I had hoped that shutting down the cooling system would have caused the Navigator to switch over to passive cooling. The top of its casing was designed to rise about half an inch to serve as a vent. With the top raised, it would be much easier to break into. But it was still sealed tightly. I was going to have to warm things up a little more. Unfortunately, that would mean burning up some of the remaining oxygen.
“Is that wise?” Trixie asked as I pulled the blow torch out of my backpack. “Forget I asked that, no part of this plan is wise.”
I lit the blowtorch and set it on the ground so that the flame was aimed at the side of the Navigator’s casing. In an ideal world, I would have brought a more sophisticated form of heat generation, but I’d been limited to what I could scrounge up on the wreck. I wasn’t sure how long it would be before things warmed up enough inside to get it to pop its top.
“Let me know if the Navigator sends any messages to the ship,” I said. “If either of them suspects we’re doing something naughty, things might get a little... interesting.”
“How interesting?”
“They’ll fire the lasers at us.”
“And if that happens, our plan is to...?”
“Er... hide in the Navigator’s coffin?” I said.
“Best get a move on with the opening of said coffin, then, eh?”
When Trixie was right, she was right.
There was a pale orangey spot on the outside of the casing where the blowtorch was pointed at it, but the top of the case was still firmly sealed. The Navigator was probably protected by a layer of insulation – maybe even the sort of stuff they put on the outside on spaceships to stop them burning up when they enter a planet’s atmosphere. The blowtorch might not make much impact on that.
I could try firing my pistol at it, but the casing was armoured – thick enough to protect the Navigator if the laser weapons built into the vault were fired. Any projectile I fired at it would probably bounce off and take my eye out.
I looked around the room at the points where the lasers were fixed to the walls. They seemed innocent enough – more like cameras than guns. They would be fitted with tamper-prevention devices. If I tried to disable them, the one I was working on would probably blow up in my face and the others would fry my body as it fell, just to be sure.
As I looked around the vault, I saw one of the video cameras following my movements.
“Something’s happening,” Trixie said.
“The cameras are back online – they’re watching us, not the pre-recorded video loop.”
“What will happen now?”
That was a good question. If the ship had been fully-manned, a security guard in a monitoring station somewhere would have seen us on his screen and manually triggered the lasers. But at this moment I didn’t know who or what was watching the video feed. If the ship was seeing us now, there was no way of telling how she had been programmed to respond. What I did know was that between the falling oxygen levels and the waking of the ship’s security systems, we were rapidly running out of time. I ought to concentrate my efforts on getting the escape hatch open.
I looked back towards the Navigator’s coffin. Having gotten this close, I really didn’t want to give up on my quest. Not until it became a choice between success or death. But how would I know when I reached that point?
Chapter Eleven
What I was facing here was, more or less, a locked metal safe inside a locked bank vault. I’d managed to get inside the vault. Now all I had to do was crack open the safe. But there was an additional complication here. I wasn’t simply trying to get something valuable out of a locked box. This was more like trying to get at somebody who had locked themselves inside a box. To get them out, I had to pick the lock that was inside the box. There was no external keyhole.
The most elegant way of tackling this would be to trick the person in the box into opening it, which you could do even with a super-smart artificial sentience given the right circumstances. You just had to convince it that you were someone it wanted to interact with face-to-face. Failing that, you had to pick the lock. From the inside. This was going to require a combination of brute force and finesse.
My original idea was to heat up the metal casing with a blowtorch so that the ‘person’ locked in the box opened the lid a crack to let the heat out. But I hadn’t managed to generate enough heat to do that. Once I had the lid open a little, I could force it a bit more and then wedge it so it couldn’t seal closed again. Then I could poke my tools in through the crack and first deal with the hidden bolts and then tackle the main locking mechanism and get the lid to fully open.
The skeleton in the vault appeared to have achieved partial success. Judging by his lack of hands and forearms, he’d gotten the lid open wide enough to reach inside – but he’d failed to prevent it slamming shut on him. A methodology that results in loss of limbs in this way has to be regarded as less than optimal. Leaving your fingerprints at the scene of a crime marks you as an amateur whose criminal career is likely to be short-lived. Leaving your actual hands behind will have even more drastic consequences. Bleeding to death being the most significant, I would say. I looked over at the skeleton and determined that I would take care not to suffer his fate.
Opening the lock on a safe, any safe, is only half the job. You have to prevent the safe from engaging additional bolts when it senses that someone is mounting an attack. Heat from a cutting torch or vibrations from an explosion cause a safe to activate hidden mechanisms that are independent of the main lock. If you don’t know what you’re doing, your joy at having cracked a safe’s lock will quickly turn to despair when you discover the door is still bolted shut. The purpose of these ‘re-lockers’ is to massively increase the time needed to open the safe once they’ve been triggered, in the hope that the thief will give up or take so long working on them that it gives the police time to turn up and catch him in the act.
The trick is to deal with these hidden bolts first, by either disabling the mechanism that triggers them or by blocking the bolts so they can’t lock into place. To do this you need to know how the mechanisms are constructed and where they are placed. There are a limited number of options and an experienced thief soon learns to recognise what he’s up against. As with most professions, we have to stay current, reading up on the latest technology. But my knowledge of the current state of the art was doing me no good on the Celestia. I needed to be an expert in vintage technology. Fortunately, modern mechanisms are often only more sophisticated versions of vintage ones.
When opening a safe, explosives are always a possibility. The noise involved is a disadvantage that has to be considered. But more significant is the risk of damaging the valuable items that you are seeking to extract from the safe. An artificial sentience is just about the most delicate bit of equipment you will ever come across. Even if you don’t blow it to smithereens, there is still a risk that the concussion caused by setting off a small bomb inside its storage box will damage it severely. I wouldn’t set off a bomb under my own hat, and similar consideration was needed here. I had to open the lock manually.
My first task was to get the top of the casing to pop open. For that, I needed to trigger the passive cooling system built into the box. And to achieve that, I need to generate heat. Much more heat than a blowtorch could manage. Something like the temperature of a small sun. Except, I realised, I didn’t. If Mr. Skellington’s twin brother had done this, there would be obvious scorch marks on the casing. But it had been pristine when I entered. Apart from the bloodstains. That meant there was an easier and less energetic way of triggering the lid.
The answer, like many such problems, was easy once I figured it out. Computers deal with data about situations rather than experiencing the situations themselves. If a machine receives data from a trusted source that tells it something is occurring, it accepts this as true. Unless programmed to do so, it won’t conduct independent analysis of the incoming data. If I could convince the computer that the
temperature inside the box had risen to a critical level that threatened the continued existence of the Navigator inside, the ship’s computer would respond accordingly. That is, it would pop open the lid to provide physical ventilation.
“Trixie, is there any evidence of the Navigator communicating with the ship?”
“Still nothing.”
I wasn’t sure why the Navigator and the ship’s computer weren’t on speaking terms, but it made my task easier. If I told the ship that the Navigator was getting fried, she would ping a message to the Navigator asking for confirmation of the danger. If the Navigator said ‘No, I’m cool,’ my plan was doomed. If the Navigator failed to respond, the ship would trigger an emergency cooling protocol, fearing that non-response was due to the Navigator over-heating.
I tapped into the data link from the Navigator to the ship. I would send an ‘overheating’ signal to the ship, making it look like it had come from sensors in the Navigator’s box. I could then intercept the query from the ship to the Navigator and make sure it was never received or answered.
“Trixie, what’s the optimal temperature range for Navigator operation?”
“Minus forty to plus one-hundred-and-twenty degrees centigrade.”
I decided to increase the reported temperature slowly until it got to a hundred and then more rapidly after that. This would hopefully mimic a rapidly failing cooling system.
The result was disappointingly undramatic. There was a soft sigh and a gentle breath of air as the lid of the Navigator’s casing rose about a half inch. It was held up by a round silver bar at each corner, like a table leg. Stage 1 complete.
I used a small rotary tool with a blade attachment to cut some strips of metal from the bottom of a control console. These strips were flexible but relatively sturdy. Working carefully so as to avoid any sudden vibration, I slid four of the strips into the Navigator casing so that they blocked the holes that the secondary bolts would lock into. With a bit of luck, the metal would be strong enough to prevent the hidden bolts locking if the lid was lowered again. That was Stage 2. Enough with the finesse, now it was time for a bit of brute force.
The fire axe was hanging from a loop on my backpack. I was beginning to think I should make the axe part of my standard equipment. The robot arm I was less sure about. It was threaded under the flap of my pack and I’d brought it along in case I needed the code on its wrist to open another lock.
I wasn’t sure how much force the lid could muster in order to try and close itself, but given that amputation was a real risk, I decided to err on the side of caution. I wanted to wedge the gap open with the most substantial bits of material I could find. I used a military-grade laser cutter to chop four lengths of steel H-beam from the criss-crossed girders that supported the ceiling.
I slid the head of the axe into the gap and levered the lid of the Navigator’s box open wider. There was a loud whining sound as the internal hydraulics tried to close the lid, but I slid a section of the H-beam into the widened gap, positioning it across the corner. I did the same thing for the other three corners. There was some creaking and groaning as the lid strained against the bits of girder, but it didn’t look like the gap was going to be closing again any time soon. It was now safe to put my hands inside the box. Probably.
I shone a flashlight into the box. There was a metal mesh inside and under it a glimpse of something that might be the navigator. I didn’t look more closely because I was distracted by what was lying on top of the mesh. Two mummified forearms complete with hands. I didn’t want to touch them so I used a pair of long-handled pliers to lift them out. I put the arms in the skeleton’s lap – I couldn’t tell from his expression whether he was grateful. I looked back at the box. Even with the bits of girder propping open the lid, I really didn’t want to put my hands in there. Then my eyes wandered over to the robot arm. I picked it up.
“Trixie, can you operate this?”
“I’ll need two if you want me to play Chopsticks.”
Piano playing wasn’t on the agenda, but what I had in mind was going to require two hands and at least one eye inside the Navigator’s box. If we used the robot arm, I would have to risk only one of mine.
I had to plug a tiny receiver into the end of the arm so that Trixie could send control signals to it. She demonstrated that it was working by closing the hand into a fist and extending the middle finger upwards. I ignored her and reached into the backpack to pull out one of the drones and the little medical kit. Just in case. I took off my belt, ready to use as a tourniquet if the worst were to happen.
“Not brimming with confidence, are we?” Trixie asked.
“Tell me where the security robots are,” I said. “How much time have I got?”
“They are currently in the charging area we passed through earlier.”
“Trying to revive their fallen comrades, probably,” I said. I hoped they didn’t have access to the spare parts necessary to reactivate the decapitated robots. “Let me know if they head this way. And monitor the lasers in here, I want to know if they come online.”
The smart thing would have been to get out of there while the security robots were distracted. But that would be to admit defeat. I wasn’t defeated. Not yet.
Chapter Twelve
You can increase the thickness of the walls and door of a safe, but ultimately security depends on how good the locking mechanism is. A safe is simply a strong box with a door and a lock. The lock and the door hinges are typically the weakest points. The Navigator’s casing did away with hinges altogether – the lid opened on four rods which slid out of the casing. They had notches in them like the end of a padlock clasp and also functioned like bolts. The rods were about three feet long when fully extended. So far I’d gotten them to extend only a couple of inches.
The lock on the casing was inside and there was no external keyhole or keypad or dial. To open the casing you needed to get inside the casing to manipulate the lock. It was an ingenious bit of design.
I decided to send a drone into the coffin to have a look around and Gnat got picked for the job. He floated in through the gap and turned on his mini spotlight. He sank slowly downwards, sending pictures to Trixie who projected them on the side of the coffin for me to see. I needed to get a look at the mechanism to see what I was up against. I knew it would be a mechanical lock, they always were. It made the Navigator invulnerable to cyberattack. A mechanical lock cannot be tricked or countermanded. It had to be opened by the Navigator. Or picked from the inside by an expert thief – but what were the odds of that ever happening?
The Navigator didn’t carry a key to open the lock. It was the key. It would extend a quicksilver-like pseudopod towards the lock. The nano-bots in it would turn the silver sliver into the shape of the key. This perfectly matched shape would slide into the lock and at the same time release a code that was known only to the Navigator, triggering more nanos to realign themselves, creating a gap that had not existed moments before. The lock would then turn and there would be a gentle click as it opened.
Mimicking the key shape was easy enough – Trixie’s scanners were more sophisticated than anything available when the lock was created. She could map the inside of the keyhole and create the shape almost instantly. Generating the right code to tickle the lock’s nanos into doing their thing was a different matter. Human beings were notoriously bad at thinking up passwords or numbers, relying on easily-remembered dates, pet or family names, or other mnemonic devices that thieves could easily work out themselves or obtain with a bit of simple social engineering. In days of old, even numbers or codes ‘randomly’ generated by computer turned out to be a lot less random than anticipated, though again this was the fault of human fallibility in determining the definition of ‘random.’
A machine like a Navigator could generate a key code that was impossible to guess. The strings they came up with were of variable length and drew from various sets of symbols, numbers, and letters. Only a Navigator could estimate how many bill
ions of combinations were possible. And a Navigator never wrote the key on a bit of paper and stuck it on the bottom of a drawer in case they forgot it.
If the Navigator had been active, I could probably have nudged it and got it to try and relock the mechanism, during which action we could have picked up the key code like the signal from a cheap vehicle’s keyless lock. But the artificial sentience was still asleep, evidently oblivious to what we were doing. Unless it was lying in wait, ready to spring to its own defence when I least expected it.
I took Trixie from her loop on the shoulder of my jacket and placed the slim metal tube into the hand of the robot. The Trixie closed the fingers around herself.
“I bet this reminds you of something you do regularly,” she said.
“What?”
“Holding yourself in your hand? Never mind.”
“You just compared yourself to a penis.”
“Yeah. Usually it’s you I’m comparing to one.”
I picked up the robot arm and used the pliers to place it into the case where the two mummified arms had lain.
“Keep your hand out unless you really need it down there,” Trixie said.
“Are we still talking about...?”
“I’m talking about the lock. I’m scanning the inside of the hole and getting ready to insert myself. Oh, for heaven’s sake, stop sniggering and grow up!”
“Sorry.”
“Okay, I’m in. I’m examining the lock mechanism.”
There was a loud ‘snap’ and I threw myself backwards away from the casing.
“Sorry,” Trixie said in my ear, “I accidentally triggered the secondary locks.”
So far the metal strips and sections of girder I’d put in place were holding.
“How do the nanos feel?” I asked.
“Primitive,” Trixie said. “I think they were man-made.”
Man-made nanos were a joke machine intelligences like to make – as if a human could ever make anything as small as a modern nanobot. They seem to forget that we made the machines that made the nanos.
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