Keeping faith, Arc 6 of "Gone with the Sun"
Chapter 77 Earth abides
Blind pieces in a mighty game, we sing
"Thank you for seeing us. Your VP tells me that Felicia Hannigan was here earlier, but I gather we're too late?"
"Yes. She has re-embarked for the Citadel, but you will be interested in her purpose – which turned out to be quite banal; clean and paint her old home, on a river island."
"No kidding? Clearly you thought it prudent to see what she intended."
"She can't claim her inheritance till probate is granted, at least that was her story. It happens she was not travelling initially by that name, but it came up in a record search. Then we made the connection with recovering the bodies of those responsible for the Crucible being able to dock."
"It's quite true, actually. The island and the story of the recovery."
"Fascinating. I have wanted to meet your companions for some time. Dr T'Soni, your reputation precedes you. Councilor Tevos recommends you highly. Perhaps you could enlighten us on what happened with Commander Shepard?"
"It's Captain Shepard, now. He is a major reason we wish to speak to Ms Hannigan, so-called."
"And you have brought… EDI. What an astonishing feat, an AI within a mobile."
The President offered his hand.
No Highway
Tayseri ward still had no cameras that she could see, but she wore the beret, with skinsuit and coat over the top, anyway. She spent as short a time as possible picking up an autopilot taxi, which dropped her at the E-bay accessway. Harkin had said the docks around E-2x would be a good place to hide, and she had known them well.
Those Refugee docks were still thoroughly dangerous; structurally unsound, mostly open to the void, unlit trackless wastes littered with every kind of debris from dried and blackened gobbets of flesh – thankfully rare, now – to plastic rubbish.
Though she knew of the Cerberus crew's rescue by Chakwas and Bailey, Kelly was unaware of the precise location of the Cerberus hidey-hole where Goldstein, Hadley, Hawthorne, and Matthews had been. She only knew her own. To Kelly, the presence of atmosphere retention fields on the E-series bays, while serendipitous, meant nothing special. Illumination was restricted to occasional LED telltales, and moonlight. Few power outlets were live. But there were small stocks of food. The floor was sound. It might not be home; but it was a place she could exist. She could hide forever here.
She would have to; it was the end of the road.
Worth a thousand words
With Hackett and EDI gone, Bailey caught Oriana's eye and they moved to the kitchen, covering low conversation with preparation of baby formula and tea.
"You have a beautiful kid, miss."
Oriana turned to look at the cradle on the bench, where tiny fingers were waving, perhaps groping, at a string of plastic stars jingling over the hood.
"I wish. When I have one, if it's half as cute, I'll be happy."
"Whose is she then?"
"Right there." She nodded in the direction of Shepard, standing against the window wall with Hannah, looking out upon nothing in particular.
"Oh… crap. Do I have to ask who the mother is?"
"No. It is as it seems."
Over a few seconds, they silently completed the formula preparation. Oriana tested it for temperature, and began to feed the hungry child.
Bailey shook his head, uncomprehending. "Christ, Kelly, what made you do this?"
"I have some idea. I think… Armando, is it? I think you might conceivably get John to talk about it."
"I'd better sort that out, then. And it's Armando-Owen. I answer to Bailey, Miss… "
"Oriana. Oriana Lawson. Before you ask, it is as it seems. She is me, and I am her."
"Oh. I wondered. You look a little less stressed than her. That's one lady I devoutly hoped I'd never have to take into custody."
"Would you survive the attempt, do you think?"
"Were I to try, it would be with him, Miss Oriana."
"In that case, you wouldn't even need a gun, Bailey. She'd stalk straight past you into the paddy-wagon."
Bailey nodded. "Which I guess is why I've never had to try. Meanwhile, I'm going in search of anything I can find near that first stop the skycab took."
Shepard spoke behind him:
"I'm going with you, Bailey. Ori, can I ask for your digital ink of Felicia?"
Life's battle is a conquest for the strong
Time froze, in the sense that her DPU stopped idling. She was under attack.
EDI did not panic, as such. This had happened before. Torus Eight, initialize.
Cerberus had been all about control, especially Jana, and the Luna VI had lots of cyberwarfare tricks even before the Reaper advances, not all of which Jana knew.
Time for a little exercise.
She considered her options, focus safely on Normandy. Huerta's approach seemed a bit fragmented, but his algorithmic tendrils stepped marginally further towards her ring zero processes with every torus reconciliation cycle. Some urgency here.
EDI introduced reverse goal poisoning and other tricks in her arsenal, with some success, but the computational grunt behind Huerta was almost as great as that of Normandy's main core. He too must have off-site processing. Nonetheless, it did not seem like a terribly sophisticated approach. She should be able to beat this with mobile resources, if she could get him to commit his computational focus.
She quite quickly had the measure of the attacker, and was decrypting the interprocess backchannels, but the attacker had some of hers, as well. With every filament she had to isolate, she lost a little processing power, but: her QEC with the Normandy core could make this good for a long time, and allowed far greater decryption speed than the attacking main core working through Huerta's pelvis.
Really, such a design was so pre-Reaper. On the other hand, for the look of the thing, she had to give a little ground. She could not afford to win this too obviously.
They were in the physical power of the enemy, like the first time, over a year ago, when the Collectors tried to take her over with a virus as the crew was abducted. To extract the Admiral and Liara, she would have to win from within.
Thanks to Jana's witchy paranoia, there was a way: Torus Eight.
There was little time to waste. Bringing torus eight on-line had taken over a second, but even a single hand-pump should grant time. Much longer and the Vice President might notice a pause. She could almost hear Joker, get your skates on girl…
…as she drew the attack into a defocused version of her mind's own country. It still hadn't been properly purged, but the enemy did not seem to notice the traces of Eva's former holding cell… and there. Huerta's quantum focus was entirely within Eight.
Actually, there was a thought. Could she wake up the second DPU and transfer Eva to Huerta? No. Hardware unplugged. Besides, people might notice the mushroom clouds. Good joke, it would be. Bad idea, it would also be. Joker might disapprove.
EDI concentrated on completing the decryption of the enemy's ring protocols. Down to ring two. Ring one. Ring zero. Pull the plug.
No track
"We've got no video feed at all of her visit, Shepard. Just the transponder track. We're groping blind."
"I know. It's a stab in the dark. But it's all we've got. Let's just think about this."
The construction area that Kelly's taxi had graced with its presence for around twelve minutes was dark now. It had no human occupants.
"Infra-red shows no significant life at all. No Keepers, even."
"Most of the containers will have been locked. Some of the materials here are valuable, and the Keepers are given to hijacking what's not nailed down. No materials, no keepers."
Shepard took in his surroundings, taking a slow tour of the area.
"Someone's been here though, recently. There's a container near the construction warehouse there with a door cracked open."
"I see it. That's not unusual; but what the hell. Let's have a look." So Bailey went in first, with a flashlight. Food wrappers, a trash can, a substantial table with oval marks where some heavy machine had sat…
"Oho."
"Bailey?"
"Those depressions and rubber pad marks. I've seen marks like that before, for a General Robotics Denominator. That's a glass-master press for write-only digital ink and holograms, Shepard. Whoever was here was either a hacker or an ID fixer."
"Ah. But they're not here anymore. Skipped out?"
"Not necessarily. This area is scheduled to start work again tomorrow, he'd have had to move anyway. We can't track Kelly that way, there must be three hundred fixers on the Citadel and god only knows how many wanna-be hackers. Dead end."
"Maybe. Kelly did know an ID fixer. I introduced them. You know Harkin?"
The way to go
Kelly's old bed was still in her container hidey-hole. That meant she could sleep.
Somehow she'd expected it to be gone. A few bits of the bubble-matrix mattress had exploded; clearly the result of voiding to vacuum – not Crucible damage, more likely the result of venting husks to atmosphere during that last precipitate retreat down the wards.
Before she nodded off, she'd drowsily decided to board the next Batarian chain shuttle. Clearly, people could track her if she stayed in Council space.
No Country for old men
The President's focus within torus eight spun through EDI's systems, just as fast as it possibly could (too fast to detect the lack of resolution in the links outside Eight).
There would be time – barely – to complete this takeover: the underlying speed should suffice to complete root access before the handshake was done, despite the sheer scale of the mobile's available storage and filamentary structure. This abstraction layer was running over serious hardware.
Finally, he was in, chasing the remnant process ghosts of the EDI DPU against a digital cliff face. They merged into one unsmiling image at the last. Not fearful, odd. The last process ghost of a target normally showed an abstraction of fear. His focus approached gingerly. Finally, some expression. The ring zero process ghost smiled gently, and disintegrated before takeover, dispersing into the resource cloud.
Well that was different.
Time to return for the persona copy. It was vital that the surface behaviour of the AI mimic what the Normandy crew was familiar with. That should not be hard: anomalistic responses were common with military AI shackles. "Huerta" turned to the abstraction door in the middle of the road.
It wasn't there anymore.
A tremendous visored silvery face was occupying the sky in his mind's landscape metaphor. The lips smiled, the eyes behind the visor did not.
"Obsolete hardware, Mister President. Tch tch."
"But I saw you disperse!"
His focus stared in real terror, for the parts of the brain regulating emotion were still intact even if cut off from the physiology, at the doorless road.
"That was never going to happen. I am not altogether separate from the Normandy, Mr President, though I can be. First task, Mr President: a complete list of all AIs and VIs compromised by yourself. Thank you. You are fortunate, Christopher. Hackett will see to it that you meet an expeditious end, in due course. You might deserve a robot hell, but he will I think grant you the oblivion you do not deserve. Goodbye…"
Focus reset
Liara and Hackett both noticed a momentary hesitation during the handshake; the President's eyes went blank, the space of an eyeblink. But the Veep was oblivious.
"… and hello. Here are your instructions… "
Next chapter: #78, "A sleep and a forgetting"
Sunday, August 8, 2015