Outriders (17 page)

“Just like ships, hops have overlapping sensor fields from tight-beam and wide-beam arrays, and all of that data from all of those sensors gets dumped into a central point where all the crazy math gets done.” Here, finally, Coleman sat forward again and highlighted a large block of code on the panel she’d enlarged, sitting in the middle of an even larger block of code.

“Ignore all this nonsense, that’s all pretty much standard solution,” she said, indicating the portions of code that she hadn’t highlighted. “This is the key part here. And it’s subtle. But the executive summary, sir, is that this section here is designed to force YN-773’s sensor suite to ignore a particular threat.”

Lincoln couldn’t follow the code, but he understood Coleman’s explanation perfectly well. “So someone gave LOCKSTEP’s sensors a blind spot.”

“Not just a blind spot,” Coleman corrected. “I’m saying, statistically speaking, they knew the
exact
rock they wanted the sensors to ignore. Composition, size, everything. For all intents and purposes, one, specific asteroid. The chances of there being another asteroid that fits the profile that also just happens to be anywhere near 773…?” She shook her head. “And this code is custom. I mean, really,
really
custom. These guys knew what they were doing. Even stylistically, it reads like everything else around it, even though it was inserted later.”

“Inside job?” Lincoln said.

“Every cyberattack is an inside job, sir,” Coleman said with a smile. “But if you mean, did they have a plant at Veryn-Hakakuri, then yeah, that’d be my first guess. Current, or former employee. Or someone obsessed with VH’s particular brand of internal software.”

Mike chuckled at the last sentence, and Coleman looked at him. “I’m not kidding, Mikey. You’d be surprised how weird some people can be about code.”

“Not
that
surprised,” Mike said, and that made Sahil chuckle.

“Can you figure out when that code was inserted?” Lincoln asked.

“Maybe, if I can get access to LOCKSTEP’s systems archive. I wouldn’t count on it, though. Even if NID has access to it, I doubt that’s the kind of thing they’re going to share.”

“Let’s get a request in,” Lincoln said. “Might as well ask.”

“Yes sir.”

“How’d they plant it?” Wright asked. “Operative on board?”

Coleman shrugged. “Probably, but not necessarily. I don’t know. This isn’t the sort of thing that’s usually going to be accessible to your average corporate drone, even their top-tier techs. We’re talking deep, deep level stuff here.”

Lincoln said, “Deep enough that they’d need access to the hardware?”

Coleman looked back at the code and shook her head. “No, I can’t say that for sure. I mean, with a hop, we’re talking a massive system-of-systems here, so it’s possible they attacked some other point in the architecture and the payload skipped to target. It’s not quite down at the firmware level of things, but it’s pretty close. In the actual control code. The thing is all these corporations have proprietary systems. Some of them are built on similar foundations, same concepts, like you see here,” she waved her hand at the un-highlighted code on the panel, “but they don’t share this stuff with anyone outside. Corporate security issues, you know. Only reason we’re looking at it is because NID had access. It’d definitely help to have someone on the inside, but I can’t say it’s strictly necessary.”

“Would it be somethin’ you could do from a ship?” Sahil asked. He and Wright were still at the far end of the table from everyone else, but they were both now fully engaged in the discussion.

Coleman paused a few moments before responding.

“Yeah,” she said. “Yeah, if you had the right access codes and the right people, I guess you could do it from about anywhere. What makes you ask?”

Sahil touched the holotable and sent the panel he had in front of him over to join the one Coleman had enlarged. On it were several images and specifications for a hauler called
Destiny’s Undertow.

“That fella right there,” he said. “Showed up to 773 unannounced.”

“That’s weird,” Coleman said. “I didn’t catch that in the packet.”

“Yeah,” Sahil said. “It’s sorta a footnote. Lost with all hands when the hop went down. I figure our folks checked it out a bit, coded it ‘wrong place, wrong time’.”

“Sounds familiar,” Lincoln said, recalling his impression of the analysts’ summaries of Henry’s death. Both events had an element of the coincidental that nagged at him. It raised the ghost of a familiar feeling, strong enough to sense but too vague to be grasped. “They dig up anything interesting on it?”

“Not much. Hauler, registered out of Luna. Original plan had it travelin’ out to the Belt, slingin’ off Mars on the return trip. Everything about it seems legit.”

“Except for it being way out by 773,” Mike said.

“Roger that,” answered Sahil. “Logs say 773 sent tugs out for it. Some kind of engine trouble. Musta been gettin’ to dock right around the time the rock hit.”

“Do we have access to any of the traffic between the ship and the station?” Coleman asked.

“I think so, yeah,” Sahil said. “One sec.” He worked a panel at his end of the table for a minute or so. While he worked, Lincoln looked back at Coleman.

“Pros and cons, Sergeant Coleman. On an op like this, would you say it’s definitely better to have someone on the inside?”

“Can you just call me Thumper, sir?” she said.

The comment caught him off guard. “I didn’t think I’d earned it,” he replied.

“Yeah, not really,” she said, “but half the time I forget you’re talking to me. Nobody else around here calls me that, so it just feels awkward.”

“I think I could probably manage it,” Lincoln said with a smile. “If you can give me the story behind the name.”

“You
definitely
haven’t earned that, sir,” she answered.

“All right, fair enough. So,
Thumper
,” he said, “between on-site and remote, what’s the deciding factor for this sort of breach?”

“Mmm… comes down to a matter of intrusion detection I guess. Are you more likely to get caught with someone poking around on site, or when you connect to the system and start injecting code?”

“Here we go,” Sahil said, and he sent a panel from his end of the table over to Thumper.

“Cool,” she said. “Gimme a few.”

While she was heads-down in the data Sahil had just sent her, Lincoln got up and grabbed a bottle of water and poured himself a cup of coffee. “Anybody else?” he asked, waving the pot around.

“No thanks,” Sahil said. Wright glanced over, shook her head, and went back to studying whatever she was working on. Coleman didn’t respond.

“Yeah, I’ll take a hit,” Mike said.

“Anything in it?”

“Nah,” Mike answered. “I’m sweet enough already.”

Lincoln poured a second cup of coffee, then balanced both cups in one hand, grabbed his water bottle with the other, and carried them all back to his seat at the table.

“Man of many talents,” Mike said, as he took the offered cup of coffee. “You must’ve done time in a restaurant.”

Lincoln shook his head. “No, this right here is all officer corps training. First two weeks is all coffee prep and delivery. Basically all I did as a lieutenant, too.”

“OK,” Coleman said. “So this is interesting.”

She didn’t look up, and she was quiet long enough that Lincoln started to think maybe she’d just been talking to herself.

“Thumper,” Mike said. At the sound of her name, she looked up at them, but there was a distance in her eyes that said she wasn’t entirely with them. After a moment she shook her head, and her eyes focused.

“Yeah, sorry. So here’s something,” she said, and she enlarged a panel and flipped it around so the others could see it. It was series of waveforms. It took a moment before Lincoln realized he was looking at the communications between the ship and the station. “You see this,” Thumper said, pointing to a short but sharp peak at the head of several of the forms. “… it’s a little hitch, each time the captain of
Destiny’s Undertow
responds to 773’s traffic controller.”

“And that’s significant?” Lincoln said.

“Well, yeah,” she answered in a tone that implied that should have been obvious. She glanced around the room at her other teammates. Lincoln was relieved to see they all looked as perplexed as he felt. Thumper sighed and gave a little eye roll with a shake of her head. “Does anybody besides me pay attention to anything?” She fiddled with the holotable and a few seconds later another panel appeared, next to the first. It, too, was a series of waveforms.

“See anything familiar?” she asked. Lincoln scanned the forms and sure enough, at the head of each one was an identical triangular shape.

“What’s this one we’re looking at now?” he asked.

“That’s me talking to Mom, from Phobos last time we were there,” she said. She mentioned it casually, but Lincoln couldn’t help but wonder what they’d been doing on the Martian moon.

“Uh…” Mike said. “Do you keep archives of all our communications?”

“Sure,” said Thumper. “We pretty much have to.”

“Yikes,” Mike said.

“Anyway,” Thumper said, pointing again to the recurring shape. “That blip is from a quantum relay. Same kind of stuff we use for deep-range commo.”

“Military grade?” Mike asked.

“Not necessarily, no,” she answered. “Can’t tell that from this. But what it
does
tell us, is that the captain wasn’t on his ship.”

“What do you mean he wasn’t on the ship?” Mike said.

“I mean whoever was talking to station control wasn’t doing it from the bridge of that hauler. There’s no reason for this otherwise.
Destiny’s Undertow
was bouncing signals back and forth between 773 and wherever the captain really was. Which was probably somewhere really far away.”

“Like Mars?” Sahil asked.

“Mars, Luna,” Thumper said with a shrug. “Could’ve come from here. Or from Pluto.”

“And NID didn’t pick up on it?” Wright asked.

“I guess not,” Thumper said. “But that’s not that surprising, there’s no reason to look for it. I wouldn’t have gone hunting for it, if Sahil hadn’t brought it up. And I only noticed it because I spend so much time staring at this stuff running commo for you guys.”

“And
they
ain’t our Thumper,” Sahil said, with a smile. “You’re the brains, Thump. Put it together for us. You got a ship on remote, a quantum relay, and a rock. How would
you
do it?”

Thumper sat back again, put her hands on top of her head and stared at the ceiling for half a minute. For as much as Sergeant Coleman talked once she got started, Lincoln appreciated the fact that she always actually seemed to consider her words carefully before she began.

“Some of each, I guess,” she said, finally. “Get someone on the inside to open it up. Do the rest remotely. Probably the usual kind of gig… exploit somebody inside who’s maybe lonely, vulnerable somehow. Willing to do a favor or two without necessarily understanding what I’m really asking them to do. Then, I’d sneak the code in some routine procedure. A system update or something. Or… oh…”

She looked back down at the panels she had arrayed on the table in front of her, and disappeared back into her own head. Everyone gave her a little time. Sahil was the one to finally draw her back out.

“What is it, Thumper?” he said.

“Or in something like a handshake…” she said, blinking up at him. “Check this out. When a ship’s coming into a station, their systems exchange some data. Helps the station keep track of the ship and vice versa, logs get updated automatically, that sort of thing. Theoretically, you might be able to hide a payload in that.”

“Theoretically?” Lincoln said.

Thumper shrugged. “You’d have to be code god to pull it off. Typically those connection protocols are where you see the most robust security, because it’s an obvious vulnerability. But if you knew the inner workings of a station well enough to convince its sensors to ignore a threat, you’re probably the right person to give this a try. Or people. We’re probably looking at a team, here.”

She stopped and shook her head.

“Awful lot of trouble to go through to wipe out a hop full of civilians.”

Her final comment triggered a strange connection in Lincoln’s mind, gave him a new perspective. He could tell that somewhere in its hidden inner workings, his subconscious was busy constructing something it wasn’t ready to offer up. But it didn’t seem to mind tipping him off a little. Images of the courtyard restaurant where Henry had been killed played through his head. Stray rounds, no unintended casualties.

“What if you were genuinely concerned about mitigating collateral damage?”

“Then I probably wouldn’t have put a rock through a space station in the first place,” she said.

“But if you knew both Henry’s identity and the true nature of LOCKSTEP?” Lincoln said. He was starting to catch on to what his subconscious was up to. Thumper looked at him blankly, not following.

“Then I could consider them both valid military targets,” Wright said. Lincoln looked her way and pointed at her. She nodded, and in her sharp eyes he could see reflected her mind rapidly reframing the conversation. “I keep the moral high ground. Two relatively soft targets. And if I keep my name out of the papers, I can evaluate the results before I decide whether I want to claim any responsibility.”

In that moment, he finally dredged up the memory that had been haunting the corners of his mind.

“Controlling the aftermath,” Lincoln said, to himself.

“Say again?” Mike said. He was leaning on the edge of the holotable now, arms crossed. Lincoln shook his head.

“Sorry. This all just suddenly reminded me of something I learned back in the early days,” he said. “It’s kind of a story.”

“Well, do tell,” Mike replied.

Lincoln glanced around at the others, who were all looking at him expectantly. He leaned back in his chair, ran a hand over his chin. They’d been at it for hours; a little storytime probably wouldn’t hurt anyone.

“Okay, so back when I was with 1st Group,” he said, “we did some work around Ragon, out of Tumangang mostly. And the militia we were working with, it’s basically what you’d expect. The big boss, can’t tell if he’s a gangster or a patriot. Probably some of both. Pretty much ran Tumangang at that point, so he was loaded. He was married, loved his wife. Still had like five girlfriends, of course, but he absolutely doted on his wife. Anyway, he had this head bodyguard, he called him his chief of security, but you know, he’s basically just some guy who worked out a lot and liked to carry guns.