Gladiator's Prize (6 page)

“I need options, Commander,” the captain said.

“It’s not good,” Northman replied, glancing up at the image. “I don’t know if the problem’s with hardware or software, but we’re damn close to a runaway reaction in all six of the main weapons cores. If we can’t get it under control within the next ten minutes, we’ll need to eject them. Even then, it’s cutting things close. I have no idea what’s causing it. Could be anything.”

“Understood. Recommendation?”

“Jettison and run like hell, sir.”

“You do that, you can kiss the invasion goodbye,” K’rilla said, her voice firm.

“Every cruiser in the fleet has the same systems, and unless we figure out what the problem is here, we won’t be able to trust any of them. We’ll lose months, maybe longer, and a billion extra people will die. Jettisoning those cores without doing everything to understand the problem first would be criminal. Even if we lose this ship, it might be worth the sacrifice—
if
we can figure out the problem and broadcast a solution to the fleet before it takes us out.”

“Who is speaking?” the captain asked, his voice tight. Northman’s aide whispered in his ear and he glanced at her with sudden respect. K’rilla pushed forward to stand next to him, knowing everything came down to this moment.

“This is Kerill d’Pecoraio,” Northman said. “She’s the chief designer behind our weapons retrofit and according to our people planetside we should be listening to her.”

The captain’s face betrayed nothing as he studied her.

“K’rilla, I told you to stay in the cabin,” Darius said.

“I’m outside your chain of command, Admiral,” she said. “Right now I need to study this. I’m jacking into the system directly.”

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“K’rilla—”

“Engineer, I have to protest—”

But she ignored the men, turning back to the screens and grabbing a cable, thrusting its prong into the jack at the base of her skull. The electric buzz of the connection raced through her, setting her nerves alight with something close to pain.

Their words faded away as she slid into the ship’s massive AI, communicating directly with the processors. It was dangerous—if something took the AI down, she’d go down with it. But it was the only way to get the information she needed. On the bright side, nobody could unjack her without risking her life. The argument over whether she should stay had effectively ended. Now she just needed to concentrate on doing her job.

Hard to stay focused, though, with data streaming around her like a river of blue fire, flanked by the green lightning of a weapons system run amok.

But
Tessa’s Glory
had been selected as the flagship for good reason. She represented the most advanced technology in the Federation, including one of the most sophisticated AIs ever built. K’rilla addressed the beast directly, thrilled and humbled as always as she communicated with the alien intelligence.

“Weapons system analysis, please.”

“Weapons system activated,” the computer told her. “Status approaching critical.

This is inconsistent with continuing ship integrity. Interrogative?”

K’rilla figured she’d try the obvious solution first.

“Shutdown system,” she ordered. “
Authorization Creator 4269.”

The system fell silent for three long seconds, an eternity for an AI operating at the speed of light.

“System not responding to new command input,” the AI said, its voice calm and impassive. “Invalid command.”

Of course,
that
would have been too easy. She’d have to figure out was keeping the ship from responding and to do that she’d have to retrace the error. Unfortunately, that 41

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meant scanning a billion lines of code. Not going to happen, not without help. But K’rilla wasn’t out of tricks yet.

“Retrace system activation.”

The AI obeyed, showing her a complex series of commands and codes. K’rilla reached out and requisitioned as much of the ship’s processing power as she could find, spinning off a thousand copies of her personal software daemon using an illicit little program she carried in her onboard core. In the background she sensed each little copy duplicating itself until a million tiny K’rilla intelligences—more than she’d ever created before—attacked the data as one. She felt the ship’s systems failing for lack of power and processing, knew the people on board might panic as they saw their life support systems go offline. Fair enough, better scared than dead. She wouldn’t need the resources for longer than a minute, just enough to check the software and trace the source of the error.

A moment of stale air wouldn’t kill them.

The daemons did their work, sending reports anomalies up a chain of processing stations until their collected data flowed through K’rilla like a heady drug. Data mining like this was dangerous, deeply illegal and addictive as all hell.

She loved it.

Ship systems came back online as K’rilla took her time studying the information, following every anomalous pathway, looking for errors in the software’s implementation. Routines and subroutines zipped past, each accurate and operating according to specs. All too quickly, K’rilla realized that the software was performing perfectly, the tiny errors clocked by her system nothing of any importance. According to her analysis, the system had been armed and locked by the Captain himself. She checked the authorization codes just to be sure, but they were authentic.

That scared the hell out of her—it had to be sabotage. Hoping desperately for another solution, she formulated a new plan of attack. Could someone have manually disrupted the hardware connections, breaking the lines of communication? She sent 42

Gladiator’s Prize

another message to the AI, at the same time dispatching another fleet of tiny software daemons to spy on its workings.

“Hardware diagnostic.”

“Running.”

Another burst of information flowed toward her. K’rilla and her daemons followed the AI through every last section of the weapons system, examining the hardware and its installation through the thousands of sensors feeding the ship information at all times. Circuits bled into each other as she examined the complicated inner workings of each fusion reactor. Northman’s assessment of the situation was all too accurate. They were looking at a full meltdown within a matter of moments and she couldn’t see a damn thing wrong with the process. The ship’s AI believed it was following lawful captain’s orders, to the point of self-destruction. And it
would
destroy everything, K’rilla knew that for a fact. She’d designed it that way as a last resort, with the understanding that in a combat situation a captain might need the capacity to blow himself up, along with any enemy vessels foolish enough to get close to him.

She wished to hell she hadn’t been so thorough in her planning. But she had one more sneaky little option, something she’d created that was even more unethical and illegal than her self-reproducing, semi-autonomous software daemons. Using it would destroy her career, but that was nothing compared to saving the invasion. The AI spoke, confirming what she’d already determined.

“Hardware diagnostic complete. No malfunctions. Interrogative?”

Not a software problem, not a hardware problem. So, sabotage it was…

K’rilla swam back up and out of the data, instructing the ship to open an audio channel for her as she ordered her tiny daemons to erase their tracks and self-destruct.

She projected her thoughts into the ‘com system directly, allowing the AI to simulate her voice for those who weren’t jacked in with her.

“Captain, this is Master Engineer Kerill d’Pecoraio,” she said. “I’ve reviewed the data, and I concur with Commander Northman. We are facing a reactor meltdown 43

Joanna Wylde

within minutes if we don’t get this thing under control. But we’re not there yet and I think I might have an idea how to fix it. Will you give me the chance?”

“Master Engineer, are you responsible for the systems failure a moment ago?” the captain asked, his voice tight.

“Yes,” she said, the unauthorized power and processing drain already all but forgotten. She had bigger things to worry about. “There isn’t a malfunction, I just needed to do a full diagnosis. It won’t happen again.”

She heard a sudden murmur from one of the men in the room—at least one had guessed what she’d done. They weren’t all dolts…

“I need to protect my ship—don’t do that again without warning us or I’ll have you shot,” the captain replied, his voice betraying the first hints of fear. “Northman tells me that unless we eject now, we might not be able to get away.”

Before she could answer, Darius broke in.

“Is this a fleet-wide problem, Master Engineer?”

She ignored the tiny rush of satisfaction it gave her to hear him use her title.

However mad he might be, at least he wanted her professional opinion.

“I can’t rule that out,” K’rilla replied, choosing her words carefully. “It’s not a software problem and it doesn’t appear to be a hardware problem, although we can’t be completely certain. But I’m pretty sure it’s sabotage.”

“How confident are you of that assessment?”

“There’s a slight possibility we have a sensor failure, although it would be damn strange to have every single sensor fail in exactly the same way at the same time,” she replied. “Sabotage seems most likely to me, but we could also have a design flaw in our sensor array. We can’t know for certain unless we manually inspect the equipment, and there’s no time to do that right now. If we eject the cores, we’ll never know.”

Silence hung heavy as they pondered her words.

“Northman, are you listening?”

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“I am,” the commander said. “But I don’t see how you could have reviewed the software so quickly, Engineer d’Pecoraio. My people have barely started their inspection and they tell me there’s no way it to complete it in time.”

K’rilla held back a sigh, wondering if she’d have to spell it out for the man.

Confession time.

“With all due respect, Commander, they’re not in my league,” K’rilla replied. “I know this system like my own child. I was given this job because I’m the best in the whole Federation and I have ways of scanning the work that are theoretical at best for your crew. Believe me, the software’s clean, which means there’s a problem with the hardware or we we’re looking at sabotage. And a hardware problem is a long shot—if it’s hardware, we have multiple sensor failures throughout the ship, all providing the same false-positive diagnostics. That’s statistically unlikely. It has to be sabotage.”

Northman fell silent and she knew she’d won. For now. If they lived through this, she’d be up on charges. At least she’d go down doing something that mattered, she mused. Soldiers died fighting all the time. If they could take the risk, so could she.

“That’s a very serious accusation,” Darius said. “Would it have to be from someone on board the ship? Every member of the crew was hand-selected.”

K’rilla thought about the incompetent guard outside his own quarters and wondered who had done the selecting. She shrugged off the thought; she had more important things to worry about.

“Yes, it’s someone on board,” she said with certainty. “You couldn’t do this remotely, not since we cut the weapons AI loose from our labs last month.”

“Every member of this crew is Saurellian,” the captain protested. “I could understand if we had a traitor from another Federation planet, but there’s never been a Saurellian traitor before.”

“Someone has to be first,” she said, flicking her attention between the conversation and the data that continued streaming past her. The systems had grown critical—if they ejected them now they’d survive. But they’d never know for sure that the hardware was 45

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solid… Time to put it all on the line. “But we have a decision to make. I think I can shut this thing down. I have a personal override for the software that bypasses the captain’s command structure.”

“Then you’re a traitor and I want you out of that computer. Now,” Northman said, his voice filling with righteous anger.

Darius and the captain didn’t respond immediately, but their silence weighed heavy. Northman was right—the creation of a secret override was beyond illegal, even worse than invading a warship with personal software daemons. Treason was probably the right word for it. But that didn’t change that fact that she’d done it on every major project she’d been involved with since her university days. Most of her peers did too.

Backdoors came in handy for all kinds of reasons.

“We can discuss that later,” she said. “I’m prepared to accept the consequences of my actions. Right now I’m offering you a lifeline. Take it and we have a shot of getting out of this alive and intact with some answers. Otherwise, jettison the core and spend the next six months trying to figure out what went wrong while a billion innocent people die.”

“If she’s wrong and this is a hardware problem, everyone on this ship will be dead,” Northman protested.

“It’s sabotage,” she snapped back. “And if it’s not, you’re right. We’ll die. But at least they’ll know what to look for. It’s a gamble.
If we win, a billion people live.
Do you really want to eject those cores only to discover nothing was wrong with them? We can’t just put them back in, you know.”

“Use the override,” Darius said.

“I agree,” the captain said. “Do it.”

K’rilla felt sudden relief.

“Yes, sir,” she said, diving back into the green and blue world of the data stream, human voices fading in the distance. Winding her way through the flowing rivers of information, she located the weapons system’s main processor home, slicing through 46

Gladiator’s Prize

the exterior layers of security with the expertise she’d spent her life perfecting. Then she sent a coded message toward the firewall, her personal backdoor flaring to life with a brilliant purple glow. Dodging the flares of her own secondary security program, K’rilla sent the override codes to open the door. The barrier disappeared, she flowed inside as the chaos of the ship’s systems crashed closed behind her.