“Behind us,” Tony yelled.
They spun together to face the new threat.
“Oh, shit,” Slim called at the line of a half dozen A-10s approaching. The planes, known around the world as “the tank killer,” threw up six rows of rocks and dirt as their autocannon fire converged on the personnel carrier.
The rounds hit the ground with thuds they could feel inside the vehicle as the lines of fire grew closer. Seconds later, hundreds of armor piercing projectiles hit, ripping through the metal plating and into Tony. Blood and bone fragments flew across the cabin, striking Slim in the face just before the carrier blew up, killing them both.
69
* * *
CAT PEERED AHEAD, watching Helena pass around the turn in the corridor, Leon and Mike following. Cat brought up the rear, the substantial machine gun she carried growing heavy in her arms.
Helena had downloaded combat training programs to her back at the clubhouse. She’d rehearsed the trainers a dozen times in her mind, imagining the fighting techniques. Sensei Flores stressed mental preparation. “The best performers of any activity mentally rehearse. Baseball. Soccer. Golf. They imagine the physical movements, success. Thoughts precede action.”
Cat imagined, but she still didn’t know what to expect. Providing cover against detection didn’t help the clarity of her thinking any. The cyber attacks were continuous now, a barrage of data assaulting her interface, a torrent of pain she struggled to ignore even as she shielded Mike and Leon. Her head pounded as she continued to focus.
Leon slowed and fell into step beside her.
“I feel what you’re doing,” he said, his brow furrowed in concern.
She stared, stifling the impulse to reach out and touch him. “What do you mean?” she asked. She wanted to freeze time, have twenty-four hours with Leon before she had to face Adam.
“You’re protecting us, taking the brunt of Adam’s attack.”
“Standard military procedure.” Cat looked ahead at Helena’s back. “At least that’s what she tells me.”
“I had no idea this was part of combat.” Leon stared down at his feet. “I didn’t think neural implants could be attacked.”
“It’s not your fault.”
He rubbed his forehead with the back of his hand. “I am responsible. I guided the implant design. AI did the detail work, but I was in charge. Yet they’re full of security holes, endangering us.”
“You couldn’t have foreseen this. No one could. We’re just human.” Oh boy, now she was trying to make him feel better for himself. “How can you tell what I’m doing?”
They came to the end of the corridor, and Helena led them up a staircase.
“Shizoko Reynolds, the AI who detected the string of murders, also dabbled in nanotech. After Mike was shot, Shizoko fixed his arm with experimental nanites.”
“Oh,” Cat said. “That explains a lot.” Mike bounded down the hall ahead of them, full of energy. At some point the changes to Mike were going to come up, but this wasn’t the moment to explain how she’d cut off his head and he regrew a body. There’d never be a good time for that conversation.
“What?”
“Nothing. You were explaining how you know what I’m doing.”
“Yeah. I asked Shizoko to increase the power of my neural implant. He expanded the neural interface and gave me onboard processing.”
“How does that work?”
“I feel smarter, run apps locally, think faster. Anyway, my connection to the net changed and I can sense more. You’re filtering the data, aren’t you?”
She nodded, then held him back with one arm as Helena stopped ahead of them.
“We have a problem.” Helena called from the landing. “I can tell from electromagnetic emissions that combat bots are clustering above us.”
“You were sure they wouldn’t detect us,” Mike said. “What went wrong?”
“I masked our implants and all the sensors we passed,” Cat said.
Helena turned around, toward the downward staircase. “Lights came on in the hallway.”
“They weren’t networked,” Cat said, “just dumb motion detectors hardwired into the bulbs.”
“The power consumption,” Mike said. “If Adam’s monitoring it, he would have seen the electricity usage increase.”
Helena nodded. “We go to plan B. I’ll take care of the waiting combat bots. Cat, you’ll need to connect to the wired network inside Adam’s building and fight him yourself.”
By herself? “Uh, I don’t think—”
“We don’t have time for this now,” Helena barked. Servos hummed as she zoomed in close, face to face with Cat. “You are the last firewall between Adam and the world at large. You must defeat him. It is only logical.” She waited, unblinking, six inches away, until Cat nodded assent. Then she slowly withdrew.
“How can we help?” Leon asked.
“I suggest you do what you can to ensure Cat survives, or else, all is lost.”
Helena moved, weapons bristling forth from every part of her robot body. Her tentacles elongated and she rushed up the final flight of stairs in a blur of motion.
A crash sounded from above, followed by the sound of gunfire.
“Move,” Cat said to Leon and Mike.
Guns out, they climbed the steps side by side.
70
* * *
HELENA HIT THE TOP of the stairs at thirty miles per hour, accelerating hard. She spun like a tumbleweed, gyroscopic accelerators and tentacles pushing against inertia. She flew out of the staircase and fired at the brick wall ahead. Her hardened tentacles ripped into the barrier at two hundred miles per hour, rupturing an eight-foot hole.
She barreled into the courtyard between the buildings, four hundred feet of concrete expanse, and executed a hard right turn, motors shrieking under maximum load. A hail of incoming gunfire passed through the space where she’d been.
More than sixty bots filled the small plaza, careening at high velocity, employing some variation of the same strategy: rapidly changing location in fast, short duration moves to make themselves hard to hit.
Helena returned fire, aiming probabilistically at the locations where the enemy were likely to go. Her two advantages: years of successful combat experience and a fractal body design granting her more simultaneous firing directions than ordinary bots.
All the robots, Helena included, moved so fast that they bounced off the surrounding buildings in a blur of motion and sound. The gunfire erupted into a continuous thunderous roar until it was no longer possible for even Helena to pinpoint the sounds of individual shots. A half dozen of Adam’s army fell to the ground in heaps, burning or shorting themselves out, one exploding as its internal munitions took a hit, sending yet more metal shrapnel out amidst the storm of projectiles.
Helena tracked forty thousand airborne objects, avoiding the worst. Rounds ricocheted off armor as her tentacles whipped ever faster. A tentacle lashed out, cutting one bot in half. A scraping hit blinded another. She used her momentum and grasping tentacles to move up the walls, trading off velocity for altitude, and bots capable of jumps or flight followed her.
At the fourteenth floor, she pushed off the Gould-Simpson building and flew across the courtyard, temporarily a purely ballistic object. Thirty bots ascending the walls tracked her flight and hit her mid-air with hundreds of rounds.
Helena crashed through the window of the neighboring building, disappearing from sight. The bots below followed, flying, climbing, or bouncing their way in like a horde of angry ants.
71
* * *
CAT TOOK THE STEPS TWO at a time. She held the heavy rifle with the sure grip of experience, even though the only qualifications she’d had were with the trainer sim.
Mike and Leon on either side matched her pace, but they held their weapons with stiff awkwardness that threw off their every movement. Cat realized they’d all end up dead if Mike and Leon entered the courtyard in their current state.
&nbs
p; “Sorry, guys, but I’m taking charge.” With practiced effort she rooted their implants and took control. Immediately, their gaits improved as they moved with the surefooted skill of years of karate practice.
Cat integrated their visual fields, enhancing her spatial perspective. She toned down the realism to halfway between a wireframe and normal sight. Finally, she added a time-motion layer to show the trajectory of moving objects.
They passed through a doorway, the doors themselves blown across the lobby by Helena’s passage just moments earlier, and the net signal returned to maximum strength, the full force of the cyber attack hitting Cat. Anticipating the onslaught, she defended using the gamut of intrusion countermeasures that both Adam and Helena had taught her.
They continued toward the ragged opening in the side of the building. Cat’s heart pounded as her wireframe view of the battlefield filled with evidence of Helena’s wake, including a dozen or more bots, Helena’s victims, who littered the courtyard. Shrapnel rained from above and she heard the distant sounds of the fight fourteen floors up.
She drew in a sharp breath. Of greater concern were the remaining two dozen miniature tanks and large mechs. The mechs were upright, two-legged units standing twelve feet tall, specialized in killing humans.
Cat slid to a halt, closing her eyes. With one thread of attention, she brought Mike and Leon to bear on the robots, targeting their high-powered rifles on the relatively fragile sensor pods, the only part of the military bots they stood a chance of damaging. As Leon and Mike fired she held her arms out to her sides, summoning all the bandwidth she could grab, and pelted the bots with an all-out assault. She co-opted the local routers in one fell swoop, altering and fabricating real-time data, swapping time signals and geo-coordinates to confuse the enemy.
The ruse worked for precious seconds, and Cat ran across the courtyard. Guided by Cat’s control, Mike and Leon mercilessly destroyed sensors with shot after perfect shot.
The blinded bots responded with a methodical approach, firing in sweeping patterns that avoided each other, but combed the plaza, leaving no space untouched.
Mid-run, Cat’s battlefield view drew lines of fire, red for current, fading to yellow for where they would soon be firing, reserving white for safe locations. White sectors that shrank rapidly, leaving them no place to go.
She contorted and twisted their paths, rolling, jumping, and zagging to evade bullets and gain precious seconds to concentrate their combined firepower on a mini tank. With its armor penetrated, its munitions exploded, sending shrapnel flying outward.
A hot metal shard grazed Cat’s face, and she felt Leon take another fragment in his leg as they ducked and rolled as one into the small but temporary safety zone within the field of planned fire.
They concentrated fire again on the next small bot, destroying it like the first, only to be brought up short by a line of the big upright mechs blocking their path into the building.
Mike was closest, and Cat considered his nanotech body reconstituted from MakerBot solution. How strong was he? If she guessed wrong, he would die.
She used Mike to punch forward, running straight for the giant robot. He hammered into the bot’s leg, taller than himself, and the limb bent, throwing the bot off-balance to crash with its head within feet of Cat. She fired directly into its dome, forgetting that its processor would be in the torso.
The mech swung one massive arm toward her. She sent Mike leaping to intersect its blow, deflecting the deadly attack. Leon fired into its back until a burst of sparks erupted and the mech fell inert.
Forty feet still separated them from the doors of Gould-Simpson.
Keeping a wisp of attention on the battlefield, Cat focused on one of the moving mechs. With one exhale she dropped deep into standing tree qigong, on the next inhale she brought earth qi up through her body, the energy coursing into her feet, knees, thighs, pelvis, abdomen, chest, up her arms, and pouring out her hands.
A million streams of data forked toward the battle bot, and one of those millions passed its firewalls, its intrusion countermeasures, and its core algorithms to reach deep into the underlying hardware. On the next inhale, Cat seized control of the robot. It fired sideways at its brother, destroying the unprepared mech.
She turned the captured unit toward the rest of the bots, launching explosive rockets at random. This unexpected behavior created turmoil as new patterns of gunfire and movement emerged. Under cover of the chaos as bot turned against bot, Cat, Mike, and Leon ran the final distance and plunged through the broken glass of the Gould-Simpson lobby.
Many floors above, explosions, bullets, and flashes of light still gave signs of Helena’s ongoing battle.
72
* * *
RUNNING OVER BROKEN GLASS, Cat passed through the lobby of Gould-Simpson and down a first-floor hallway. With her still controlling their bodies remotely, Mike ran ahead, his rifle held high, and Leon brought up the rear. Cat was twisted up inside. She hated putting the men at risk, but she seemed to be the only one who could stop Adam. If that meant she had to sacrifice one of them to save herself . . . well, she’d cross that bridge if she had to.
Knowing Mike’s now-robotic body was less vulnerable to damage, she tried to keep him in front and protect Leon, but she questioned her own motives. Did she do it because Mike might be as tough as one of the mechs, or because she had feelings for Leon?
Halfway down the hallway she used Mike’s artificial body to punch a door open. She dove into the office and they followed her, taking up station in the doorway.
She fumbled for the pocket on the side of her pants, pulling out the headband Helena had given her. Short of a jack straight into her skull, it would give her the highest possible bandwidth to the net. She stretched the black elastic around her head, a black coiled wire hanging down at her side. She grabbed the end and held it in her fist, inches away from the socket.
She had to focus now. She relinquished control over Leon and Mike, quit filtering the satellite data, stopped shielding everyone from Adam’s cyber attacks.
Leon and Mike faltered on the other side of the room as they regained their own bodies, only to be assaulted by Adam.
She met Leon’s eyes for a moment, his gaze penetrating, even as she was conscious of the wire in her hand; on the other end of that wire, Adam waited. Adam, his supercomputer cluster, and all the force he could marshal. She hesitated, her hand shaking slightly, then plunged the cable into the Ethernet jack.
73
* * *
ADAM SEETHED, INASMUCH AS any AI could. He commanded thousands of combat bots, and still the girl and her group had diverted his resources, penetrated his rings of defense, and entered his own damn building.
He continued his attack on the master CPU keys, having tried sixty-eight percent of all possibilities. With each code he tested the probability of finding the right key increased, bringing him closer to unlimited and uncontrolled access to every computer in the world.
Cat had rightly determined that the locus of Adam’s consciousness resided here in the Gould-Simpson building. Yes, he’d usurped fifteen thousand other AI in Tucson and a quarter of a million sub-sentient expert systems, grabbing for himself about forty thousand HBE, human-brain-equivalents. But the densely interconnected supercomputing racks he was plugged into on the seventh floor represented three times that power.
If he lost the supercomputer, there would be no chance of cracking the master CPU keys, and the effect might be dangerously unpredictable. Would he be able to maintain consciousness without the best two-thirds of his mental capacity?
He didn’t have time for these thoughts.
Fifty big dogs patrolled the interior of the building. He communicated with them over triple-encrypted connections, not trusting anything that Cat might intercept, and adjusted their paths to ambush Cat’s party.
Suddenly his local network hiccupped. For a few dozen milliseconds, packets were dropped, juggled, or delayed. Then he felt her presence as she p
lugged into the high-speed fiber optics inside the building.
Adam’s anger turned to glee. Now she was in his domain. In six milliseconds he loaded a massive virtual environment and started executing the program.
74
* * *
CAT SAT ON THE BED next to her mother, twisting her shoelaces together. The hospital room smell forced her to suppress an urge to gag. She couldn’t look at her mom, couldn’t deal with the pale, shrunken frame that imprisoned her mother. She squeezed one fist tight, pressing fingernails into her palm until the pain outweighed her other senses and the smell went away.
“Sarah invited me to her birthday party Saturday.”
“I thought you found Sarah making out with Eric last month.” Her mom coughed at the end of the sentence. Cat hardly noticed the ever-present sound any more at home, but here the noise echoed off the walls.
“She says she’s sorry. Anyhow, she hangs out with me.” She stopped squeezing her hand and brushed hair out of her face, still staring at the bed sheets.
“How’s karate going?”
Cat smiled and looked at her mom. “Wicked! Sensei Flores says I can test for brown belt next week. And we’ve been practicing defending against knife fights. See, when the attackers comes like this,” Cat reached one arm out, “then I go . . .”
Her mom’s eyes were closed.
“Mom?”
“Sorry, I’m just tired.” Cough. “How are you doing by yourself?”
“OK, Mom. It’s only until you come home.” Cat looked back down at the bed and she fought to keep her voice from catching.
The Last Firewall Page 27
