,’ and the last one, those three quick thumps, I think that means ‘danger.’”
Lanoe pointed at Valk next. “Give me camera feed of the inside of Maggs’s cell, right now.”
Lanoe was not a man given to deep self-examination. He’d never really tried to work out why, sometimes, he grew so angry he wanted to choke someone to death with his bare hands. He was, however, wise enough to at least find out if they deserved it first.
Even if he was pretty sure in advance.
“You input one code,” he said, staring into the face of the robot dog. It was blank now, just matte gray plastic. “And the whole ship shuts down. It leaves us completely defenseless.”
Maggs was up against a wall of his cell, pinned there by two marines who were trained in how to restrain someone in microgravity. Ehta stood by with a particle rifle, ready to blow his head off if Lanoe gave her the order.
She knew Maggs almost as well as Lanoe did.
“That’s the principle,” Maggs said. “A nasty little surprise left behind by your friendly local Centrocor espionage representative. Whom you presumably stranded on Tuonela just before they could activate it.”
So he’d been right. There had been a poly spy onboard. Lanoe turned the dog over and over in his hands, as if he could find some hidden hatch on its side that concealed a bomb or a vial of poison. He knew better, of course.
“It’s not a particularly smart program, mind you,” Maggs said. “Very limited in its vocabulary, for one thing. A terrible conversationalist. Most likely it needed to be small, just a few thousand lines of code, so that we wouldn’t notice it lurking inside our computers.”
“Smart enough,” Lanoe said, “to know what to do when it couldn’t complete its mission on its own. It went looking for the one person onboard most likely to betray us.”
“That’s rather unkind,” Maggs said.
He did not, of course, say it wasn’t true.
Lanoe nodded to himself. “Someone with a Centrocor employee number has to activate it. So what you’re telling me is if I throw you out an airlock right now, I never have to worry about this again.”
Maggs sneered. Lanoe had to grant that he was very, very good at sneering. “You’ll remember I didn’t enter the code. I don’t expect you to know anything about computer systems, Lanoe, but you must have noticed that your engines are still running. When I realized what was happening I immediately—and rather cleverly, I think—brought it to your attention. I knew you would recognize the barracks code.”
Lanoe smiled at him. “Nope,” he said.
It gave him a surprising amount of pleasure to watch Maggs’s face fall. Even just for a moment.
“I wasn’t even monitoring your cell,” Lanoe said. “Luckily for you there were other, more observant people around. But okay. Sure. You let us know what was going on. Do you want your commendation now, or can you wait until we get back to the Admiralty? Either way, you’re going back in that cell.”
It was possible that a look of real panic crossed Maggs’s face just then. It was also possible that Maggs was just a good actor.
“I’m not a spy!” the con man said. “I just proved that! I know you think that just because I worked with Centrocor once that I must be tainted forever. But that was a long time ago! I broke that connection when I went to save Niraya with you. In point of fact, Centrocor is suing me right now!”
“For fraud? Attempted extortion? Abandoning your post?”
“For making them look bad. They had written off Niraya as a loss. Indefensible. When you and I saved it anyway, it was a public relations nightmare for them.”
Lanoe’s fingers twitched. Curled up until his hands were just the right diameter to crush the life out of Maggs’s larynx.
A thought came rushing up into his head, one he hadn’t expected.
She’s dead. Zhang is dead. You didn’t save her. The only woman I loved is dead because when we needed you most, you weren’t there. You showed up ten minutes late, you and your high-ranking friends from the Admiralty, you showed up when I had already won that damned battle. When Zhang was already—
He forced himself to breathe.
“My loyalty is to the Navy,” Maggs insisted. “Do you think Admiral Varma would have let me anywhere near this mission if that was in doubt?”
“You can ask her the next time you see her. When we get home and let you out of your cell,” Lanoe said. He gestured at Ehta and she moved forward, opening her mouth to issue orders to her marines.
“Wait,” Maggs said. “Wait!”
Despite himself, knowing he would probably regret it, Lanoe turned slowly around. Raised an eyebrow.
“You haven’t figured it out. Have you? What my message meant.”
Lanoe drew a long, deep breath.
“Damn you, Lanoe, you don’t even understand what this virus, this service package, was meant for, do you? It wasn’t designed to kill you. It was designed to make you easy to capture. Don’t you get it?”
“Apparently not,” Lanoe said.
“They wanted to cut our engines. Leave us dead in space, because they’re already on their way to come collect us. That’s why the program was so insistent that I hurry up.” Maggs grimaced in frustration. “Lanoe, Centrocor is coming for us right bloody now.”
“Be a dear and don’t touch those exposed bus bars, all right?” Paniet said, shoving his upper body inside a maintenance duct. Valk wasn’t exactly sure what he was talking about—the long metal things covered in wires or the slats of what looked like a very large set of Venetian blinds.
“Why? Are they fragile?”
“Not at all,” the neddy replied, laughing. “They’re sturdier than you are. But if you touch two of them at the same time you’ll create a short circuit. And with the voltages going through those bars, you’ll be vaporized and turned into a ball of plasma that will rip its way right through the side of the ship.”
“Okay,” Valk said, keeping his hands clasped behind his back.
“I really oughtn’t have anyone down here who isn’t rated for engine maintenance,” Paniet said, his voice muffled by the machinery around him. “It’s very dangerous. But I won’t tell if you don’t.”
“Lanoe said there had to be some kind of evidence of the tampering,” Valk said, repeating why he’d come down here in the first place. So far all he’d done was follow Paniet around a serie
s of incredibly tight corridors that seemed to branch and come together at random. He’d expected to find that the engineering deck would be some cavernous space dominated by the giant fusion torus that powered the ship and its drives. Instead, it seemed the torus was buried under tons of shielding and armor—and therefore not visible at all.
He supposed it made sense. It also made him wonder why he’d never seen the engineering section of a big ship before, despite the fact that he’d traveled on dozens of them. Well, if they were full of exposed bus bars and things, he guessed he had an answer.
“You think it’s down here?” he asked.
“What’s down here?” Paniet replied, pulling himself back out of the duct.
“The—I don’t know. The data spike or … or microdrive, or whatever the spy used to introduce the virus. Is it plugged in down here?”
Paniet gave him a very kind, very patient smile. “You do know we can detect things like that. That we scan everyone who comes onboard for weaponizable equipment. Yes?”
“Uh, I do now,” Valk said.
“This spy of yours wouldn’t have brought some kind of physical media onboard with them, no. Most likely this service package—and please, please stop calling it a virus!—would have just been loaded onto a minder or even a suit computer. It would have to have been camouflaged very carefully to get past the ship’s safeguards, but I imagine a poly would know how to do such a thing. No, there wouldn’t be any physical evidence. The package exists only as code grafted onto our integral software. I found it as soon as I was told it was there, though I doubt I would’ve ever discovered it, otherwise.”
“You—you found it. So what are we doing down here?”
“My job. Be a dear and hand me that filter panel, will you? The thing that looks like an origami master dropped a tab of methylcholinase.”
Valk looked behind him and found the filter, a round panel filled with intricately folded and vaned mesh. He handed it over and Paniet slid it into place.
“So you found it. The vi—the service package. And you deleted it, right?”
“Ah, no. I’ll get around to it, though. Promise.”
Valk frowned. No, he told himself, he really didn’t. You needed a face to frown. But hellfire, it felt like he had. “But it’s dangerous—”
“Incredibly so. And that, love, is the answer to your question. It’s dangerous to keep it in place. Even more dangerous to delete it. Right now that service package’s code is buried so deep in subroutines of subroutines that I need to tease out each line and check to make sure I’m not deleting something vital. If I scrub the wrong string I could delete our ability to recycle our water. Or I could crash the drivers of every display emitter on the ship and then we wouldn’t be able to stream videos, or, for that matter, fly. So yes, you can tell our esteemed commander that it will be done. But that it’s going to take about a week of my doing very little else. How does this old filter look to you?” Paniet held up another of the mesh panel. This one looked like somebody had stepped on it with a dirty boot.
“Kind of nasty. Wait, so you’re telling me the code is buried in the rest of the ship’s software. So that it’s hard to tell what’s Centrocor’s and what’s the Navy’s. Like—like—threads. No. Smaller than that. Little tiny fibers woven together to make … make threads.”
Valk was not aware of time passing. Only that suddenly Paniet was calling his name, over and over. He wanted to respond but he was—somewhere else. Somewhere he couldn’t describe, somewhere with no light, no air, not even any dimensions, just—yes and no. Yes and no, over and over again, and sometimes the maybe of a qubit but those were rare, and Paniet was still calling him and—
The neddy rapped his knuckles on Valk’s helmet. “You still in there?”
Valk snapped back into reality so fast he got dizzy. “The lines of code in the service package, they all had an extra, unnecessary space inside their closing brackets. Whoever wrote that code—that was like, their signature or something.”
Paniet nodded carefully. “And you know this because …?”
“I just deleted the service package,” Valk said.
He couldn’t explain it much better. He’d simply looked at the ship’s code. At its innermost programming. He’d analyzed millions of lines of dense scripting, teased out the offending entries, pruned the necessary directories …
All without touching a terminal, or tapping a single virtual key. It was all just there, all the time, and all he had to do was look at it. As simple as turning his head to look down the corridor. No, simpler. And much faster.
The neddy didn’t look horrified. More impressed than anything else. “And that is something we can do, is it?”
“I guess so,” Valk told him. “I, uh, won’t tell if you don’t.”
The Navy made a point of never fighting a battle inside a wormhole. Because ships largely had to pass single file down the ghostly tunnels, it would be like two cars of the same train lobbing shots at each other. It was just too dangerous—you couldn’t properly maneuver, your fighters would just get in each other’s way, and long-range guns were largely useless.
Worst of all, you could barely see who you were shooting at. Radio waves—the basis for almost all of the Hoplite’s sensors—didn’t propagate easily inside the wormhole, where even photons that touched the walls were instantly annihilated. Laser range-finders were all right, as long as there was nothing between you and the thing you wanted to hit, which was almost never the case. And that was even assuming you were in a straight, unobstructed section of wormhole, instead of a bit that curved and twisted like a crawling snake. Which was almost always the case.
The Navy had come up with all kinds of innovative strategies and solutions to these problems. The Admiralty had spent billions on trying to tease out the knot of wormspace combat. In the end, after all that money spent and person-hours wasted, the answer had come back: Don’t fight inside a wormhole.
Apparently they hadn’t shared that memo with Centrocor.
Lanoe remembered the four cataphract-class fighters they’d sent after him on his way to the Admiralty, back at the start of all this. Those pilots hadn’t shied away from a wormspace fight. He was certain that the force now approaching them wouldn’t, either. Not that he knew anything about what they were sending for him.
“Launch ’em,” he said. Candless tapped a virtual key and a cloud of microdrones burst from a panel near the cruiser’s engines. They burned their tiny thrusters hard, maneuvering to avoid the wormhole’s walls. They pushed back along the cruiser’s route, looking for any sign of pursuit. On his display their camera feeds built up a composite image, the way an insect’s compound eye synthesized a coherent picture from hundreds of facets. The picture they provided was very complete.
They couldn’t see what wasn’t there, though.
“You could have hours yet,” Maggs said. “Or minutes. Sadly my little robot dog friend wasn’t clear on the time frame. Just that the attack was imminent.”
Lanoe gritted his teeth. “No idea what they’re sending, right? No clue if we’re facing a couple of fighters or a whole destroyer group?”
“If I had such information,” Maggs told him, “I would share it.”
“Sure,” Lanoe said. He would never trust Maggs, never again, but he had to assume the con artist had no reason to lie right now. “XO,” he said, “what can we field right now? Talk to me about gunnery and support craft.”
Candless nodded. “As far as the guns go, the rather brusque Lieutenant Ehta tells me her people are still a bit untutored but they’ll get the job done. Maybe expect fifty percent effectiveness there. There’s good news and bad news about support craft. We have plenty of fighters in the vehicle bay, a full squadron of twelve. The bad news of course is that we haven’t enough pilots to go around.”
“There’s me, and Valk, and you,” Lanoe pointed out.
“May I suggest that your arithmetic is a tad faulty?” Candless asked. “You’re going to fl
y one of those cataphracts? We do know that traditionally the commander of a Naval ship stays on the bridge during battle, don’t we?”
“Belay that. I’m more use out there.”
“Well, then, there’s Valk. Who happens to be an artificial intelligence. I can’t in good conscience assign him to a support role. The law is very clear, that no machine is ever to be allowed autonomous access to a weapons system, not even—”
“Belay that, too. I know how you feel about AIs, but this is different. It’s a completely different thing.”
Candless stared at him down her long nose.
“I’d take Valk as my wingman any day,” Lanoe said. “You don’t know him like I do.”
“Very well. You can have him then. Since I’ll be back here, on the bridge.” He started to bridle at the idea, but she held up one hand for patience. “My personal feelings aside, you need somebody to actually steer the cruiser while you’re out there racking up kills. Unless you have yet another surprise guest up your sleeve. Maybe a pilot or two you’ve hidden in your luggage.”
She had a point. Leaving the cruiser without a pilot in the middle of a battle was a great way to have it blunder into the walls of the wormhole and annihilate itself. He resisted the urge to slap his console in frustration. “What about Bury and Ginger? You trained them. They have to be halfway competent.”
“Bury has never fought in actual combat before, but he’d do well, I think,” Candless said. “As for Ginger—I’ve already told you. She can’t fight. Before we left Rishi, it was already confirmed that she wouldn’t be finishing the pilot program. She doesn’t have the killer instinct. I’d half-expect her to simply refuse if you tried to make her shoot at someone.”
Lanoe shook his head. “I didn’t plan on giving her the option. She knows how a fighter works. That’s good enough. We don’t have enough people that we can let her sit this out just because she has moral compunctions.”
Forgotten Worlds Page 22