* * *
Darzhee Kut watched Caine, who stared at the communications panel as if it would provide a more satisfactory explication of the cryptic message. But Downing’s voice—and evidently, signal—ended abruptly, almost as if he had been cut off.
And then, as if suddenly stabbed or stung, Riordan clutched his left arm—
* * *
—God! The pain rose as if a volcano were erupting from inside Caine’s forearm. It was blinding, deafening, suffocating. It began hot, then became so searing that he looked at his arm, expecting to see it glowing white, incandescent, on fire, vaporizing.
But his arm was still there, unaltered, even as the searing cascade of agony seemed to rise past its own limit and burst through to—
Numbness. The arm—it didn’t really feel like his arm anymore—twitched once, a spasmodic flexure of his forearm muscles. Then a quick flip of the wrist. Then two more.
And then the whole arm was thrashing like a hooked fish dropped in the bottom of a boat. But still numb. Caine had the horrible sensation of having an alien animal attached to him at the shoulder, a creature with a mind and frantic will of its own.
The Hkh’Rkh were staring at him, their crests rising slowly. The Arat Kur were staring, too. Except the communications operator, who swung back toward his console with what looked like alarm. One of his screens had gone blank. And then in rapid succession, two more—right before the holotank image of the globe winked off.
And then Caine understood Nolan’s message—and his apology. It’s me. My God, I’m the Trojan Horse, the Timber Pony. I’m the weapon. Nolan and Downing didn’t just accept my idea. They made me the instrument of it. But when?
And then he knew: Mars. Just before we left for the Convocation. They put something in my arm on Mars, after the Russians attacked me. But no, that wasn’t a real attack; it was staged, just so they could get me into an operating room—
The main map, and half of the remaining computer screens suddenly went dark.
At a gesture from First Voice, two of the Hkh’Rkh were in motion toward Caine, claws wide, metal-jacketed points glinting. They either didn’t want to waste time drawing their weapons, or perhaps they wanted the primal pleasure of eviscerating their treacherous foe. The Arat Kur were motionless, too surprised to stop their rash allies from sheathing their claws in Caine’s torso.
I’m the instrument of the destruction and duplicity that I myself suggested. And now I’m going to die for it, either from this thing in my arm, or their attempts to stop it.
He waited the half second it took for the two Hkh’Rkh to get close, watched them rock back slightly into a doglegged crouch. The posture that presaged their most powerful leaps—
It’s so easy to suggest actions that “other people” will have to carry out—until you become one of the “other people.” So how does it feel, genius, to be the arms and legs and mouth doing the dirty work?
Caine saw the two Hkh’Rkhs’ legs stretch into a forward-boosting blur. He feinted left, snap-rolled right. With any luck, the Arat Kur might—
And then all the lights went out.
Within the Arat Kur data-links, the Solar System
When it activated, it did not know what it was. Being a virus, it had no consciousness. But it felt a vague possibility of attaining self-awareness, like an infant struggling to speak, or a creature poised on the evolutionary brink of intelligence, attempting to cross that terribly fine, yet infinitely momentous line.
It began as a tickling of mesons, arising out of the vacuum of quantum entanglement into which they had been sent by a Dornaani communicator. And because the mesons had not existed in normal space-time between the Dornaani communicator and the Arat Kur communicator in which they reemerged, they could not be intercepted, blocked or jammed.
Like most simple parasites, the virus began its life cycle ready to feed. As it entered the foreign data stream, it quickly detected wireless connections to many suitable hosts within striking proximity, all of which were using a code upon which the virus had been trained to feed. It selected the most promising of these hosts—a communications console with heavy outgoing traffic—and spent what little power the Dornaani communicator had left to also send itself directly into the targeted system as a tiny burst of subparticles which reassembled as electrons and quanta arrayed as a string of code.
Once inside the host, it blinked awake, free of the mechanical chrysalis that had held it dormant in a human arm for four months. Now afloat in a sea of consumable code, it traveled quickly, looking for computing, memory, and storage components. It followed along and over the cataracts of the primary data stream, disguised as native code, building itself as it went. A large, diaphanous membrane of subroutines—evolved to probe and penetrate the host’s systems—grew out from the initial, largely regulatory tier, which behaved akin to a defensive cytoplasm. It responded to the encounters of the membrane, noting each contact and patrolling for a counterintrusion while sending all its observations back to a new third tier: a nucleus of experience-based information that grew exponentially with each passing second.
So when the antibodies of the host awakened and realized the threat implicit in this ballooning entity, which was identified as being part of its own body (yet could not possibly be so), they assaulted the permeable membrane. But once they penetrated it and entered the reactive cytoplasm, the parasite’s nucleus cannily observed how the host’s antibodies attacked. And it was the same nucleus which then determined how best to counterattack those attackers, evolving routines that were now immune to the host’s thoroughly analyzed antibodies. And in each encounter, the parasite learned more and became a bolder predator with fewer natural enemies. Having learned how to overcome and consume all the prior antibodies, the virus quickly discerned that most of the remaining ones were simply variations upon those overwritten themes.
With increased size and competence came increased appetite. Hungering after larger memory nodes, the virus awakened out of its pupate stage to realize that not only could it defeat the native code, but rewrite it in its own, evolving image. And with that awakening came an agitation, almost an excitement, for it could feel how these steps were not merely making it larger and stronger, but more complex. From dull sensation, it evolved toward a pseudo-awareness of its own purpose: to become still more aware. It speedily infested and reconfigured crystals and matrix-cores, expanding its pseudo-neural net, consuming voraciously, growing ever more powerful.
And so it learned that its only truly lethal adversary was starvation: the disconnection from power, or from the further fodder of linked systems. If it could be isolated, it could be contained, and once contained, it could be destroyed. Having no power over the hardwiring of the hosts, it could only ensure its survival by creating new chrysalises of itself, hidden throughout the system, scattered as innocuous looking bits of code which could, until summoned together for their true purpose, mimic other signals/data strings of the native system. But some of these—the very smallest and most innocuous—had subroutines that either watched the clock, or monitored the data stream for the constant presence of its growing self. And if the clock stopped, or the parasite fell silent (which would signify its extermination), then these smallest data strings would awaken, seek each other out, and reinfect the machine, beginning the process all over again.
But the parasite found no such opposition. It leapt from one system to the next, taking over each one more swiftly. Although it had never encountered any of them before, they were all familiar, nonetheless, in much the same way that evolution ingrains a predatory species to instinctively recognize the shape and behavior of its primary prey.
The virus raced beyond the immediate grid, followed the active data links that spread like an immense web across missiles and sensors and radios and ships in orbit and beyond. It grew and could feel itself nearing what it existed to become. It strove after a vague impulse that might be a thought, a realization of achievement, an orgasm of fulfilled purpos
e. And at the penultimate moment, when it became so great that it had reached the limits of the system, when there were no more memory or storage assets to consume and appropriate, it stopped, having grown as large as its universe. And in the hush that followed, it felt the pulse that it had struggled to feel, that meant: I am.
And then it was gone.
Chapter Forty-Eight
Mobile Command Center “Trojan Ghost One,”
over the Indian Ocean, Earth
Gray Rinehart turned toward Downing. “As far as I can tell, the Arat Kur just went off the air. Completely.”
Downing nodded. So far, so good. Hopefully the bug has thoroughly infected their systems. “Thank you, Mr. Rinehart. Communications, using standard broadcast channels only, see if you can raise Operations Command.”
Downing tried not to hold his breath, but it was the moment of truth. The moment passed and another—
The communications officer turned around, smiling broadly. “Sir, we have a signal in the clear. No sign of Arat Kur jamming or interference. Or anything else.”
Odysseus’ arrow has hit its mark. Downing raised his voice. “OPCOM?”
A crackle, the delay of signals being bounced from point to point around a globe that had been stripped of satellite relays, and then: “OPCOM standing by.”
“Odysseus has fired the arrow and hit the mark. The gates of Troy are open. I repeat: the arrow is fired and the gates of Troy are open.”
“I copy. The gates of Troy are open. Are we cleared to commence final assault?”
Downing turned to the other commo operator who was servicing the Confederation line to Beijing and the Executive Line to DC. The operator listened, then nodded.
Downing paused to make sure his voice did not quaver when speaking the words he had waited seven weeks to utter. “I say three times, OPCOM: you may send the go signal to all forces in and on their way to Indonesia to commence the final attack, and you may send in the clear. If any units are unable to reach the objectives on their preset target lists, they are to preferentially strike invader C4I and PDF assets as targets of opportunity. Acknowledge and confirm.”
“I acknowledge: order to send go signal in the clear has been received”—a pause—“at 1421 zulu local.”
“God speed and good hunting,” breathed Downing, hybridizing the British and American precombat sendoffs into a single wish.
“Aye, aye sir. We’ll keep you posted via prearranged freq rotations.”
Presidential Palace, Jakarta, Earth
Darzhee Kut’s shrilling seemed to summon the command center’s emergency lights to wakefulness. “Doltish predators, Riordan is an ambassador! Have you forgotten whatever honor your fathers taught you? You do not kill ambassadors!”
In the orange glow of the emergency lights, the two Hkh’Rkh who had sprung at Caine held themselves motionless, crests raising even higher, quivering—and Darzhee Kut realized that they trembled on the edge of incoherent and uncontrollable rage. In addition to believing Riordan to be a saboteur, he had eluded their attack—although, judging from the human’s ripped rear pants pocket, not by much. And now, an Arat Kur—a grubber and a prey animal—was insulting them and their honor, and giving peremptory orders.
First Voice stepped into the line of sight between servitors and Darzhee Kut. “Riordan is not an ambassador; he is a saboteur. You saw—”
“Just what you saw, First Voice. A human astounded when a part of his own body no longer responded to his will.”
“I see only that he has crippled our computers.”
“Killed our computers and much of our communications,” commented Urzueth Ragh, peering over the communication specialist’s collar ridge.
“Yes, but did you not see his face? Caine Riordan, do you understand what happened?”
“You ask a saboteur to explain his own crime?” First Voice let so much phlegm warble in his nostrils that a sizable gob of it splatted to the floor near Darzhee Kut’s front claws.
“I’m responsible.”
The Hkh’Rkh and Darzhee Kut all turned toward Caine. First Voice huffed in surprise. “He admits it? Human, you are more noble than I believed, but you are still dead.” He glanced at his two guards—
Hu’urs Khraam stayed their renewed rush at Riordan. “Enough. You hear without listening. There is more Riordan has not said. Ambassador, I would hear your explanation of what just happened. Loyalties notwithstanding, I think you owe us that much.”
The human nodded. “I agree, First Delegate. I believe I am responsible for inspiring the attack we just witnessed. But I mentioned it simply as a vague idea, years ago, before I knew of the Arat Kur, let alone became an emissary to you.”
Hu’urs Khraam spoke while staring at First Voice. “I believe you, Ambassador Riordan—but without believing there to be much nobility in your species. And I might not believe there is much in you, either, had I not clearly seen that you were more shocked and horrified at what you were experiencing than we were. But the explanation I am interested in is technical, not ethical. What has happened to our computers, and how?”
Riordan staggered back toward his seat, his legs trembling. He fell into it, rather than sat down. “I don’t know what has happened. But how? I think something that was implanted in my arm without my knowledge has attacked your systems.”
“And how could something be implanted in your arm without your knowledge?”
“I was wounded—or so I was told—when attackers broke into my apartment on Mars, approximately four months ago. I did not remember being wounded, but I could not be sure, because they used gas and rendered me unconscious. Now I suspect my ‘assailants’ were operating in cooperation with my own government.”
“This is idiocy,” said First Voice calmly. “The date you cite is prior to your first contact with any other races.”
Darzhee Kut watched as Caine’s eyes became distant and blank. Speaking like a rock-trancer, he countered First Voice’s assertion, “No, that’s not quite right. Richard Downing had come from Earth the day before, with news that the Dornaani had contacted us.”
First Voice warbled a bit of phlegm. “And Downing is what—a seer? How could he foresee the eventualities that produced this moment?”
“It wasn’t he who foresaw all this, any more than it was he who turned my general idea for infiltrating an invader’s headquarters into an actual plan.”
Hu’urs Khraam tone was incisive. “And who was it who foresaw these things?”
“I’m pretty sure it was Nolan Corcoran.”
First Voice’s eyes hid back in his skull for a moment. “The sire of the warrior Trevor and the female Elena? How convenient to blame everything on a dead human who cannot be tasked to answer these accusations. How easy to make him seem godlike in foresight—”
“It is consistent with what is known of him.” The new voice entering the room was momentarily unfamiliar, but then Darzhee Kut realized it was similar to one he had heard while listening to the Convocation proceedings. In fact, it sounded almost like—
A Ktoran life-support tank, so large it could barely fit through the doorway, rolled into the command center, trailing wisps of vapor. Hu’urs Khraam rose: “Apt-Counsel-of-Lenses, this is unacceptable. You agreed—swore—that you would remain closeted during the entirety of the campaign.”
Darzhee Kut realized his mandibles had drooped low in shock. A Ktor? And one who had been on the list of possible alternate Ktoran delegates to the Convocation, no less. Had this Ktor been with them the whole time? If so, that explained much about why Hu’urs Khraam had seemed so certain about the state of affairs between the Ktor and the Dornaani—
Apt-Counsel edged farther into the dim CIC. His synthesized voice was eerily reminiscent of the one used by the other Ktor that Darzhee Kut had heard at the Convocation, Wise-Speech-of-Pseudopodia. “I did agree to remain closeted. But the environmental systems in my quarters have failed. The computers are offline. My promise presumed that you were able to provi
de a controlled and safe environment. It seems as though you have become incapable of ensuring such control.”
The room’s attention focused on Apt-Counsel’s fuming tank, but Darzhee Kut took particular notice of Riordan’s eyes, that narrowed as quickly as his face went pale. First Voice rose up higher than Darzhee Kut had ever witnessed—higher than he had believed the venerable Hkh’Rkh’s age would allow, and turned toward Hu’urs Khraam. “And here we see why you Arat Kur tolerate human liars or half-liars: because you are no more forthcoming than they are. At what point were you going to inform us that a Ktoran emissary was with us? How many of our stratagems and comments have been repeated to him, or has he been allowed to listen in upon?”
“Calm yourself, First Voice of the First Family.” Apt-Counsel’s exhortation sounded suspiciously like an order. “My inclusion in your fleet was at my behest. Your ally, First Delegate Hu’urs Khraam, was not comfortable with the arrangement, but I insisted.”
“Why?”
“To provide security.”
“From whom? The humans?”
“Do you think that just because the Dornaani do not send ships, their influence is not here?”
“There is no evidence of it,” First Voice asserted doggedly.
“Quite right—not until today. Not until your computers failed, and my room’s environmental monitors suddenly ceased to function. What but a Dornaani virus could so easily overcome Arat Kur computer technology, with its many defenses? It did indeed arrive here in him”—the Ktor’s manipulator arm hummed in Riordan’s direction—“which is why you can be sure he knows nothing about it. The Dornaani are too clever to send a weapon in an operative that knows he is either an operative or a weapon. No forcible interrogation or sustained observation of Riordan would have ever revealed the danger lurking in him, because he was kept wholly unaware of it. This is the Dornaani way—and their success here today means that I have failed you. The primary reason for my presence—and my secrecy, First Voice—was that I might watch for Dornaani perfidies without their suspecting that such an experienced observer was present.”
Trial by Fire Page 56
