Just checking to see if I can post 2 threads today...OK, it works. Please note that the forum ate all my quotation marks, so if something looks odd, it's really not my fault
Part 3 - Milo and Sylvan
Twenty stories above the small single bed, rain pattered lightly against the roof of the tenement block that Sylvan and his little brother, Milo, had been sharing for nearly two years now. Although it was a council flat, they had gone to great lengths to get it fixed up and inhabitable since they'd moved in, and now it provided comfortable lodgings for the two unemployed twenty-somethings.
Sylvan was tossing and turning in his sleep. For the last few nights, he'd dreamed about something enormous and menacing, barely seen, but always presenting a very real danger - these vague dreams frustrated him, and he worried that he was taking too many of his own little chemical cocktails of late. Gotta cut back on those Molotovs, he thought to himself as he slipped out of the exceedingly untidy bed and padded into the kitchen/dining room/lounge/study area of the flat. There, on a single, somewhat grubby old Formica table, sat The Beast. Every time Sylvan talked about his computer, you could almost hear the capital letters in its name. Although it was simply a truly jacked-up box, Sylvan was inordinately proud of it - he had lifted the microprocessor array from a High Street store himself, at great risk of being busted by an automated face-recognition program running on the surveillance cameras.
Now he sat down in front of it and lightly touched the keyboard. Sylvan was somewhat of a stickler for tradition in a universe populated by teenaged hacker Gods, and his ancient Fuzzz keyboard was testimony to this fact - there was no shop that sold this particular type of keyboard anymore, save perhaps for the occasional second-hand store down town, but even so, they were very rare. Appearing to be a somewhat plain old-fashioned touch-typing keyboard, of the type that had been connected to computers since the 1960s, it had a large, flat touch pad instead of a numeric keypad on the right - the touch pad could recognize hand gestures and finger movements and also doubled up as an ordinary numeric keypad when required. Sylvan found that this little accessory was a very, very fast way to navigate the vast plains of the Web, and he used it constantly, and lived in fear of the day the touch-sensitive cells in the pad gave up the ghost, which they were bound to do sooner or later.
Today they seemed to be functioning pretty well. His fingers made little swirling locking and unlocking motions, and the keypad recognized his special password, unlocking the administration console for him to begin his day's work.
Dark brown hair complemented the gentle curves of Sylvan's cheekbones - he was certainly not a typical masculine man, with his naughty boyish grin and twinkling violet eyes. He's spent a ridiculous amount of money on those eyes, back when he was working as a government-paid spy in the former Communist Republic of China, and he could still remember the way they had ached as the custom nanobots injected special ribonucleic sequences into the genes of his iris cells over a period of a week. He had emerged with green eyes, which rapidly become violet, and stayed that way. It was a quite striking effect.
For the past few weeks, Sylvan had been trying to break into a particularly difficult box that was apparently located in Chechnya, a place where the law enforcement was notably lax, and this paved the way for a multitude of dodgy enterprises, such as the one this mysterious box, which his crew had labelled 3Mamma, appeared to be engaged in. Snooping using hijacked routers and switches, Sylvan's crew had discovered that the box regularly spoke to only certain very specific machines, most of them in high orbit, and appeared to be hiding some very valuable secrets. All of the machines it communicated used military-grade encryption for their transmissions, and the chances were slim to dwindling of breaking into 3Mamma using a spoof transmission due to this fact. But Sylvan had figured out a way to do it. He'd awoken just in time - his cell phone would have begun beeping minutes ago, reminding him to wake up and be ready. Over the course of the last three weeks, the ragged members that composed the crew of which Sylvan was the lead cracker had noticed that the same machine always logged in at exactly this time in the morning.
Much negotiation had been required to get access to a very specific router that lay on the outskirts of Chechnya, that the mysterious military machine normally used specifically to communicate with 3Mamma. There were no other routers providing access to that specific part of Chechnya, which was still not the most connected of countries, even in this age of ubiquitous computing. The Chechnya boys who "owned" the router had been reluctant - Sylvan suspected that they knew exactly what his crew wanted that router for. But, as Sylvan's father had always said, money speak every language very delicious, and they had caved after a sizeable and quite untraceable transfer of money had been made into their bank account. 20 minutes was all they had - then the router would revert control back to its owners in the Chechnya highlands.
Sylvan had written the blocker program himself - it was his masterpiece, and had required nearly sixteen pots of strong black coffee to prototype, implement, and test. It was a very vicious program - he had hooked up sixteen extra Matsushita "Hintoi" Generalized Parallel Processor matrices to The Beast the week before to allow it to run at something approaching it's true power. Sticking out like long, thick and very grey middle fingers from the rear of The Beast, the Japanese GPPM blocks looked vaguely phallic. Since the dawn of cracking, back in the days when actual insects still presented sizeable hazards to the pioneers of computing, computers had been female. Nobody quite knew why - Sylvan suspected it was just because many of the people who knew these machines so intimately equated their vagaries with the often extremely unpredictable moods of the opposite sex, but he couldn't tell for sure. Such things were lost in the mists of time, or at least only remembered by people in retirement homes.
Numbers whizzed across Sylvan's huge twenty-five incher LCD panel as The Beast slotted in the blocker program. Technically, it wasn't really a blocker - Sylvan wasn't sure that a phrase existed that could describe its function. Smart Phage was the name he had coined as he was writing it - it was a bit like a very smart virus that impersonated another computer, to devious intent. Today he would live to see the power of this masterpiece, which he was sure would go for a very good price on the open market before everyone else started using it and it became Just Another Utility.
Seconds passed, and then a single LED began to glow in the front of Sylvan's box. It was one he had hooked up himself - soldering was a skill that was falling out of grace now that motherboards came sealed into a block of silicon to protect them against abuse, and could be reproduced more cheaply than they were repaired. All that the little blue LED indicated was that The Beast was now connected to all 16 of the GPPMs, and that the phage was ready to execute, its awesome processing power held in check only by a few small plastic keys and one rather groggy programmer.
At the peripherals of his vision, Sylvan noted that the rest of his crew were present and monitoring the situation - some of them were performing sentry duties, watching for unusual traffic on the nodes of the Web surrounding the Chechnian focal point of today's attack.
Smiling, Sylvan pressed the Return key.
*
Three hundred kilometres high in the ocean of vacuum that forever holds Terra in an icy grip, something extraordinary was happening. Shaped a little like a squat stack of black Lego blocks with rounded edges, the twenty centimetre tall military satellite began to broadcast a distress signal to a location that coincided exactly with high lunar orbit, although to the casual eye it seemed like there was absolutely nothing there. Nothing like this had ever happened before, and the weak AI executing on the ageing processor mesh that occupied the lion's share of the satellite was concerned. The message was very terse, and took less than a picosecond to transmit, but Allyssa station only got the message an instant later, due to the speed of light that hindered ordinary radio messages.
*
Fingers hummed on old-fashioned keyboards across the planet as the Sylvan's crew coordinated and developed the attack. None saw the numbers, the IP addresses, the subnet masks - in fact, few even had their eyes open. Few were brave enough to watch, but they knew their duty and they did their jobs well. Spearheading the glittering binary mask of the phage was a slew of containment proggies, DDOS utilities, all aimed at subverting and exposing the core of 3Mamma to enable the crew to work her over in the 20 minutes that they had.
*
Allyssa's main Security Division was roused by the little satellite in High Earth Orbit twenty seconds after the attack. Inside the perfectly controlled air of the orbital, alarms echoed down the thinly carpeted corridors, and systems operators were roused from their sleep, to jump up and run into the Security Division.
When they got to their seats, they realized what was happening. Allyssa orbital's processor core, a third-generation Malay design, wrought in thirty seven meters of unified organic silicon processors, and also executing one of the largest Artificial Intelligences ever created by human minds, was under siege. It seemed like the attackers were coming in on every transmission at once - but the operators knew this was a falsehood, quite probably the work of a single program, a hitherto unknown combination of virus and incredible timing.
Working feverishly, the operators tried to shutdown all external communications, and to hell with the Ordinals. Even with the very advanced technology that the Ordinals had supplied them, Allyssa orbital's processor mesh was still in charge of the life support system, and if that was taken over, all of the three hundred people on the station were fucked, would in fact probably die choking on their own vomit as they ran out of O2.
*
This was going better than Sylvan had dreamed possible. Once they had gotten past the encrypted password locks, 3Mamma had been laid out before them like so much candy, and his crew were going insane locking things down, running rootkits, and otherwise nicely patching things up for a second run later on, when the dubious sysadmins who ran 3Mamma would undoubtedly think they were safe again. Sylvan ran a sysdiag on 3Mamma, and found that she had unexpectedly large amounts of available processing power - he had never, in actual fact, seen that many zeros in the Available Processor Cycles column of the datasheet before in his entire life. It took quite a lot to impress Sylvan, and today he was astonished.
A thoroughly debauched idea occurred to him - why not run the Phage on this processor instead? Before he could think it through, he ran a shell script that upped the Phage into 3Mamma's main memory pool, and his finger hovered over the key that would execute the Phage for far less than a tenth of a second. For some reason, he couldn't bring himself to do it. He had a very bad feeling about what would happen if he did run the Phage on this process0r - the Phage had a nasty habit of consuming every available processor cycle, and what if 3Mamma was doing something important, like controlling a nuclear reactor or a missile silo?
He stopped Phage, and then they were all left in darkness as the Chechnians took back their router. Opening up a protected IRC channel, Sylvan said:
Did we do everything neccessary?
Moments passed, and then a single reply came back and the connection closed itself:
3Mamma is ours (:
In his room, Milo whimpered in his sleep and rolled over.
Part 4 Tormentor of Angels
Tonight the stars shone coldly above Vesper, which was the name the UNPC High Commander had bestowed upon the small atmosphere-capable dropship that could carry sixteen men with a degree of comfort. Dumpy and inelegant in their default hull configuration, but nonetheless a very flexible cargo and crew carrier, the small military dropships were the pride and joy of the men and women who rode in them, day after day.
Macs crew had seen action several times in the past couple of weeks, and the Captain had felt it fitting that they get a bit of rest, so he had pulled a string or three and gotten his team assigned to a sub-orbital watch that normally entailed nothing more than being available at extremely short notice anywhere on the planet in case another striker team needed backup. Incidents where a single striker team composed of about sixteen people couldnt handle a job were quite rare, which was why his entire team had heaved a unanimous sigh of relief when hed told them about the new assignment. For a week, theyd be cooling down in the stratosphere, catching up on sleep and mending the wounds theyd incurred during the last three weeks.
Tumultuous times those last three weeks had been, that was for sure. Even with strikers crisscrossing a point within 300 kilometers of every single square centimetre on Earth, there was still occasionally trouble that they needed to intervene in. Twice in the last week theyd been called upon to squelch minor coupes in unstable Third World countries, which was in itself exhausting work. What made it even more tiring was the fact that they always had to hide themselves from general observation their standard uniform stood out quite drastically from the cloth that normal Earth soldiers usually dressed in. Of course, the chameleon suits were a great help, obscuring them from any trivial kind of observation, but they still werent perfect, and Govcentral had sent word down that several groups of people now knew of their existence and what they were capable of.
Evening came rapidly when you were moving at just under the speed of sound 20 clicks straight up Mac and his crew hardly noticed it. Their full attention was being held either by TV or the snooker table. Quite a few of Macs team had become bona fide pool sharks, and they trounced him regularly, even though hed been playing pool before most of them were born. He bore it with a joking geniality, knowing that the men knew that hed been running sniper missions for The Man when they were still sucking The Teat, as he never ceased reminding them. It was strange for any striker team these days to have more than one First Generation crew member First Gens were becoming a statistical rarity as the people on Allyssa and her sister station, lives accelerated a hundred times by the huge spherical time distortion fields encircling their homes gave birth to children who grew up inside the confines of the Confederation, never knowing Earth until they matured and were old enough to be sent to it, perhaps as part of a striker team or a research or investigation team.
Although there were no windows on the outside of the dropship, the inside walls could easily be programmed to display views of the outside at such a high rez that they were virtually indistinguishable from what an actual glass window would have shown. Windows and other irregularities were impractical on the outside of a machine which used its entire surface area as a giant sensor all the time, and could change the shape of that surface area to whatever it pleased. Some joker scientist who had once worked for an aerospace company had written a clever little program a few years ago that made a dropship extend four dragonfly-shaped wings from its sides and flap them up and down so quickly and so accurately that it could actually hold itself steady and move around like a dragonfly in the air. Of course, the dropship had the disadvantage of several billion times more mass than the insect it was striving to emulate, and as such it tended to destroy objects on the ground with the sheer force which it ripped through the air with when using these wings, so the scientist got a commendation for his work and everybody continued using the standard gravitic lens engines.
No windows were in evidence tonight somebody had probably set them to silently disappear at nightfall, which suited Mac just fine. He was looking forward to getting a good nights rest for a change, and his bunk was beginning to become a very tantalizing option. All of the dcor in the dropship was military-standard, a tradition he preferred there was after all no point in coddling soldiers.
Before he headed for his bunk, he decided to make a last inspection of the ship and check that all systems were working smoothly. Starting at the cockpit, he made sure all the nav systems were functioning, eyes glazing over as huge columns of figures scrolled across the flat panels that showed all the nav info to the absent pilot, who was no doubt already asleep. Although he was not a fan of lax discipline, he knew that the pilot would essentially have been a fifth wheel sitting in the cockpit instances where pilots actually piloted dropships were rare, diminishing towards zero as the programmers on Allyssa perfected the AI control routines for these miniature flying fortresses. Mac was more a pilot than the pilot himself, because the dropship obeyed his orders and his alone, or those of the officer below him in rank should he not be available.
Next he made sure that all of the munitions were bolted down properly probably a redundant task, but it was something he found reassuring. Some of the weapons theyd been given by the Allyssa Special Forces Division were dangerous in the extreme, some so powerful that they could probably take out even a dropship if used skilfully, which was a feat in and of itself. Dropships were so robust that they could withstand megaton nuclear explosions happening only a kilometre or two away, even shielding the crew from the radiation involved, although God knew Mac never wanted to be in that sort of situation again, not after the one his team had barely diffused in the Congo basin two years ago, where there had been a very real possibility of a good fraction of the remaining Congolese forest being turned into a very large parking lot.
Those first few decades, when all the striker teams had still been amateurs, recruited from military bases around the world, had been strenuous ones, filled with fear and the anticipation of discovery. Thankfully, no dropship had been damaged so badly that it was discovered. Back then, few governments had possessed anything that could even damage a dropship, let alone shoot one down. Coated in a millimetre of smart biotanium, a material which according to the science boys was an organic composite that could change shape very rapidly and still retain the strength of a flawless diamond, it was not uncommon for a dropship to fly heedlessly through a heavy-fire zone, machine gun and anti-aircraft bullets glancing harmlessly off the skin as it made its way through war zones. Of course, for a dropship to be seen in the first place was highly unusual only if they were severely damaged were they incapable of keeping the hidefield running.
Finally the Captain reached the Engine Room, really only a fanciful name given to the centre of the dropship by a previous engineer. Growing up in a Western-civilization dominated society, Mac had always imagined an engine room to resemble something out of Star Trek, with a huge streaming plasma beam centred in a room filled with technicians tending to the every need of the engine. Dropships had no such luxuries the engine was encased in a meshwork of metal woven between it and the hull by trillions of nanobots, clamping it firmly to the hull of the dropship. Considering the forces that little cube of darkly glistening metal could exert upon the dropship, this was a comforting thought. Beneath the first drive sat the second, a backup used if exorbitant amounts of acceleration were needed. Mac couldnt recall the last time the dropship had needed the backup drive it really sapped the electrolytic foam batteries to use both at once, doubling the rate of power discharge. Electrolytic batteries were integrated into just about every non-utility part of the ships hull, tiny pockets of quantum foam into which billions of volts of electricity had been pumped by Allyssa station. Allyssa manufactured 3 different vehicle classes, A, B and C. Macs dropship was a Class C, which meant that its internal power sources could last a very long time, but that its engines were powered from stored power, not power generated by an onboard fusion reactor. Their reactor was too small to provide the brute force needed to move the dropship around, so they recharged their batteries at regular intervals. Spreading the millions of tiny batteries through the hull of the dropship meant that they could take a severe pounding and remain flying, as long as the drive wasnt destroyed. Theoretically their reactor could generate enough power to fly the dropship without batteries, but that would mean everyone on board would have received a lethal dose of radiation by the time the drive could reverse gravity powerfully enough to move the dropship upwards, and to attain any decent speed would mean instant death for any human on board. The reason theirs was a Class C ship was that there was no space for the bulky radiation shielding required to survive the gamma rays emitted by an Ordinal reactor functioning at high energy output levels. On larger ships there was enough space for that, but not theirs, so they flew by the seat of their pants. Thankfully the energistic potential when all the dropships batteries were fully charged was sufficient to fly them into orbit and back six times, and around the world almost twenty times, with some help from aerodynamics.
Mac took a last glance at the crowded, brightly lit interior of the engine room and meandered off to his room to catch a bit of shuteye before tomorrows drills.
*
Captain Mac had been asleep for only half an hour when a dazzling mazer beam, composed of microwave radiation oscillating at an extremely specific frequency, sliced neatly through the middle of the dropship, completely destroying both the primary and secondary drive units, and shorting out almost two thousand electrolytic batteries. Freed from its confines, the electricity sparkled on the slightly conductive exterior of the dropship for a few seconds, briefly disabling the dropships hidefield.
Endorphin-analogues crashed into Martines mind, rocketing her into full consciousness uncomfortably fast. Panic drilled into her as her optic implant chips emblazoned almost every inch of her vision with glowing red warning blocks, system readouts showing imminent failure. Her practised eye scanned the list and she realized what had happened somebody had struck the dropship, disabling and melting every system across the centre of the fuselage, and worst of all, their attackers had destroyed both of their drives and damaged the low-power reactor used to shapeshift the hull of the dropship. In so doing, the enemy had succeeded in turning Vesper into a 17-ton paperweight stuck at an altitude of 30 kilometres.
Quick as a snake, Martine checked the biostats for the other crewmembers. Luckily, no bunks had been in the path of the mazer beam, although she suspected a few of her team might have incurred burn wounds from hot metal dripping onto them from the melting ceiling. If it hadnt been for the reflexive healing action of the outer hull, the dropship would have fallen apart, split neatly into two halves, like a metal coconut.
Captain Mac stuck his head through her door and shouted, Were evacuating ship, get out, move, move, MOVE! Suit up and meet us at the rear airlock! then popped back into the narrow, brightly lit corridor. Martine hurriedly pulled off her shirt and pants and wriggled into the thin, sticky fabric of her combat suit, feeling it loosening and then tightening around her as it activated and began functioning. Lungs tightening, she realized that they mustve started losing air pressure inside the dropship already she was having difficulty breathing. With a sigh of relief, she zipped up the front of her suit and grabbed a helmet from the repair slot outside her door. She noticed that all six of the other helmets had been removed, which was a good sign her team was complete. Cool, firm air greeted her an instant after she sealed the helmet to the neck of her suit and began running towards the rear of the dropship.
When she arrived at the airlock, she saw Anton standing by the hatch, ready to cycle the outer atmosphere and crack open the wide yellow-painted door, which could be blown open in an emergency. Covered in warnings in 16 languages, the door was their only chance to escape the doomed dropship. Underneath her feet, strange vibrations had set in, air thickening and tugging at the dropship as it fell.
Right, thats everyone. We leave the airlock one by one, current altitude is 25 thousand metres, and optimal drop rate at this position will give us 2 minutes 30 seconds fall time. Keep coms to a minimum, wait for my signal, Ill say where we should reconvene, but time me out at 4 minutes after I hit the sand. Got it? Captain Mac said, voice rising automatically over the rising wail coming from the hull of the dropship, even though their suit coms reproduced it more than well enough. He sounded considerably calmer than she felt he should be, seeing as how he was talking about their lives in a blas way.
Time ran out for them then, and Anton slammed the emergency open switch down, machine-enhanced muscles triggering a tiny explosion outside. Six circles of hull fabric were torn away, and then the airlock followed, a meter and a half wide, taking nearly three square meters of hull fabric with it. Martine knew from her readouts that the dropships automatic repair routines had been disabled, so they would not have to worry about bouncing off the inside of the hull when jumping out. Anton flipped in the microgravity they were experiencing as a result of the fall and slid out of the screaming airlock hole like a fish into a tidal pool, smoothly slipping out into the empty sky. Following him barely an instant later was Avette, Matty, Sam, and then it was her turn. She gave Captain Mac one last look, seeing her suit reflected in his silky visor, and then pushed herself out of the airlock, struggling against the powerful wind blowing through it now. Captain Mac sped out of the airlock behind her, and then they were all alone in the sky. Having done a few trail paratrooper runs during her training, she had no trouble selecting the paratrooper routines using her cortex implant, and the dropships status readouts scaled themselves down and shrank into a corner of her sight. All that mattered now was opening her parawing once she reached terminal velocity. They had little time to reach the ground, and she knew that they were sitting ducks in the sky.
Exactly one minute and three seconds after Captain Mac exited the dropship, her cortex implanted opened her parawing for her, and she grimaced as the suit dug into her shoulders, stiffening and compressing against her as the wing fought with the air for a few seconds, then stabilized, and she was gliding. Although she was moving very fast, she was now in control of her descent again, and it was a relief to know that the ground was no longer a certain death, but only an obstacle. Beneath her she saw four identical black triangles slicing through the thin night air, heading towards the rendezvous point.
Where are we? she asked her cortex implant. It flashed back:
Current Location: Braamfontein, Johannesburg, South Africa, African Continent.
Heading: Northeast
Speed: 210 kph
Edited by - SYN on 9 December 2002 2:32:2