Noble Conflict (7 page)

‘Then you must be one scary bugger,’ approved Dillon. ‘Like a taller version of Mariska!’

And they both laughed. They were still laughing when Trey was carried past them unconscious on a stretcher to the infirmary.

Later, Kaspar lay in bed staring at the ceiling. Normally he went out like a light after a session in the gym, but tonight sleep was a stranger. He sat up, switched on his light and grabbed his datapad from the bedside table. Maybe the questions buzzing around his head would make more sense written down.

1. Why suicide?

2. Why the massive interest by the Insurgents in totally isolated locations?

3. Why don’t they equip themselves with any kind of radio or CommLink?

4. Why didn’t they kill the truck driver?

5.
WHAT DO THEY WANT???

The last question he double underlined, but it didn’t help. He was no closer to finding an answer. Swinging his legs out of the bed, he got up, crossed to the desk and turned on the datalink. If I can’t sleep, I may as well do some research, he thought.

The back of his neck began to prickle. Maybe he should just leave well enough alone? But he wanted answers.

Funny, then, how the phrase ‘curiosity killed the cat’ kept dancing about in his head.

Kaspar started the research engine on his screen and spent the next half-hour failing to understand a single word. He knew the engine was a brilliant tool for doing research and spotting patterns in data, but you needed a brain the size of a planet just to read the online instruction manual. Sections headed ‘Heuristic Contextualization’ and ‘Para-Linguistic Hybridization Factors’ simply bounced off his skull without a hope of penetrating.

He finally admitted defeat, grabbed his jacket and took the short walk to Library Services. Through the door, Kaspar could see the duty librarian seated behind a desk. She wore her purple hair in a choppy hairstyle and the red ID Badge at the end of the lanyard prominently displayed around her neck meant she had the highest security clearance. She was scrutinizing data on a holo-screen to her right, a slight smile on her lips. Kaspar was surprised at how young she looked, not much older than him. And best of all she didn’t look too nerdy. He knocked once and went in.

She smiled the moment she saw him. ‘Hello. I’m Mackenzie, call me Mac. You’re up late. Are you a night
owl like me or are you on some kind of punishment detail? Hang on! Aren’t you the cadet who’s been all over the news recently? Milding? Rilding? Something like that? Sorry, I’m rambling! How can I help?’

Kaspar blinked at the verbal barrage. Wow! And his first impression of her had been correct. She couldn’t have been more than a couple of years older than him. She had full lips, the largest almond-shaped brown eyes he’d ever seen and long, dark lashes. Kaspar wondered what had driven her to work at the research centre of the Guardian Academy. And how on earth had she managed to get such a high security clearance at her age? Surely proof positive that she had to be considerably older than she looked?

‘Hi,’ he replied. ‘It’s Wilding, actually. Can you help me? I’m trying to use the research engine but I can’t understand a word of it.’

Mac gave him a quick assessing glance. ‘Sure thing. I spend half my life explaining that manual. Grab a chair and come round.’

Kaspar wheeled over a chair from the nearest table and placed it behind Mac’s desk next to hers.

‘So what is it you want to know?’

‘OK, I get the basics,’ Kaspar began. ‘You describe what you want, the areas you are interested in, the timespan you want to examine and so forth. Once you’ve done that, a bunch of semi-intelligent databots are launched off into cyberspace. Right?’

‘Right,’ replied Mac. ‘They interrogate systems, access archives and they negotiate with each other in order
to produce a comprehensive response to your query.’

‘Well, I get that bit. So far, so good,’ said Kaspar. ‘But what about the rest? All that contextual  . . . linguistic  . . . hybrid doodah factor stuff?’

‘OK,’ laughed Mac. ‘Suppose you were to launch a search on  . . . let’s say – “farm”.’

Damnit! Had everyone on the planet read his biography?

‘So most of the databots will go haring down what you might call the obvious route. Farm, farmer, farming, agriculture, hydroponics, food production, pesticides and so on. But some of them will find other linkages – like “ant farm”, and start researching insects. And some will recognize that “farm” is phonetically similar to “pharm”, and that will lead off towards pharmacology, drugs, addiction. Now depending on what you are trying to achieve, that will either be a waste of time and resources, or it’ll be a breakthrough into a whole new area of investigation – a light bulb moment. Your various doodah factors control how narrowly focused the search is. You can impose a real straitjacket on the databots, or you can let ’em off the leash and see where they take you. Any clearer?’

‘Yes,’ said Kaspar. ‘Finally!’ Human talk, instead of pretentious academic guff. ‘Go on.’

Forty-five minutes later, he was all set. Mac had shown him how to use a small but powerful subset of the available features and he was ready to launch the bots. If he could get the bots to figure out the pattern to the Insurgents’ attacks and unauthorized computer breaches,
then maybe he would be able to work out exactly what they were after and in that way predict where and when the next attacks might come. For once the Guardians would be one jump ahead instead of the other way round.

There was just one question left to answer. Security code.

Kaspar started to type in his personal access code – the one he used for accessing his bank account and personal data. This was private research, after all. But then he stopped. He was trying to understand the terrorist threat better, trying to learn how to defeat the killers in their midst. That sounded like work to him. So he deleted his personal passcode and typed in his Guardian access code instead.

The first data came back almost immediately. Kaspar eagerly leaned forward.

‘Best to let it stew for a while,’ Mac advised. ‘Think of the bots as painting a picture. They start off by drawing a few lines, blocking out the composition, sketching. Then they start filling in a detail over here, reshaping something that isn’t working over there. If you look too soon, you’ll see construction lines and false starts. Give the picture a while to develop before you start appreciating the art.’

‘Oh, OK,’ said Kaspar, trying to foster some patience.

They sat in silence for a moment. Mac turned to another data screen to resume what she was doing before Kaspar had interrupted her. Kaspar stole surreptitious glances at Mac. He’d never seen anyone quite like her
before. She was about as far away from his old life on his uncle’s farm as it was possible to get.

‘Is something wrong?’ asked Mac, even though she wasn’t directly facing him.

‘No. Why?’ Kaspar’s gaze instantly returned to the data on the screen.

‘You’re staring a hole through me.’ Mac swivelled round in her chair to look directly at him, amusement in her voice.

Where had Kaspar heard that phrase before?

‘It’s my eyes, isn’t it?’ said Mac. ‘People always notice my eyes.’

Kaspar frowned at Mac. Her hair colour and style had caught his attention more than  . . . The twinkle in Mac’s honey-coloured eyes alerted Kaspar to the fact that he was being wound up.

‘Yeah, it was definitely your eyes,’ Kaspar agreed with a grin.

They both laughed.

‘So, Mac, if you don’t mind me asking, how long have you worked here?’

‘Three years. Since I was sixteen.’

‘
Only
three years?’ said Kaspar, astounded. ‘Congrats. I thought you had to have one foot in the grave to get red security clearance.’

‘Or be the only member of the library staff to be working late at night when an insomniac general can’t get the data she requires because she doesn’t know how to access it and you don’t have the proper clearance,’ grinned Mac.

Ah, that explained a lot. ‘This general must’ve been desperate.’

‘She was,’ said Mac.

‘What made you want to work here in the first place?’ Kaspar couldn’t help asking.

‘Knowledge is power. My dad is always telling me that.’ Mac looked at Kaspar pointedly when she said that, then laughed as if she’d heard a good joke and changed the subject. Kaspar gave her a sideways look, wondering at her in-joke which left him on the outside. He shrugged inwardly. Mac was kind of weird.

After about half an hour of albeit pleasant small talk, Kaspar could wait no longer. He turned back to the screen and started appreciating. There were maps and charts, timelines and frequency counts, all showing the details of the Insurgents’ attacks on the Alliance, stretching back for years. But what was missing was any kind of coherent pattern or wholeness to it all.

‘That’s strange. Looking at what seems to have been targeted, there seems to be two separate groups working,’ Mac mused aloud, peering over his shoulder. ‘What did you say the one who stabbed himself looked like? A ninja? Well, let’s call them
ninjas
and the others  . . .
phantoms
. The ninjas are really good at getting into places they aren’t meant to be. They’re not particularly violent – the casualty rates resulting from their actions are surprisingly low, even though they sometimes hurl flash grenades around like confetti – like at your graduation ceremony. They love getting access to Alliance computers and their motto is
apparently “You’ll never take me alive” – judging by the number of attempted suicides that have taken place before you Guardians have been able to make an arrest. I think, for the ninjas, it’s all about psychological confusion rather than actual physical damage. That and keeping the Guardians occupied.

‘But look at the other kinds of incidents – when there are bombings and lots of casualties. That seems to be a completely different way of operating. That’s the work of the vicious ones, the phantoms. And they’re never seen – the arrest rate is non-existent, although there’ve been some deaths reported occasionally, like when they get caught up in their own explosions. They’re the ones who plant bombs in public places and really work the terror angle.’

‘You can tell all that from this stuff on the screen?’ said Kaspar, moving in closer to try and see what Mac was seeing.

‘Like all this stuff, it’s about knowing what you’re looking at and how to interpret it,’ said Mac. ‘Check it out. Look, the intelligence suggests that there are definitely two different
types
of groups where one group doesn’t seem to know what the other group is doing. As I said, one lot seem to go for the computers, to attack our communications and technology, while the other lot carry out violent terrorist atrocities on civilians.’

‘But look at the rate of the attacks,’ said Kaspar. ‘The ninja attacks and the phantom bombings ramp up in synch. Doesn’t that imply coordination?’

‘Or maybe competition between two groups of Insurgents, each with different aims and methods?’ suggested Mac. ‘Maybe rival political parties among the Crusaders?’ Suddenly alert, she drew Kaspar’s attention to a flag on the screen. ‘Oh, hello! We’ve got an out-of-tolerance hybridization factor.’

Kaspar looked at her blankly. ‘We’ve got a what?’

‘The bots might be off the leash,’ she explained.

Leaning in closer, Kaspar saw that a group of bots were researching the suicide angle. ‘Suicide, suicide bombings, sanctity of all life, honourable death, atonement for failure, unrequited love, intractable pain, shared near-death experiences, mythical heroes of legend  . . .’

The bots were definitely starting to wander a little too far off-topic.

‘I’m not really in the market for poems of hopeless love or fairy stories. Can we lace up the straitjacket a little tighter?’ asked Kaspar.

‘Sure.’ Mac sent an advisory to the search engine and the bots raced off in another direction.

‘What I’m after is more insight into the terrorists’ psychology,’ said Kaspar. ‘Can we nudge the bots in the direction of the interrogation reports on the Insurgent captives?’

Mac issued the commands and then read through the summary. ‘It’s all variations on a theme.’ She frowned. ‘Some long-suffering body from the Justice Directorate spends hours offering the captured Insurgents coffee and biscuits and asking questions. In return, they get nothing
but meaningless rants, abuse, vile threats and some hair-raising displays of self-harming. Finally they give up and write an intelligence assessment that seems little better than reading tea leaves.’

‘So let me see if I’ve got this right,’ said Kaspar, exasperated. ‘The enemy is stupid but quite smart sometimes. They are precise in their targeting – though we don’t know what they are looking for in our data archives – except for when they go for some pointless bloody massacre of civilians. Some of them trap themselves when they could escape, some stab themselves when they could shoot you, and others are totally invisible except when they stand right in front of you and smile.’

‘I couldn’t have put it better myself,’ said Mac.

‘Yeah, but that gets me precisely nowhere,’ Kaspar sighed.

‘What can I tell you? The data is the data.’

Kaspar tried to bite back his intense disappointment. But what made him think he could discover more about the Insurgents and their motives in a couple of hours than the High Council had in decades? It was just that no one seemed to be asking questions – the right questions, at any rate. Kaspar couldn’t forget the smile on the face of the Insurgent who had killed himself. His expression hadn’t been that of someone thwarted or defeated or even defiant to his last breath. No, his smile had been one of satisfaction, of triumph. And there was no hint of insanity in the Insurgent’s final expression, at least none that Kaspar’s admittedly untrained eye could see. The High
Council didn’t seem to care about the Insurgents’ deeper motives. As long as the Insurgent threat was being contained, that seemed to be enough for them and most of the Alliance civilians. Why were there never any serious calls for talks to end the war?

What did the Insurgents
want
?