by John Appel
But that didn’t mean she couldn’t poke around a bit, and perhaps see about mapping and tapping the node’s links to the rest of the dark net.
She felt the buzz of her physical-anomaly alarm against her neck and shifted her perceptions of her sensorium partially from virtual space to physical space. Finding nothing amiss in her quarters—no temperature flares, no chemical traces, no sudden movements of the objects around her—she realized the signal came from the smart agent she’d tasked to monitoring the hallway feeds outside her rooms. After she’d cracked them, of course. She’d send the local sysadmin a debrief memo detailing how she’d suborned the cameras when she moved out...
Cameras that at the moment showed four bulky figures, one in power armor, arrayed outside her door. She immediately fired off digital probes at each and got hits consistent with the same family of polymorphic code as the compromised node, just as her virtual form was cast out of the station network like a vase knocked off a high shelf.
Dumpshock threatened to overwhelm her sensorium, but this wasn’t her first experience with rapid exit from VR. Still, her pulse raced and her hands threatened to twitch from the adrenaline dump. Discipline and long practice helped her still her hands, to breathe deeply, to ride out the physical reaction while responding to the situation, which became immediately kinetic as the soldier in power armor—and it had to be a soldier, only the Army had any armor on the station—kicked in her door.
Physically, Okafor was no match for two hundred-fifty kilos of armored soldier. But they were well within the ten-meter peer-to-peer range the aux unit gave her djinn—
Time seemed to slow as she went into full virtual-engagement mode, aiming every scanner in her collection at the armored form. She ran her virtual fingers across it, feeling the warmth of the IR hotspots and sensors, the chill of the blacklight, and there it was, a buzzing sensation under her fingertips as she located the communications array. The door sailed across the room and the soldier took the first step across the threshold, right arm with its integral mini-gun raised to sweep across the space. One of Okafor’s agents counted the signal streams passing in and out of the suit, while she grasped her RF fuzzer and spammed the inputs, seeking a way in. The door crashed into the far wall as the trooper stepped fully inside, turning towards her supine form.
Aha! A diagnostic input. Her body remained still but for her hands as her fingers trembled, echoes of her virtual motion she couldn’t fully suppress. She launched another agent with orders to brute-force the diagnostic mode, cycling first through her painstakingly compiled dictionary of default login credentials used by manufacturers over the years.
Success came almost immediately—pure luck really. No time for triumphant crowing, though, as the trooper took another step forward even as the diagnostic menus opened before her like popcorn kernels. Damn, it was read-only access. She called forth a cavalcade of stack smashers to hammer the diagnostic system, each one pumping volleys of code, trying to find a sequence that would crack open the memory space she needed...
“Josephine Okafor?” The voice projected from the suit’s speakers was surprisingly high-pitched. “Wake up, please. You will come with us. Resistance will be suppressed.” The other three, two constables and another soldier, all dressed in their services’ tactical gear and light armor, stepped into the room and fanned out on either side of the armored trooper. Her forearms buzzed as her sensorium mapped their positions.
Moving slowly to buy time, Okafor rolled to a sitting position, taking care not to dislodge her aux unit. “Why are you here?” she asked, trying to make her voice sound fuzzy, as if she’d just woken up.
“Disconnect the electronics and stand up,” the soldier ordered, ignoring her question.
“Whose authority are you operating under?” she asked.
“Acting Prime Minister Miguna,” one of the constables said in a flat voice.
SCORE. One of her stack smashers caused the diagnostic system to fail, opening the memory space to her arsenal of malware, which flowed into the space like spilled water, and there was the mobility-control module, and there were the weapon systems, and there the suit’s built-in medical kit. Her agents seized control of these systems and now she let herself feel the exultant rush.
“I don’t think I will,” she said, and took over the suit like a puppeteer.
A flick of thought sent a massive dose of sedative into the trooper’s veins. She punched right with one armored fist, knocking the intruder on the left into the wall with a bone-crunching thud. She raised her right hand and the suit mirrored her action, then swung it sideways and triggered the mini-gun. The tactical armor was no match for the armor-piercing rounds, and her first burst simply cut the next intruder in half. Blood and viscera sprayed everywhere, and the room flooded with a coppery smell. She felt the warm splatter of it across her face and almost lost control.
The fourth attacker screamed and ducked before fleeing into the hallway. Okafor gathered herself, doing her best to ignore the horrible smell, and walked the armor out of the room in time to register an additional three people in the hallway. She raised the suit’s right arm again, only to lower it in surprise when one of the newcomers shot the fleeing intruder in the head.
One of the interlopers raised a rocket launcher to their shoulder before the one in the center smacked their arm. “Don’t be an idiot,” the center figure hissed, as Okafor realized that the suit was ‘seeing’ them on radar, not in the visible spectrum. “Backblast will fry us all indoors.”
She found the external audio controls, cracked them, and spoke. “Who are you, and what the hell is going on?”
One of the figures stepped forward and reached up to pull a phototropic stealth hood up and away from their face. “Are you Josephine Okafor? My name is Myra. Pericles Loh asked me to watch over you.” Myra pointed at the armored trooper standing before her. “We didn’t expect this, though.”
Pericles Loh? The rumored head of the Fingers on-station? What did he want with her? The post-combat crash started to take its toll, and she felt her control slipping away. “You only answered one of my questions,” she snapped.
“Apologies.” Myra took a tentative step forward. “The Treasury Minister has launched a coup. His people are attacking Government House now.”
Her control, already fragile in the wake of dumpshock, nearly gave way at the news. A coup? She knew the High Commissioner had her suspicions about Miguna, and rumors—low-voiced, one person to another—of probes into his dealings and the One World party had circulated for months. To launch a coup, though—Miguna clearly had backing in the military, and the Constabulary. Her breath caught and her body trembled as she fought to maintain a semblance of composure.
A quick check of the suit’s comm systems seemed to confirm Myra’s second assertion, at least. She identified ten suits of power armor—half the garrison’s complement—as they crashed through the Government House complex across the street, accompanied by perhaps forty or fifty more combatants. The sounds of gunfire were audible now, and people were starting to stir about in the quarters block around her. “Damn,” she said. “We can’t fight our way through that.”
“We don’t have to,” Myra said. “If you come with us, right now, we can get you somewhere safe.”
“I need to get to Constabulary HQ,” she said stubbornly.
Myra threw up her hands in exasperation. “If we’re not out of here in the next sixty seconds, madam, the only place you’re going is wherever Miguna wants to take you. Even if you’re in a suit of power armor. However the hell that happened.”
Okafor took a shuddering breath, returned her primary attention to her physical body, and sat up. She was reluctant to put her fate in the hands of criminals whose colleagues she’d chased for years, but they had shot one of her attackers. Enemy of my... worse enemy. Making her decision, she dropped her full arsenal of destructive malware into the suit’s systems and carefully stood up. An armorer would have to completely rip out and repl
ace the control systems before that suit would be functional again. Popping the emergency medical releases to retrieve the drugged soldier inside wouldn’t help the rebel cause either. Scratch one enemy asset.
“I’m not in the suit,” she said. “I’m in the apartment.” With care, she undid the cables connecting her gear as the Fingers team hustled forward. “Let me grab my cane and we can go.”
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Toiwa
Constabulary Headquarters, Ileri Station,
Forward Ring
A knock on the door of the tiny sleeping cubicle attached to her office roused Toiwa from her nap. Chijindu’s voice rumbled through the partition. “Commissioner? Wake up, please. Inspector Zinsou needs you.”
She rubbed her eyes and checked the time to find she’d been asleep for nearly a half-hour, then slid open the door. “What’s going on?”
“Someone’s attacked Government House.”
“Shit!” The space behind her eyeballs still felt grainy but her brain cleared rapidly. She popped open a window to Zinsou, audio only, as she shrugged into an old fatigue shirt. “Toiwa here. Situation report.” She tied in Chijindu and tried to loop Valverdes in as well, but her aide didn’t respond.
“Multiple reports of gunfire at Government House,” the third-shift watch commander reported. A row of side windows popped up displaying video feeds, some fixed, some from aerial bots. Armored figures fired into the complex as sporadic return fire lanced out. Wriggling into her pants, she watched as other armored figures swarmed the residence block across the street.
“Get Chakraborty on,” she ordered. Chakraborty was the Trailing Ring third-shift commander.
“I’ve tried. We’ve lost contact with the Trailing Ring precinct.”
“Open a call now with all the precincts and get Colonel Carmagio or Major Biya on the line too.” She slid open the partition of her sleeping cubby to find Constable Chijindu in full tactical armor busy laying out her own gear. He paused to set a bottle of water next to her as she pulled on her boots.
Zinsou’s voice was strained. “I’m trying, ma’am, but only North Ring HQ is responding.” He paused. “We’re pulling direct feeds from around the station. There’s fighting in the Hub that looks like Army units fighting each other.”
Toiwa’s body jerked as the adrenaline hit. Chijindu, spotting the motion, turned, concern written across his craggy face, but she waved him off. He studied her for a few seconds before nodding and ducking out to the outer office.
Army units fighting each other.
“Commissioner?” Zinsou asked, hesitantly.
“I’m here.” She took a deep breath. At that moment, her priority-message indicator lit; Miguna was calling her. “The Treasury Minister is calling me. I’m going to loop you in. But first…” She opened the contingency-plan file for the second time in two days and swiped through until she found the one she was looking for: Mutiny. “Initiate Red Tango Five immediately on my authorization.”
“Contingency Red Tango Five, confirmed,” Zinsou said.
Toiwa took another deep breath before answering Miguna’s call. She tried to tie Zinsou in, but the minister had privacy-locked it. She found her override but it only let her record the call. She gritted her teeth. “Toiwa here. Why are you calling, Minister Miguna?”
“That’s Prime Minister Miguna,” Miguna said, the smugness in his voice thick enough to cut with a knife.
Perhaps she’d been desensitized by the rapid succession of shocks, as Toiwa barely twitched at his pronouncement. “What’s happened to Prime Minister Dabiri?” In a side window, she messaged Zinsou to contact Constabulary headquarters and the High Commissioner.
“Dabiri’s pathetic cozying up to the Commonwealth, and her cowardly response to this Saljuan incursion, demonstrated conclusively that she’s not fit to lead Ileri at this critical moment. At the urging of my party, and with the support of right-thinking members of the armed forces and the Constabulary, I’ve assumed the role of Prime Minister.”
Chijindu returned with a bulb of tea which he placed in her hands with surprising gentleness. She sucked down a welcome swallow and set it down, holding her arms out as he helped her into her armored vest. “That’s outside the Covenants of the Republic,” she said.
“Extraordinary times, extraordinary measures.”
More side windows popped up displaying fighting at Government House in New Abuja and at other key points.
“I’ll ask again, Minister, why are you calling me?”
“I’m offering you an opportunity to do the right thing,” Miguna said. “You have the chance to help make this transition smooth and minimally disruptive.”
“By going along with an illegal coup?” she retorted, as Chijindu slipped her tactical harness, loaded down with the necessities a constable might need during an operation, over her shoulders and moved around front to buckle it in place while her fingers danced, messaging instructions to Zinsou.
“Nnenna, Nnenna, be sensible. This is the only rational course, the one that maintains our sovereignty, that honors our heritage and our place as one of the First Fourteen. My supporters are already in control of the essential points planetside and our comrades in the Navy will soon have orbital space under control.” She actually heard him lick his lips across the circuit. “There can be a high place for you in my government.”
She might have ambitions, but she’d be damned if she’d ride in this bastard’s wake. “With all due respect, I must decline,” she said.
Miguna’s voice took on a menacing rumble. “You can save many lives if you play along, Nnenna.”
That gave her pause. She could sense the seductive pull of his argument, saw how it might be true. How if she went along with Miguna, put the resources under her command towards his purpose, that the fighting taking place right now would be the last on the station—if Miguna won in the end. And that by giving him the keys to the planet’s gateway, she’d greatly improve his chances of victory.
All she had to do was turn her back on her oaths, on her beliefs, on everything she stood for. To let her children grow up on a world where this fool set the tone. Assuming he didn’t get them into a war with the Star Republic, or the Commonwealth—or both.
There was never a question about her answer, not really.
“I’ll see you on the dock for this, you vile, traitorous fuckwit,” she said.
“So be it,” Miguna snapped, and closed the call.
“Zinsou, we’re on our way—” she began, as every window but those local to her djinn blanked and went dead.
The station network—or at least their part of it—was down.
“Chijindu. Command center. Now,” she hissed through clenched teeth, drawing her pistol and disengaging the safety.
The big constable nodded. Shotgun held at the high ready, he moved down the corridor with remarkable grace for a large man so heavily equipped. Their carpet-muffled footfalls sounded like a cavalcade in Toiwa’s ears. Abruptly, she realized she was still carrying her helmet in her left hand. Chijindu reached the first corridor juncture and she tapped his elbow before he peeked around it.
Chijindu was about to turn the corner when the first shots boomed from the direction of the command center. With a wordless curse, Toiwa flipped her visor down. The tactical overlay it displayed lacked the data feeds it should have pulled from an operational network, but her own audio pickups worked perfectly well, and her djinn had the building’s floor plan in local storage. The shots were coming from the command center entrance, twenty meters down the corridor to th
eir left. Her djinn plotted two likely targets based on the audio, and she tagged the target icons ‘Hostile’.
Chijindu peeked his head around the corner, just a second’s glance to give his helmet’s cameras a look. The data streamed across their link and she counted the dark shapes huddled behind riot shields arrayed around the command center door. Constabulary uniforms and gear, she noted with shock. Her people were fighting each other.
She clamped down the sudden rush of fear. Deal with that later. First get control.
More shots echoed from the direction of the command center, and she could hear gunfire from other parts of the building as well. Shots were being returned and she could hear the splat as frangible rounds, meant to minimize damage to equipment like life support or electronic controls, impacted the attackers’ riot shields. No one but the Constabulary or the military wore armor, so why would her people need to carry anything heavier? From the sound of it, the attackers were limited to frangible rounds too. A small favor, at least.
Their djinns counted the targets.
