“We’ll need ’em,” Mike said, sounding unusually grim: and it was hard to associate the normally cheerful and spry Mike of the Upper Worlds with this angry presence. “I don’t think we’ve ever have had an attack like this, Boss. Everything else has just been nibble- nibble-little-mouse stuff in comparison.”
“What, even the attack last year?”
Mike shook his head. “Not in the same league as what’s coming,” he said. “The Powers of Darkness are here in force, and they’re out for our hides.”
Dev now looked at the crowd which had initially seemed too big, and began thinking it was too small. “If we need more—”
“We’ll send out the call,” Mike said. “All the online system security people are on alert, at all the worldwide branches. We’re posting minute by minute updates on the Topianet with data on the attack and packages of the antiattack weaponry—all people need to do is grab one, arm themselves, and jump in—”
Then Mike paused and put a big burly hand to one ear in the gesture of someone listening to a private conversation who’s forgotten he’s not wearing a headset. “What?” Dev said.
Mike shook his head once, listening. Then after a moment he turned to Dev, hefting his club. “Think I’ll make that call right now,” he said, sounding even grimmer.
Tau looked alarmed. “Already?”
“Analysis is coming back from the skirmishers,” he said. “They’re being pushed back, and their chokedown routines aren’t doing the job.”
“How many running?” Tau said.
“Sixteen thousand attack processes running, four thousand succeeds, seven thousand fails, five thousand presently negotiating but estimated to fail—”
“Seven thousand of our fails?” Tau said. “How the—”
“I think we’re about to find out,” said Mike.
“So let’s go do that,” Dev said. “Because once we’ve found out what’s not working, we can turn this around.”
Mike nodded. “Boss, if you want to speak to the troops—”
Dev swallowed. “Better get it done now . . .”
The Bloomberg shape swung around to face his troops, threw his arms in the air and held that big bloody ax high. “Warriors and defenders of Omnitopia,” he shouted. “Will you hear the First Player?”
A great roar went up from the crowd: weapons were shaken, horns were blown (or honked), and various beasts, fabulous or otherwise, screeched or howled their approval. Then something like quiet settled down.
At least I don’t have to shout, Dev thought. When we’re all virtual, they can all hear me as if I were standing next to them. “Okay, people!” Dev said. “Since I’ve been running around handling other stuff all day, you all know the fine details of this attack better than I do. But the broad facts of the situation haven’t changed. There are a bunch of nasty people out there who want to ruin our players’ fun. They want our money—your money, that you guys earned—so they can all go lie on a beach somewhere even though they haven’t earned it. And even more than that, they want to make us look stupid. And we are not stupid!”
A roar of agreement. “So get out there and kick their butts!” Dev said. “And when Jim Margoulies, or Cleo, or maybe even I turn up on the network news tomorrow, and we just laugh and say, ‘They were no big deal, Omnitopia dealt with them,’ then you’ll know who we’re talking about. It’s you. Because you people are Omnitopia, and I am proud to be associated with you!”
Another roar. Dev reached out into the air again and pulled out the Sword of Truth, held it up in the air. He glanced at Mike. Bloomberg the Terrible glanced over Dev’s shoulder, nodded for him to look that way.
He looked. A stillness fell over the crowd as they saw what he saw: darkness just this side of the horizon, visible now for the first time as it moved closer.
“Let’s get over on the other side, people,” Dev said, “and get ready to party.”
He turned and splashed down into the glowing green water of the river, across it, and up onto the other side, and the army of Omnitopia came after him and flowed past him. Out at the edge of things, the few bright shapes of Omnitopian skirmishers withdrawing from the initial contacts with enemy code were silhouetted against the growing darkness. Dev and Tau and Mike moved forward with the van of the army, while more and more troops filled in behind them. A rear guard of many hundreds remained behind on the island; between them and those thousands who had crossed, the river deepened and widened and started to run fast.
Ahead of the army’s front lines, the skirmishers came riding or rolling or flying in to consolidate themselves with their fellow warriors. “Not good,” Dev heard one frustrated, gasping tiger-rider muttering as others in her skirmish group helped her down off her wounded mount. “Those countermeasures were effective only for a few hundred milliseconds. Then the damn attacks rerouted. They were pulling our own core routines out of the viruses and using them to generate antibody routines on the fly; we were just getting canceled out—”
Behind Dev, Tau was already talking to the air again. “No, it’s not working, we’ve got to shift away from that algorithm, they’re onto it already. I want everybody moved over to the M1H1 variants—yes now, we’ve got plenty more variants in the locker but that one’s the most virulent, so just do it, we’re getting ready to move here and I want our best shot!”
The last of the skirmishers were coming in now—a company of Mongol horsemen, a loping herd of tyrannosaurs, a last few zombie-crewed haunted tanks. All of them pushed their way behind the Omnitopian lines, and as the lines sealed behind them, turned once more to face the foe.
And out there in the darkness, more darkness drew near. The advancing gloom was now resolving itself into countless dark faceless humanoid shapes, hulking and silent, slowly moving toward them—the physical manifestation that Mike and his upper-level code warriors had chosen to represent the attacking programs. The golemlike shapes were armed with spears that burned with black fire, each one representative of a loaded code probe, all ready to slice or stab into Omnitopia’s data system and suck out data and money. They had been coming slowly, at first. But now they were coming faster. And faster still—
“Yeah, yeah, but has it propagated completely?” Tau was saying to somebody up in the light and relative sanity of the real world. “Are you sure it’s—oh, okay, I see it now—” He turned toward Dev, gave him a thumbs-up.
Dev swallowed, looking around him at the warriors of Omnitopia. “Okay, everybody,” Dev said. “Here they come. You ready?”
A growl of fury was what came back. Dev glanced over at Mike: and Bloomberg the Terrible gave the nod. “Okay then,” Dev shouted. “They wanna play around with us, huh? Then let’s go play!”
The answering shout was deafening. Mike held his club high and charged. The army followed, pouring past Dev—
The two fronts crashed together, and battle commenced in earnest, the opposing sides clashing in a muddle of weaponry. The dark shapes of the attacking programs presently appeared to be trying to bull their way through the defenders by sheer weight of numbers. In such places the Omnitopian fighters were using the same tactic to hold them out, the closely serried ranks expressing the pingstorm routines that the Conscientious Objector system was generating to block the logins. Elsewhere, the attackers seemed to be trying to target specific fighters, and the whole front line was an assortment of one-to-one duels, each sheaf of illicit logins being stopped by a single player guiding a massively multiple defensive routine. Many weapons now being brandished glowed with the lava-green of the Conscientious Objector defense modules, each now being guided by human minds and by hands on a keyboard somewhere—inputting new Internet addresses or host-server information ripped from the attacking programs, teaching the CO system what it needed to know about each attack as it came in, helping it cope until its own heuristic routines could absorb the data and apply it to other bridgeheads that needed defending.
Here and there the dark shapes were breaking through the Omn
itopian lines in ones or twos, only to be attacked by crowds of small green-glowing creatures like gigantic and ambitious amoebas, which flung themselves onto dark bodies and smothered them by sheer weight. These were the Conscientious Objector’s more normal defense routines, tasked to stop illicit queries or multiple logins. If the darkbody creature representing a given hostile routine was simple enough or limited enough, these subroutines would gang up on it, smothering its exterior connection so as to starve it of remote processor time and finally phase-canceling it out of existence. If it was too strong or complex, the CO system’s “green blood cells” would hold it in place until a small fighting group could break away from the Omnitopian defenders’ lines to deal with it.
Dev and Tau stood a hundred yards or so back from the battlefront, peering into the turmoil. “What do you make of it?” Dev said.
Tau looked from one side to the other. ““I think we’re holding,” he said. “System says there are something like sixty thousand illicit logins per minute being attempted. That we can hold. For the time being—”
“How much worse is it going to have to get for us not to hold?”
“I’d say twice,” Tau said, “maybe three—” He broke off, looking alarmed. “Stay here,” he said. “Something I need to deal with—”
Tau vanished.
Dev swallowed, did his best to stay calm. An alarmed look was not something he liked seeing on his chief programmer’s face, anymore than he’d ever cared to hear Tau say “Whoops!” while coding, back in the day. “What?” he started to say to Tau by remote, and then stopped himself. What if I interrupt him in the middle of something important? Shut up, stay put, let the army handle it—
But it was hard for an old gamer to just stand there and let the play go on around him. Dev stayed there, watching the brightly colored lines of Omnitopia security staff in front of him pushing against the dark mass of the attacking zombie computers and bot routines. The battlefront looked like a sine wave at the moment, a long scalloped line of color against gloom, with the two sides pushing into and out of each other, in some places slowly, in some with more speed. It doesn’t look too bad, he thought. We’re holding our own—
—except over there, those code-golems shouldn’t be so far into our battle line—
—really much too far in, I don’t like the look of that—
Dev swallowed as, off to his left, he saw the Omnitopian line punching in hard—the attacking forces plainly now adapting to the Omnitopians’ defense strategy and some temporary weakness in the CO. Getting a little too close to the river now. In fact, a lot too close— The line of defenders gave even further as he watched, sagging right back into the river now. And only a hundred yards in on the island side of the river was one of the Macrocosm-trees. The rearguard defenders were rushing forward to meet the threat. But if they couldn’t hold—If the code-golems’ line makes contact with that tree’s code, Dev thought, it’ll use the ’cosm’s structure itself to flood the system. It’ll be all over the Macrocosms and into their separate accounting structures before we can react! And whoever’s running that attack routine will get everything they wanted—
The Omnitopian defenders were being pushed right up onto the island now. Horrified, Dev glanced down at his own weapon, still in Sword of Truth mode. “System management!” he said.
“Here, Dev—”
“Hook one of the attack-routine packs into the sword! Then monitor me and adapt my pack as necessary—”
“Done, Dev.”
He pushed his way as fast as he could through his own people and back into the river, immediately sinking in up to his neck. “No no no no no!” he said to the system, which belatedly recognized him and pulled the “water” away, pushing the riverbed up under his feet so that he could make it across. Why’d it take so long to recognize me? I don’t want to know . . . He pushed through more defenders on the riverbank and made his way back and around to the crowd of Omnitopian fighters who were even now being pressed back toward the tree, then pushed in among them with the sword at the ready. “Which ’cosm is that, people?”
“Pastorale—” one fighter gasped. He was a big burly man in sixteenth-century Italian armor, swinging a big double- handed sword at the faceless code-golem he was fighting.
“Oh, no!” Dev said, and lunged at the golem, spitting it on the sword. It went down, vanishing as the routine driving it expired, but another pushed into the gap to take its place. All those poor little kids in there! Dev thought. What are they going to think when these things come spilling into fluffy-bunny land and start stomping on the flower fairies? It didn’t bear thinking about. He swung harder, taking down another dark golem.
The press around them was getting thicker, though. The defender beside him, the guy in the Italian armor, turned a blue-eyed, alarmed gaze toward him between one foe and the next and said, “Dev, where’s your guard?”
“What?” Dev was too busy swinging for what the guy was saying to register.
The defender looked around him in panic. “Bodyguard!” he yelled. “Backup! To Dev, to Dev, come on, people!”
There was a rustle of activity around him—but what Dev noticed first was that those faceless dark shapes were suddenly a lot more interested in his neighborhood, and in him particularly, than they should have been. Suddenly it occurred to Dev that he’d been assuming his own invulnerability a little too casually. If one of those spears hit him and someone at the other end of one of these attacks managed to invade his virtual persona deeply enough to get at his confidential data, almost any of his data—It’ll be all over the planet within hours, if not minutes. And it’ll be my fault, because I came in without enough prep—
Dev gulped and fought harder. It didn’t seem to help: the faceless dark shapes around him pushed in closer, each one he took down now instantly replaced by another. They were beginning to surround him, cutting him off from the other Omnitopians, and Dev started to curse himself. He was too used to being invulnerable here, the master of all the worlds inside his universe. But for once he wasn’t in safe territory, protected by an impregnable system. He’d come willingly out to the interface with the real world, where people who hated him had a chance at him. Idiot. You’ve fallen into the one part of your game that is not a game, and the bad guys are going to take what you can not let them have—
He chopped at his attackers, his view suddenly full of nothing but spear points in the hands of darkbody golems, and though the Sword of Truth sheared them off as quickly as they got close, he was in a bad spot, no mistaking it. And even as Dev thought that, in came the one he couldn’t get around quickly enough to parry, straight at his eyes—
A flash of light blinded him as someone’s energy weapon thrust blue-white and sizzling between Dev and the spear that was coming at him, slicing the spearhead off at the socket. Someone else grabbed Dev by one arm and pulled him back out of range of the attackers. The pressure around him grew truly unbearable for a moment, then suddenly lessened as a crowd of armed and armored shapes crashed into the faceless, inimical program-fractions nearest to Dev and pushed them back. He gasped for air as more of the armored defenders surrounded him, shoulder-to-shoulder, backs toward him. “You okay, Boss?” one of them yelled.
“Yeah—”
“Good. Better part of valor now, okay?” The whole circle, with him inside it, started moving back away from the line.
Beyond the circle, Dev saw more defenders starting to fill in where his group had been. It was hard to be sure, but he thought his people were gaining ground again as he and his sudden bodyguard pushed back out of the press and got their backs up against the massive glittering code- trunk of the Pastorale Tree. “Double up,” shouted the one who’d spoken to him first, “and get some more backup over here!”
Within moments the ring of steel around Dev was so thick it was impossible to see any of the enemy beyond it. The nearest of his impromptu guards, the one in the armor who’d first called for help, now turned to face Dev. His ro
und worried face Dev knew, but couldn’t place—not that this was unusual in Omnitopia. The man was bald and had big shaggy eyebrows, under which those piercing blue eyes were looking out at Dev with a truly furious expression. “Dev, you goddamn lunatic,” he said, “forgive me, but what the shit were you thinking of? What would’ve happened if one of those guys got through to you?”
“I, uh,” Dev said, and then stopped, because there was absolutely no point in doing anything but apologizing. “You’re right,” he said. “Sorry.”
“Good,” his employee said. “Now you stay here until things are safe, okay?” And he vanished out through the ring of defenders, who generally were looking at Dev with expressions suggesting that they agreed with Blue Eyes.
Dev nodded and leaned against the tree. Gradually his field of view started to clear a little, so that he could see that the attack at large seemed to be falling back, pushed toward the river and past it again by the Omnitopians. Shortly thereafter the ring around him gave way a little, and Tau pushed through it and strode over to Dev.
“Don’t yell at me,” Dev said, for Tau was scowling. “They did that already.”
“Nothing like I’m going to do it,” Tau said. “Is it possible for you to be left alone and not find a garage roof to jump off?”
Dev wiped his brow with his forearm, panting. “Yeah, fine, guilty as charged. Save it for later, okay? How are we doing?”
Tau let out an annoyed breath. “All right for the moment. There were four big fronts where they tried to break through. We stopped the first two right away, but the other two were much worse, and one of them, right here where our people were shoved back into the river, was the worst of all. Maybe a hundred thousand zombie logins hit us in that spot—”
“But they didn’t punch through.”
“No thanks to those of us who went in without adequate safeguards and diverted resources that were needed for the defense!”
Dev made a face. “Okay, I guess this is later . . .”
Diane Duane Page 26
