Fool's War (57 page)

Another waldo stretched out from the wall to catch hold of her. Al Shei’s body rose to meet it. She grabbed its forearm with both hands and used it to lever herself up into the relatively clear air, snatching her wire cutters as she passed. The cart arms and the wall arms were still grappling with each other, trying to sort themselves out. Al Shei pried open a panel in the ceiling/wall over them. She caught up a clipper full of wires just as a waldo closed on her ankle. She clamped both hands around the wire cutter’s handles as the waldo dragged her backwards. The wires broke and a shower of sparks exploded out against Al Shei’s face. The lights went dead, leaving only the narrow beam of her lamp to cut the darkness. The waldo holding her relaxed and Al Shei was able to launch herself around the curve of the hallway.

On her right she drifted past a doorway, not a hatch. Her brain skimmed memories of the schematic she had pored over in her cabin.
Maintenance Closet!
thought Al Shei jubilantly and she scrabbled at the edge of the door. Fortunately, the power was out here too, so any electronic locks had been disabled.

Al Shei slid the door open, pulled herself inside and slammed the manual bolts shut behind her. She hung in the darkness for a moment, trying to catch her breath and collect her thoughts. Her abdomen burned painfully and the taste of salt and iron wouldn’t leave her mouth. Anonymous objects bumped against her. She turned her head to shine the lamp’s beam around. Multiple cabinets had been knocked open, and the detritus formed a whirlpool around her. Flotsam scraped past her hands and torso as the walls turned. The air had cooled perceptibly since the disaster began, but not dangerously. The Fools had obviously maintained their generator batteries well, at least.

First things first. The power.
They’d have a drone down to repair the damage she’d done to the wires in no time, and it wouldn’t take them long to guess where she’d gone. Her light glanced on a whole host of waldos on the walls. She swam across to a maintenance panel, pulled it away from the wall and looked at the underside. She smiled. They’d gotten rid of all the exterior labels, but the AIs hadn’t thought to erase the panel diagrams. She scanned the symbols and her smile grew wider. There was a breaker cluster in here with her.

She counted three panels up and four over from the one she had opened. Underneath it, she found a gorgeous set of orange, green and blue cables all feeding into a group of four squat wafer stacks. Bobbing unsteadily in front of her target. Al Shei pulled her overall sleeves up over her hands and grabbed the stacks. She closed her eyes, braced her feet against the wall and pulled. The wafers came free, almost burning her hands even through the cloth. The pin-pricks of sparks landed against her cheeks and brows. Al Shei drifted gently through the sea of detritus and bounced off the far wall.

She let the cluster go and shook her hands free of her sleeves.

Take that!
She thought wildly. She shone her light all around the closet. The waldos remained still. Most of the level should be out of power. Which was good for now, but the AIs most certainly knew where their own breakers were. Her light landed on the silver-grey doors of a locker below her feet and Al Shei felt a surge of hope. Maybe there was one other human necessity the AIs hadn’t been able to quite do away with.

Al Shei tucked her legs and dove towards the locker. She grabbed the handle to steady herself. She could hear a distinct rattle inside.

Didn’t they have anything secured?
She thought as she opened the door. She hid behind it as the contents of the locker spilled out. As she had hoped, a pressure suit floated past her. It must be for emergencies. The AIs couldn’t install their ubiquitous waldos on the outside of their can without someone noticing. For the same reason, they couldn’t send any of their customized drones out there. There was too much activity outside. Too many chances to be seen. If something happened to the outer hull of this can that they had electronically hidden from the rest of Port Oberon, one of them would have to take the cold walk outside to fix it.

She nabbed the suit out of the stream by its collar and pulled it behind her toward the nearest wall. Her lamp showed her that it was a standard industrial issue get-up; mustard yellow emergency gear, a back pack for gas tanks, a cutting/welding torch holstered on the side. It had a chest plate for tools, and pockets for the wrenches and screwdrivers that were now swimming through the whirlpool. She checked the gauges on the gas tanks and batteries. The suit was charged and ready to go.

Al Shei abandoned her tool belt to the whirlpool and climbed into the suit. Her body had given up trying to reason with her about relative directions and she was able to ignore the fact that she was rolling perpendicular to the rest of the room as she locked herself inside and secured the helmet. As soon as she did, the suit batteries kicked in and lit up the chin keys and interior displays. She bumped a key with a jerk of her chin and the external lamps came on. A quick glance around showed her where the tool belt had drifted. She retrieved it and loosened the cinch out as far as it would go so she could strap it around the suit’s waist.

 
Al Shei nudged the chin control to darken the faceplate down enough to conceal her face, but not enough to hinder her vision. She checked the readout of her air, her gasses and her batteries one more time, and then opened up the door.

And almost collided with a woman in tan overalls. She recoiled from the glare of Al Shei’s lamps. Al Shei opened up the suit’s intercom.

“She was here all right,” she said. “Pulled out the wafer stack in there and headed for the ether.”

“Ashes!” cursed the woman, holding up her hand to try to shield her eyes from Al Shei’s lights. “She’s got two whole levels out of commission. Any line on where she went?”

“Probably trying to find her husband. Where’s he at?”

“Med bay level ten…” The woman bit the sentence off. Al Shei clasped both fists together and swung hard at the woman’s temple. She connected, and as the motion drove her backwards, she heard something heavy hit the wall. She took her own impact on her shoulder and shone her light around. The woman’s body floated limp and still in the middle of the corridor.

The maintenance closet had done one other thing for her. Al Shei swam to the far wall and used the dead waldos to pull herself along it. It told her which were the inner and outer sides of the corridor. The next hatch she came to on this side should be the stairs.

Yerusha cycled back the hatch on the comm center. Schyler stood next her with his mouth slightly pursed. They had been back aboard after what she was calling their “little jaunt” for about three minutes. Resit had coolly told them there was an uproar from the Landlords because the station was now off balance and they were struggling to correct it, and to contact the can, but no one was looking for them specifically. Then, Lipinski had called up through the intercom and asked them both to come down to the data hold.

Lipinski hunched over the boards at Station One, writing out commands one painstaking word at a time. He didn’t look up as he waved them over.

“Do you recognize this?” He pointed at a program-and-connector diagram with a slew of numbers underneath it.

Yerusha studied the conglomeration for a moment. “It’s an AI diagram, but it’s a lot bigger than average.”

“Good, I got it then.” Lipinski finally did look up. The rings under his eyes stood out starkly against his pale skin. “That, or things like that, have been bopping back and forth in the network for the past twenty minutes.”

Yerusha, although she thought she’d been prepared for the idea, felt a shiver crawl down her spine. “You think the battle’s started?”

Lipinski nodded. “Now, if we’re right about anything, it’s that this, what’s his name, Curran, his AIs are out in the net trying to take out the monetary transactions. Eventually, they’ll all be coming back here. They won’t be able to get to can 56, because that’s in free fall. No stable reception point. But they can still get back to Port Oberon.”

Schyler’s gaze was so steady, Yerusha realized he had passed stoic calm and come out on the other side. “What are you getting at?”

“I think I can use Tully’s catburglars to get them.”

“How?” demanded Yerusha.

“I’ve been watching the signal flow between transmission points. You get a big pattern passing from a designated transmission-receiver device, to a second transmitter-receiver, and then it goes back from there to where it came from. Then, you immediately get another similar pattern going from transmitter to receiver, and then nothing.

“I think they send through copies of themselves to make sure the link’s stable between point of transmission and point of reception before they send themselves through. It makes sense. A signal can’t do anything until it gets some hardware to respond to it. You’d want to make damn sure there was hardware there to catch you, or you’re going to become just another bunch of photons heading for Kingdom Come.”

“And how were you able to figure all this out?” Schyler waved at the boards.

“You can’t track a signal in hardware without getting a program into the hardware, but you can track a signal between hardware points without trouble. You just need a working receiver, unless its encrypted. Those AIs are big, clever and fast, but they’re not encrypted, and Pasadena’s got a very good receiver.”

“So,” Yerusha’s head was spinning. “With all these years, nobody’s ever spotted them bouncing around before?”

“Nobody knew what they were looking for,” said Lipinski quietly. “I mean, if anybody spotted them while surveying the lines, which is illegal as all hell in most systems, they would just think somebody was transmitting a copy of AI code to somebody else. What’s weird about that? It happens all the time.” He paused. “Anyway, we don’t know that nobody else has spotted them. I mean, Al Shei found out what was going on, and look what happened to her husband. We don’t know they haven’t done the same thing to other people.”

Yerusha felt her stomach turn over. This was not how it was supposed to be. This was like Lipinski finding out that God’s angels were only interested in humanity’s destruction.

“So, what’s your idea?” Schyler shoved both hands in his pockets.

“We take
Pasadena
away from Port Oberon so we’re an isolated transmitter-receiver. I set Tully’s catburglars to break the security on the receiver telescopes. Then, we watch the outlying transmitters. There are six capable of reaching Port Oberon directly, and, after Free Home Titania, it takes a full four seconds for a signal to get here from the closest one. Add in the time for the copy-bounce and you’ve got twelve seconds of transit time.

“So, we get the Free Home to shut its receivers down. Then, when I pick up a concentration of AI signals doing the initial copy bounce, it’ll give me an alert and I can set the catburglars in motion and take out all the receivers on the station.”

“You’re going to order them to shut down?” asked Yerusha.

Lipinski shook his head. “No. That could be counteracted to easily. We might not get all the AIs with this trick. Some of them might be here already. We don’t want them to come undo what I’ve done. We need the receiver hardware thoroughly disabled. The communications signals are light, right? The receivers are all telescopes. All you have to do to disable a telescope is order it to point at the Sun and order it to look at the pretty bright light really, really hard. Even at this distance, good old Sol can burn out every optic in every ‘scope on the station.”

Yerusha swallowed hard. It could work. It really could. If the signals were in transit and the receivers suddenly shut off, they’d just keep on going out into the vastness of the universe.

“And you don’t think they’ll spot this little maneuver?” she was surprised at how small her voice sounded.

There was a dangerous light in Lipinski’s eyes. He was attacking the monster that had haunted him for years. Finally, he had the chance to strike back at the thing that had brought down his whole world. “I don’t think they’re taking us into account right now. I think they’re going to find out that’s a massive mistake.”

Schyler nodded slowly. “There’s one problem. Pasadena is still impounded. How do you plan to get us away from the station.”

That took Lipinski aback. “The catburglars?” he suggested. “The alarms are still down…”

“And risk the AIs spotting us as soon as we make one too many transmissions using the same encryption tricks?” Yerusha sighed heavily. “You two just don’t think right for this kind of thing. Have we got a roster of who’s on shift at flight control?”

Lipinski wrote a command across the board, calling up a list of names. Yerusha looked them over and spotted Louise Berryman. “Great, we’re set, as long as our accounts haven’t been touched yet.”

“What are we going to do?” Schyler almost sounded bemused.

Yerusha rubbed her thumb and first two fingers together. “Bribery. Berryman’s on the quiet dole. We can pay for a docking trolley to tow us out of here without getting it recorded in the log.”

Schyler stared at her. “Exactly what is it they teach you in the Senior Guard?”

Yerusha shook her head. “Oh, no. Not even for you.”

Schyler rubbed his nose and nodded to Lipinski. “All right. Do it.”

Dobbs circled the randomizer matrix, touching it gently here and there. It didn’t take much to tell that there were security codes in there that would destroy the thing under unauthorized probing, possibly triggering another of the Black Holes.