Hegemony (41 page)

"I just can't...," Zandy said, "no, I just don't
want
to believe this."

"Join the club," said Muir.

"Alright, people," said Demi-Captain Tralk, "we already knew what was at stake. Anyway, it's time to move.
Ice Knife
should be done with her reactor restart in just about five hours, and we're going to need some time to set this up."

"Right," said Muir. "Alekzandra, are you ready?"

"Ready, Sir," Zandy said, still shaking her head at the thought... trade war... She forced a grim smile. "But if we're getting on a first-name basis, no one calls me Alekzandra... Just Zandy."

"Alright, Zandy," said Demi-Captain Tralk. "Given the circumstances, I suppose we can go to a first name basis at that. In which case, I'm Freya and this," she said pointing to the Executive Officer, "is Muir. Actually, now that I think about it, first names are a
good
idea. Less chance of someone overhearing us using a Fleet rank and getting suspicious."

The three officers checked their weapons. Muir secreted his little needler in his tunic, while Freya and Zandy holstered their weapons and arranged recently purchased local civilian cloaks to conceal the holsters. A newly purchased, used air-car waited outside; the skimmer Freya and Muir had taken from the would-be assassin and used to liberate Zandy was too likely to have been tracked. Muir had abandoned it a few nights ago in a part of the city that promised to see it stolen and stripped before the next day dawned.

"Where are we heading?" Zandy asked.

"It looks like the North Atrium of the Ki-Leng Multi-Emporium is our best bet," Freya said. "Every other facility with a hyper-bandwidth uplink is just too likely to have local System Defense Forces security, and with the traitor still active..."

"Can't risk it," Muir said, shaking his head in a somewhat resigned manner.

Freya nodded. "Everyone have a schematic of the location loaded?" she asked.

"Yes," said Muir, and Zandy nodded. All of them had downloaded multi-level maps of each of the possible uplink sites.

Zandy accessed the map momentarily from the pers-comp she had been given, having it show as an overlay on top of her normal vision. The Ki-Leng Multi-Emporium was an eight-pointed star of wide malls, with a relatively low skyscraper, the fifty storey, 200-meter-tall Ki-Leng Tower, in the center. The tower was an asymmetric, compound spire of sculpted crystal facets, surrounded by the eight radial malls, looking something like a branchless alloy-and-crystal tree-trunk, surrounded by its oddly symmetrical roots. Each of the radial malls was a wide, 150 meter long, three story structure. There were retail stores, entertainment venues and restaurants by the hundreds along the sides of the eight malls, and down each mall's center line ran a narrow manicured park of trees and flowers. Each mall boasted a vaulted transparent crystal roof to let in local sunlight but keep out New Capital City's equatorial heat (equatorial heat was an issue for many of the Hegemony's larger cities, since an orbital elevator's surface hub required an equatorial location). The central tower connected all eight malls, serving, according to the readout Zandy had, as prestigious office space, catering to those who wanted to avoid the hyper-urban feel of the huge towers in the core of New Capital City.

Zandy imagined that it would have been a nice place to check out, on leave... That thought brought a memory of Jessa, Pixie, to her mind and she forced it down, squeezing her eyes closed for a second.

What concerned her and her comrades now was that the north-most of the eight malls, the North Atrium it was called, boasted a hyper-bandwidth communication center and avatar holding facilities, a place from which the planet's daemon
aristokratai
could transfer themselves at light speed across the planet, or even across the whole Yuro system, to any place that had a receiver able to accept the hyper-bandwidth signal and an avatar for them to inhabit once they arrived.

---

Ylayn floated, disembodied, amidst a shifting three-dimensional sea of information. There was an art to attaining this state, almost a sort of satori, that most interface hackers lacked. Most times, even she couldn't reach it. But when she did, nothing else came close; not sex, not drugs or euphoric interface data feeds... nothing.

Unencumbered by her sleeping body, her mind sifted and manipulated information. She was almost unaware of what exactly she was doing, barely self-aware at all, existing in a haze of instant, interface-driven decision gates and unexamined intuition.

Sometimes when she attained this state, her old self would seem to speak to her... the old self that had a different name, a different face... The prior self, that had fled half a step ahead of government assassins, almost catatonic with fear... The old self that, to survive, had irrevocably changed herself, had deliberately suppressed memories, had undergone surgery to alter the looks of her own body and the structure of her own brain,  to create the woman who now called herself Ylayn Dajo.

Ylayn wondered idly what that old self thought now? Did she like being Modified to look like a voluptuous anthropomorphic cat? Or was she horrified? Did she take pride in being one of the best data hackers in the Brotherhoods? Or was she burning with shame at being a pirate? Did she thrill at being the lover of one of the deadliest captains among the void-runners, or was it fear that made her heart hammer when the captain touched her?

It didn't really matter. Ylayn did not let herself pay too much attention to her old self, and the task still lay at hand.

The code trace that she had tracked from the detonation signal, that was the place to start. It was one end of a delicate and complex thread. Where did it come from? No way to tell; it was alone, a single string of data in the data sea. It would not unravel in that direction...

Where was it going? That was a better way to follow the thread. It would take some resources to scan for the code trace across the planet's data network, so Ylayn focused herself on obtaining them.

There were systems on the planet below that were closed to her, secure systems, corporate or government networks that would take focused, dedicated effort to breach... if they
could
be breached. But even trying would create waves, ripples of her own in the data sea. Not worth it, not yet. But there were other systems that she could access almost at will; commercial systems with barriers so porous that in her current state she penetrated them almost without conscious thought. A quick scan of inbound and outbound public data, a quick analysis of the authorization codes hidden in plain sight... there. Now the public system was available to her, serving her under a thousand simultaneous aliases, seamlessly co-opted. It would take hours before the public systems' security routines could even begin to be aware that anything was amiss.

Now, to look for the trace again. She had enormous processing power now, if she was careful how she used it. Had the code trace been observed more than once? It was a tell-tale of whoever had sent the detonation code. What other activity in the planetary network had that tell-tale? Ylayn crafted her search, sent it out into the network as several thousand seemingly unrelated commands. Information began to flow back to her, shuttling through cut-outs, masked as unimportant, routine data flow. Floating in the center of her webs, she collated it, gave it an order and a structure that would have tripped alarms if it had been observed.

There... the data trace. It was rare, but not singular. It marked a small bank transaction. It lingered around the data trail of an air-car rental. It had been used to pay for a pulse of coded data on a high power radio array;
that
was the detonation code she was looking at, seen from another perspective. The trace showed up again, for another deep space communication. No way to tell what or to whom; anyone could have been listening and the communication itself was encoded on a level she could not touch, not only encrypted but consisting of a short arbitrary string of data; a single iteration would be meaningless to anyone except the recipient.

But there was another bit of information here; she had enough now to deduce the origin of the data trace. It was the trace left by a non-standard pers-comp. She had suspected that already, but now she was sure. Someone was using an advanced pers-comp, possibly a custom model, and every time they did, it left a little data trace in the network. In her mind's eye, Ylayn smiled a cat's smile. Sloppy, she thought. Oh, very sloppy. Customized, non-standard pers-comp units could be so
very
useful, she knew, but they were best used only once; they interacted with standard networks in ways that often left little swirls and eddies of code-trace, artifacts of translation routines and on-the-fly improvisations as the network struggled to talk to a non-standard computer. Whoever was using this pers-comp was unaware of the risk, or willing to take it.

All right, then. She had her thread well in hand. It was one unit, probably one person. And they were active on the planet below, banking money, renting air cars, sending highly secure signals out into space for some waiting listeners... and beaming out detonation codes to trigger cunning booby-traps to kill her and her shipmates.

Ylayn sought further, searching for other iterations of the tell-tale data trace. Code walls blocked her access from secure communication nets, but the trace had led her here, and she was unwilling to let it go.

She sent out more distributed commands, organizing borrowed computer resources to bring their stolen power to bear on the barrier. But brute force would not serve; the attempt to crack the barrier would probably warn the very person --or persons-- whose data she wanted. Instead, she probed gently, masking her reconnaissance as random, routine system queries or automated data collection surveys... annoying but commonplace, and unlikely to set off alarms.

The barrier was getting clearer, but the more she saw, the harder it looked to breach. This was unexpected. This data barrier was nothing standard, nothing she had ever encountered before. This was as strong a defense as she had ever seen.

In Ylayn's experience, locks this strong rarely failed to have something worthwhile behind them, but her reconnaissance showed her that none of her normal techniques would get through. Massive brute force would probably work; she had the resources, for now, to try to simply overwhelm the barrier. But that would leave traces. It might even lead someone back to her, if they were as good as she was at reading those traces. And worse, the attack would be utterly blatant. Though she might get some of the static data behind the barrier, the owners of that odd, powerful barrier would instantly know that someone had broken their defenses. And then, in all likelihood, they would simply shut down their tantalizing system, leaving her no chance of getting more data.

But... wait. There was something here, something teasing at the edge of her unfocused mind; she had seen patterns that reminded her of this barrier before. Where? When?

And then she knew. The structure of the nano-detonators were... related... to this barrier code. Not closely related... but... The nano-detonators were disabled now, but she had them at her disposal, and she shifted her focus, opening data feeds from the
Whisperknife'
s tactical systems, doing the deep analysis of the detonators that she had not had time for when she had disabled them.

"How long is she going to be interfaced in, do you think?" Warez asked, not really looking at Nas.

"Who knows?" Nas said softly. Such long data interface sessions were unusual for Ylayn, but sometimes she did this, submerging herself into the interface, lying seemingly asleep in her command pod with multiple data cables plugged into the data ports at the back of her head. When she came out of a deep interface like this, Nas knew, she seemed... changed, almost fey, for a while, sometimes for hours, or even days.

"Who knows," Nas repeated with a frown.

Ylayn had rarely had to work this hard to break a code barrier. Sometimes the preparation to get
at
a code barrier was much harder than this: the physical infiltration to reach a point where she could interface with the right data systems, or the slow, often boring process of gathering enough computing resources to do the job. But the actual job itself rarely took so much work.

The deep data structure analysis of the detonators had given her hints to the structure of this barrier, but it didn't give her the key. On the other hand, this time, finally, hints would be enough. The barrier cracking code Ylayn had created was based on the records of the detonation signal, preserved in the cunning systems of the nano-detonators. But those detonators had never been intended to survive, and so they had had few defenses to protect their secrets. And now those secrets were woven into the digital weapon Ylayn had crafted.

The code breaker she had crafted was lovely, and she spent long seconds admiring its data structure, looking at it from her disembodied point of view. Lovely, but even lovelier in action, Ylayn thought, and triggered the code.

Several thousand computers on the surface of Yuro IV accepted her commands, sending out distributed sections of code, innocuous until they reached their target and coalesced into her barrier breaker. There were defenses, keyed to resist any attack, set to disconnect the entire system if the attack proved too strong. But the random bits of code coming at the defenses didn't look or act like a data attack, until they arrived and took their final form. And by then it was too late.