Spheres of Influence-eARC (44 page)

General Jill Esterhauer tilted her head, and started to open her mouth.

And the dim, shimmering thread blazed into coruscating brilliance as the connection went fully active.

DuQuesne stiffened.
Got you!
he thought grimly, and forced his own connection protocols to hack into the encrypted stream.
Mentor!

I am here, Marc DuQuesne, as are we all.

His vision saw it as a seething, crackling vortex of energy, a metaphor that made the encryption and security defenses seem as dangerous physically as they were electronically—and if you were, as DuQuesne now was, immersed in the electronic world, some of those defenses could actually kill you—trace your patterns back into your own skull and wipe you out like a deleted drive. He was exposing himself directly in order to use all of his brain as a weapon and a sensor, a perceptual filter that even the highest-order AISages couldn’t match, though their physical speed should vastly outstrip his capabilities.

But they aren’t Hyperions.

Mentor, Isaac, Mio, and Vincent were trying to tap into that deadly sealed column—in more mundane terms, trying to suborn the connection from the general’s end so they could find out who and what they were dealing with.
Which means that technically we’re trying to hack the general’s brain, but if our suspicion’s right—she’s already
been
hacked.

Suddenly the connection broadened, and
something
burst out of it—no, a lot of somethings. He recognized the network feel immediately—piranha seekers, advanced active worm codes that were designed to locate other active local processes and shut them down.

Vincent was struck immediately, and vanished from the Net—shutting down and severing his connection to prevent destruction.
Hope it’s enough…and that he didn’t take any with him into Gabrielle’s headware.
The other AISages seemed to be holding their own, though barely.
Hang on, Isaac, Mio!

His own defenses—manifested as shields of light this time—shunted the seekers away. Mentor simply swept them away, and his own counter-seekers wiped the worm code.

Try to just jam it!
DuQuesne said.
Yeah, it’d be nice to get a look at our adversary, but he’s
prepared
. Probably running the defense off the general’s own network! We’d have to shut her down in order to stop it!

Our adversary has locked down the transmitters,
Mentor reported.

Dammit.
He could perceive the lock commands holding the transmitters out of control.
Take
time
to break that—time enough that people in the regular world might even notice.

I need some way to shut down those locks. But with the lock commands encrypted, those things’ll stay inoperable unless I can break the encryption. And I don’t have time. Blast! And nothing I’m carrying on my physical person has
nearly
enough power to…

He paused at that thought.
Power…

HA! Got it! You’re messing with the wrong power engineer, my friend!

He pinged the others.
Hold onto your hats, everyone—network’s going down…for just long enough!

Instead of triggering the locks, DuQuesne called up the specs of the room transceiver systems from headware, and on the fly calculated and sent a pulse through the local controllers that looked, to those controllers, like a dangerous overvoltage from a shorting direct line. Automatic, built-in cutoffs cycled, shutting off all power to the Council Chamber network systems for a moment—and thus removing the temporary software locks on the transmitters. DuQuesne had been ready for that, and as soon as the power came back on, he activated the main transmitters in jamming mode.

He snapped back to full physical consciousness with a jolt—with that powerful a jamming pulse, there was no staying connected with the local network. The pulse faded and the network restored itself…but the powerful outside connection was gone.
We won that one.

The battle had taken, perhaps, two-tenths of a second from start to finish.

Chapter 55.

Ariane sensed
something
going on and then realized that Mentor had—for a few moments—completely vanished from her senses.

At the same time, General Esterhauer paused, mouth open, unmoving for an instant; then she slowly closed her mouth, looking momentarily puzzled, confused. Finally she blinked, shook her head, and said, “I see. But if you agree with my basic principles, you must understand how I must view your…demands.”

I certainly do
, Ariane thought, but was trying to understand what had just happened and figure out something more useful to say when Simon spoke up.

“General,” he said, “Might I ask you a—I hope—simple question?”

She shrugged. “Go ahead.”

“Is there, in fact, anything that Captain Austin
could
do that would convince you to give this plan a chance? Or is your mind so made up that nothing anyone could ever say would change your mind?”

That
stopped Esterhauer cold for a moment. Slowly, a wry smile spread across her face. “I would like to think my mind is not totally shut…but I will admit, Doctor Sandrisson, that I cannot think of any argument or point she could make that would change my mind.”

“Then perhaps I can offer a compromise,” said another voice. Looking in that direction, Ariane saw Robert Fenelon standing. “To summarize, we have two, apparently diametrically opposed sides: Captain Austin, who feels that it is necessary to unite both sides of humanity under a single Leader, as the Arena seems to imply, to provide for quick and unified decisionmaking, especially in this time of crisis; and that of General Esterhauer and her allies, who are not going to permit any individual such unlimited power.”

A general murmur of agreement greeted Representative Fenelon’s statement. He smiled, stroking his beard thoughtfully. “Then allow me to present to you a scenario that allows both of you to get most of what you want, based on some rather old history—Rome, among others, had to deal with similar problems on occasion.

“I propose that the position of Leader of Humanity be an appointed one—by the SSC and CSF—and that a specific oversight group be selected which can decide to strip the Leader of his or her authority, but not to second-guess or undo decisions of the Leader directly. Such work would be left to the next selected Leader.”

Now wait a minute.
She could see several ways this could go wrong. “I—”

“Hold on, please,” he said. “We will
also
make it so that the oversight group can only be assembled to do this sort of action by a supermajority vote—exact proportion of attendees to be decided—and that barring such extraordinary action the Leader’s actions in the Arena and her authority over Arena-related activities here in normal space are to be reviewed and her appointment renewed—or not—for five years. And further as the
first
Leader, if you agree to all stipulations of the arrangement, you will be guaranteed two such terms unless your actions cause us to both call up the oversight group,
and
the oversight group decides to strip you of your authority.

“On the Leader’s side, she (or, later, he, perhaps) will have effectively absolute authority over the activities of the SSC and CSF that relate to the Arena or the defense of the Solar System against potential enemies. This is similar to the
imperium
authority of ancient Rome.”

That seems…quite reasonable to me,
Simon said over the link.
What do you think, DuQuesne?

Yeah, Fenelon’s always been a sharp one. He might have something here, he just might.

It
could
work,
Ariane said cautiously, beginning to hope that there
was
a way out of this mess.

Robert Fenelon looked at Ariane. “If I understand correctly, if you agree to our arrangements you would be bound by them—that is, if we
did
vote to strip you of your authority, we would be able to do so and then choose—ourselves—a new Leader?”

Ariane nodded slowly. “That’s the way I understand it, yes. If I accept the arrangements,
then
the Arena accepts that those are the rules. Seemed to work that way with the Blessed—they had specific rules and they followed them.”
Especially when I take into account what happened with Sethrik. Obviously the hoops that had to be jumped through had to be done in the right order.

“Good,” Fenelon said. “Then that would address General Esterhauer’s main concern. We would not be dependent on whether you
wanted
to follow our rules; we could, in fact, remove you if the situation were grave enough, and we would not need force of arms or any argument with you or yours, simply a vote of an emergency committee.

“At the same time, it gives you the full authority of law to act as you see fit, as long as you don’t…go so far that we feel ourselves impelled to act. A five-year interval for what amounts to a vote of confidence should not be overly onerous, I would hope. I could also see us agreeing to confirm
some
, though not all, of your candidates as potential successors. Perhaps a list which includes one of yours, one of ours, and so on.” He looked at both the general and Ariane Austin. “If we can work out the details, would you both be willing to accept this compromise?”

Ariane looked at the others—and especially at DuQuesne and Simon. “What do the rest of you think?”

DuQuesne shook his head. “Before anyone gets ahead of themselves, I don’t want it said that any of this was being agreed to while anyone was not really fully in possession of their faculties.”

“Eh?” Fenelon looked confused, as did most of the others present. Ariane echoed the sentiment.
What in the world are you
talking
about, Marc?

“General Esterhauer, you were in communication with someone outside of this room at crucial moments—despite the blackout we had attempted to impose. Moreover, when we finally succeeded in disconnecting, you seemed momentarily at a loss.”

“When you…” Jill Esterhauer glared at DuQuesne. “The fact that my advisors were not cut off is hardly evidence that my faculties were diminished; rather it’s evidence that I have better preparations in my comm-net than most people.”

“Just a question, General,” Gabrielle Wolfe spoke up. “Do you sanction the use of lethal force to protect your advisor connections?”

Esterhauer looked honestly taken aback. “What? No, of course not.”

“Well, then, you have a problem, ma’am, because the defenses of that connection included piranha seekers at top level capability. My AISage’s doing a full cleansing restore and reboot now and it was a near thing that he didn’t drop the code in
my
brain—meaning I’d be probably brain-wiped or close to it.”

My God,
Ariane thought, appalled. That kind of malicious code was one of the true horrors of brain-computer integration; you could catch the same mind-destroying diseases, and instead of months or years, the loss of everything you were would take seconds.

It was indeed that bad,
Mentor’s voice said inside her head.
I have, however, isolated one of the instantiations in case someone wishes to examine the design.

“If you want to look at the evidence,” Ariane said to Esterhauer, “My AISage caught one of the seekers. And recorded the whole sequence of events.”

A shadow of the same suspicion showed on Esterhauer’s face, but there was also concern and confusion. “I…would very much like to have my people examine all of the evidence,” she said. Then she wavered and collapsed to her knees.

“General!” Saul Maginot was next to her. “What is it?”

The stiff military bearing was gone now; Jill Esterhauer was obviously badly frightened. “I was trying…to dig out the memory of what…who I was talking to…and I can’t. My AISage, Damon, he cannot recall the connection, he went active, I’m…confused…”

“Quick!” DuQuesne snapped. “Shut her down, Gabrielle! Her and her AISage—need to get them stabilized now!”

Gabrielle Wolfe looked helpless. “I…don’t think I have the right—”

Oasis Abrams shouldered the others aside and whipped an injector from one of the pouches distributed around her body; in a single smooth motion she knelt and jabbed the injector right into the base of Esterhauer’s skull. The General immediately collapsed, caught by Oasis before she could hit the floor.

“You just
happened
to be carrying a dual-mode anesthetic dose on you?” Ariane said in disbelief.

“Not ‘just happened,’ no. I’ve had a lot of…interesting jobs over the years, Captain. Having a way to shut down someone and their AISage simultaneously has always been a very useful thing to have.” She turned to Esterhauer’s soldiers, some of whom were still trying to cover the group. “Put your weapons down, people. We were talking, not shooting, and your commander needs medical help, not guns.”

One of the armored figures, in the markings of a CSF Master Sergeant of Marines, glanced over to White Camilla and then to Saul; both nodded, and the squads stepped back and put away their weapons.

Gabrielle was kneeling next to Esterhauer. “Sorry y’all, but we need to get her to a real hospital stat—Kanzaki Central will do. No telling what kind of damage has been done, or might get done if they wake up. Sounds like whoever she’d been in contact with had some kind of logic bombs set up—both in her, and her AISage. Hope we can salvage most of her, though.”

“Of course,” Saul agreed. “Captain Austin?”

For a moment she didn’t understand what Saul was asking, then it hit her. “Of course, one moment.” She concentrated.
Mentor, open up channels.

The sense of the wider net came to her instantly, and she could see the ripple in the rest of the assembly as they felt full senses and access restored. Immediately the emergency services group responded to Gabrielle’s signal.

It’s never simple, is it?
She sighed. “And just when I thought we had everything settled.”

“I think we have found a solution,” Saul said kindly, as General Esterhauer was carried away. “Hammering out the exact details and ratifying it may require a few more days, but from this sequence of events it is obvious that there are forces that do not want you to succeed…and that,” he continued, with a fierce twinkle in his eye, “makes
me
even more determined to see to it that you
do
.”