Prodigal (57 page)

“What the hell are we dealing with, Commander?”

“I’m not exactly sure, General—except that you’re facing some very dangerous people. My advice, sir, is to blow them out of the sky while you have the chance.”

“Destroy a Collective Spacing Directorate vessel?” Tambor asked dubiously. “Without even trying to establish contact?”

“I don’t see what good that would do, General,” Lea interjected. “As Commander Straka has explained to me, we may be dealing with a highly evolved intelligence. If they could sabotage
Almacantar
’s computer core, there’s no telling what else they’re capable of.”

“I thought they were Solar Expeditionary Force.”

“They
were,
” Nathan explained. “God only knows what they are now.”

Tambor considered it, but clearly didn’t believe much of what he heard. Bostic picked up on his hesitation and put on a move of his own.

“General,” he said, “it might be in everyone’s best interests if we do as the commander says. We shouldn’t take chances with so much at stake.”

“Maybe not,” Tambor conceded, “but I’m not about to create an incident until I know what the hell’s going on.” With that, he stepped off the command platform. All of them followed him with their stares, down to where six heavily armed guards escorted someone into JTOC. They marched right up to the general, then parted to reveal the identity of their prisoner.

Lea gasped in astonishment.

Avalon’s hands and feet were shackled, her neck fitted with an explosive collar. Even so, the guards gave her a wide berth, their weapons constantly trained on her—taking no chances with a former free agent. Avalon wore her sensuit, its sensor web glinting in the dim, crimson light, though Lea imagined that the guards had reduced its effective range for their own protection.

Tambor approached cautiously. “You were with the SEF.”

“Yes,” she said simply.

“Then you’re going to help us sort this out.”

Avalon’s skin was pale, even more pale than usual, her face mottled with electrode scars. She stood up straight, but Lea could tell she was exhausted—fresh off the hours of torture Bostic had inflicted on her.

“Why would I do that?” she asked, quite logically.

Tambor made it very clear. “Things can get a lot harder on you.”

Avalon considered it for a time. “What do you need?”

Tambor waved the guards back, telling them to hold position. He then stood aside and motioned Avalon to the command post. Slowly, she ascended the stairs and joined the others. Lea immediately came forward, not exactly sure of what to say. She still owed this woman her wrath, and yet felt responsible for her at the same time.

“It wasn’t supposed to happen this way,” she said.

Avalon turned her head toward Lea, silver eyes mirroring her expression.

“It doesn’t matter anymore,” she replied, and didn’t speak of it again.

“General,” the watch officer reported, “we’re receiving a signal from the approaching spacecraft.”

“What is it?” Tambor asked him.

“Uncertain, sir,” he replied, as a deluge of numerics appeared on his display. “I’m not getting anything on voice or video channels—but I
am
receiving a large bitstream of data via the telemetry link.”

“Looks like an autodownload,” the general said. “Directorate ships are programmed to dump their mission data when they return home.”

“Son of a bitch,” Nathan countered, and rushed over to the comm panel. He read off the data, which
looked
like a standard telemetry stream—but then he turned to the general, his skin ashen. “I think they’re running a trojan, sir—the same thing they did to us. They could be infecting your system right now.”

“We screen all incoming transmissions for viruses, Commander.”

“Your filters wouldn’t
recognize
these viruses,” he retorted, then pleaded with the watch officer. “Shut it down.”

The watch officer looked up at Tambor anxiously.

“Shut it down,” Nathan repeated, “
now.
”

Tambor nodded.

The watch officer killed the transmission. After a few seconds the stream terminated, leaving only a blinking cursor on his screen. Nathan released a long breath, standing back up and returning to the general. “Looks like we got it in time,” he said, “but you should still do a thorough scrub of the entire network, sir—and don’t accept any more encoded transmissions.”

“Do as the man says,” Tambor told the watch officer. “And open up a voice channel. I want to see if anyone’s listening.”

The watch officer tried to comply, but the console wouldn’t respond.

“I’m sorry, sir,” he said. “Voice communications seem to be off-line.”

“Can you pin down the cause?”

“I don’t know.” Lea watched him run a deep diagnostic, the results appearing on his screen. He shook his head, appearing confused. “It looks like a series of failures. So far, only the noncritical systems seem to be affected, but—”

Lea saw it before the watch officer could say it. Even though the malfunctions were confined to the subsystems with the weakest layers of security, they were spreading exponentially—and gaining speed as they chewed through the network.

“It’s a breach,” she said, looking up at Tambor. “We’re under attack, General.”

Tambor’s eyes narrowed at her.

“It’s
them,
sir,” Lea told him. “You need to do something while we still have time.”

Tambor drew a deep breath.

“Are ASATs in position?” he asked.

“At your command,” Tiernan replied. “We’ve got four on
Almacantar
’s flank and more on the way.”

Tambor looked up at the main screen, which now showed an external view of
Almacantar,
the feed coming off the antisatellite weapons that stood poised to blow her out of the sky.

“Initiate,” the general said.

“Aye, sir,” Tiernan acknowledged, and relayed the order to fire control. Three of the ASATs maneuvered to point-blank range, spitting bright plumes from their thrusters, the star-shaped vehicles bringing their pulse cannons to bear on target. “We have positive lock, General. Weapons are hot.”

“Take him out.”

The first ASAT opened up with a blistering salvo. The bright discharge distorted the video feed, scrambling the picture into a mosaic of static—but underneath, Lea could see a fire burning in space. When the feed cleared up, she fully expected to see
Almacantar
lurching into a death spiral, venting atmosphere as she started to break apart. The ship, however, was completely intact—a fireball rapidly dissipating off her port side.

“What the hell just happened?” Lea asked.

“Report status!” Tambor shouted. “Why did it miss?”

Tiernan pressed the minicom to his ear, sorting out the waves of chatter coming in. “No miss, sir,” he said, a sharp edge in his voice. “We have a positive detonation on target.”

“Then why is that ship still there?”

Tiernan looked directly at the general.

“ASAT 1
was
the target, sir.”

Lea and Nathan stared up at the view screen, where another one of the ASATs tumbled into the frame. It weaved around the others, intercepting the one closest to
Almacantar
’s engineering section. The weapon then lined itself up and punched a shot into its target’s tail, blowing it to pieces.

Tambor slammed his fist down on the console.

“What’s going on with my weapons, Lieutenant?”

“Unknown, sir. Fire control reports loss of contact with orbital assets.”

Bostic shook his head in utter disbelief.

“Gotta be a runaway,” he muttered.

“No,” Nathan said. “It’s
them.
”

The rogue weapon quickly moved against the others. Tumbling through space on a trail of hot vapor, it stalked each target one at a time—firing off single bursts, scoring a hit each time. The sky around
Almacantar
flared into a firestorm, casting a bright orange glow against the gray hull of the ship—but otherwise left her alone. The last view JTOC had of her was before the rogue hurtled toward the last remaining ASAT on a collision course.

The picture cut out on impact.

“We’ve lost them,” Tiernan said.

“Track down the source of the malfunction,” Tambor ordered.
“Now.”

Tiernan tried to get a coherent response from fire control, but could only shake his head at one bad report after another.

“It’s no good, sir,” he said. “Fire control is getting no response from their computer.”

“Then reroute to a remote site.”

“They can’t. The system is totally locked up.”

Tambor forced his way over to the tactical console himself. “Ground batteries!” he barked into the intercom. “Open fire!”

The general watched the overhead screens, waiting for some indication that the ground stations had heard and carried out his order—but the ping that represented
Almacantar
just floated there, untouched. After a few tense moments, another stream of reports came through the comm panel, each one telling the same story.

“Ground batteries powering down,” Tiernan said. “All crews indicating a massive, simultaneous computer failure.”

Nathan grabbed Lea.

“The telemetry feed,” he said to her. “They must’ve broken in.”

“Even flex viruses don’t work that fast,” Lea said. “If they’re asserting that much control over a network this big, then we’ve got serious trouble.”

“You got any ideas on containment?”

“That was never my thing.”

“Then we better come up with something,” Nathan said, going with Lea to the general. “You’ve got two hammerjacks here, sir. Let us help.”

Tambor flashed Tiernan a fierce look.

The lieutenant nodded once:
Give them a chance, General.

“Very well,” Tambor said. “Officer of the watch, stand down.”

The watch officer hesitated to relinquish his post, but then stepped aside. Nathan jumped in after him, taking control of the comm panel. Lea brushed past Tiernan and sat down at tactical. She linked both of the nodes together, while Nathan opened a clandestine port into the wider system.

“With any luck, those bastards won’t spot us poking around,” he explained, just as reams of code started dumping themselves to his station. His eyes widened at the sheer volume of information, which rewrote itself even as he tried to sift through it. “Holy shit,” he whispered, scrolling past thousands of lines. “Are you
seeing
this?”

Lea did. The core of programming that ran JTOC was completely gone, entire subsystems reorganized on the fly—including the security protocols, which came down on her like a guillotine.

“Unbelievable,” Lea whispered.

No longer concerned with stealth, she rammed into the firewall with brute force, searching for any vulnerability she could exploit. When that didn’t work, she wrote a quick series of protoviruses and released them, hoping that the incursion would keep the system busy enough for her to bypass its defenses. The rate of attack slowed, but for less than a minute. After that, the infection was on the march again—even faster than before, aware of her presence in the network.

“Dammit,”
Lea seethed.

“This goes way past JTOC,” Nathan added, shooting a grave look at the general. “They’ve already breached every major subsystem and now they’re moving out into the wider Axis. At this rate, they’ll assert control over every CSS domain within the hour.”

“How the hell can they
do
that?” Tambor asked. “What about our security?”

“That’s what I’ve been telling you,” Nathan said. “That doesn’t
mean
anything to these people. They’re operating on a totally different wavelength, General. I don’t know if there’s anything we can do to stop them.”

An alarm on the tactical panel sounded, then amplified itself over the JTOC loudspeaker. The defense condition lights on the overhead display clicked to red, flashing in a constant mantra of imminent doom. Everyone on the operations level froze when they saw it, because they knew it could mean only one thing.

The full strategic forces of T-Branch were now in deployment mode.

“My God,” Tambor intoned.

The screens that displayed
Almacantar
’s position switched to a worldwide map of missile installations. Spreading outward like a plague, a wave of lights sprang to life as each facility came online—automated systems reporting their READY status, beginning a countdown until launch. Lea drilled into the subroutines that directed those computers, unable to penetrate the wall of code that protected them.

“They’ve taken full command of the Strategic Missile Forces,” she said, her throat closing up at the sight of it. “Right now, they’re initiating a worldwide strike—over ten
thousand
neutron warheads rigged for simultaneous launch. Targets include New York, Washington, Moscow, Singapore, Tokyo—and Vienna.”