******
Haylek felt sore. He was not sure if it was due to the piloting ordeal he had been through earlier, or some side effect from Chorus’ reintegration of his matter. Whatever the case, he longed for a dose of Elation.
Instinctively, he looked toward the area of the room where the boxes of Elation would have been—and then reality hit him. He was not in the safe house anymore; he was on board a pirate ship. He felt disappointed in himself for feeling the urge after having sworn himself off the drug.
The crew had brought furniture into Laina’s quarters for the hackers. They now sat in a cluster of desks situated around each other, with a hologram of the Waterfall display in the center.
He looked over at Freeze and The Doc. Both tapped away at their surfaceboards. Somehow, they had not yet shown signs of withdrawal. Eventually, though, they would, and it could put their mission in jeopardy. He would soon need to talk to Chorus about what they could do to help them.
Earlier they had managed to connect an encrypted wave into the Ocean. They then covertly probed for the Brotherhood’s watermark and established contact with them. With their help, they created a private grid that interconnected all the owned Brotherhood systems together.
This gave them significant processing power that they could utilize for their mission. Now it was just a matter of using what they had learned about the enemy A.I. to devise a program smart enough to track it.
Haylek looked at the Waterfall display, which was showing the Brotherhood’s grid. He keyed a command into his terminal and another hologram appeared adjacent to it. This one showed a three-dimensional cluster of green icons, with yellow and red icons at the outer edges. This was their firewall around the Sea Wolf.
As he watched it, he could see the size and complexity of the firewall growing. The outer web of nodes went from yellow to green, signifying that they became owned. A new sphere of nodes stretched out at the periphery of the hologram, depicted as red icons. This was the new border between them and the rest of the Ocean.
“Okay, Freeze,” Haylek said. “That’s probably enough systems. You can stop now.”
Freeze let out a sigh of relief. “Finally …”
“Good job, Freeze,” Haylek said.
“Yeah,” he responded. “Thanks, you fucking slave-driver.”
Haylek had been pushing him hard to own as many systems as possible. The more systems they had to work with, the better they could firewall the ship against a counter-hack. If someone, or something, should break past their firewalls, they could lose control of their own computers—or worse, lose control of the ship itself.
“Time to proceed with the next phase,” Haylek said.
He pulled up the encrypted conference channel on his station. A hologram appeared showing the avatars of dozens of Brotherhood members. Judging from the amount of bragging going on in the channel, they were all anxious to get started.
“Doc,” Haylek said, “throw the Hound-dog program into the pit.”
“Deez boh-weeeng stuff!” Doc complained.
At this stage of the plan, they didn’t really need for an expert in encryption—so Doc was probably justifiably bored. But Haylek needed to keep his team busy somehow. If nothing else, it would get their minds off their inevitable need for an unavailable Elation fix.
“Hawn-dok trown inta da greed peet!” Doc said.
Haylek watched as the Hound-dog tracker program was put into the grid’s pit—a virtual area in the center of the grid that gave the program access to the shared resources of the Brotherhood grid. From there, it would reach out across the private waves and run in parallel on the thousands of nodes they had owned, giving it massive processing power to run.
The display showed the various stages of execution for the program. Soon the status messages for each stage gave way to a prompt—the animation of a dog sniffing inside a pit. The Hound-dog program was now awaiting commands from his terminal. It was ready.
“Okay, guys,” Haylek said aloud, simultaneously broadcasting his message to the Brotherhood conference. “Stay sharp—we’re about to start sniffing. Doc—execute the ‘Smell’ procedure.”
“Booohhh-wwwweeeennnngg,” Doc lamented as he keyed the command.
The Waterfall displayed a new image: a zoomed out map of the Ocean, with packets of data traversing the waves between nodes.
The packets of data were tiny spheres with different sizes and colors depicting the amount of traffic and type of packet—data or energy transfers. As they traveled, he could hear a faint audible click from each one.
As the program probed farther out, the amount of packets darting between the waves began to accelerate and become blurs of light flashing in every direction. The clicking sound turned into a cacophony tapping.
“Execute ‘Filter Scent’ procedure,” Haylek ordered.
“Blah blah blah,” Doc responded.
Haylek could see the points of light wink out from the Waterfall as the Hound-dog program began to eliminate uninteresting packets from the Ocean map. Soon, what was left were only those waves and traversing packets that fit the signature they were looking for.
“Waverider,” Freeze called. “Something’s wrong with Dazzle’s node. Look at the conference.”
Haylek focused his attention on the conference channel. One of the hackers, Dazzle, was arguing with the group—accusing one of them, Shark, of probing his firewall. A brief exchange of threats went on between them, which ended with a warning by Shark.
“Disband this Brotherhood, or I will devour you all.”
At that moment, Haylek saw Dazzle’s node disappear from the map.
“Doc!” Haylek yelled. “Rotate the encryption algorithm to a new key set! Do not use whatever Dazzle knew about—pass it privately to the conference members—everyone except Shark!”
“Joo got eet!” Doc said.
“Who is this Shark guy?” Freeze mused. “I’m going to counter-hack him—”
“No!” Haylek barked. “We don’t want him on our doorstep.”
“They’re all hitting him,” Freeze said. “Why can’t we join in?”
“Just wait,” Haylek said.
He looked at the conference and saw some threats against Shark now—and some of the members appeared to be probing his wave.
Shark made another broadcast to the group: “I am hungry. Slimsparkle, I’m going to eat you now.”
Slimsparkle’s node soon disappeared from the Waterfall.
“Doc!” Haylek said.
“Yeah! Me know!” Doc responded.
Haylek gave a look at the Waterfall display, attempting to gauge the progress of the Hound-dog program. The Ocean hologram comprised an intricate web of dark blue lines that pulsated with data. The map swelled with each pulse from the heartbeat packet, punctuated by a low audible thump in the background.
The Waterfall showed it had successfully filtered all activity except for the nodes that exhibited the heartbeat packet—the ones that they could use. With a little more time, they may be able to find Chorus’ brother.
Another broadcast from Shark appeared: “My belly is not full. Freeze, I am coming for you now.”
“Freeze—what are you doing?” Haylek asked.
Hearing no response, he looked over to see Freeze in mind-link mode. Haylek tapped to him.
“What are you doing?”
“Sorry,” Freeze said, “I was just probing. I’m getting out now.”
“No, try and slow him down since you’re in there.”
The Waterfall showed the green icons in the periphery of their firewall begin to turn red—first the outermost ring, then within seconds, the next ring. The hack systematically progressed inward, peeling away each layer of protection. In the center was its intended target, the Sea Wolf itself.
Haylek nervously glanced at the other display on the Waterfall: the Hound-dog’s findings on the Ocean. The hologram pulsated with the mysterious heartbeat packet
. The thumping sound was growing louder as the map of the Ocean grew larger. The sight and sound gave him a sudden chill—it was as if an unseen evil was staring back at him from the image.
He shook off the feeling. If only they had more time, they would be able to narrow the location of the heartbeat packet’s source: Chorus’ brother.
Haylek shifted his attention back to the firewall. The green icons were losing the battle as the red ones took their place. Only a few layers of protection remained around the ship’s computers. He queued up the backtrack program and had his finger on the button, ready to begin the program’s execute procedure. Once activated, the program would erase their tracks and shut down the whole grid—severing their connection to the Ocean.
“Waferid’r! Der zumteen in deez hotbeat packet! I zee zumteen!”
Haylek hesitated. “What do you see? Some kind of encryption?”
He saw Doc tapping madly away on his terminal’s surfaceboard.
“Yaz! I go capch’a zum of it. Geef me wang zec.”
Haylek looked at the firewall—the hack suddenly slowed down. He glanced at the status logs and could see that Freeze was slowing it down by counter-hacking and retaking some of the lost systems.
“How much longer, Doc?” Haylek asked.
The Ocean map’s thumping was now deafening and its size continued to zoom out, growing immensely as it tracked the proliferation of the heartbeat packet. The size and complexity of this hack was bigger than anything he had ever seen—Chorus’ brother seemed to be everywhere.
“Me gots enuf!”
Haylek pushed the button, sending the backtrack signal out.
He watched as the backtrack program erased their software and all traces of it from the owned systems.
The Hound-dog avatar, in the center of the Brotherhood pit, dissolved itself. The Ocean map pulsated one last time, one last thump—then it faded away. The Brotherhood conference, and its virtual room of avatars, closed and disappeared.
Finally, the firewall and its web of connected systems and waves winked out. The Waterfall was now completely dark.
“That was close,” Haylek breathed.
Freeze disconnected his mind-link.
“Who was that?” Freeze asked. “Why would someone in the Brotherhood turn on us like that?”
Haylek thought it over and a disturbing thought occurred to him.
“I don’t think that was someone from the Brotherhood.”
“Well, then, who was it?” Freeze asked. “UEP? Confed?”
“Joo dummy!” Doc said. “Eet wuz Choroos’ bruth’a!”
They sat in silence for a moment.
“Okay, guys,” Haylek said finally. “Let’s stay off the Ocean. We’ll start a new build-out in a few hours. In the meantime, you two work on deciphering what we captured. Maybe we’ll get lucky and find something we can use.”
Haylek stood up from his terminal and began heading toward the door.
“Fine, what are you going to do?” Freeze asked.
“I have to go find Chorus. I need to talk to her.”