by Doug Farren
Tom, however, was bothered by the fact that it appeared as if a major security breach had occurred over 50 years ago. Although he couldn’t fathom why anyone in their right mind would want to start a war between the Tholtarans and the Terrans, it certainly appeared as if someone had done just that. If Sorbith’s information was true, then someone has had intimate access to even the most secure networks for a very long time. Tom decided he needed more information.
“Orion,” Tom said.
“Yes Tom?” the ship’s AI instantly responded.
“I need to find someone who’s intimately familiar with the primary hubs and able to provide me with some history of the changes that have taken place since the Tholtaran war.”
There was a short delay as the computer consulted the Alliance database. “There are a number of people who satisfy your search criteria,” the ship replied. “The current head of the maintenance department at Tanami station happens to be one of them. Would you like me to see if he is available?”
“Yes. Set up an appointment for me to see him as soon as possible and then make sure the station is aware of our plans.”
“Acknowledged.”
Tom busied himself with preparing a quick lunch while the computer made the arrangements. Fifteen minutes later, the ship said, “Arrangements have been made for you to meet with John Muldalga at 1400 today. Tanami station is aware of our arrival time.”
Sitting down at a terminal, Tom said, “Very well. Show me his bio.”
A picture of a very dark-skinned male appeared on the screen with a biographical summary to the right. He was a 73 year-old native Australian born in the tiny town of Balgo. He was fluent in Galactic Standard and English as well as his native tongue of Kukatja. He had never served in the military. He had started work at the Tanami station as part of its initial construction crew when he was 22 and has been there ever since. Although it was not uncommon for people to work well into their nineties, it was rare for someone to work at the same place for their entire career.
Tom finished lunch and headed for the control room. Earth maintained six redundant, widely separated, primary hubs. Two of them were on Earth itself with one being situated in the Tanami desert of Australia. The wide-open space provided plenty of room to build the giant receiving antennas needed to pick up the fainter signals. It also kept nearby population centers safe in the event the facility was attacked.
Tom manually piloted the ship during the short 1,600 kilometer flight. At a distance of 500 kilometers, the Orion suddenly said, “We have been targeted by two orbital weapon arrays as well as several ground-based systems.”
Tom acknowledged the report. This was standard operating procedure for such a sensitive installation.
A few minutes later, the ship reported, “Six Talon-class fighters have taken off and are on an approach vector. Intercept in three minutes.”
Glancing at his control board, Tom verified that his weapon systems were powered down. Any ship not belonging to the local defense force coming within 400 kilometers of the hub would immediately be fired upon if their weapon systems were active. Even Peacekeeper vessels were not exempt from this requirement.
The sleek, heavily armed fighters approached and escorted Tom all the way to the landing field. An armored car approached the Orion less than a minute after he touched down. Tom dropped his ramp and met the vehicle a few meters from his ship. It rolled to a stop and John Muldalga stepped out of the passenger side.
“Peacekeeper Wilks!” John greeted him. He had a loud, heavily accented voice that easily carried the short distance separating them. “Welcome to Tanami station.”
“Thank you,” Tom replied, grabbing John’s extended hand. John’s grip was firm and his huge hand easily encircled Tom’s cybernetic one. “You did not have to come all the way out here to meet me.”
“It’s no problem,” John replied. A light sheen of sweat glistened on his forehead. The heat rising off the tarmac was stifling. “Come, let us go to my office where we can talk in comfort.”
The inside of the car was air-conditioned. The driver, a young female marine dressed in full combat armor, looked her passengers over and then began driving. At the end of the tarmac the car drove down a long ramp and entered an underground parking lot. She stopped in front of a heavily guarded armored door.
After carefully inspecting everyone’s identification cards, one of the guards made a call on his radio and a few seconds later the half-meter thick door rolled aside. “Welcome to my sanctuary,” John announced.
“I am impressed with your security measures,” Tom said, following him into the brightly lit hallway.
“There’s a lot more you don’t see,” John said over his shoulder. Pointing to a small bubble mounted on the ceiling, he continued. “Every inch of every corridor is monitored by video cameras. Microphones pick up conversations which are analyzed by an AI as well as randomly by live people. There are numerous defense mechanisms built into the facility as well.”
“What made you decide to work here for all these years?”
“I love my job and I love the people I work with,” John’s voice boomed off the bare walls. “The day I stop working will be the day I begin to die.”
John stopped in front of a door. There was a short delay followed by a large click. Pushing it open, John said, “This is my office, my home away from home. Please, find a seat, make yourself comfortable, and tell me what I can do for you.”
Tom lowered himself into one of the three sturdy leather chairs arranged in front of John's desk and glanced around. The walls of the office were adorned with pictures of family, letters of appreciation, and service awards. The desk was made of plastic that had been fashioned to look like wood. The only things occupying the desktop were a computer terminal and a small stack of papers in one corner.
“I’m gathering some information,” Tom said. “Before I became a Peacekeeper I was a communications specialist in the Alliance space force.”
“Ah! A fellow tech. What ships? Can I get you something to drink?”
“Water would be fine. My first assignment was the Gravis, a communications relay servicing ship. After that I was transferred to the Komodo Dragon.”
John walked over to a small refrigerator and pulled out two bottles of water. “The Dragon! A ship that will forever be part of our history. Did you see the Kyrra?”
“I did. They seemed to be very nice people," Tom said, taking a sip of his water.
“Well,” John said, settling back into his chair. “Perhaps we’ll have some time later on to talk about them. But that’s not why you came all the way out here. What can I do for you?”
“What I really need to know is some history of the hub. Specifically, the process used to upgrade the hub computers.”
“How far back do you want me to start?”
“As far back as you can remember.”
John chuckled and scratched the top of his head. “That’s going back a long ways mate.”
“Just do the best you can.”
“Okay. Let’s see…When I first started working here we were using DEC XL-7300’s. They were state-of-the-art back then. After remaining in service for nearly 17 years though, they needed to be replaced. Spare parts were almost impossible to find and they were nearing their computational capacities.
“We checked with some of the other hubs, Terran as well as alien to see how they handled their upgrades. Mojave station had just completed one and we decided to use the lessons learned from their experience to make ours go much smoother. We ordered three J-series model 8250s from DEC. We used the same conversion program developed at Mojave station to convert our software over to the new system. We then ran them in parallel for two months with the output of the new system being compared to the old. When we were satisfied, we switched over and decommissioned the old system.”
“You didn’t write new software?”
“Why would we?” John replied. “The hub isn’t much more than a glorified ne
twork switch. It’s a pure digital system. The old software was working just fine and we didn’t see a need to start from scratch and rewrite it all and then go through the hassle of having to debug it. It was another reason we stayed with DEC machines—made the conversion process so much easier.”
Tom sat in thought. If Sorbith was right and the security breach happened before the Terran-Tholtaran war, then the upgrade would have copied the invading software along with the authorized code. “Did you convert the code from the active system or did you use a backup copy?”
“Oh we would never mess with the active system!” John said, shaking his head vigorously. “We keep a master copy of all the programs on a test and development system. If we ever need to make changes, we test it out first on the T&D and then upload it to the live system.”
Tom was not a computer expert, but he did catch the significance of John’s statement. “I take it your test system is linked to the live system?”
“They’re on the same network.”
“Have you ever found any anomalies in the code on your test system?”
John’s eyes narrowed as he stared at Tom. “How would I know—I’m not a programmer. I’m not sure I like where you’re going with this Mr. Wilks. Our security has been verified by the military and is air-tight. We have multiple routines running on the system as well as a separate system that monitors the traffic into and out of the hub. If there had been a security breach we would have known about it.”
Tom opened his mouth but before he could say anything John added, “It wouldn’t do anyone any good anyway. Most of the data we handle is encrypted at the source so having access to the hub would be useless.”
“Unless someone has broken the encryption routines,” Tom calmly said. “In that case, having access to the hubs would give them the ability to read almost every message that passed through them." Tom saw the look that suddenly appeared on John’s face and knew he finally understood. “My question to you is, what if the security breach happened years ago, not long after the system was put on line—or perhaps during its development? What if someone managed to penetrate your security and not only alter the hub’s core code, but also the networked master code? Your altered software would have been translated into the new system and become part of the base code. The hub could be compromised and you would have no way of detecting it.”
“Do you have evidence of this?”
“We have some very strong suspicions that someone has the ability to intercept and alter our messages. I’m afraid I can’t go into the details.”
John picked up his phone and waved it at Tom to emphasize his point. “I hope you're wrong Peacekeeper. If you’re right, I’ll spring for the most expensive meal you can find on this planet. There’s only one way to find out.”
He put the phone to his ear and said, “Call Dennis Kendal." There was a pause as the phone carried out his instructions. “Dennis, John Muldalga, I need you to drop whatever you’re doing and get over to my office…Because there’s a Peacekeeper sitting in front of me who’s just handed me a convincing argument that our security might have a gaping hole in it…Thanks.”
John set the phone down and said, “Dennis is the site’s programming lead. His office is just down the hall.”
A few seconds later, there was a knock at the door. “Open the door,” John said into the air.
There was a click indicating the room was being monitored by an AI. A short, bald, overweight man in his early thirties walked through the door. He was huffing as though he had run down the hall. “We just went over all this four months ago,” he blurted out. Looking straight at Tom, he added, “Our systems are secure.”
“Sit down Dennis,” John said. “Mr. Wilks here has brought up something we’ve never considered." He went on to explain the details.
Dennis began biting his thumbnail halfway through John’s talk. By the time he finished, Dennis was staring at the floor, lost in thought. There was a moment of silence, then Dennis looked up and said, “You just might be on to something Mr. Wilks.”
“What!” John exclaimed.
Dennis turned and gave John a stern look halting anything else he might have wanted to say. “I’m serious,” he said. “The early operating systems weren’t as secure as today’s. If an organization had the ability to penetrate a military system, they could have leveraged that system’s access to the hub to breach our security. It would take a genius of a programmer to cover their tracks and to think about altering the T&D system as well but it is a possibility.”
“What are we going to do about this?” John asked, his shoulders drooping.
“The only way to know for sure is to go through every line of code in the entire system,” Dennis said. “Not just the source code, but the compiled code as well.”
“Good God man! That could take years.”
“Months if we concentrate only on the most critical code." Standing up, Dennis held out his hand. “Thank you Mr. Wilks. We never thought about a decades-old breach. I’ll be putting our entire staff on this as soon as I get back to my office. I’ll let you know if we find anything.”
Tom stood up and shook hands with Dennis who then turned and quickly walked out of the room. As the door closed behind him, Tom turned to John and said, “I’ve been told that Restaurant Steirereck in Vienna serves an incredibly delicious steak. It wouldn’t be a proper wager though unless we also agreed upon the terms if you win, name it.”
John’s face scrunched up in thought for a moment then transformed into a broad smile. “I’ll take dinner on the S. S. King Richard,” he announced.
Tom had never heard of it. Utilizing his biolink, he asked the Orion. The reply came back at the speed of thought: The S. S. King Richard was a large yacht with one of the most highly rated restaurants in the world aboard. The only way to enjoy the cuisine was to book passage on one of the 12 cruises the ship made each year. There was currently a three-year waiting list.
“Good choice,” Tom said. “The King Richard it is then.”
John got up out of his chair and the two shook hands, making the bet official. “How often would you like me to report on our progress?” John asked.
“Give me a call only if you find something,” Tom said. “If there is a breach, we don’t want anyone to know we’re searching for it. Just ask to speak to me and I’ll be here as soon as I can.”
Chapter 18
The life of a Peacekeeper did not always revolve around work. Since he enjoyed classical music, Tom became a regular at the Sydney Opera House. He also enjoyed taking walks through the famous Royal Botanical Gardens as well as playing chess with strangers in Hyde Park. At first, people seemed hesitant to play chess with him; perhaps fearing he would use his biolink to cheat or simply because he was a Peacekeeper. However, after three weeks of going to the park nearly every evening, he was accepted into the small group of regular players. But not every evening was without excitement.
He had just started a game and was about to make his fourth move when he heard the squealing of tires followed by the unmistakable sound of a large motor vehicle accident. His opponent must have also heard the sound because he was craning his neck trying to look over Tom’s shoulder. Tom stood up so fast that the top part of his leg caught the end of the cement table, cracking it off. Yelling a quick apology, he bolted down the sidewalk, switching his cybernetics to full-power mode as he raced along.
The Orion instantly evaluated the situation. “I have contacted the local emergency center,” the ship told him, routing the information through his cybernetic ears. “Police and paramedics are being dispatched. Accessing the security cameras for that intersection.”
Tom had to force himself to slow down to keep from running into traffic as he neared the edge of the park. The accident had taken place in a large intersection just North of St. Mary’s Cathedral. Despite all the advances in modern technology, most of the traffic still consisted of manually driven electric vehicles. Tom quickly surveyed the scene
as a ghostly video image appeared several meters in front of him as if projected on an invisible screen. The Orion had accessed the security cameras and was playing back the moment of the accident.
A large, double-decker tour bus had swerved to avoid a pedestrian who had walked out into the street without looking. The bus collided with a small car causing it to cross into oncoming traffic, hitting a garbage truck. The car’s front-end was tightly wedged under the truck and the battery had shorted, starting a small fire.
As he approached the scene of the accident, Tom could hear a woman screaming from inside the burning car as well as the crying of at least two children. Sprinting across the intersection he got to the car as the truck driver was trying to open the jammed car door. “Stand aside!” Tom yelled.
The truck driver immediately obeyed. Tom’s eyes quickly scanned the car allowing the Orion to evaluate the damage and determine the most efficient way to rescue the victims. Utilizing its interface with Tom’s cybernetic eyes, the ship overlaid a pulsing red dot on the car and provided instructions on what to do via the biolink, which was far faster than verbal methods of communication.
Activating his external speakers, Tom put his face against the still-intact driver-side window and yelled, “Turn your head and close your eyes.”
Tom could clearly see that the woman’s legs were trapped under the collapsed dashboard. Smoke was beginning to fill the car and the driver was too distraught to pay attention to what she was being told to do. Looking in the back seat, he could see two children. An older child of perhaps 9 or 10 was struggling to undo his safety straps but was so panicked he was having a difficult time with the simple mechanism. A screaming infant was strapped into a car seat next to him.
