Chapter 37: Low Bypass
"I said, 'Well, what'd I say to piss you off this time, baby?'
She said 'I don't know.' I don't know what my baby's putting down..."
-Willie Mabon
Sure, I was pleased enough at the controller elimination. Aileen was on his side now and there were lots worse allies. We had a lovely little fix that could be replicated with trivial ease. But…it was such a simple idea. No wonder I hadn't thought of it. I threw up an explosion of fireworks and confetti around my figure and let my pleased surprise show through in my tone of 'voice'.
*We used the internal systems of the relay to expedite the decrypt, there's no fucking reason we couldn't blow the entire thing over the relay to everything else…"
But my enthusiasm began to fade as I thought about the intelligence implications.
*There's no practical reason not to.*
"Oh god. Politics again?"
Silly boy. Life was politics. You had to steer, to nudge, to manage, to create an environment which would maximize probabilities that your targets would make the most useful choices. It was the hubris that toppled civilizations and the 'but I'm different' mentality that made tyrants of good men. I just didn't much care…if there was a hell, I was already bound for it. If not, I'd damn well use every advantage I could bring to bear for Jerome and his little monkey tribe.
*Put yourself in the place of our saboteur. After your sneaky little move, you're looking forward to watching the worlds burn themselves down. Suddenly the trend reverses. A fix goes out, systemwide, that just happens to be undoing your hard work and doing it with your own language. The troubleshooter's ID has been broadcast. What's your next move?*
One of the several endearing things about Jerome was that you could follow an idea through his head by his changing expressions if you caught him off-guard. This time was no exception.
"Arrange a little accident, then start furious damage control. Either try to disappear or bring in the big guns and go double-or-nothing. Or arrange big guns to cover the fadeout. I see your point."
Finally, some sanity. It was tantamount to suicide, since there were so many avenues to strike at us from…
"…but I can't just let us sit on this. Love, think of the stakes."
I'd been thinking of the stakes all along, since after I'd taken the call this…last…whatever morning it'd been. At the time it seemed like such a great idea. Burn off some mutual loss with some profitable destruction. Viking funeral. Followed with a high-dollar informal wake. Then he had to go getting all noble when the full extent of the disaster started peeking through!
*Don't we have a big enough bullseye painted on my ducts?*
"Look, we've got to get Utopia Planetia back and running either way. I'll bounce it off Dravis and let him make the call. I'll be diplomatic and political."
You'll be territorial and stroppy, because you don't know how to be diplomatic or political, not really, and especially not at Sammy…but I didn't say it. I just sighed and got ready to reestablish contact.
*I'll be decrypt bitch through the console, then, shall I? Unless the dinky little thing has enough resources to run the program itself. Grocery-list lady in three, two…*
"There you are. Here's the console."
The camera view swooped dizzyingly over to the serial plate and a mental crossreference made me groan. It was gonna be like sucking a golf ball through a coffee stirrer…not fast, not pretty, and requiring far too much attention on the suction end. I rolled my eyes but nodded to Jerome, miming a flightstick in my hands.
"Can do but I'll have to steer it from here. Sideband me the login and I'll get the decryption program running."
"Sending it now, do you need me to do anything?"
If I'd wanted to be a data doctor, I wouldn't've gone to Io! Nevertheless when I heard her credentials, I reached out through the relay to get remote access to the facility with our maintenance pass, then from there ignored the external console entirely and started sweet-talking the controller into accepting a modified internal decrypting program. If I fucked up, I could probably catch it, and if he was really going to suggest this to Dravis then it was obligatory to see if it'd even work. Jerome raised his eyebrows at me but I shook my head as I concentrated on keeping the instructions straight to be fed over. She'd just get in the way.
"Not a thing. This shouldn't take more than five or ten minutes."
If I'd been working through the console it would've taken about half an hour, but if he was going to fuck up my strategy, I was going to borrow his direct approach.
"Right. When you have any news, holler. Literally. I'll leave this channel active."
Another swoopy camera movement, abruptly steadying, and we were looking at the back of Mrs. Caldwell's head poking above her slat-framed chair as she went back to her work. Everybody was busy except Jerome. Well, his business was violent trouble, so any time he was idle was generally a positive sign.
*Change of plan. Running it on the controller because we only tried that on the relay and there were lots more resources to play with.*
His eyebrows shot up and he glared at me.
("You were planning on telling me this when?")
*Right about now.*
("What's your fallback plan?")
*If it goes into self-defense mode? Hell, I can always try to lobotomize it remotely. Otherwise you'll have something to do after all.*
The fallback plan was to make a lot of excuses and request further ordinance interdiction. I was so impatient to do something, anything, useful that I didn't much care. Working through the relay, I was almost as fast as I'd be if I had a direct line and was confident enough in my ability to head things off that I didn't give it much thought. Didn't mean he wanted to hear it.
("What happened to defense in depth?")
*What happened to refuge in audacity and velocity?*
("You know damned well that's for combat!")
*What do you call ANY of this?*
("Ninety percent waiting, ten percent terrified adrenaline. Touché. Damn you anyway.")
*This IS where I went where I died, dear one.*
("Somewhere between the gutter and the stars. Just…give me something I can hand to Dravis.")
*If I get to pick, it's a coin toss between a handful of feces or a well-squeezed handful of uranium isotopes.*
("Which is exactly why you don't get to pick. How's it going?")
*Faster. A lot faster. Like a good little kid it's busily rewriting itself as fast as the storage will stand up and glue down the bits.*
On the relay I'd had to squint and monitor every bit for paranoia's sake. Here I was watching it intently but letting it crawl on its own, and the decrypt was gratifyingly fast, already more than halfway done.
("Speaking of Dravis' assumptions that we've been going along with—like the comm links being down and the invasion force thing—")
*What now?*
("Flip this around. You're the cee-whatever-oh of THE biggest corporation in human history. Suddenly something goes badly wrong and after an update is sent out you get anomalies around Charon and your facilities and system relay go dark. You send a scout in, scout goes down. You send in the UEG, they assault hostile drones and the dropship gets taken out, then that facility lights up Brazil. Why do you go right to 'blow it all up' when that worked so well the first time around?")
I thought and thought on that one. PTMC's officers were rapacious, arguably amoral sociopaths, as you'd expect to find in high office everywhere, but they weren't stupid. With the facts at my disposal I could only see murky logic to that end result.
*It's not a decision you'd make lightly…with the UEG baying for blood. Nationalizing Post-Terran wouldn't be the best move and it might be a better idea to let them clean up their own mess if they can…a 'if you don't take out these facilities, we will' ultimatum. No wonder Dravis looks like hell every time we see him, right now your progress reports and procedure may be the only things standing between the Potemkin and all PTMC's facilities.*
Jerome snorted audibly at that one and I could see Aileen pause and cock her head before shrugging and going back to work.
("You'd think he'd be happier to hear from us, then.")
Well that one was easy enough.
*And what if you're WRONG? What if this doesn't work? Quite apart from the practical recovery, PTMC and the UEG are still going to tear everything apart bit by bit, they WILL be trying to replicate my results on the hardware you claimed you ran, the wheels of justice will be grinding exceedingly fine. They can't just call this a 'rogue update', they'll have to trace their own saboteur internally and either hand somebody over or hand over a trail to the UEG's investigative forces—who will ream PTMC's secret dirty laundry wider than an elephant raping a mouse unless some really rampant corruption has to take place at some fascinatingly high levels, which will have its own knock-on consequences…*
A fresh reorganization was better than coffee. The entire mess ran on and on and up and out, great glittering wheels of filthy consequences, human action-reactions interlocking up and up and out of my comprehension, but when I was feeling sharp I could see a lot further and a lot clearer. Not that I could take my eyes off the rewrite as it finished up and obediently executed a full power-off restart. The controller dropped out of visibility and after a few moments I tried the connection again, watching the hardware initialization messages scroll across the back of my mind.
("So this is a mixed blessing because now there's an audit trail?")
*And nobody can simply beg the UEG for money to rebuild—of course with little oversight- because PTMC's far too vital to be let die, even if they had to blow up most of their facilities. Yeah, you shit on somebody's sweet little ideal resolution and for a large paycheck, so PTMC's gunning for you. The UEG will want to extensively debrief you under any number of interesting drugs, and we can't have that, so they're not exactly on your side either. The public will want to know why you didn't save more lives, somehow, the military is probably fuming at the slowness of this response and I don't know how far the goodwill of one Colonel will get you…and don't forget there's my countryman or countrymen lurking around. And everybody knows what I sound like.*
("I'm just going to stop talking to you now.")
*And you wonder why I've been riding your ass about getting out of the solar system? Controller just came up, looks good from here. Let me have it print out a report and force a drone programming refresh.*
We had to keep moving if we wanted a chance to survive any of this, and something as simple as a spray of rocks in our path would, with our velocity, smear that chance right away. A few shouts at the controller just to make sure it'd hear and obey, and Mrs. Caldwell whipped around in her chair at the sound of the printer, nearly overbalancing with reflexes still apparently keyed to somewhere else's gravity. Jerome managed to stop goggling at me long enough to pull on his company face.
"Got your controller back, Mrs. Caldwell, and I told it to pull in all the drones for a reprogramming to correct safety parameters. Can you verify they're coming in?"
"Looks good, Jerome. They're heading in at a reckless speed but I take it that's a vestige of the old programming. I can let you know in just a couple minutes."
"Please do, the controller reprogram isn't new but this is the first real feedback I'll have for drone response."
As hard as that was to believe. MN00012 was a ratfuck and we'd erased all evidence. Tycho was a ratfuck and we'd called in arty to erase all evidence. The Mercury power installation was a ratfuck and we'd blown holes in all the evidence. McQuarrie didn't have any drones. Oh, for complete data.
"Right, I'll keep the channel open again if anything nasty starts to happen."
At which point I would leap into action and curse. For now I could at least check our private message store for the first time since the initial cattle call.
*Oh, you'll love this…news agencies all over the system wanting a comment on this, on that. How do you want me to handle it?*
This I wanted to hear. Publicity had been hashed over time and time again between us and I had no real sense for it. There were arguments for staying incognito, there were arguments for going public. He'd played mum on McQuarrie so…
("Send 'em all our good profile shot…")
Jerome, in jumpsuit, arms crossed but smiling, lounging against the most photogenic angle possible for the spaceframe's nose. I liked it, the wingtip cannons were in the corner of the shot so it almost looked like I was hugging him between stubby wing and blunt nose.
("…and the following message, from you-as-secretary. 'Mr. Corbell much regrets that he is not available for comment at this time, having been exclusively engaged by PTMC for an extensive troubleshooting contract. He will be happy to respond to all inquiries with the appropriate level of information upon his return.' Endquote. That leaves us some options, yes?")
It left me some wiggle room and kept them on the hook quite nicely. Rumors would leak…from servicemen and servicewomen on the Potemkin or from Tycho itself, from reporters, from Hannah and from the rescues, from Tawny and Quentin. Enough plausible holes that Dravis couldn't banish us entirely out of sight and out of mind. With a nasty little mutter I recorded the message…oh-so-sweetly, of course…and began the tedious process of copying all those network addresses into one single multicast transmission. Hell, let them all see each other's inquiries. It'd do no harm. I had just metaphorically shot my data wad when Caldwell cleared her throat inquisitively toward the pickup and Jerome arched an eyebrow to show he was listening.
"Looks like you'll have a refit crew after all, the drones are back in control. Can I trust them?"
The $65,536 question that nobody quite knew the answer to. Jerome dodged it neatly.
"I understand my boss is dispatching a team of data analysts to every affected facility to ensure everything is back on track. I have to let him know that the dog-whistle is effective so I'll mention you need a team as well."
She grinned charmingly into the pickup.
"Oh, don't bother with that. Pass me his number and I'll talk to him myself. Have to follow up on this maintenance request anyway. You're due a few compliments—you're the only PTMC face that's played straight with me—and I have to start the ass-chewing somewhere."
Jerome's turn to grin, once again baring the tips of his canines inadvertently. I wasn't far behind.
"Much appreciated. I'll be more than happy to give you that number…Samuel Dravis reports directly to the board. It'll be nice to have some merde roll uphill for once, pardon my French."
It was only right, only fitting. I immediately slugged our boss' contact information over the channel sideband. Aileen jotted it down onto something just out of sight with a nod.
"There's a good sized pile here to dig the yard out from under. We're going to be busy as anything. When are you arriving?"
Like Jerome had an electronic orrery in his head?
*What's two and a quarter AUs between friends? Call it a little under a day in the fucking bath, there's only so much I can do even at five internal. Space is big.*
"Ugh! Call it twenty-four hours, perhaps a smidge less. You wouldn't happen to have any PTMC property there that'll do better than x5?"
Mrs. Caldwell's mouth pursed somewhat sympathetically.
"Not a thing. Nothing I can let you borrow either, no matter what your clearance."
Not that it would make a difference. I did some quick numbers from Mars to Pluto as a little worst-case estimate and it didn't look good. Three and a half days in the bath! A quicker courier at x6 would shave all of 10 hours off that and couriers were all engine and no real storage anyway. The older capital ships managed x8 but their spaceframes could only handle a maximum of 8 to 16 G of loading to begin with, making it a moot point. Significant UEG hardware—like those big ugly saucers—managed to handle a lot more but they had some kind of super-secret way of reinforcing their structural integrity so they didn't turn into a crumpled beer can under their own inertia every time the skipper wanted full steam. All I'd heard was that it involved some sort of force field and took a lot of power to run, and I didn't want to get Jerome his very own firing squad by risking digging to deep. Pity the boy couldn't handle a modest 500 Gs…we could get to Pluto in six hours. As a cloud of disassociated scrap, because I wouldn't handle it either. I was beginning to seriously think about the logic of doing the decryption locally, the relay could hit every facility in the solar system without pesky light-speed lag. Might even be able to take care of the situation in the Belt…but that bore further discussion. My course projection for this run to Mars ran us right past Mercury at what, for interplanetary distances, was pretty much pissing range…but I didn't see fit to mention it. Not if we'd be hunting asteroids in the Belt shortly afterward.
"Never hurts to ask. All right, I'll talk to Sam and let him know you'll be calling. Been a pleasure dealing with you, ma'am, I'll shout at approach control when I'm in range."
"Appreciate the painless solution, Jerome. See you when you get in."
Another connection bit the dust. The boy rubbed his temples frustratatedly.
"A day? Really?"
*I can only bend the laws of physics.*
"It's not the laws of physics, it's my damn bones that feel like they're getting bent."
*Far be it from me to stifle your basketball ambitions.*
"Too old. Too used to sitting on my ass and playing with my stick."
*Playing with MY stick, thanks.*
"Which raises the usual awkward questions. Bah. If I can banter I'm doing OK. Anything I need to know before I talk to Sam again?"
*Hell if I know. I established these things can rewrite themselves on the fly and that we can pull in secondary controllers with standard signaling, suitably corrupted. But you'd still need a team on site to zot the little bastards.*
Jerome stood, twisting left and right with a fusillade of crackling from his shoulders that I internally cringed to hear.
"Can't we just put a set of recall coordinates to outer space or somewhere further away than propellant stores would take it? Straight up?"
The image wasn't unappealing. Something futilely striving for altitude, in any number of poisonous atmospheres or some thin enough to let it possibly attain escape velocity…or, more likely, crashing down to ruin when the meager internal reserves ran out.
*Much as I'd like to suggest we let the primary reprogram the secondary back to sanity, then the fixed secondary would run into the corrupted primary and freak out. And we'd be relying on compromised code to get that far. It's not a bad idea for places where the secondary could either puff out into impotence or be decisively smashed. Otherwise it's boots-on-the-ground.*
"I'll be sure to mention it. Dammit, Jenny, I'm doing my best to escalate us right out of this gig."
*And you've done a fantastic job, my love. Shall I summon the weasel?*
"Please. Sooner I get this call over with, sooner I can eat something and get in the damn bath again. Never thought I'd be getting sick of good steaks."
*Hold that thought. Dravis coming up.*
A single alert tone and the video came to life, projected over the atmosphere-flight throwback window in the cockpit. Dravis was turned away from the pickup, staring out his own window and apparently down at Earth. His suit coat hung on the back of the chair and his pale arms protruding from a wrinkled white shirt betrayed that he didn't get much time outside. The matching tone on his end had him whirl around to face the pickup, but with a suitably composed expression.
"Ah, Material Defender, I trust you have another installment of unsettling data?"
And there went Jerome, reflexively bristling. The signs were small but if you knew him, evident.
"Utopia Planetia is back under local control. It is possible to remotely summon the secondary controllers into a free-fire zone. It is also possible for the corrupted facilities to decrypt themselves with no outside hardware required. My recommendation has changed since the last time we talked."
If anybody asked me, I was still in favor of broad-spectrum annihilation, but I was bloody-minded like that lately. Dravis tented his fingers and leaned forward.
"Do continue."
"Simply put…divide corrupted facilities into three primary categories, each receiving a different treatment. First category-normal locations with no secondary controllers. I will send you a transmission under the supplied maintenance ID that will cause these to decrypt themselves internally and report back with full status. In the case of facilities that do not report back, ground intervention will be required."
And did I ever not want to do that. Obediently I put together a generic record of my broadcast with a few internal identifiers that should recognize wherever it was applied and fill in the blanks to suit, and slugged that back over the relay.
"I see that transmission now. I will relay it down to the security team for immediate dispatch through our regular system update procedure…"
Red flag! I flashed a literal example up across the screen and the text 'NO: Suspect initial sabotage' across Dravis' face. Jerome held up a finger, shaking his head.
"Have you definitively established that the division that handles updates was not the one which introduced the initial corrupted update, or where the sabotage initially occurred? A trivial change here could result in setting all the facilities in intruder-defense mode."
Sam's eyebrows writhed and drew together, like reversed footage of severing an earthworm. Begrudgingly he sighed assent.
"Very well, I will present it directly to the Board. The next category?"
Some part of me was surprised they hadn't gotten into it yet.
"Next category is facilities with secondary controllers and operating in either vacuum, low atmosphere, drone gravity, or external conditions hostile to secondary controllers within the time frame of their internal propellant reserves. These facilities would receive a transmission that I will send along now—with coordinates altered for local conditions, to send the secondaries out to deep space or other certain doom, beyond range of their communication abilities and beyond range of their propellant stores to return to the facility. Following that neutralization, you'd send out the recovery transmission."
Dravis nodded impassively, crossing his arms in front of him. It seemed he'd had the chance to sleep and recover from yesterday's weaknesses. Making him annoyingly harder to read, natch. Obediently I compiled what I'd used, blanked out the locations and wrote a brief note in a separate file explaining the encoding pattern and location, and slugged it back along the long subspace trip to Shiva.
"Recovery is uneconomical?"
"Prioritize, Dravis. Unless you wanna rely on code that doesn't acknowledge you as the boss, there's no way to save the mines and the secondaries."
"Yes, yes, Material Defender. Spare us both the inevitable sarcastic jibes regarding the initially-discussed plan. As your kind's aphorism states, it did not survive contact with the enemy."
Awkward. Who was the enemy here? Another Rihannsu, somewhere, but we hadn't run into them…just a few traces and playing clean-up for their mess. This was solidly in the plot-foiling and not villain-confronting stages…and I still couldn't see how to move on.
"Speaking of contact, the third category is facilities where secondary controller commanded suicide is impractical. I recommend…"
There was a pause while he thought and Dravis waited him out.
"…It'd have to be local intervention. If the UEG or your other corporate security squads…or mercs…can potshot these things then you can reclaim faster. Quicker they're knocked out, quicker you get your toys back."
Tenuous arguments ran through the back of my mind for doing it at the source. I'd have to encode a transmission to blare 'hey, assholes, scan for this thing and shoot it'—two problems, the consoles wouldn't respond to their input anyway and it assumed somebody was alive and competent. Then I'd have to piggyback instructions for sending out an acknowledgement, which also relied on success.
"A very tidy shifting of responsibilities indeed. Shall we discuss the situation in the Belt?"
Jerome rolled his eyes but for once didn't rise to the baiting.
"Why, do continue."
Much.
Author's note: Space is fracking big. Also internal logic dogpiling on itself means that some of D2's opening may be appearing a lot sooner than I'd thought. As much as it may not seem evident at this point, this is all building toward a remarkably sudden D1 climax. Which comes as a surprise to me-apart from some specific background research for particulars, as with any good yarn the author can roughly plot out the trajectory and let the character ballistics unfold as they will. In this case, however, the acceleration and speed of the plot projectile isn't apparent until a fixed milestone flashes by MUCH sooner than expected.
And yes, I half-apologize for the Shaft joke in the preceding chapter. Obviously popular culture would be widely divergent from ours from about 1945 onward (see also swearing and measurement assumed equivalency in fiction)...but given that the social revolution of the 1960s and 1970s would've been happening in the 1950s and 1960s I don't think a universe-homologue is so very unlikely. That, however, is simple justification for 'if it surprises the author and makes him laugh, it stays'.