by Brian Smith
Ayers’s musings were interrupted by a tap on the door, rather than by a virtual avatar of her visitor appearing in a mixed-reality overlay in her snoopers. She hadn’t worn snoopers or oculars at work in over two months. They were almost impossible to use effectively in the nonnetworked environment in which everyone was working these days. She had to physically release the door lock from her desk if the person on the other side didn’t have the access code.
A yeoman stepped into the space with a few stacked flimsiplast sheets in hand—another throwback to the information stone age that the war was forcing them to relive.
The yeoman looked to be on the verge of tears; her eyes were red and puffy from crying earlier; she looked unkempt; and she seemed to be barely holding it together. The word was out on her—she’d lost her entire family on the West Coast. Ayers felt terrible for her, but the yeoman wasn’t the only one who’d suffered losses; after three months, Ayers found the woman’s demeanor increasingly grating with each passing day. Still, she wasn’t without compassion. She bit her lip and refrained from saying anything that would send the yeoman deeper into a mental tailspin.
“What have you got there?” she asked instead.
“I’m not sure what exactly is on them,” the yeoman replied with downcast eyes and a sniffle. “They came addressed to you directly, ‘Eyes Only,’ from the Naval Research Laboratory. Code-word clearance.”
Ayers nodded. “Okay, I know what they are, then. Thanks, Gonzalez. That’ll be all.”
“Yes, ma’am,” the rating replied meekly.Ayers didn’t bring up the data on the flimsiplast sheets until the door closed behind the yeoman and the space was secure again.
Ever since returning from Mars with her report in hand, she’d been operating on the top tier of the naval hierarchy, at a level she’d never imagined. Within two weeks of her return, she’d been spot-promoted two grades to CW5 and reassigned as a special assistant to the Director of Naval Intelligence. Her security clearance was ratcheted to the top, she was given her own office and a small staff on Armstrong Station, and, despite her rank as a warrant, she now wielded impressive influence behind the scenes. When she’d debriefed her report with the director on Earth, she’d asked the admiral why he felt she merited all this. His answer was straightforward: she’d been fighting this war since before they even realized it was a war, and he had an instinct about her. She’d taken his answer at face value, pinned on the promotion, and turned to.
Ayers picked up the first flimsiplast, opened the data partition on it, and began to read. Although the page was made of a paper-thin complex polymer, it could either bend limply in her hand or be commanded to “brace up” in an unbendable sheet with the subtle application of a little electric current. Transfer of classified information was being handled manually, moved from unnetworked archives to hardcopy media like this and then hand carried by courier to the recipients. At least she didn’t have to worry about returning the files; they could be deleted once she was finished with them.
The first report was on the Omni Systems synths. Thuvia had brought the remains of two of them back to Earth almost completely intact except for the part where Kusaka Shiguro had disassembled them with, of all things, a sword. Reuben James had brought back several, most of them severely damaged in close combat. Using this information, along with the schematics stored on Campbell’s data cores, researchers on Earth made a good deal of progress. Most of this report was a technical breakdown on the synths and their capabilities, which meant it was Greek to Ayers for the most part. Still, she was an expert at extracting the pertinent data she needed from a report like this.
There was good news: U.S. Army robotics specialists had figured out a way to spot an Omnisynth in a crowd and had passed the data back to the navy. The crew of Reuben James had learned the hard way that the Omnisynths could simulate a human infrared signature, so switching to a thermal overlay in one’s snoopers didn’t break them out in a fight. However, army researchers found that using a combination overlay of night-vision and ultraviolet modes made the synths stand out with a sort of visible electromagnetic aura that human beings didn’t generate. Snoopers weren’t designed to combine vision modes like that, but they could be modified with a firmware upgrade. Very shortly, the Omnisynths were going to be rendered vulnerable. Detection was more than half the battle; right now nobody could even guess how many there were, or how many sensitive locations they might have infiltrated while seamlessly mimicking humans.
Another finding in the report was that Omnisynths could morph, much like a spaceplane on atmospheric reentry, changing their physical appearance. Another piece of the puzzle fell into place; this relieved a lot of Ayers’s previous frustration regarding hunting highly placed MIM agents.
No wonder it was impossible for us to find Gabriel Rogan. I’ll bet my retirement pay the son of a bitch is a synth! Maybe even more than one synth, hiding in plain sight. A muppet being controlled from behind the scenes by players who can stay anonymous. Rogan can always be where he’s needed at any given moment; otherwise he’s a ghost. Impossible to kill, too, until we bag the entire MIM leadership cabal.
Ayers mentally filed that idea away to put into her next report.
Right now Terran forces were hopeful that the Omnisynths already in circulation were the only ones they would have to find and destroy. The data cores included not just the schematics for the Omni Systems factory that produced the synths, but its location on Mars as well. The entire industrial complex had been targeted in the recent “flyby” attacks conducted by TOA forces, and treated to a literal hailstorm of tungsten kinetic lances. High-resolution imagers from Terran space showed nothing but a new, densely packed field of small impact craters where facilities had been located. One problem solved, at least, and a minor chalk mark in the win column—provided the MIM hadn’t built more of these synth factories somewhere else. They’d been manufacturing particle-beam weapons in the asteroid belt, on 5111 Omega, so anything was possible.
The second report was on the advanced computer cores that Bill Campbell’s supercomputer on Titan had engineered to upgrade itself. This information was part of the package Carter Drayson had turned over to the government. It still rankled her that he’d come out of all this smelling like a rose, but results were what mattered in the end, and he’d delivered.
The engineering report on the computer cores was more in line with Ayers’s specialty, and she understood portions of it even though she wasn’t a hardware engineer. What made her instantly sit up and take notice was that the same fluorescent goop so central to the makeup of the Omnisynths was used extensively in these cores as well, apparently in the way the cores networked and communicated back and forth. This sent her immediately back to the Omnisynth report, which she dug into a little more carefully this time.
The Q-gel in the synths was intrinsic to all sorts of their functions, but network communications was second on the list, right behind the AI brain itself. She was sitting straight up in her chair now, her heart pounding, and she went to the third report: the one on the Q-gel itself.
Again it was all highly technical, mostly a mishmash of advanced-chemistry and astrophysical-sciences jargon that gave her the beginnings of a massive headache. Once more, however, she was able to draw the pertinent facts from the mass of technical data. The report stated that it was the first known example of quantum entanglement used in applied engineering. The author of the report hadn’t been able to keep his own excitement from showing through: the potential clearly existed not just for FTL communications, but in the ability to move information packets across cosmic distances in zero-time—a violation of causality and current cosmology that didn’t seem to faze the report writer.
It didn’t faze Ayers, either, because she knew that Kusaka Shiguro had recently published his mentors’ entirely new theory of astrophysics and cosmology—one that might account for this. This potential, given the use of this Q-gel within the networking hardware of both the computer cores and the
Omnisynths, . . . That was it! The answer!
This was the missing piece of the puzzle that brought it all together. Everything she’d previously ruled out as impossible wasn’t impossible at all! She’d found her way out of the information-warfare maze after all, and the cheese was right there in front of her, waiting to be grabbed. The entire picture was almost complete.
Ayers’s face flushed in a pleased grin, and she sat back with her coffee mug in hand, letting the third and final report fall to her desk. Her eyes unfocused a bit as she looked at the whole problem again with this fresh understanding. She had only one or two questions left to answer, and then, she felt, she’d have the final solution. She’d never been so excited in her entire life, even though, at the same time, her growing suspicion was almost too terrible to contemplate. She stabbed the intercom button on her desk, calling for Yeoman Gonzalez.
“Yes, ma’am?”
“I need to commandeer one of the ready-alert duty boats—I’m going Luna-side, down to NAS Ross. When you call to set it up, they’re going to say no and squawk at you about security clearances and such. I’m already on the cleared list—let ’em know that from the git-go and you’ll save yourself a lot of arguing.”
“Aye, aye, ma’am. When do you want to go?”
“Soonest. I’ll be leaving here directly for the boat.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Ayers had the wall locker open by the time she cut off the intercom and was already stripping out of her service dress uniform to change into a spacing jumpsuit for the hop to Luna.
U.S. Naval Aerospace Station Ross Crater
Ross Crater, Luna
Mike Ashburn was just finishing up the day’s work in his office when there was a rap at the open hatch. He looked up and saw Cheryl Ayers standing there, looking excited.
“Hey, Cheryl,” he said amiably. “How’d you get down here? C’mon in!”
Ayers stepped into the office and keyed the hatch shut behind her. “Are we secure in here?” she asked.
Ashburn grinned. “This whole station is one big classified-information safe. What’s on your mind?”
“I have a couple of questions for you—I want to revisit a bit of old ground. Sketch out for me the whole timeline on Bill Campbell’s supercomputer on Titan—whatever you remember. You have your own coffee service in here?” she added almost in the same breath, her eyes locking onto the miniaturized brewing system on a side table.
“Have at it,” Ashburn grinned at her. “You’ll have to brew some fresh. I was just about on my way out the door for the day.”
Ayers nodded, moving over to the coffee brewer and dialing up a single dose of brew. She glanced over at Ashburn. “Want a cup of joe, lieutenant?”
Ashburn shook his head. “It’s Miller Time, not coffee time. Okay, so you want to hear about Titan again? What for? It’s ancient history now.”
“It’s important.”
“All right. My first trip out there was a few years ago, back around the end of ’91. We arrived in October, if I remember right. That was a supply run. Last year I went back, on Thuvia’s maiden run. Another supply run, obviously, but that was the time Campbell asked me to do a flyover of Janus Station. Whatever the problem was between him and the proxy he had in place there, it was ongoing by then. I kept a hard copy of the data from the flyover and physically passed another copy to the captain of the Dejah Thoris. You’re familiar with what happened next: the hijacking, and someone taking a shot at me and mine out in the Trojans. I made it back to Mars last November after stops at Ell-4 and Terra, and that’s when I finally got the flyover data back to Campbell. At this point the whole thing is moot—Campbell explained to me what was going on and told me the Titan computer was already shut down and being disassembled.”
“Jeez, y’all are even doing it down here now.”
“What’s that?”
“Referring to Earth as ‘Terra.’ Ever since the war started, the newsfeeds began doing it, and it’s becoming standard in the lexicon. Nobody calls Earth ‘Earth’ anymore—now it’s ‘Terra.’”
“Yeah, you’re right,” Ashburn replied with a shrug.
“So the decision to shut down the computer was made sometime between August, when you actually made the flyover, and November, when you talked to Campbell face to face about it.”
“That seems right. Carter Drayson could probably nail it down to the day or week for you if you could get in touch with him.”
“Do you still have the data from your flyover?”
“No. I had one hard copy and gave it to Campbell—I didn’t keep one. However, there is someone around here who might be able to help you if you’re looking for ISR imagery. After the attack on Thuvia, Admiral Costello called me aboard Ranger and positively raked my ass over the coals. I got to know one of his pilots after we pulled him out of a half-slagged fighter. He’s here on the station, right now. Costello must have been at least a little suspicious about what I told him, because he took Ranger to Saturn and sniffed around a bit, and my buddy did an overflight of Janus Station with a full recon package. He told me about it a month or so ago over a beer. Apparently, it was all very benign and aboveboard: nothing to report. This was right around December first, right when the balloon went up.”
Ayers let loose with a string of invective that would have curdled the ears of a chief bosun’s mate. Ashburn’s eyebrows went up in real appreciation. “Wow! Do you talk to your mother with that mouth?”
“Sorry, lieutenant,” Ayers replied. “It just that we’ve been cyberhacked yet again and, once again, nobody even knew.”
“What do you mean?”
“The intelligence data on the overflight Ranger conducted should have been uploaded as a matter of routine to ONI, no matter how benign or unimportant it seemed at the time. I’m sure it was uploaded, assuming the admiral’s intelligence staff know and did their jobs—a pretty safe bet. After our first couple of conversations back on Mars, and right after I began this job, I put in a data request to ONI for anything having to do with Kevin MacDonald, Janus Industries, or Titan. The data from that flyover should have hit my desk two months ago, even as molasses-slow as things happen right now. In fact, I did get a reply: ONI said they had nothing come up using any of those search parameters. Nothing. Obviously, the data either never made it or some AI cybermole intercepted and scrubbed it before it could be archived. God damn those MIM sons of bitches to hell!”
“Well, let’s go find A.J. He can tell you firsthand what he saw.”
***
They found McClain in Cernan’s Folly, sitting at the bar and just about to bite into a cheeseburger when they accosted him. The appearance of two squids intent on interrupting his chow didn’t go over well at first, but McClain was a stony professional, and as soon as he grasped that this was actually something important, the meal was promptly forgotten.
McClain corralled Skate Hess over her beer-fueled protests, and the four of them reconvened a short time later in Ashburn’s office. At Ayers’s urging, McClain and Hess recounted their own flyover of Janus Station, such as it was.
“Both of you debriefed with the intel staff afterward, right?” Ayers asked.
“Affirm,” McClain replied. “What is all this about, anyway?”
Everyone here had a sky-high security clearance, but access to information was also based on need-to-know. Ayers mulled it over for a minute and decided to bring them into her thought-loop. “I’ve got three reports linking the Omnisynths to the computer cores Campbell’s computer engineered for itself. At first I didn’t think it was possible for a supercomputer on Titan, no matter how advanced, to be able to accomplish the sort of tasking the MIM has placed on it, because of the distances involved.”
“That’s right,” Ashburn said. “Hours and hours of signal delays—it couldn’t effectively interact with the Marsnet in real time.”
“Except it can, thanks to the Omnisynths. It’s that green goop, lieutenant: the Q-gel. It’s in the synths, it
’s in the newer computer cores, and it’s produced in large, quantumly entangled batches, right out of the production facility. Essentially, it allows the computer cores and the synths to effectively become one: they all form a singular AI mind, if that makes any sense. When the central system on Titan networks with an Omnisynth on Mars or Terra, it’s faster than your brain gets a signal from your bladder telling you it’s time to pee. It’s literally instantaneous.”
“That’s impossible,” Hess said flatly. “It violates the laws of physics.”
“The old physics,” McClain corrected her. “Haven’t you been paying attention in class these past few weeks? So, Ms. Ayers, what you’re saying is that it’s possible that the computer on Titan could be the one the MIM is using to cause all this trouble?”
“Maybe. Jury is out on that, but we’ve been looking for a big computer complex since the war began, and so far this is the only one we know about. The assumption until now was that the MIM system was hidden somewhere on Mars—and, let’s face it, you could hide one just about anywhere on Mars and make it damn near impossible to find. I’m starting to think it’s been right under our nose the entire time—on Titan.”
“But the Janus computer is shut down,” Ashburn protested.
“I don’t think so—”
“No, it ain’t!” McClain and Hess replied together.
Ayers looked between the two of them expectantly. McClain added, “All the indications we saw were that the facility was not only up and running, but being expanded.”
Ayers looked around the office desperately. “Damn it! If ever there was a time we needed some working snoopers. . . . Is there any way you can draw me a picture of what it looked like?”
“Here,” Ashburn replied, moving over to the flimsiplast flatscreen that was currently giving his office a view of Lake Superior as seen from a Duluth, Minnesota, highrise. He killed it with a couple of button presses and switched the screen over to a computer-assisted drafting mode. He fished around his desk for a moment and then tossed a stylus to McClain. “Have at it, skipper.”
