The DOG pawed at the hatch, and then looked back at Gillies. He nodded, and said, "Heel!" as he readied his last mini-sun. The DOG obeyed with alacrity. Gillies trained the mini-sun on the hatch, let it compute, then raised his thumb.
Something did go wrong with this one, but Gillies wasn't sure what it was, as he was knocked back across the room and momentarily stunned by the blast. Coming to, he instinctively bounced behind cover, twisting himself so he could cover the hatch. Even as he rolled, a greyband capsule struck near his feet, and the solvent spewed out, seeking marine armor. Gillies activated the mechanism that would shuck the first ablative layer, and returned fire. His dotter struck a Xene warrior who was charging through a gaping hole where the coreward hatch used to be. The alien, despite being hit through the midsection, kept on coming.
Behind him, Gillies saw the DOG unit rolling around on the ground with another Xene, and behind them, he saw the characteristic tall panels of a Xene ship's engine control room. But before he could use the com, the gut-shot Xene was on top of him, thrusting with a small trident in each of its three combat arms. Gillies jumped backwards, and activated the forceblades in his gauntlets. Two bright-blue beams, each sixty centimeters long, shot out just in time for him to parry the Xene's trident attacks.
Sparks flew as forceblade met trident field. Gillies caught the two main attacks, but was too slow on the third, and a trident skewed off his blade to sink into the left side of his armor. It didn't penetrate to skin, but it didn't have to. The Xene twisted the handle, and the remaining field charge earthed itself, shorting out most of Gillies' systems. His whole left side locked up, and his sinister beam faded to nothing. Desperately, Gillies fired his back pulsors, throwing himself forward in a mad lunge with the functioning force blade, expecting to feel the other tridents in his chest.
But the Xene toppled over, smashed into the floor and rebounded with Gillies on top of him. Before the alien could recover, Gillies thrust his forceblade through its chest exhaust, the savage blow sending him into a spin that he couldn't control. Out of the corner of his helmet, he saw the DOG propel itself out from under the Xene's anterior limbs, where it had struck as he'd shoved.
"Well done," Gillies sent, remembering the order codes Sublight had sent down. But there was no answer: only an ominous vibration deep in his cheekbones. Quickly, Gillies flipped through the other channels, without success. He couldn't get a full damage control readout, but the emergency tell-tales inside his helmet told him his motor controls were shot, there was significant loss of suit environment and the trident charge was still ravaging his suit systems. He'd probably be dead inside twenty minutes—with everyone else from his own platoon and Two Platoon as well, if he couldn't get to the drive controls and shut it down.
The controls were little more than five meters away, and there were no Xene defenders in the way. But Gillies was unable to move, his arms and legs twitching uselessly, bound in armor that had effectively lost its nervous system. He was writhing uselessly on the notional floor under 0.2G, but even the low gravity couldn't help him.
Quickly, Gillies assessed his options. The DOG unit looked to be fully functional, but it couldn't receive his commands. He looked down at it, and it looked up at him.
"Come here!" Gillies tried, but there was no response. Desperately, he tried again. Still, the DOG just stared up at him. He tried gesturing to it to come closer, but only a few of his fingers moved. He tried again, with his other hand. No fingers, but the wrist flopped backwards and forwards, like a clockwork obscene gesture.
The DOG seemed to understand that, because it unwrapped its tail, and jetted up to Gillies, doing an elegant flip-over halfway that put its tail next to Gillies' helmet. He wondered what the hell it was doing, till his damage control telltales showed one restored com circuit. The DOG's tail was its antenna and input fiber, and it had just plugged into his suit phone.
"Well done!" Gillies exclaimed again. The tail wagged a little, but not too much. Praying that his message log wasn't destroyed, Gillies summoned up Sublight's message again. It worked, and this time he ran through all the codes, using up a precious five minutes of his remaining life support. But it was worth it. The DOG's command language was surprisingly sophisticated when groups of words were used, and it hinted at equally sophisticated capabilities.
"DOG! DESTROY . . . ENEMY . . . ENGINE . . . CONTROL . . . PANELS . . . IN . . . VISUAL . . . RANGE . . . AND . . . RETURN!"
The DOG detached itself, and sped over to the engine room. Gillies watched in fascination as it moved to each panel, and a cutting lance shot out of its nose, melting through the armored covers of key fiber junctions. Then, a blue claw went in, and came out festooned with broken fibers and the Xene's curious half-sentient chips, their metallic blood boiling out into vacuum. Luminescent trails on the panels died. When the second-last panel dimmed, Gillies skin crawled as the ship's screen pulsed and died. When the last panel faded into darkness, his stomach told him he was in zero-g. The artificial gravity was off and the ship was no longer accelerating.
The DOG jetted back, and reconnected. Gillies smiled and nodded at it.
"GOOD . . . DOG! Very good!"
The rest of the battalion shuttles would intercept all the sooner now, maybe even soon enough to save Gillies' platoon. They could even be landing now, for all he knew. But it was too late for him. The suit said he had less than five minutes of atmosphere left, and they'd never get to him in time. Wearily, he tried to think of something he could do, something to add to the simple equation of not enough air and a broken suit. Salvage atmos tanks from one of his dead marines back in the hold? He couldn't get to them. He was too tired, and he couldn't move anyway. He might as well just go to sleep . . .
With a jerk, he twitched himself awake, and checked the tell-tales again. The suit had cut him to half pressure—he wasn't getting enough oxygen. He couldn't think. There was the DOG, maybe it could get him the atmos tanks, but once again, he couldn't think of the commands. His head felt like he'd just gone through a gravity flux. He couldn't remember the commands, the commands. Only the one Sublight thought was funny, though Gillies didn't know why. Maybe it was Sublight's joke, and it wasn't a real command, but it sounded like just the right thing for the situation.
Half unconscious, Gillies muttered the command that would save his life.
"Lassie. Get help."
****
Garth Nix is the author of many books and stories.
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When SysAdmins Ruled the Earth
Author: Cory Doctorow
Illustrated by Rob Dumuhosky
When Felix's special phone rang at two in the morning, Kelly rolled over and punched him in the shoulder and hissed, "Why didn't you turn that fucking thing off before bed?"
"Because I'm on call," he said.
"You're not a fucking doctor," she said, kicking him as he sat on the bed's edge, pulling on the pants he'd left on the floor before turning in. "You're a goddamned systems administrator."
"It's my job," he said.
"They work you like a government mule," she said. "You know I'm right. For Christ's sake, you're a father now, you can't go running off in the middle of the night every time someone's porn supply goes down. Don't answer that phone."
He knew she was right. He answered the phone.
"Main routers not responding. BGP not responding." The mechanical voice of the systems monitor didn't care if he cursed at it, so he did, and it made him feel a little better.
"Maybe I can fix it from here," he said. He could login to the UPS for the cage and reboot the routers. The UPS was in a different netblock, with its own independent routers on their own uninterruptible power-supplies.
Kelly was sitting up in bed now, an indistinct shape against the headboard. "In five years of marriage, you have never once been able to fix anything from here." This time she was wrong—he fixed stuff from home all the time, but he did it discreetly
and didn't make a fuss, so she didn't remember it. And she was right, too—he had logs that showed that after 1AM, nothing could ever be fixed without driving out to the cage. Law of Infinite Universal Perversity—AKA Felix's Law.
Five minutes later Felix was behind the wheel. He hadn't been able to fix it from home. The independent router's netblock was offline, too. The last time that had happened, some dumbfuck construction worker had driven a ditch-witch through the main conduit into the data-center and Felix had joined a cadre of fifty enraged sysadmins who'd stood atop the resulting pit for a week, screaming abuse at the poor bastards who labored 24-7 to splice ten thousand wires back together.
His phone went off twice more in the car and he let it override the stereo and play the mechanical status reports through the big, bassy speakers of more critical network infrastructure offline. Then Kelly called.
"Hi," he said.
"Don't cringe, I can hear the cringe in your voice."
He smiled involuntarily. "Check, no cringing."
"I love you, Felix," she said.
"I'm totally bonkers for you, Kelly. Go back to bed."
"2.0's awake," she said. The baby had been Beta Test when he was in her womb, and when her water broke, he got the call and dashed out of the office, shouting, 'The Gold Master just shipped!' They'd started calling him 2.0 before he'd finished his first cry. "This little bastard was born to suck tit."
"I'm sorry I woke you," he said. He was almost at the data center. No traffic at 2AM. He slowed down and pulled over before the entrance to the garage. He didn't want to lose Kelly's call underground.
"It's not waking me," she said. "You've been there for seven years. You have three juniors reporting to you. Give them the phone. You've paid your dues."
"I don't like asking my reports to do anything I wouldn't do," he said.
"You've done it," she said. "Please? I hate waking up alone in the night. I miss you most at night."
"Kelly—"
"I'm over being angry. I just miss you is all. You give me sweet dreams."
"OK," he said.
"Simple as that?"
"Exactly. Simple as that. Can't have you having bad dreams, and I've paid my dues. From now on, I'm only going on night call to cover holidays."
She laughed. "Sysadmins don't take holidays."
"This one will," he said. "Promise."
"You're wonderful," she said. "Oh, gross. 2.0 just dumped core all over my bathrobe."
"That's my boy," he said.
"Oh that he is," she said. She hung up, and he piloted the car into the data-center lot, badging in and peeling up a bleary eyelid to let the retinal scanner get a good look at his sleep-depped eyeball.
He stopped at the machine to get himself a guarana/medafonil power-bar and a cup of lethal robot-coffee in a spill-proof clean-room sippy-cup. He wolfed down the bar and sipped the coffee, then let the inner door read his hand-geometry and size him up for a moment. It sighed open and gusted the airlock's load of positively pressurized air over him as he passed finally to the inner sanctum.
It was bedlam. The cages were designed to let two or three sysadmins maneuver around them at a time. Every other inch of cubic space was given over to humming racks of servers and routers and drives. Jammed among them were no fewer than twenty other sysadmins. It was a regular convention of black tee-shirts with inexplicable slogans, bellies overlapping belts with phones and multitools.
Normally it was practically freezing in the cage, but all those bodies were overheating the small, enclosed space. Five or six looked up and grimaced when he came through. Two greeted him by name. He threaded his belly through the press and the cages, toward the Ardent racks in the back of the room.
"Felix." It was Van, who wasn't on call that night.
"What are you doing here?" he asked. "No need for both of us to be wrecked tomorrow."
"What? Oh. My personal box is over there. It went down around 1:30 and I got woken up by my process-monitor. I should have called you and told you I was coming down—spared you the trip."
Felix's own server—a box he shared with five other friends—was in a rack one floor down. He wondered if it was offline too.
"What's the story?"
"Massive flashworm attack. Some jackass with a zero-day exploit has got every Windows box on the net running Monte Carlo probes on every IP block, including IPv6. The big Ciscos all run administrative interfaces over v6, and they all fall over if they get more than ten simultaneous probes, which means that just about every interchange has gone down. DNS is screwy, too—like maybe someone poisoned the zone transfer last night. Oh, and there's an email and IM component that sends pretty lifelike messages to everyone in your address book, barfing up Eliza-dialog that keys off of your logged email and messages to get you to open a Trojan."
"Jesus."
"Yeah." Van was a type-two sysadmin, over six feet tall, long pony-tail, bobbing Adam's apple. Over his toast-rack chest, his tee said CHOOSE YOUR WEAPON and featured a row of polyhedral RPG dice.
Felix was a type-one admin, with an extra seventy or eighty pounds all around the middle, and a neat but full beard that he wore over his extra chins. His tee said HELLO CTHULHU and featured a cute, mouthless, Hello-Kitty-style Cthulhu. They'd known each other for fifteen years, having met on Usenet, then f2f at Toronto Freenet beer-sessions, a Star Trek convention or two, and eventually Felix had hired Van to work under him at Ardent. Van was reliable and methodical. Trained as an electrical engineer, he kept a procession of spiral notebooks filled with the details of every step he'd ever taken, with time and date.
"Not even PEBKAC this time," Van said. Problem Exists Between Keyboard And Chair. Email trojans fell into that category—if people were smart enough not to open suspect attachments, email trojans would be a thing of the past. But worms that ate Cisco routers weren't a problem with the lusers—they were the fault of incompetent engineers.
"No, it's Microsoft's fault," Felix said. "Any time I'm at work at 2AM, it's either PEBKAC or Microsloth."
****
They ended up just unplugging the frigging routers from the Internet. Not Felix, of course, though he was itching to do it and get them rebooted after shutting down their IPv6 interfaces. It was done by a couple bull-goose Bastard Operators From Hell who had to turn two keys at once to get access to their cage—like guards in a Minuteman silo. 95 percent of the long distance traffic in Canada went through this building. It had better security than most Minuteman silos.
Felix and Van got the Ardent boxes back online one at a time. They were being pounded by worm-probes—putting the routers back online just exposed the downstream cages to the attack. Every box on the Internet was drowning in worms, or creating worm-attacks, or both. Felix managed to get through to NIST and Bugtraq after about a hundred timeouts, and download some kernel patches that should reduce the load the worms put on the machines in his care. It was 10AM, and he was hungry enough to eat the ass out of a dead bear, but he recompiled his kernels and brought the machines back online. Van's long fingers flew over the administrative keyboard, his tongue protruding as he ran load-stats on each one.
"I had two hundred days of uptime on Greedo," Van said. Greedo was the oldest server in the rack, from the days when they'd named the boxes after Star Wars characters. Now they were all named after Smurfs, and they were running out of Smurfs and had started in on McDonaldland characters, starting with Van's laptop, Mayor McCheese.
"Greedo will rise again," Felix said. "I've got a 486 downstairs with over five years of uptime. It's going to break my heart to reboot it."
"What the everlasting shit do you use a 486 for?"
"Nothing. But who shuts down a machine with five years uptime? That's like euthanizing your grandmother."
"I wanna eat," Van said.
"Tell you what," Felix said. "We'll get your box up, then mine, then I'll take you to the Lakeview Lunch for breakfast pizzas and you can have the rest of the day off."
"You're on,"
Van said. "Man, you're too good to us grunts. You should keep us in a pit and beat us like all the other bosses. It's all we deserve."
****
"It's your phone," Van said. Felix extracted himself from the guts of the 486, which had refused to power up at all. He had cadged a spare power-supply from some guys who ran a spam operation and was trying to get it fitted. He let Van hand him the phone, which had fallen off his belt while he was twisting to get at the back of the machine.
"Hey, Kel," he said. There was an odd, snuffling noise in the background. Static, maybe? 2.0 splashing in the bath? "Kelly?"
The line went dead. He tried to call back, but didn't get anything—no ring nor voicemail. His phone finally timed out and said NETWORK ERROR.
"Dammit," he said, mildly. He clipped the phone to his belt. Kelly wanted to know when he was coming home, or wanted him to pick something up for the family. She'd leave voicemail.
He was testing the power-supply when his phone rang again. He snatched it up and answered it. "Kelly, hey, what's up?" He worked to keep anything like irritation out of his voice. He felt guilty: technically speaking, he had discharged his obligations to Ardent Financial LLC once the Ardent servers were back online. The past three hours had been purely personal—even if he planned on billing them to the company.
There was sobbing on the line.
"Kelly?" He felt the blood draining from his face and his toes were numb.
"Felix," she said, barely comprehensible through the sobbing. "He's dead, oh Jesus, he's dead."
"Who? Who, Kelly?"
"Will," she said.
Will? he thought. Who the fuck is —" He dropped to his knees. William was the name they'd written on the birth certificate, though they'd called him 2.0 all along. Felix made an anguished sound, like a sick bark.
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