InterstellarNet- Enigma

by Edward M. Lerner

  Carl bounced off a wall and twice off the floor, bruised from head to toe, before tumbling to a stop. Nothing felt broken. Sitting up, he nixed the painkillers his med nanites had already started to synth. This was no time for drug-dulled thoughts.

  “Everyone okay?” he netted.

  “Barely,” Tacitus netted. Joshua remained sprawled on his back. “What was that?”

  “My guess? Motar realized this base is the primary target.”

  “With us inside?” Joshua asked.

  Clearly. “Do the math, Joshua. How many ships the size of what we’ve seen will fit inside a fifteen-klick-wide sphere? Now picture that many ships coming down our throats. Because at about two gees, it’s only a forty-or-so minute flight. Motar intends to take out this base before they all arrive.”

  Another shock, the strongest yet, sent Carl flying. More dust rained down. Sirens wailed: loss-of-pressure alarms, judging from Xool rushing to slap patches on the walls.

  Levering himself up off the floor, his right arm screamed with pain as broken-bone ends grated. He managed to sit using only stomach muscles. Through clenched jaws he asked, “Do you seriously expect to survive till your ships can get here?”

  Ene, seemingly uninjured, stood. “You have three ships. We have hundreds coming. If need be, this facility will be rebuilt.”

  Motar would have signaled Task Force Glithwah, requesting support. Depending how hard Koban pushed it, how much she decided to slow down before they swept past, reinforcements could be here in as little as three hours.

  Carl said, “Despite a tunnel filled with ships and silos with missiles you’re the one getting pounded.”

  Another blow struck, tossing them like dice in a cup. Carl landed on the broken arm; for a moment, he blacked out. He swam out of the darkness to find Joshua crumpled, chest slowly rising and falling, oozing from a jagged cut along the scalp line. (“We’ll be okay, Tacitus netted.) Red Circle, bleeding purple, lay inert in a second heap.

  This time, Carl did not override his implant’s guidance to his med nanites. The fog of pain ebbed.

  And in his mind’s ear, over the insistent beeping that denoted unopened urgent messages—where the hell had they come from?—a voice demanded, “Should I proceed?”

  It was Votan!

  “Sitrep,” Carl netted, after adding Tacitus to the link. Because if anyone had ever needed a situation report, it was they.

  “Yes, sir. Excalibur is overhead. Durendal and Joyeuse remain in orbit. The last I saw both seemed fine. Many drones do, too.”

  “Blue Moon drones, or the drones we left orbiting the planet?”

  “Blue Moon. I don’t know about the other.”

  “And the battle?”

  “It’s over.”

  “If the battle is over, why are we taking this pounding?”

  Motar joined the link. “So that we could consult. If you and Joshua hadn’t been inside, I would have nuked the area and had done with it.”

  In a netted terrain image, near a mirrored, slow-time, curved surface, a new crater had appeared. In and around that pit, almost directly over Carl’s head, dust and debris had yet to settle. Twenty meters deep, he guesstimated the hole. Meters more rock would have been pounded to gravel—porous to shortwave RF—above cracks and crevices penetrating deeper still into bedrock.

  “Ir appreciate your restraint,” Tacitus offered.

  Motar netted, “Two-hundred-plus ships are about to descend on us. Even after the pounding we’ve taken, we could handle twenty or so—these guys have terrible reaction times; they can’t track targets, identity decoys, or evade ordnance worth mentioning—but not hundreds. Given the rate of fire their railguns can sustain, they’re dangerous even firing just dumb projectiles. We’ll retrieve Votan before we pull out, but what can we do about you two?”

  “Show me the tactical situation,” Carl netted.

  In consensual space, a 3-D graphic displaced the battle-scarred terrain. Red sparks swarmed above Xool World, still shrouded in slow time. As many again red sparks were en route to Blue Moon, harried (or so it seemed) by tiny blue dots: Hunter drones that had been monitoring the planet. In the vicinity of Blue Moon itself, only blue sparks appeared: the three vessels of Task Force Mashkith and drones. They had lost lots of drones. Task Force Glithwah, still hours away, merited only a flag along an edge of the graphic.

  “What happened to the local Xool ships?” Carl asked. “And didn’t I feel missile launches?”

  The tactical graphic gave way to a new terrain image, panned back from the first. The second lava-tube entrance had collapsed. Wreckage lay strewn across a new, still dust-shrouded crater. “Just the one ship made it out before we closed the door,” Motar netted. “But on its way down, that ship took out your last two infantry robots.”

  “And Xool surface weapons?” Carl asked. “Any apart from the railguns you mentioned?”

  “Silo-based missiles,” Motar netted. “Easily swatted, given a little warning. Some drones went down, though, in the initial surprise. We’ve taken out the silos we’ve spotted.”

  “Okay,” Carl netted, “Grab Votan and make a dash for it. The Xool ships on their way have built up speed. You need a head start.”

  “And you?” Motar asked.

  “We aren’t going anywhere,” Carl netted.

  After the last strike, Ene had shouted. It must have been a call for assistance, because the five Xool hustling into the room had tended to Red Circle. As they trundled Red Circle from the room on a gurney, Ene seemed to remember his prisoners. “The starship.”

  Joshua was unconscious. Maybe, Carl thought, letting his eyes fall shut, he, too, could appear out of it. He slumped—with care, trying not to jostle the broken arm. Ene would have ample time later to abuse them.

  “I can crash the computers here,” Votan netted from the surface. “Force a reboot, maybe rolling reboots. The details are in messages I’ve sent you. I’ve been working on the code; I’ll need maybe five minutes to finish. Ten minutes, tops.”

  Motar netted, “You don’t have five minutes. Excalibur will set down in two, as near as we can get to the observatory. A minute after, we go. Whether or not you’re aboard.”

  “Then leave me,” Votan netted. “You can’t spare the time to retrieve me anyway and I have to strike back. Somehow. Pick me up when you return for the commander.”

  Except, Carl thought, there won’t be any coming back. The obvious tactical move was dropping one of the nukes Motar still held in reserve. Take out the command-and-control center.

  “If you could disable all their computers, that’d be one thing,” Carl netted. “Bringing down the observatory computers for a short while isn’t worth your life. Run like hell for Excalibur. That’s an order, soldier.”

  “The computers here are all I can hurt,” Votan netted. “Sorry.”

  Tacitus netted, “But with Votan’s help, Ir can do much more.”

  CHAPTER 54

  Keeping the metaphor to himself, Joshua found the situation too much like an octopus juggling chainsaws:

  —Ene and Carl verbally sparring. Emergency patching, of walls and fellow Xool alike, had preempted Ene for awhile, but now he was back.

  —Control-room chatter from which, given only the occasional phrase that emerged from the background din, and the few words Tacitus had maybe translated, Joshua intuited only enough to add to his confusion.

  —Tacitus’ urgent netting back-and-forth with Votan.

  All as hundreds of ships pursued the three battered survivors of Task Force Mashkith, and while Joshua, still feigning oblivion, strove not to react to anything.

  For the first time since meeting Carl, Joshua thought, maybe I should have learned b’tok. The discipline in massive multitasking, especially with Tacitus preoccupied, would have been useful.

  “The starship,” Ene said. “Tell me where the starship is, and we’ll attend to your friend.”

  “Who is fine,” Joshua net-texted.

  “I’m
about to pass out,” Carl told Ene. “You want answers? Remove these cuffs. Let me get at my first-aid kit.”

  “The starship.” Ene said again. “Where is it?”

  “My arm is broken,” Carl countered. “I need meds from my kit. More than that, I need to see to Joshua.”

  “After you give me something,” Ene said.

  “How much longer?” Carl netted.

  “A few minutes,” Joshua texted back. Texting took fewer CPU cycles than simulated speech, and just then Tacitus needed every cycle they could get. “Call it five.”

  “What’s taking so long?” Carl answered, taking Joshua’s hint this time. “Never mind. My knowing won’t help. Distracting your other half certainly won’t.”

  Did Carl imagine this was easy? Working at the machine-code level, all zeroes and ones, Votan had isolated the binary representations of most instructions, some operating-system calls, and network services. She had crafted, still toiling in binary, the most elementary of viruses. So far, Tacitus had spotted three reasons why Votan’s virus would not have worked on the Xool computer.

  Fortunately, biochips ran rings around neurons, human and Hunter.

  “This process can get very disagreeable,” Ene eventually said. “Answer my questions.”

  “I’ve heard only the one question,” Carl said. “If you have another, try me. Maybe that’ll be something I can answer.”

  “The starship,” Ene rasped.

  “Ready,” Tacitus texted.

  “That’s fortunate,” Carl texted. “It’s almost show time.”

  Joshua opened his eyes and, with a groan, sat up. “What did Ir miss?”

  “How are you feeling?” Carl asked.

  “Groggy,” Joshua lied. “The worse for wear. Ir could use water.” That Ir will not actually drink.

  “Ene? Some water? Ene? Ene?” Carl asked.

  But Ene was not heeding. His eye and ear stalks had swiveled toward the control room, where, amid swelling chatter, Joshua heard words that might mean enemy ships.

  “Something wrong?” Carl asked.

  “No! Tell me about—”

  “Those fusions drives that just lit up?” Carl offered. “Of course you’ve not seen that fleet till now. Those ships had been coasting, stealthed. And now …”

  Ene turned to shout something to the control room.

  Several Xool converged on the largest of the consoles. The alien seated there shouted back. In that long, sibilant response, Joshua heard words he believed meant messages sent.

  He ceded their vocal cords. Tacitus deserved to be the one to announce, “It’s done.”

  “Done.” Ene echoed. “What is done?” With the din in the control room swelling into a yet louder, somehow agonized, cacophony, he demanded, “What have you done?”

  “You don’t know?” Carl asked.

  Carl’s head wobbled as Ene lashed his face—left, right, left—with a ropy arm/tentacle.

  “What have you done?” Ene repeated.

  “Do you remember that observatory on the surface?” Tacitus asked. “And the computer in it? Well, Ir did.”

  Ene turned toward Joshua, arm/tentacle raised threateningly.

  “In the early days of human computing,” Carl said, blood dripping from his nose, “malicious software took days to exploit vulnerabilities across networks. Within decades, that latency came down to minutes. Now, a minute is a long time.”

  A Xool dashed in from the control room. Purple Octagon. He and Ene had a heated, inexplicable exchange.

  “What have you done?” Ene voice had taken on a sibilant edge that seemed, somehow, ominous. “Explain, now.”

  “Done?” As Tacitus spoke with his usual flat delivery, Joshua fashioned their face into a sneer. “Ir created a state-of-the-art, learning, evolving, self-replicating, memory-resident worm. While you …”

  “We?” Ene prompted.

  Joshua took over. “You opened a comm channel to your hundreds of ships—and thereby turned them into so many clay pigeons.”

  • • • •

  Ene did not understand skeet shooting or the finer points of worm design. He did not quite get how Xool twentieth-century software was helpless before twenty-second-century malware. But that ships gone silent had begun reconnecting over emergency, audio-only, analog radio channels, that every ship to make contact reported itself blind and defenseless? That, Ene got.

  Since the cyber attack, per Carl’s implant, three minutes had passed. Three frantic minutes that had surely instructed the Xool neither rebooting nor rollback to backup files would resolve their problems.

  “You have twelve minutes to convince me not to launch smart missiles at your ships,” Carl told Ene. “Smart missiles will not miss.”

  There was a quick exchange in Xoolish, and then Purple Octagon snipped their cuffs.

  “Thanks,” Carl said. “I told you before: your people and ours don’t need to fight. But if you choose war, it’ll be over soon.”

  “What do you want?” Ene asked.

  Glithwah, bless her heart, had been right all those years ago. He would get to reason with the Xool.

  “To start, confidence-building measures. You release the tunnel entrance from slow time.” Releasing two infantry bots. Carl let Ene work through that implication for himself. “The ships in planetary orbit return at once to your home world.” Per Motar’s latest tactical download, that entailed half the opposition. “The remainder break off pursuit, head home as quickly as they are able.”

  Ene and Purple Octagon consulted. Around Purple’s midsection, the fringe band writhed agitatedly.

  “Shall I take a look at your arm?” Joshua netted.

  “It can wait,” Carl netted back. “Ask again in twelve minutes.”

  “Unacceptable,” Ene said. “Those ships would endanger every network at home.”

  “Destroy their onboard computers,” Carl countered.

  “In twelve minutes?”

  “Closer now to eleven. Jettison them. Take axes to them. Set them afire. I don’t care how.”

  More animated consultation.

  “And in exchange? What do we get?” Ene asked.

  “The lives of everyone aboard those ships.” Perhaps not everyone, Carl admitted to himself. Reentry without computers would be tricky. It still gave those crews better odds than as bull’s eyes in a shooting gallery. “And, we resume discussions. Aboard my ship. On more of an equals with equals basis.”

  Louder than ever, Purple and Ene conferred.

  “Nine minutes,” Carl interrupted.

  Purple and Ene kept talking. Other activity ground to a halt, the Xool in the control room turning eyes and ears toward the debate.

  How many ships and crews must die to make his point? “Five minutes.”

  With two minutes remaining, as Joshua, unhindered, returned with a water pitcher and glasses, the Xool deliberations reached a crescendo. Purple strode toward the control room.

  “Very well,” Ene said. “We will order all ships home.”

  CHAPTER 55

  Ene and Purple Octagon, the latter now revealed to be named Lua, settled into the least claustrophobic cabin—Carl’s own—aboard Excalibur. They, too, had had a challenging day. Before talks resumed, it was best that both sides take the time to process everything that had transpired. Because they had nothing but time. On the planet below, Carl estimated, the Xool had had perhaps seconds to consider the sudden and helter-skelter descent of their crippled fleets.

  Shuffling along the main corridor, enjoying low-gee, he took Motar’s report in person. Without decent computers, Xool ships were outclassed. Without smart weapons, they were hard-pressed to hit anything. Maybe that was why, when they did hit something, often they kept on hitting it. The only Hunter losses that day had been among drones, in almost every case units stationed in close orbit, with little warning to dodge or defend themselves.

  What Carl did not get was why the outward-sweeping Xool ships had maintained a barrage aft, or why, in
doing so, they switched armaments from missiles to railguns. Whatever the reason, the Xool tore to shreds any disabled drones near their planet. No one he had asked had offered a theory, either.

  Motar finished, and Carl, still shuffling along the main corridor, netted through to Koban. Together they reviewed Task Force Glithwah’s deployments as some ships shepherded home Xool stragglers and the rest mounted patrols. With those details attended to, Carl peeked through robotic eyes at affairs, on and underground, here on Blue Moon.

  He yawned, telling himself he could always bunk with Joshua. If the day’s adrenaline surges and caffeine megadoses ever faded. If the opportunity for sleep ever again presented itself. If the throbbing in his nose and arm—both set by Joshua, Excalibur’s medical resources being minimal—and from assorted bruises, ever receded sufficiently to allow sleep. If the din of repairs to Excalibur’s Swiss-cheesed hull ever diminished. If the infernal itching beneath his cast let up.

  For that last, he kept reminding himself, the end was in sight. A day at most. Bless the nanites. If Xool had had bones to break and require knitting, maybe they would have felt differently about nanotech.

  In the comfort of the copilot’s acceleration couch, to the familiar background chatter of the bridge crew, Carl reclined, closed his eyes, and began organizing a report for the Foremost.

  Before drifting off to sleep ….

  • • • •

  Show time, Carl thought.

  The wardroom was not much of a meeting venue, but Excalibur could offer nothing better. He and Joshua sat across from their “guests” at the lone remaining human- (and Xool-) height table. Koban, whom Carl had invited to attend, had demurred, preferring to remain on patrol. That decision left Corinne, also invited, seething with curiosity and frustration, trapped aboard Fearsome—a scant few thousand klicks distant—until Koban reconsidered or arranged other transportation for her.

  Remembering the padded, backless furniture at the Xool base, Carl had had a crewman find pillows to cushion rigid plasteel seats. Recalling Xool hospitality—before the beatings had begun—Carl asked, “Cold water, anyone?”