Netlink

by William H. Keith

  At the water’s touch, the clay began foaming, and Kara could hear a thin, sizzling hiss. In another moment, the dab of clay had doubled in size… then doubled again. Carefully, Kara nudged the gold brooch across the counter until it just touched the foaming goo.

  Within fifteen minutes, the goo had eaten her brooch. It took another hour to dissolve the television, the hair dryer, and the spray can. She didn’t stay to watch. Instead, she went back to the main room, where she sat at the computer access, exploring Aresynch. She spent two hours calling up maps and diagrams, and playing the self-guiding tutorial on the public access system.

  When she returned to the fresher, the goo had evaporated completely, leaving only a trace of powdery residue, like talcum. The pocket television appeared unchanged; the gold and the lead it had concealed were gone completely; the plastic hair dryer, however, no longer looked anything like its original form. In its place was a small, sleek hand gun, just the size of Kara’s palm.

  The TV and pistol both went into a jumper pocket. Carefully she brushed the nanoresidue into her hand and disposed of it in the toilet. Taking a final look around to be certain she’d left no incriminating evidence, she closed up her case and switched off the computer. Standing inside the hotel room door, she pulled out the television and thumbed the color adjust tab; seconds later, the screen answered with a silent, printed message: OK.

  It was time to go.

  Tai-i Genji Ishimoto thought of it as a sea.

  Though he was pure Japanese, the son of a respected Nihonjin architect, Ishimoto had been born in Jaffna on the north coast of the Imperial Dependency of Seiron—the former Sri Lanka. From the age of ten, his passion had been gill diving in the crystalline waters first of his home island, then farther afield, in the Maldives, the Philippines, and even the Great Barrier Reef. He’d joined the Imperial Navy because its education benefits would help him get both the downloads and the references he needed to get work on one of the big undersea colonies, Oki-Daito, perhaps, or the fabulous Ryoku-gyoku.

  A decision that had carried him far indeed from the emerald seas of Earth. As if in compensation, however, his current assignment offered him the mental release of something akin to diving. It was only ViRsimulation, of course, provided by the Aresynch facility’s Mark XXI AI, but it was the closest thing he’d found yet to gliding above a reef at ten meters, wearing nothing but gill helmet, fins, weight belt, and knife. Instead of an ocean of water, however, he was floating now through an ocean of data—but data manipulated by the AI to create an ongoing simulation through which Ishimoto could move with the freedom of a dolphin. The colors were those of a reef, emeralds and turquoise blues for the medium through which he swam, more colorful notes marking the specific stacks, clusters, and nodes to which he had access.

  The AI had its own ICS—Internal Computer Security—of course, but Ishimoto was the human security watch, a backup to the automated systems who could apply not only intelligence but feeling to the task of monitoring the constant flow of data through the Net, searching for intruders who might be anything from small-time black marketeers looking for corporate access codes to Confederation spies. Human operators like Ishimoto gave the security system an extra edge against human system intruders, an edge that had more than once stopped a hostile break-in.

  The ocean he swam in was enormous, a simulated sea that comprised the entire Kasei Net. The system was in fact the sum total of all on-line computer networks both on the surface of Kasei and throughout the length of the sky-el clear out to Deimos, as well as the computers aboard spacecraft temporarily linked into the Net. It was so vast that no merely human mind could take it all in; what he was seeing was an abstract, the equivalent of computer screen icons that allowed him to navigate the Net with both efficiency and ease, with the entire architecture, representing hardware and software both, visible as a crowded universe of coral heads and rocks, of sunken cities and wrecks, of fantastic shapes like tubes and platforms and two-dimensional planes and doorways and stranger constructs that had no real correlation with anything in Ishimoto’s real-world experience. The voice of the AI itself—or one of the subroutines that made up the AI’s total complex of personalities—was his guide.

  And his guide had just spoken. “I detected a single set of unauthorized radio transmissions,” the voice said in Ishimoto’s mind. “It was quite brief, most likely a coded query and a reply.”

  “Where?”

  “The transmissions were too brief to allow me to isolate their positions. Both, however, originated within the civilian complex.”

  Ishimoto frowned. The civilian complex was enormous. Unless the transmitters repeated themselves, they would be impossible to track down… a fact of which they were no doubt aware.

  But the advantage was Ishimoto’s. Alerted by the AI’s senses, he was aware now that someone was engaged in unauthorized radio transmissions aboard the Aresynch facility. ICS took a dim view of that sort of thing. Unregistered radios were prohibited and were confiscated whenever scans of baggage or passengers turned them up. Such scans were almost useless, though; many visitors possessed two-way radio circuits grown inside their brains, and any spy worth the yen spent training him would have access to nano that could grow a transmitter out of innocuous raw materials.

  Alerted, he could close in on the offenders, and when they moved again, he would be ready for them.

  “That ought to do it,” Kara said. They were in a zero-G module, adrift in one of Aresynch’s largest public access comcenters.

  Lechenko, floating at her side, nodded. “What bothers me is how much time it’s going to take. You watch your tail in there, okay? We can watch for security types out here, but we can’t do a goking thing about the on-line flamers.”

  “They’ll never know I’m here.” She wished she believed that.

  She used a handrail to guide herself to one of the hundreds of burnished, egg-shaped modules fastened to the inside of the enormous sphere that housed the complex. Picking an unoccupied module, Kara glanced left and right, then tucked her legs up and slipped inside feet-first. Palming shut the privacy door, she settled back on the couch and strapped herself down. At a thought, her Companion extruded quicksilver filaments from her hand as she held it up to the access plate. She felt her Companion make contact with the Aresynch AI, a buzzing in her hand and just behind her eyes.

  “Ikusa no chikazuki,” she thought, focusing the Nihongo words into a coded upload onto the Net. “Military access. Code red-red-three, flash, blue.”

  “Military access granted, Level One” sounded in her mind.

  I’m in, she thought, but she was careful not to let the words slip into an encoded upload.

  “Communications center. Message upload, channel three-five-nine-two-zero. Priority routine.”

  “Communications channels accessed. Ready to accept message uplink.”

  The message had already been prepared, coded in a low-level, low-priority Imperial naval code used for routine traffic. With a thought, she uploaded the packet.

  “Your message has been transmitted.” The thought came back almost at once. “Do you wish to make another transmission?”

  “Negative. Military access. Code red-blue-five, flash, green.”

  “Military access granted at Level Two” was the reply.

  These initial levels were fairly easy to get at, the electronic equivalent of touching unlocked doors and watching them swing open. The tougher challenges still lay ahead.

  As always when dealing with computer systems, even extremely powerful and intelligent ones, the only way to make the thing work was with patience and exacting precision.

  One hundred fifty thousand kilometers outsystem from Mars, an old and decrepit tramp freighter detected a signal on a low-priority military channel. The name on the ship’s hull, picked out in white katakana lettering just beneath the brow of her bridge and faded by years of micrometeorite scouring, was Chidori Maru. At this distance, Mars was tiny, a sliver of gold-orange aimed
at a shrunken, yellow sun.

  The message, had anyone aboard the ship bothered to decode it, was a request for information about the vessel’s cargo—specifically about whether it should be listed as Class C or Class D on the docking off-load manifests.

  The real meaning, however, lay in the fact that the message had been transmitted on that frequency at all. The ship’s captain ordered a similarly coded reply, then turned to his first officer. “Very well, Mr. MacKenzie. Cry havoc, and let slip the dogs of war!”

  Captain Johanson was a great fan of classic literature. His flare for the dramatic, however, was not as out of place this time as it often was. His cargo on this run might very easily, if poetically, be described as dogs of war.

  The ship’s cargo bay, located forward in her primary module, yawned open, spilling light into space. The single ascraft stowed inside was also a relic, her hull patched and worn, the surface streaked with rusty corrosion accumulated in the atmospheres of dozens of worlds. Once clear of the freighter, she fired her thrusters, the burn ticking off the long minutes necessary to set her falling toward the distant golden crescent of Mars.

  Tai-i Ishimoto paused, tasting the emerald waters representing the computer network in the simulated space of the civilian-quarters comp-access node. Part of the swift-flowing currents he sensed about him was communications traffic to and from Aresynch, an enormous volume of ingoing and outgoing information, most of it automated. According to the AI, all was both routine and authorized. He was beginning to question that initial alert. It was possible that what the AI had detected was an electronic echo, an accidental rebroadcast by the circuitry in some civilian visitor’s head of a standard automated signal. He’d heard of that sort of thing happening before, even with nonelectronic prostheses such as dental implants. The fact that there’d been two such signals, an apparent question coupled with a reply, might have been coincidence after all.

  There wasn’t much to go on. Still, duty demanded that he consider every alternative. If the unauthorized signals were indeed indicators of covert activity, the signalers might well have moved on by now. Where?

  There wasn’t enough clear evidence yet to warrant putting out an alarm, but Ishimoto thought a careful patrol of the military communications and computer access nodes was in order. Swerving left and diving, skimming the light-shimmering bottom with a relative speed more appropriate to a hypersonic aircraft than to a swimmer, he approached a massive coral head displaying holographic characters: RESTRICTED. MILITARY NODE 1. CODED ACCESS ONLY.

  As watch officer, Ishimoto had the necessary codes riding on his persona like a uniform. He struck the coral head full on; without even a simulated shock, he passed through, emerging in another, deeper stretch of water.

  The taste of the currents was different here, the coral formations larger and more menacing.

  He was willing to bet his next leave on Earth that the intruders, if they existed, would be here. They might not be on the Net, but it was certain that they would need access to the Net to get information on whatever they’d come here to see or do.

  When they did, they would make a mistake. No outsider could know the intricacies of the Kasei Net perfectly.

  And when they made that mistake, Ishimoto would be waiting.

  Kara was up to Security Level Five, and still there’d been no indication that her work on the Net had attracted any undue attention. She’d entered the Net deeply enough that she was now adrift in someone’s ViReality, a simulation of a shallow, sunlit sea.

  Though she was no swimmer, here was an AI fantasy where her knowledge of zero-G maneuvering stood her in good stead. She found she could stretch out virtual arms, push off with her legs, and send herself gliding through the simulation with the speed of a combat ascraft. Power of will alone, a mental shifting of her attention left or right, up or down, was all that was necessary for steering.

  Dimly she was aware of other fellow travelers in the sea, shadowy forms that darted and flashed like wheeling fish, representations of running programs. Large objects—doorways, structures, even blocks of rock, or were they life forms of some sort, with their strange and colorful textures?—represented access to other levels and other nodes; most were identified by cryptic notations in blocky Japanese type, DENTATSU: KASEI NO HYOMEN, said one prominent mass of gnarled gold and white. “Communications: Martian Surface.” That was where she wanted to go. Swinging left, she dove into the convoluted surface, a soundless, shockless explosion of light about her as she plunged into yet a deeper level of the Net.

  The air/spacecraft dropped toward Mars. The men and women sealed into their combat machines within the transport’s cargo bay could only wait, wondering if they’d achieved the surprise upon which all depended.

  Lieutenant Randin Ferris lay inside the support module of his warstrider, a CVL-2 Red Saber, thinking about Kara… and about ViRsims. Even one time in a firefight was enough to convince any soldier that ViRsims, no matter how realistic, never quite carried the same level of reality as the real thing. Probably it was the knowledge that you wouldn’t actually die in a simulation, wouldn’t even feel more than a mild sting when someone shot you and booted you out of the link.

  Ran wasn’t entirely sure whether he was dreading this combat drop more for himself, or for Kara. Since he’d met her, two years before, he’d gone from thinking of her as fellow officer and occasional sex partner to someone that he cared for very deeply indeed. It had been all he could do, months before at that party at Kara’s family’s estate, not to let on how scared he was for her. He had the easy job. All he had to do was storm a heavily defended Imperial base. Kara had to penetrate that base’s electronic defenses. And if she were caught—

  “Hey, Lieutenant?”

  It was Rob Lorre, one of the newbies in his unit, a twenty-year-old who went by the handle Mouther. “Yeah?”

  “Is it true what they say about the Nihons? I mean, about how you don’t want to be captured…”

  “No one in his right mind wants to be captured, Mouth. What kind of null is this?”

  “Yeah, but the Nihons got a rep for taking a guy apart real slow to get at what’s in his brain.”

  “Kid, who’s been downloading all this kuso on you?”

  “Well, some of the guys were talking and—”

  “ ‘Some of the guys.’ Kid, you’ve got to stop listening to the who-was, you know? Putting too much meaning on barracks gossip’ll screw your head up worse than the Impies will.”

  “Yeah, but—”

  “Just do what I tell you and you’ll come through okay. Linked?”

  There was the slightest pause. “Linked, Lieutenant. Thanks.”

  He opened the channel to include all of the waiting war-striders. “All of you, start your finals. If you get scragged by enemy fire, we’ll carry you out by hand if we have to, but if one of you gokers has a strider go down because you forgot to set your systems parameters, so help me you’ll walk home!”

  He started running through his own checklist, wishing there were a way to delete the worry dragging at him like a black hole’s gravity well. It was all he could do to concentrate on the job at hand.

  One way or the other, though, it wouldn’t be long now.

  Kara had successfully accessed the Planetary Communications node and from there moved up a level to Aresynch’s traffic control center. Slipping into the ATCC messaging stack had dropped her out of the ocean simulation and into a blackness similar to a warstrider’s first-stage link-in. At a mental command, windows expanded before her, showing computerholos of Mars and the sky-el and the synchorbital, together with columns of data giving readouts on status, systems operations, and readiness levels. Orbiting ships were shown in blue; ships under power had their courses marked in red, while ships maneuvering in free-fall had their transfer orbits showing green.

  In moments, she’d picked out both the ascraft and the freighter Chidori Maru, the latter in a standard approach vector toward Aresynch, the former now decelerating
hard as it skimmed atmosphere over Kasei’s night side. The ascraft had already been flagged as entering low orbit without proper clearance. Now she would find out whether the codes provided by Confederation Intelligence were as up to date as claimed. Insinuating herself into the AI’s awareness, she presented it with a succession of numeric codes.

  “This is not according to standard procedure,” the machine told her. “You are not accessing this unit through an authorized channel.”

  “Accept Priority Code Shiragiku,” she told it.

  There was a tense pause as the AI considered this.

  “Priority Code White Chrysanthemum accepted. I am ready to receive new instructions.”

  She had those new instructions ready, filed in a special uplink directory in her RAM. Swiftly, she uploaded the packet, her attention focused on the simulated display screen before her.

  The warning flag pointing at the incoming ascraft vanished, replaced by the katakana symbol signifying “all correct,” while the record of the incoming craft’s transgression was silently deleted. As far as the system was concerned, all proper authorizations were on file, and all was as it should be.

  “Accept Priority Code Wakazakura,” she told the AI.

  There was a longer pause this time, one stretching into seconds. Either the Net was unusually busy at the moment, or…

  “Priority Code Young Chrysanthemum accepted. I am ready to receive new instructions.”

  The second code gave her immediate access to a different set of nodes on the Net, while allowing her to remain in her lookout position in ATCC. A new window opened, overlapping the first.

  “Aresynch Defense Network,” she said. “Targeting.”

  “Targeting accessed. Please upload target coordinates.”