by Mark Wandrey
“I’d like that in writing.”
“And I’m the son of a bitch?” Dram said, looking into her intently narrowed eyes. “What does that make you?”
“Daughter of a bastard, sir.”
“That you are,” he said and nodded. She turned to leave, but he put his hand out to stop her. “One magnificent bastard he was, and this is the first time I’ve seen him in you. He’d be proud.”
“Don’t say that until I’ve succeeded,” she said and detached herself. “I have a lot of work to do.”
Minu unlocked the door and walked out, leaving Dram alone in the room. He watched the door long after she left, his face a dark mask of concern.
* * * * *
Chapter 5
December 14th, 517 AE
Tranquility, Plateau Tribe
If Minu’s team had thought they were working hard before, they were sorely mistaken. As her people arrived the next morning, they found the entire schedule trashed and reorganized. “We’re going to work on this night and day until we have a solution,” she said, pacing the lab. “I’ve been promised whatever it takes, including two scout teams to help with training and testing. They’re our guinea pigs.”
“What’s a guinea pig?” Alijah asked.
“An extinct animal used for testing drugs on old Earth,” Pip whispered. Alijah drew his lips into an ‘O,’ as Minu continued.
“I posted the new schedule to your tablets. I’ve put all other projects on hold or transferred them to other research teams.” They began complaining, but she continued talking over them. “Once we find a solution and deploy it, we’ll go out into the field with the scout teams to make sure the new scheme works as advertised.”
“In the field?” Terry asked.
“You’re kidding, right?” Pip said.
“Awesome,” Alijah laughed. Minu doubted he understood what he was in for. Only she and Pip had been to the frontier more than once.
“I won’t go,” Mandi declared, shaking her head and crossing her arms.
“As a civilian, that’s your decision. When the testing phase begins, I’ll reassign you.”
“Fine,” she said, her eyes shooting daggers at Minu.
After the first week, Minu found herself staying in the lab later and later. Shortly after New Year’s and two days straight of falling asleep at a workstation, she admitted to Pip that she didn’t know enough to handle the task before her.
“No one’s done anything like this since Earth,” he agreed. “We’ve fought more than a few wars on Bellatrix, but that was before we redeveloped firearms.”
“Not the same tactics,” she said. “Arrows and swords aren’t like guns and beamcasters.”
“Have you searched for relevant university classes?”
Minu hadn’t checked for classes about creating an army to fight aliens. Maybe she could put together her own curriculum? She spent the rest of the night reading through the course catalogs of every university on Bellatrix. The results were not exactly encouraging, but she went to bed with some hope. In the morning she met with Pip and reviewed her results.
“Pretty thin,” he said after reading it all. “I’ve taken a few of these.”
“It’s all I could find,” she said. “I can’t believe the Concordia don’t have their own classes, or at least files.”
“What makes you think they don’t?”
Minu narrowed her eyes and Pip looked like he’d said too much. “What have you found?”
“I’ve said too much already.”
“No, you haven’t said enough.” She crossed her arms and looked at him sternly. He bit his lip and tried to look innocent. “Damn it, Pip, what aren’t you telling me? I want some details.”
“You remember when we talked about those partial Concordian databases we found? Well, we also have a few pirated access keys for the main database. We know for a fact the local network is complete, just carefully segmented to keep us from finding anything dangerous.”
“I think we’re in plenty of danger now. What we need is the means to defend ourselves.”
“The Tog probably won’t see it that way.”
“You, and others, think they want us to be armed and dangerous. We’re armed, but we’re not very dangerous.”
“I could get fired for thinking about this.”
“I’ll fire you if you don’t.” Pip looked grief stricken, and Minu shook her head and patted him on the arm. “You know I won’t, but we need that information.”
Pip sighed and pointed to her computer, a desk unit more powerful than a tablet, hardwired into the main network. She slid out of the chair, allowing him to take her place. “There is some risk in doing this,” he told her before proceeding.
“Like?”
Pip took a small metal case from his pocket. To her surprise, it had a tiny bioprint ID reader on it. He slid a finger over the moliplas plate, and it obediently popped open. Inside, she could see places for a dozen data chips. Unlike average chips, these were dualloy. “When we use these IDs, we run the risk of their being traced back to us. It’s sort of a game of cat and howler with the Tog. They know it has to be us, they just haven’t been able to prove it…yet.”
“Serves them right for not giving us the information.”
Pip shrugged and took out one of the dualloy chips, shooting Minu a questioning look. She nodded, and he slid it into the computer. “This is a bad idea,” he said quietly. Minu popped him in the back of the head and pointed at the screen. “Ouch, fine.”
Using his access, he logged into the Chosen network, then shifted to a gateway in the civilian network. She watched him change identities twice before pausing in a corporate network. “Where are you now?” she asked.
“Malovich Industries,” Pip said. Minu smiled as he drew upon the pirated identification. The active light on the dualloy chip came alive, indicating it was now in use. Pip entered a simple command, and he was in the Concordian network. “Here we go.”
Like all Chosen computers, Minu’s had a complete set of script translators. When the input switched to the alien language, the screen flickered with the cryptic symbols, and the translation matrix activated. Pip, always the consummate professional, didn’t waste a second. He instantly accessed the Tog learning archive and scrolled through the index faster than Minu could read. “There’s a lot here,” he said with a whistle, “I don’t think any human has ever seen some of these.”
“Copy it all,” she said. Pip looked around for storage, and Minu handed him a stack of brand new chips. Because it was a desktop, the computer had several data ports. Pip filled all of them and went to work. “How long?” she asked, her heart racing.
“All this? Shit, maybe hours, days, I don’t know. There are petabytes of data. I could—” he stopped in mid-sentence when a pop-up notice appeared. With a sweep of his hand he made it disappear.
“What was that?”
“Trouble.” Minu raised an eyebrow. “The network is wondering why we’re downloading all this data.”
“It’s that smart?”
“Apparently. We usually take a little here and there.”
“Okay, broaden the range of the theft, get us some weapons schematics and military data.”
“Maybe it will confuse the AI,” Pip said and split the screen. In moments, another computer chip flashed as it received copied data. Another warning popped up. “Shit, maybe that wasn’t such a good idea.” Minu wanted to know what was going on, but Pip couldn’t talk. They’d been friends long enough for her to know when he was using most of his brain, and that was a rare occurrence. His fingers flew across the virtual keyboard in a blur, calling up programs and mustering defenses. Quick as a snake striking, he whipped one of the chips out of its slot and slapped another one in. Most of what he was doing was lost on her. She saw that he had at least two more sessions running, one of which was a local connection to his own computer up in the lab. “Code breaking bug,” he said through clenched teeth.
For almo
st ten minutes Pip matched wits with the Tog network AI. He drew on more and more of his assets to keep from being kicked out, or worse. Programming written before mankind had tamed fire fought back against him, but he somehow managed to keep it from besting him. Every thirty seconds he unconsciously removed a full chip and replaced it with an empty one. Minu tried to replace one for him. He snapped at her and slapped her hand away, so she didn’t try again. She checked the pile of new chips and realized they were going to run out. Just then, Pip jerked out the dualloy chip holding his pirated identification and stabbed the network disconnect, separating her computer from the network.
“Are we safe?” she asked, her heart still pumping.
“It was damn close,” he said, sitting back and stretching his legs. She knew he must be twice as tense as she was. “I think it was Z’Kal in person, there at the end.” He looked genuinely concerned.
“The Tog librarian?”
Pip nodded and wiped sweat from his forehead. “I must have set off alarms all over the place. I can’t believe I got as far as I did.” He stared at the small pile of chips on the desk. “You know what this is?”
“Illegal.”
“Right, and it’s also more deep, hard, secret Concordian data than we’ve collected in a hundred years. We scored!”
“What it really is,” she said, taking the chips from him, “is a tool we can never let leave this room.”
“But, Minu!”
“Don’t ‘but Minu’ me. You know as well as I do if this data ever leaves this room, two things will happen. One, they’ll hang you and me out to dry. I wouldn’t be the least bit surprised if Jacob tries to have us fired. And two, we’ll never see that data again.”
“They won’t give it back.”
“Don’t bet on it.” Pip looked at her in disbelief. “You may be right, but no one with less than two stars will ever see it, that’s for certain.” Pip handed her the last of the chips. “I trust you, but you don’t have a safe.” Minu turned around and opened the tiny safe in her office wall. Inside were the chip with her new car’s registration and her debit card. Before putting their hard-won chips inside, she took them one at a time and found the locking tabs. Using her thumbnail, she snapped off the little piece of recessed plastic. Now, the only way to get rid of the data was to destroy the chip. The nine chips full of data were forever read-only. She wondered how long it would take them to figure out what was there. “What did we get?”
“To tell you the truth, I’m not sure. I know there’s an awful lot of the warfare data you wanted, and more than a few thousand technical specifications on weapons. Shit, I might have downloaded Tog cookie recipes at the end to keep Z’Kal off my ass.”
“I don’t know how to thank you, Pip. You really went above and beyond.”
“Promise me you won’t look at any of it without me here.”
“Okay, but why?”
“One, I’m drooling at the prospect of seeing what I got. Two, because I’m afraid a little more than data came through.”
“I clipped them off,” she told him, “bugs can’t affect read-only chips.”
“True, a self-replicating bug is stopped in a read-only environment, but they can be copied into a computer when someone accesses the data; then it’s no-holds-barred.”
“Okay, I understand. Tomorrow, after we finish in the lab, let’s start dissecting what we have.” He smiled and left her alone in her office.
* * * * *
Chapter 6
February 10th, 518 AE
Science Branch, Chosen Headquarters, Steven’s Pass
During the following month, Minu’s schedule compressed into one seemingly endless day. Almost every team certified in the weapons’ use returned for follow up seminars, led by Minu and Pip. During the classes they discussed using the beamcasters for cover fire and avoiding the use of the guns while on the move. “Emphasis should be placed on suppression fire and the use of the beamcasters for pinpoint, highly-destructive sniping,” read Minu’s summary on the handouts. Those who’d already used the weapons agreed whole-heartedly with this change in strategy. Minu also advised the Chosen council that teams taking the weapons into the field should carry an extra power unit for each weapon, at a minimum.
Between meetings with scout teams and council briefings, her team started a complete dissection of the weapon. She had one mounted on the wall of her lab, like a live-action exploded blueprint. They named the components they knew and understood. They labeled those with functions they suspected with asterisks, and they painted the mysterious pieces red and left them unlabeled. When they finished, the amount of red was disturbing.
“I can’t believe we know so little about these damn things,” Minu moaned upon seeing the results.
“It’s common with Concordian tech,” Alijah said. Minu looked around and saw universal agreement among her people. That evening, she and Pip set about reducing the pile of red-labeled components. Like the earlier late-night session, he showed up after hours with a bottle of mead in one hand and a stack of tablets in the other.
“Booze and porno?” she asked with a wry smile.
“Booze and data,” he said and slid past her, “even more arousing in my opinion.”
“You’re a strange bird,” she said and closed the door behind him. The tablets were his personal units; he’d disabled the network connections on two of them. They planned to use those to sift through the stolen data. “Aren’t you being overly careful?”
“When it comes to stolen Concordian data, there ain’t no such thing.” He slid a chip into the first computer and began working. It took less than an hour to justify his precautions. He purposely went through the last three chips first, figuring they had the highest risk attached to them. Pip sifted the data a few files at a time, running it through every bug filter in his arsenal before copying it onto a new chip. The chips were the dualloy type, like those he kept his pirated IDs on. Once loaded, he coded them as read-only and set them aside. Halfway through the second chip, the computer screen flashed ominously and locked up.
“What was that?” Minu asked. She’d been warming up a snack when the incident occurred. All she’d seen was a flash on the wall.
“That was justification for my paranoia,” he said. Pip experimentally pushed a few buttons, then turned the computer so she could see. The computers were solid-state machines, photonic computers with no moving parts. Except for one damaged by physical impact, she’d never seen one fail. The screen looked scrambled, and a window displayed the message, “Hardware Failure.” As she watched it dissolved into Concordian script, then even that deteriorated. Like a melting candle, the entire image disintegrated into random digital garbage.
While that was happening, Pip removed the computer chip and attached another much smaller computer to the dying tablet. “Diagnostic machine,” he told her. “Wow, this is one dead computer!”
“What happened to it?”
“There was some sort of suicide bug tucked into the data we stole.” He worked with the diagnostic computer for a minute before disengaging it. The power light on the stricken machine flickered and went out. “I’ve never seen anything that thorough.” He took out a marker and wrote “Component Level” on the plastic screen of the dead machine. Under that he wrote “TOXIC” in big letters, then wrote the same on the chip that caused the crash.
“Are you sure your diagnostic machine is safe?”
“Oh sure, it doesn’t really load data; it’s like looking at Medusa in a mirror. Perfectly safe.”
“Who is Medusa?”
“You need to read more. We’re going to have to go a lot slower and sift through every single file, at least until we get to the first couple of chips.” Minu looked at the stack of chips and whistled. “Yeah, I know.”
“Okay, so let’s get to it.”
The next day in the lab the others noticed that Pip and Minu had dark circles under their eyes, and they kept grinning at each other. Naturally, they came to a compl
etely wrong conclusion. “About time,” Mandi said with a self-satisfied grin when they broke for lunch. Minu stared after her, confused. It wasn’t until days later that Terry told her everyone thought she and Pip had slept together.
“You bunch of assholes,” she yelled at him.
“Take it easy,” he said and backed up, genuine fear in his eyes, “we were all happy for you! Well, most of us. We narrowed it down to him or one other who’d finally get to you.”
“He really isn’t my type,” she mumbled under her breath. “Wait, who’s the other?” Terry was a quick study, and with the intent of keeping his skin intact, he refused to tell her. The rumor about her and Pip made it around the Chosen at nearly light speed. Only a couple days later, she got her first real date.
***
March 12th, 518 AE
Chosen Headquarters, Steven’s Pass
Minu sat at a table in the corner of the cafeteria by herself, drinking coffee and scanning a tablet full of sifted, safe data retrieved from the Concordian files they’d stolen. She’d already eaten her lunch, and the remains were on the tray in front of her.
“Good afternoon,” a strange voice said. Minu looked up and saw a Chosen she couldn’t remember meeting.
“Hi,” she said and returned to her reading. After a moment, she realized he was still there, so she looked back up. Handsome, nearly two meters tall with well-kept brown hair, blue eyes, and a very athletic build, he was worth the second look. She unconsciously compared him to Aaron, and she found him less muscular but just as handsome. “Can I help you?” She also noticed the three gold stars on his collar.
“I’m Christian,” he said.
“I’m agnostic,” she replied and went back to her reading.
“No, that’s my name. Christian Forsythe.” She blushed and put the computer down. She looked at him, embarrassed. He was smiling and silently laughing. She joined him.