04. Birth of Flux and Anchor (42 page)

The Nigerian nodded. "I believe so. It'll simply be a matter of making a convincing enough cover story. Something, perhaps, about changing the programs so that the wizards and magicians and monsters won't have power anymore. That's going through everywhere anyway, so it's just capitalizing on their existing fears."

"And what of the safety of our wizards and magicians when all this hits the fan?" the admiral asked, concerned.

"If they can't fend for themselves, in Flux, they're no threat to anyone anyway. In Anchor they have sufficient security troops to at least cover their asses. The independents I don't care about at all. I need the cover, which also provides a convincing set of reasons for the military guard. Some will try to stop this because they want the power for themselves. See?"

"All right. I don't like it, but I'll accept it. Coydt, the third cluster alone is your baby. I want you to handle it personally. You have carte blanche there. I don't care if you have to shoot the bitch and run poison gas through the headquarters complex."

"Oh, I don't think that will be necessary, sir," the security chief responded.

. "Very well. It's your head, and maybe all our heads, if it doesn't get done. The clock is running on us. I want to commence exactly seven days from today. That will give all of you a chance to map out contingency plans and assemble and brief your teams. Shindler will give you the names of the technicians in each cluster and their units. You and your officers have the full authority to do whatever is necessary to accomplish the sealing. At 0400 hours one week from today all access to 7800 interfaces will be denied all personnel not specifically encoded in the computer memory by the military programs. You may submit a list of others on your staff to be added to the existing very tight limits. None of the researchers and not one of the board will have access."

"That will drive them all nuts, but particularly Watanabe," Coydt noted. "This means we'll have to act to secure her before commencing operations. She'll otherwise try to get around everything."

"I want the board neutralized for the duration." Cockburn told them. "House arrest if possible, but if you must shoot them, then shoot them. Understood? I want no one sowing the seeds of revolt and discord who can get an instant following. Understand that they'll have to be kept under wraps. What we do won't seal anything—it'll simply allow me to do so. I will wait until the last possible minute I deem safe, for purposes of information and in hopes there can be some sort of breakthrough. I expect Earth to concur with us, but I must tell you that if it does not, I feel I must commit treason. Like you with your Watanabe monitor, Coydt—if I have to save the bastards from taking their own lives, I'll do anything necessary to save them. The decision is made. Only the when of it remains. Now—
move
!"

Suzy Watanabe slept in a small flat she'd converted out of two offices right off the master computer center for Anchor X-ray. She rarely left the building these days, and in fact rarely even-left the heart of her private interface with the system.

After her usual routine of meditation, exercise, a shower, and a very light breakfast, she donned her robe and walked to the door to go into the center itself. The door, however, refused to budge for her.

Cursing, she pulled down the manual switch and threw it, then found that it, too, had no effect. She was suddenly suspicious, and went back to one of the two doors exiting into different halls of the administration building. Neither of those doors worked either. She got on the intercom at once.

"Energy and Transport switchboard," said an unfamiliar woman's voice.

"This is Watanabe! I am locked in my chambers and I demand to know who did it and why!"

"Doctor, this is Military Security. By order of Admiral Cockburn, commander, you and the other directors are under temporary house arrest and all access by nonmilitary personnel to computer interfaces is hereby revoked."

It shocked her. She never thought it could or would happen here, in her own temple of worship, in her own inner sanctum— without warning, like thieves in the night! She didn't even know how it was possible considering the people loyal to her and the automatic defensive system she'd established. Still, fury got you nowhere.

"Are my people all right?"

"Yes, ma'am. All permanent party personnel assigned to this building were removed for their own safety and protection. There was, in fact, some strong resistance, including the use of arms against us, but we managed to subdue everyone without having to kill. Those who identify as your own personal guard are under heavy sedation, however, for their own safety. If they came to with that dedication, we would surely be forced to kill some of them."

She sighed, and felt a bit stupid to have thought that her girls would be a match for a well-planned and expertly executed takeover by military professionals. She realized, too, it was a fatal flaw in her own psyche that did it. She so detested military people and the military mentality that she had totally excluded them from her own control. Even the security people assigned here had been processed only to accept her authority and deeds as nonthreatening. She had not trusted them enough to leave them as professionals, but adopting her code and ways, since they were often rotated and it would make things obvious, that left them, in circumstnces like these, still under the orders of Coydt.

Cockburn, Coydt—they were all of a package. She had no doubt that this move was not a direct threat to her or her group; the fact that they had said they were arresting
all
the board made that plain. Clearly, it was something of a military coup. They were setting up their defenses without even talking to this new alien presence, getting ready to either kill them or seal the Gates forever in their typical knee-jerk reactions.

She reached into her robe and pulled out a tiny hand-held personal computer no larger than her hand and as thin as a ten-page pamphlet. It had limited abilities—a mere hundred thousand gigabytes of memory and it had to be downloaded to a main computer through a special interface—but it was a useful tool. Everyone working with any kind of figures had one. Nobody, however, had one programmed the way Suzy Watanabe could program.

"Ready," said a soft, small voice from the hand-held computer.

"The military has sealed me in my rooms and has removed all of my people from the temple under guard," she told it. "All other board members are also under arrest. Analysis of this coup?"

"They are going to seal the Gates."

"Yes, I figured that. How could they do it in such a way that I could not
undo
it?"

"Unknown. Probably thousands of ways to do so. Most probable would be existing undetected prior programming using the network to override."

"Undetected!"
She didn't like that. She didn't like anyone, even a computer, to suggest that there was something in her computers she hadn't even discovered.

"Information, please," the computer responded. "Was the takeover without strong resistance, and has any sign or mention been made of computer resistance to takeover?"

"It was bloodless, they tell me, and there was no mention of problems."

"Then they have overriden your entire defensive program series. Either that or they are lying, in which case they will come for you and do whatever is necessary to gain bypasses."

Ego flaw number two, she thought ruefully. It simply had never even entered her mind that someone would capture her alive and imprison her so easily. Short of suicide, there seemed no way they couldn't get the bypass information out of her if they wished. No, even suicide wouldn't help. It had been Coydt, after all, who'd resurrected her in the first place.
Damn!
They didn't even need to come for her. All they had to do was kill her while she was trapped here and then resurrect a very obedient new Suzy somewhere else. She felt angry not at them but at herself.

And, of course, Short Stuff, her personal, was absolutely right. They probably hadn't run into anything because she was still here and still herself. That meant they'd bypassed all that sophisticated defensive programming before they'd even entered the temple, and that meant sending overriding commands to her own 7800 and everyone else's before they ever got through the front door. Short Stuff was right. There were layers of that big computer she never detected or even suspected were there. Now, for the first time, she understood the real reason why the only operational 7800 had gone to Security at Site Y, and what had been their primary mission there.

There was, however, still one chance to foul them up. She went into her office and tripped a series of secret panels built into her desk and the wall beside it. With the right ID codes and prints, it all folded down into a crude but working Overrider interface. She put on the crude headset, adjusted the controls, and opened her mind.

The interface played a stirring rendition of "God Save the King." It played it over and over, and there was no way to break through or get any other response. After a half-hour trying to do so, she was so sick of that song, she was happy that her former homeland, Australia, had finally declared itself a republic.

This had really torn it though. Clearly they
had
simply ignored her whole set of local protection commands, and the computer had no choice but to obey. Years ago she'd discovered and turned to her own ends Coydt's little trap allowing someone else to be Watanabe and filter through all her work. If they'd tried that route, they would have had a rude surprise, so they had simply overridden all of it.

She needed to think. Assuming they could do this, Short Stuff was certainly right that an override of the military system was unlikely. If they sent a tapeworm through the Gate program, destroying its knowledge of how to reset for incoming, she might be able to write new programs to do what they had erased, given enough time. Transportation, after all, had pretty much designed those Gates, and she knew exactly how they operated.

They, of course, would know that too. Realize that not only she but lots of Transportation people could do it. It was too insecure for them. Even if they shot everyone involved, they'd never be sure they didn't miss somebody.

Some sort of program, then, within this special military override. A set of commands using a language and system proprietary to them and probably using computer-generated security ciphers and filled with deadly traps to anyone even looking over how to reverse them. Unless you had all seven parts of the cipher and then were able to decode it and apply it in a preset manner—probably all seven at once or something like that—it could never be overridden. Then Cockburn would scatter that code all over the place so that not even he knew where it all was, and you'd need a fair number of people agreeing to furnish their parts just to reassemble it. It was impossible. She would have to accept the fact that, unless these aliens or Earth could break through, the Gates would remain shut. Only by going out into space, finding an optimum point, and opening up a new Borelli Point would it ever be possible to go inbound or outbound—and except for some small automated devices, all spacecraft had been destroyed or cannibalized after New Eden was terraformed to prevent such a thing and the Point in space closed and blown.

They would be truly sealed in, that was sure. She knew that the nature of the Flux strings in that alternate universe were pretty easily fixed. Nobody could open up a new hole outbound or inbound without the new string immediately converging on the existing one. So long as the Borelli Points were still open, even if sealed to incoming traffic, here on New Eden, any attempt to punch through would result only in nothing reassembling. That was true for traffic coming from either direction. They were stuck. The only way out now would be for somebody to build a spacecraft capable of creating and controlling a Borelli Point in space, then punching through from there—only, probably, to get stuck at the next set of Gates down.

She sat back in her chair and sighed. All right, then—she couldn't stop it, and she probably couldn't get into the computers and override the defensive systems without destroying herself. She had to accept what was, or would soon be, if the fools could do it at all. Then what?

The gods had teased her, tantalized her. They had shown her the way to the true inner light, then snatched it away. It was not to be achieved as a gift, that was certain. She saw the pattern. Those who had opposed the shining path of perfection had been destroyed. Those who had embraced it now were receiving it. Here, on New Eden, there was division. The people and those of the true path would embrace it, but there was an evil infrastructure that opposed it—the military. They were not to be denied salvation, but they would have to earn it. They would have to achieve a state of near perfection themselves, and they would have to cleanse the world of evil. But how?

With its control of all weaponry and all the top levels of technology, the military would always be supreme. Even to wipe it out would simply result in the creation of a new overclass. Such power as this corrupted everyone, even herself. She had hoped that by communion with the computers they could attain the highest state, but she knew now that even her beloved computers were corrupted by the evil.

With a start she realized that the gods had been showing her that from the start, but she had simply failed, in her blind love of her machines, to divine the meaning. Those horrible monstrosities, those duggers. The computer had corrupted them, deformed them, made them not great but lesser beings. Even the experiments with direct network access among deliberate scientists had corrupted those scientists, turned them into freaks or riddled their souls with the evil lust for ultimate power over others, the same evil that corrupted the military by its very nature.

Salvation, then, could not come through the computers, yet the computers were necessary to sustain life. She had been given the gift to understand all that was good in the computers while denying her its most evil heart. Even so, had she not understood her own divine will by being exposed to the potential evils of the computers?