A large minority of those who believed the Premier owned the backdoor also believed the Premier had combined all the subkeys onto his private computer in his home for convenience, and that additional people and organizations had stolen the code from there.
Various people in the military had listened to these conclusions and deduced that the better part of valor in an uncertain world would be to use BrainTrust CPU chips for all military computers, since the BrainTrust alone in the world had stripped out the back door circuitry in the chips it manufactured under license from American vendors. These military people had, in their foolish wisdom, attempted to write into the requirements for their combat systems a specification to use BrainTrust chips only.
That produced howls of indescribable fury from the American chip vendors. The military contractors had supported them, and the full force of a lobbying system with powerful proponents in every state of the union had used their full might to overturn this requirement.
So all the computers in all the weapons of America’s military had the backdoor embedded and fully operational.
In the temporary Cyberwar Combat Center of the Chiron, Merrilee Winston listened to Colin on the phone. She ended the call grimly. “I see the codes on my tablet. Thank you. We’re on it.”
She smiled at the classroom full of the best and brightest computer security hackers of the BrainTrust, bringing her eyes at last to rest on her son. “You get your wish.” She tapped her tablet. “Here are the codes.” She turned a fierce glare on everyone. “We are only using these for the duration of this emergency and the needs of this battle. Then we’ll scrub the codes from all these machines and melt down the machines so there’s no chance of resurrecting them. Is everyone clear?”
Shura raised her hand. “Can we use them to attack the Russians sailing toward the Prometheus fleet as well? They are part of the battle, aren’t they?”
Merrilee pursed her lips. “Let me examine the situation before making a determination.”
Shura continued to look at her quizzically.
Merrilee sighed. “The answer is probably yes if they represent a serious threat.”
Kingsley spoke a few words. “Won’t work with Russians.”
Charlie amplified, “They’re way primitive compared to American Navy. Lots of stuff under local control, hardly any integration. They’re not very effective, but they’re not very vulnerable either. We’ll have a lot of trouble getting connections so we can use the backdoor.” He paused. “The Chinese are even worse. They barely have any networking.”
Merrilee put a period to the discussion. “For now, focus on the Americans, whose fighters are flying toward us as we speak.”
Charlie crooned with delight as he studied his displays. “They’ve released the shipboard missile locks.” He looked up. “Plan Backfire, Mom?”
Merrilee’s eyes took on a hawkish appearance despite her thick glasses. “Plan Backfire. Now.”
Captain Tucker of the South Dakota had tried everything he could think of. He’d gone to flank speed. He’d gone to the very edge of crush depth. He’d even tried a couple of Crazy Ivans, the hardest turns he could make to port and starboard with the intention of throwing off the bot that seemed unshakably glued to his tail.
After wiggling and waggling at max speed at insane depths for a while, he calmed down as he realized that his unwelcome hitchhiker had done no harm. Could he get back into the fight?
He drove the boat straight ahead for a while, until Sonar assured him the bot propulsion signatures of the swarm trailing him had faded. He ordered an ascent while reloading the torpedo tubes.
The sonar operator jerked and adjusted his dials.
The captain started to ask, “What?” when he heard it too: the sound of a high-speed electric drill, apparently emanating from the stern of the boat. The whining seemed muffled at first, then suddenly became sharp and clear.
Sonar gave his best interpretation. “I think the bot just drilled through our acoustic tiles, and now it’s drilling our outer hull.” He didn’t need to point out that if the drilling bot punched through the light outer hull and went to work on the inner pressure hull, they’d be in serious trouble.
The captain had a disturbing image of a bot that looked humanoid except for the propellers where the legs should be, pulling an electric drill bought at Home Depot from its tool belt, and destroying his sub with a three-quarter-inch tungsten-carbide drill bit. He shook his head. “All stop.”
Moments later, the drill punched through the outer hull, then stopped as well. Sharp tapping followed.
The comm operator sounded amazed. “Morse code.” He hurried to translate the letters.
THIS IS THE ALCYONE. PLEASE HOLD POSITION. WE DON’T WANT TO KILL YOU. SIT TIGHT. ONE WAY OR THE OTHER THIS WILL ALL BE OVER IN A LITTLE WHILE. IF YOU NEED ANYTHING, ASK OUT LOUD. WE CAN HEAR YOU.
Tucker rubbed his temples. “Okay, we’ll comply. What’s happening out there?”
NO SHIPS SUNK YET. THAT WILL PROBABLY CHANGE, HOWEVER.
Two Ticonderoga-class cruisers and three Arleigh Burke destroyers prepared to launch ten LRASMs apiece, targeting Bogey Twenty-Nine.
Hatches blew off fifteen of the vertical launch tubes on those ships, and fifteen missiles lifted into the air.
This might have looked from the outside like a good opening salvo, but the operators of the missile systems looked at it in stupefied horror.
They had not punched the launch buttons yet.
Fifteen missiles lifted into the air and practically spun on their heads as they tipped over and headed straight for the other ships in the American fleet.
On the Kennedy, Beck and his staff had the eerie opportunity to watch as two of their escorts’ missiles dived toward them.
The Kennedy’s Phalanx gatling guns, the last defense against incoming missiles, operated under local control and therefore did their jobs as intended. One missile exploded short of the ship, destroying the Phalanx gun that had nailed it. The other missile dodged the hail of bullets and slammed into the base of the bridge.
Damage control klaxons sounded. The CIC shook violently at the impact that landed just far enough to leave the Center intact.
Admiral Beck had feared this and laid plans long ago. “Network blackout now!”
All comm between ships in the fleet ended. Every receiver on every ship powered down. Even the ships that did not hear the admiral’s order, upon seeing the missiles misfiring, followed the standing order the admiral had laid down to respond to this situation.
Every subsystem on every ship reverted to local control, cut off from everything and everyone.
Bad as this was, the crews had known it would not be enough. As the enemy had taken control of the missiles, they had surely also planted additional viruses in every computer they could reach. The operating systems and applications of every piece of networked equipment on every ship had been fully compromised. There was only one solution.
Every ship powered down every computer in every subsystem and started a reboot from the ROMs with original, pristine, virus-free software.
By virtue of their supreme competence and heroic efforts, mixed with a hefty serving of luck that their vessels had not been damaged too badly by the backfiring missiles, the men and women on two of the stricken ships were able to safely launch under local control a dozen of the LRASMs that were intended to strike Bogey Twenty-Nine. The missiles straggled out of their launch tubes and hurtled toward the intended target.
Additionally, the fighter squadrons already in the air had little choice but to try to fly their mission, since an aircraft carrier rebooting from scratch was not a hospitable place where one could sensibly land.
Beyond that, the entire American fleet was now out of action for the next hour—if they were lucky.
At long last, Ping got to lift her fighter into the air and let slip the copters of war. “Diric, you got full control of your drones? Ted, how ‘bout you?”
While Ted Simpson and
Diric answered with enthusiastic affirmatives, Ping looked down at the two Prometheus patrol boats from which her and Toni’s F35s had just taken off. They had made a long, harrowing trip past the Cape of Good Hope from West Africa to the Pacific, to come up on the BrainTrust from the south, where none of the Alliance fleets would see them.
The trip had been particularly precarious because the patrol boats weren’t designed to carry fighter planes in the open seas, and despite the extraordinary engineers and the extraordinary engineering that had gone into the helipads and the counterweights and the gyros on the Storm King and her sister ship, Ping had spent much of the voyage expecting them both to capsize.
But that was all behind them now.
Toni took command. “Ping, form up on my wing.”
As Ping obeyed the order, she looked around. She could see Ted sitting in the back cockpit behind Toni, and twisting hard enough, she could see Diric behind her in her fighter’s extra chair. The weapons control officer positions in the original design had been refitted into places for the swarm control officers.
They were coming into direct comm range of the fleet of stealth drone copters that had flown from the Prometheus straight across Africa, powered by an ever-varying combination of laser power from Matt’s satellites (always online, but not able to focus enough power to prevent the copter batteries from draining), lasers from the Alcyone (which had sailed on the surface for part of the way from East Africa to the Fuxing to make the assist), and the Aegis (from Fuxing to the battle zone).
Diric announced readiness for battle. “Switching from remote satellite feeds to direct control.” With the copters under direct control, there would be no time lags that would impair copter performance in a dogfight.
Ping cheered. “All right! Now let’s take those suckers!” Next she chortled. “Preparation, Jam says. Well, I’ll show those bastards some goddam preparation!”
Toni interfered with her fervor. “Hold on there, cowboy. Let the boys and girls down below do their prep work. Basic strategy, Empress. Let your people soften up the target first. This is known in military speak as ‘preparing the battlefield,’ so you should appreciate it.”
“Sure,” Ping offered cheerfully. “All preparation, all the time. Sitting tight.”
Admiral Beck abandoned proper protocol and paced, a caged tiger with no way to communicate or learn what was happening until the Kennedy rebooted.
He found himself running a number of questions through his mind, one of which eventually bubbled up into speech. He turned to his surveillance expert. “I’ve just had a bad thought.”
The officer he addressed looked back at him, perplexed, since there were too many possible bad thoughts at that moment to identify one as the likely source of trouble.
The admiral explained, “How did the BrainTrust even find our bombers? The damn things are as stealthy as black cats at midnight.”
The officer frowned. “That’s a very good question, Admiral.” He stared into space thoughtfully. “To the best of our knowledge, we knocked down all the satellites they had with surveillance capabilities when we knocked down their laser sats.”
The admiral frowned harder. “When we get operational again, I want to find out where they’ve hidden another surveillance network. Or is there some other way they could have found our bombers? Besides some magic tech no one outside the BrainTrust has ever heard of?”
Lambert interjected, “Virtually all of the BrainTrust’s tech is evolutionary. Whatever they’re doing, they’re not doing magic.”
Beck look around. “Other ideas?” After a moment of silence, he continued, “Very well. I want to find their alternate satellites and destroy them.”
The satellite operator had been listening to the conversation, while simultaneously managing the progress of his systems during the reboot. At this, he interrupted apologetically. “Uh, sir, destroying the sats the BrainTrust is using might not be a good idea.”
The admiral glared at the nervous operator. “Why not?”
“Because, Admiral, I suspect they are using our satellites.”
Despite the success of the military-industrial complex in thwarting the NSA’s effort to secure the military against cyberattack, the NSA had modestly greater success defending their own resources. They might not be able to secure their computer chips, but they could darn well secure their comm lines, and thereby significantly limit the risk of an initial viral penetration.
So instead of using the standard encryption combo of RSA with AES for its latest generation of surveillance sats, the NSA had incorporated one-time pads into all its platforms. One-time pads were an abominable nuisance to maintain, but you could guarantee that no outsider could inject an attack into the opening dialog between the computers. The NSA had reluctantly concluded it was worth it.
In the opening moments of the Battle for the Open Seas, it had worked well enough for the NSA geeks to feel satisfied with their efforts.
But nothing lasts forever. Computer security is particularly short-lived when the enemy has direct physical access to your hardware and can simply rewire around all your cool software.
Brandy floated in zero-G in the cockpit of her cute flying-wing spacecraft. The ship had once belonged to the US Air Force. It had been borrowed by the FBI for a job of dubious legitimacy and had then been taken by Brandy, either as salvage for the BrainTrust or as a war prize for SpaceR, depending on who you asked. The purpose of the original FBI mission with the craft had been to break into and hijack the satellites in the Starry Night network.
Irony was never lost on Brandy, who sat in her pilot’s chair, snapping her chewing gum while cackling every so often as she and the BrainTrust used the ship to penetrate America’s most advanced surveillance network. She turned to her companion. “Everything copacetic?”
Song, a Chinese peasant who’d demonstrated a remarkable genius for designing and building bots out of almost nothing, smiled at her. On his screens, you could see bots scurrying around both the interior and the exterior of the NSA satellite Brandy had grabbed in the robotic arms extending from the cargo bay of her ship. “Our hardware and software are now wholly integrated. We can take full control any time.”
Brandy shouted into the air around them, “Hear that, folks?”
Charlie Winston’s high-pitched voice came through with some background static as he spoke over the comm. “This is great, Song.” His voice was muffled as he turned from the microphone. “Mom, can we take over the NSA satellites?”
Merrilee answered sternly, “That’s may, not can, Charlie. Brandy just told you that you can, but I’m telling you that you may not. Colin doesn’t want them to know we’ve hijacked their systems, at least not yet.”
“Okay, Mom.”
The squadron leader of the first fighters that had lifted off the Kennedy heeled his plane over and plunged toward the BrainTrust icebergs. He jinked continuously in the faint hope it would throw off the aim of the lasers trying to kill his sensors.
On his helmet display, the target area of the Chiron where the CIC should be was highlighted in red. He closed fast, amused that neither SAMs nor fighters would stand in his way and irritated that he would have to take his fighter within knife-fight range to ensure his missiles didn’t drift off target when they lost their guidance systems to the blasted BrainTrust lasers.
His briefing had warned him that the enemy had a pair of F35s. He was confident, however, that he would see them long before they saw him since his sensors and immersive display were fully integrated with the sensors on all the other planes in his squadron. With his planes spread out, one of them was guaranteed to get good radar returns off the sides of the enemy planes. If the enemy showed up, they were on a suicide mission.
Indeed, as he thought about it, a pair of F35s showed on his display a considerable distance to the south-southwest, marked as targets since their Identification Friend or Foe failed to respond properly. After dropping his anti-ship missiles, he’d head for them next.
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br /> So far, the supposed optic-killing lasers hadn’t done jack shit to interfere with his flight. He had started wondering about that when another pair of enemy fighters showed up to the rear, on the edge of the second squadron behind him.
Cursing and puzzled that the second squadron was not engaging the enemy, he launched his anti-ship missiles far too early and peeled off to engage the enemy fighters.
Approaching the enemy as the enemy approached him, with a total closing speed of nearly Mach 2, the squadron leader and his wingman came within launch range of the enemy in moments. The other pilots of his squadron flew close behind as they too ditched their anti-ship missiles before coming around. The enemy aircraft exploded as the squadron leader’s missiles touched them.
Then his own wingman exploded, and the squadron leader jinked with mad abandon to avoid missiles being fired from…from the planes in the second squadron!
He broadcast to all the planes in both squadrons, “The enemy has hijacked our IFF systems! Revert all systems to local sensors only! Get on the bug! The guy you’re shooting at is your wingman! Forget about the enemy fighters! Hit the Chiron! Now!”
About half the fighters seemed to have gotten his message. The other half seemed to have been jammed and continued shooting at each other with panicked determination.
Captain Ainsworth and Chief Hart watched philosophically as the missiles from the American ships streaked toward them.
These missiles had been launched in the moments after the BrainTrust’s cyberwarriors hammered the ships but before the ships had been forced to shut down everything. Chief Hart stated the obvious. “Yup, they’re all heading toward us. Looks like they figured out who we are.”
Captain Ainsworth pointed at a couple of the outlying rockets. “We did burn out their sensors. See how they’re drifting? They might hit us, but I doubt they’ll be able to hit any one section of our ice armor with enough warheads to penetrate and sink us.”
Braintrust- Requiem Page 32
