Insidious

by Michael McCloskey

  Divide and conquer, she reminded herself. Step one—locate Avalon’s local radar.

  Aldriena figured she could probably simply ask for the radar control through the civilian half of her Cascavel, but a slight chance existed that the request might be flagged by security. She decided to keep direct queries as a last resort.

  Aldriena asked for a map to the zero grav laboratories. The route appeared in a diagram in her PV. An option existed to include external routing. But anyone asking for routes extending outside the station into the vacuum of space might well be flagged by security as well.

  She thought about heading somewhere popular and waiting to see if her Cascavel could uncover the information by snooping through a lot of link traffic. It would probably work eventually, but she had to finish before the UNSF arrived. They’d given her a lead of only hours in which to prepare the station for their arrival.

  Aldriena inquired about station tours for new inhabitants. The standard tour package came up and she stepped through the sites one by one, as they worked around the station. She put the map into browse mode and moved the view through several angles. When she rotated a view beyond the bulkhead of the section being illustrated, it showed nothing. She found an option on the pane called “complete view.” Suddenly, the interface rendered the areas beyond the bulkheads, including some features outside the station.

  Aldriena blinked. She recognized the local radar array almost on top of the section in which she stood. She realized sheepishly that the spaceport was a logical place to put the Earthward-looking radar station. According to the map, it sat beyond and “above” a bulkhead separating the passenger embarkment zone and the control tower.

  It was very close!

  Step two—plant the spoofer at the radar station.

  Aldriena studied the map for a minute longer. Then she laughed. She took a right and strode down the crowded corridor until she found the women’s restroom entrance on the right wall. She walked inside an open passageway into the room and found the corner most stalls.

  According to the schematics, the women’s restroom on the arrival deck was within seventy meters of the local radar antenna covering the Earthward hemisphere of space around the station.

  Within the confines of the stall, Aldriena fiddled with the spoofer device, readying it inside her right glove. She didn’t worry about making a lot of noise, since anyone trying to solve the logistics problem of using a public restroom while in full gear would make a racket.

  Aldriena left the stall. A woman stood in front of a mirror staring at her own face. Aldriena automatically judged the stranger’s looks: the long black hair looked too frazzled; the thin nose drooped too much at the end. Otherwise, the person looked healthy, but ordinary. The woman’s helmet sat on the counter.

  “I’m trying to memorize my face now while I can see it,” the woman said.

  Aldriena flashed a fake smile. “Good idea,” she said, and removed her own helmet. She splashed her face with water from the sink in front of her. She saw hand dryers and luxurious white towels, so she grabbed a towel and wiped her face, then let it drop into a receiving bin.

  “It must be harder for you to wear the helmet all the time. You’re so beautiful,” the woman said.

  “Me? Oh, thank you,” Aldriena said. Compliments from women were harder for her to absorb, since they usually came with less agenda than those from men.

  Aldriena let her spoofer slip into the towel return opening. “Oh, damn, I dropped my manual,” she said. “So stupid, why’d they give us a hardcopy, anyways?”

  The woman across from her smiled. “Leave it in there,” she said. “That’s where it belongs.”

  Aldriena laughed. She pulled open the access doors below the counter and kneeled down. The woman, having delivered her joke, donned her helmet and walked out of the restroom.

  Aldriena peeked under the counter. There were four, square ports the size of her open hand for robotic delivery of soap and toiletries. The rest of the cabinet was empty. The station had been built with attention to detail; even under the sink, the white plastic was clean and flawless. No errant holes or bad material cuts marred the underside of the countertop. Aldriena mentally shrugged. Her spoofer only had to go undetected for a few hours. She attached it to the upper right hand corner of the cabinet space and closed the doors.

  Aldriena laughed.

  Who would have guessed? she thought. My first and second objectives are as easy as throwing something away in the women’s restroom.

  Aldriena emerged from the restroom and headed out of the debarkation area of the spaceport.

  Step three—find the spinner.

  Aldriena brought up her station map browser again to check for the closest security stop point. It looked to be only three minutes away. She fell into a beautiful concourse of white and purple. The ever-present ads on the walls were only outnumbered by the purple airscrub-grass vases.

  The nearest ad suggested a switch of her undersheers, claiming that men “could tell from your eyes” if a woman had sexy undersheers or plain white ones under her clothes.

  Implausible. Besides, I’m already wearing the finest available under Momma Veer.

  This time she had decided undersheers alone wouldn’t cut it. She needed the protection of her military skinsuit if she saw action. And the likelihood of action seemed high, considering her assignment to ambush a warlike alien cyborg.

  She came to the checkpoint. An alcove in the wall held a desk and a guard. Beyond them, a large metal door stood closed.

  Aldriena stepped forward. The guard stood up before her.

  “Where’s the spinner?” she asked.

  “What makes you think—?”

  The guard stopped short. Aldriena had pulled her helmet off. She leaned forward on the counter and let her hair spill to one side.

  “You … you should put that back on,” the guard said.

  Yep. It’s a guy, she thought.

  “Just tell me where the spinner is. Whaddaya call it?”

  There was a pause.

  “Claw.”

  “Claw. Nice. So where is it?”

  “Why would I know?”

  “Because you’re security. Of course, you know. Look, tell me where it is and I’ll owe you one.”

  Aldriena knew that no one on the stations really believed in the spinner’s rules or wanted to follow them. And most men were happy to discover a woman brazen enough to ignore a rule or two, provided she was stunningly beautiful.

  She gave him her best smile. She hoped he was tired of staring at black helmets. Seeing a beautiful face would be more powerful in an environment like this. When people see something all the time, they become attenuated to it. Take it away, and they starve for it. Aldriena fed a starving man.

  The guard looked down at the featureless console. No doubt, he had a PV pane anchored there. The counter held information displays only he could see.

  “Spinward,” he said. “There’s a lab. They’ve been building something and I believe Claw oversees it.”

  Her link received a pointer. She opened it and saw a lab outlined on her PV map.

  “Thanks … what’s your name?”

  “Drago.”

  Aldriena smiled. “Thanks, Drago. I’m Aldriena. I’m busy right now, but I’ll be back.”

  Actually, I won’t be back. Poor guy. I still have a ways to go, though, before I’ve used men worse than they’ve used me. Or tried to use me, anyway.

  She slipped back into her helmet and traipsed away. She cursed the bulky armor she wore for the thousandth time. How could she make a memorable exit looking like a black robot soldier? She sighed. It occurred to her that the faceplate of the armor never fogged up. At least the suits were well designed. She had never felt hot or cold in them, either.

  Aldriena picked up the pointer in her PV and changed course to find the lab. The lab extended across an entire quarter section of the station, spanning more square feet than a soccer field. Her curiosity awakene
d. She pictured an alien from a distant star, working on a secret … what? A way back home? A personal arsenal with which to attack Earth? An entertainment system?

  Her link told her she was only a few steps away from the closest lab entrance. She took a turn and saw the corridor ahead ended at the lab door. It clearly wasn’t an ordinary door: it stood seven feet tall and twice as large as the bulkhead doors near the spaceport. Her link bathed the end of the passageway in a virtual red haze signifying a forbidden zone. A real-world bright green biohazard symbol and a red stop sign at chest-height on the wall completed the warning ensemble.

  Probably a HIT here somewhere, too. A well-hidden one.

  She came up to the bulkhead door and slid her hand over the biohazard sign affixed to the wall. Her fingers felt a ridge. It was real.

  Please turn around and depart, this area is off limits, came the warning piped through her link.

  Security wanted there to be no doubt: this area was closed. Her Cascavel didn’t pick up packets leaving the network beyond the door. The communications might be routed more securely, she thought.

  She turned back. Right now, she looked like someone who had made a wrong turn, not a potential terrorist.

  Something or someone had to go past the doors. Aldriena considered the possibilities. The lab workers had to come and go … unless the spinner worked alone?

  Presumably, technicians might need to fix hardware glitches here and there. Things that a spinner might consider beneath its notice. If a spinner thought anything like a human. Impossible to say. Aldriena decided to keep thinking along the route anyway. So that meant they would be replacing parts. Most likely, the parts would be fabricated on the base, given the extreme remoteness of the location.

  How would they bring in the parts? A cart? A toolbox? A robot?

  “Merda!” she spat.

  If only we’d gone with a software hack to swap out the identification signatures of the UNSF ships with fake transport signatures. But the colonel with the bad link bias pointed out that it would be too obvious to anyone on the lookout for an incursion … damn him.

  He was probably right, though.

  Aldriena hated working in the suits. How the hell was she supposed to break the rules and get away with it when she looked like everyone else? At least it made it somewhat easier to take the exact opposite tactic and impersonate someone. Easy enough to grab someone’s gear and wear it. The person’s link complicated things.

  Her Cascavel could clone another link for a short time. It had to break into the target link and steal its authentication secrets, then disable the target link so it would be isolated from the network. Unlike legal links, the Cascavel could charade as other hardware for a time. The copy wouldn’t work forever, but Aldriena felt confident it would last long enough to get in there and hand a spinner her special delivery.

  She sped up her stride toward the nearest fabrication module on her PV map. She passed other station inhabitants in their gear, each one treading along on unknown business. She could see resignation in their strides. Humans weren’t meant to operate this way. The suits were dampening their interactions to the point of smothering everyone’s natural social behaviors.

  When she arrived, she found only a white door flanked by giant purple vases overflowing with airscrub grass, each with a miniature palm tree rising from the center.

  Aldriena let herself inside. Beyond the door, she found a simple room with advertisements flickering on the walls. A conveyor belt and a drop chute sat empty and silent. Someone had discarded a hardcopy of the station rules on the floor. She chuckled at the irony of it. It was harder to stifle the spread of electronic copies of the crazy code of behavior, so the spinners gave out hardcopies instead. The more primitive medium was easier to keep under tabs. Her link picked up the book’s service cybloc. She could see that the chip forbade making electronic copies of the content by any method. Of course, her Cascavel could cache away a copy of anything that passed in front of her eyes without alerting anyone.

  Her link picked up a service for ordering parts from the wall near the conveyor. Apparently, the module was completely automated. Aldriena had imagined a setup where people ordered new parts and a specialist fabricated and delivered them. Not surprising, considering that Aldriena herself had been acting as a delivery girl for the stations. But the reality was that parts were usually ordered via link and delivered by robots.

  She poked around the interface in her PV for a while longer. Then she saw that the station did have a troubleshooting alias for requesting help.

  Aldriena sent the request and started pacing. Her link told her that she had three hours left before she could expect the UNSF. At least the swift execution of the first half of her mission had bought her some time.

  A person wearing green-trimmed gear walked into the room from the door Aldriena had used.

  “Hi. What’s the problem?” the person asked via link.

  “I need to take a part to Claw in the lab, but I don’t have the authority to get in,” Aldriena said. “Claw asked for it. I’m in trouble if I can’t get it in there soon.”

  “That doesn’t sound like a fabrication problem.”

  “It’s not, but do you ever take parts there? Can you get in?”

  “I’m not going into any lab with Claw unless he orders it.”

  “Can we talk face-to-face? These helmets are ridiculous, don’t you think?” Aldriena asked.

  “Take the helmets off? Uh, are you feeling okay?”

  Aldriena pulled off her helmet.

  “What’s wrong? Afraid of a little excitement? This place is so dull!”

  The helmeted figure looked her over calmly.

  Then the troubleshooter took off his helmet.

  Aldriena’s heart sunk incrementally. The man was a woman! A beautiful woman.

  The face before her had a splattering of freckles and long brown hair. Her eyes were a startling clear green.

  Aldriena’s face must have betrayed her disappointment.

  The other woman giggled. “You were so brave a moment ago,” she said.

  Aldriena gathered her wits. Time for a change of plan. First, her Cascavel isolated the woman’s link so she couldn’t call for help.

  “I need your help,” Aldriena said.

  “Yes? Did you get in trouble for taking your helmet off?” the woman smiled. “I’m Sheridan.”

  “I’m Aldriena, and I’m here as the vanguard of a UNSF incursion to this base. It’s been taken over by an AI.”

  Sheridan’s beautiful eyes flexed wide. Then she laughed nervously. “Are you a whack job?”

  Aldriena sensed that Sheridan had half swallowed the information. The nervous laugh and the way her body had frozen meant that she was considering it. Aldriena knew it was a good lie. If she mentioned space aliens, she’d get nothing. But mention an AI and everyone was ready to believe it. After Marseilles, fear brooded in everyone’s mind that it would happen to them.

  “Think about it. Have you heard about the incursions?”

  “Well … security is on high alert … maybe for wackos like you.”

  “The AI is in control. That’s why we have to wear these crazy suits. All these inexplicable rules … all created by the AI.” Aldriena pointed at the book on the floor.

  “That’s not my copy,” Sheridan said quickly.

  “I didn’t say it was. I don’t care if it is.”

  “What do you want, Aldriena?”

  “I want to clone your link and get into that lab,” she said.

  “No. I don’t know you. I think I should report this.”

  Aldriena considered attacking her, but she didn’t feel like making a mess.

  I can still talk my way out of it.

  “This is bigger than us, Sheridan,” Aldriena said.

  “What is Claw working on that the UNSF needs to stop it?” Sheridan asked.

  Aldriena had no idea. She was about to ask Sheridan the same question. But she could use the question.r />
  “A weapon,” Aldriena said. “But I can’t say much. Earth is in danger. A lot is riding on this, Sheridan.”

  “I don’t know you. You’re probably lying.”

  “All right. Tell the authorities … if the UNSF doesn’t show up here in a few hours. But when they do, let me into that lab. Okay?”

  “Maybe you’re a criminal and the UNSF is coming after you,” Sheridan said.

  “Think about it. You know things are far from normal here,” Aldriena urged. “Do you have a better explanation?”

  “I’ve been thinking about it. That’s the only reason I’m even having this conversation. What good is getting into the lab before the UNSF gets here? Won’t they let themselves in when they arrive?”

  Aldriena produced her grenade. “I’m supposed to neutralize the spinner for the space force,” she said. “Claw is a new model. The first of many. It’s the primary muscle of the AI. With Claw out of the way, we might have a shot at containing the AI here. Haven’t you noticed the communications crackdown? Earth is trying to protect itself.”

  Sheridan stared at the grenade. “You’re either a freakin’ space force commando or a terrorist,” she said. “How’d you get that on the station?”

  “It’s a glue grenade, so there’s no incendiary signature,” Aldriena said. “But it is industrial strength glue. Should shut the spinner down. It could save lives. You’d be a hero.”

  “Okay. Tell you what. You pass a T check and maybe I’ll believe you.”

  Aldriena knew a truth check relied on links that were obeying the spec. Her Cascavel could easily defeat the check.

  “Okay.”

  Sheridan activated the truth check protocol. Aldriena’s link, had it been obeying the WLP, would now be monitoring her mentality, searching for cues of deception. On Earth, the protocol could only be activated with the permission of the link host. Aldriena had signed away her rights to refuse it several times when entering the deep space stations.