“By their programs shall ye know them,” Simeon intoned, suddenly wishing that he had not made the construct he inhabited in this virtual reality quite so vividly lifelike. He could definitely do without the dry mouth, pounding heart, and sinking stomach right now, for example. He could change the setting, but that would deprive him of one more slender advantage: his familiarity with it. So long as the matrix remained, the intruder had to fight on his terms.
“These people are not going to garner many SUM’s,” he said resolutely, and stepped forward, raising his shield. Central awarded Social Utility Marks to a number of unlikely people, but this would really be stretching the bounds of possible recipients.
“Come on, you bastard!” he shouted aggressively. “Nobody hurts my dog!”
The worm program struck. Simeon groaned, stamped his feet into the ground, and braced his shoulder against the shield. Data/fangs gnawed at it, recoiling with a sound like frying bacon amid choking clouds of green vapor. His bat flailed, knocking aside eye-tentacles and tongue-wasps. For a long subjective time there was only batter and strike, leap and wiggle and dodge. The oozing serrated mouth loomed in constant menace. It wants to swallow my pattern whole and assimilate it in one gulp! Tongue-worms flicked alarmingly around his head. They would subvert the Master Control Programs with their probes. He continued to flail the wasps out of the air, stamped them underfoot, swung the bat, and an eye exploded in a shower of black syrup like a giant overripe fig. Finally, the worm recoiled for a moment, and Simeon whirled aside and fled, dodging and jinking through the maze.
Got to keep it off-balance, confused, he thought, listening to its triumphant screeching hard on his heels. Every muscle in his “body” already felt bruised. But it was more satisfying that way, too. Knowing you’d disorganized a section of code wasn’t nearly as much fun as seeing blood—or ichor, in this case—fly and feeling flesh pulp under a blow. The howl sounded again, closer.
“Talk about your slash-and-burn data collection,” he gasped in time with the pounding of his stride. What sort of maniacs would let something like this loose inside an information system? It had to be destroying as much as it gathered.
Got to make it think it’s won, eventually. Isolate it in the outer subsystems of the computers, keeping the ultimate control-keys behind barriers the worm thought were the edge of the entire system. Otherwise, it would infest the whole system, like maggots in rotting meat. Including his own mind, unless he committed suicide by severing all connections between his organic brain and the data system.
That was an unfortunate image. He flashed back to the refugee ship and the dead Bethelites, their bodies moving with burrowing life.
I will pull the plug first, he thought grimly. Theoretically, it was impossible to self-destruct the station. In practice, he probably could. Win or die.
“Raaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!” the worm screeched.
“As Channa would say, eat shit and die.” Simeon panted the words out as he turned a corner and took a stance again. Thorns and leaves flew into the air as the data-worm tried to smash directly through to him. Then there was a huge splat sound and a wailing cry of pain as it ploughed into the stone core of the hedge. That persuaded it to come around the corner. It seemed larger; frothy pink blood streamed around the working, palping mouths. Some of the teeth had shattered on stone, but they regenerated as he watched. The worm’s approach made the ground shake. Behind him, he could hear the wuffle and growl of the AI, setting new barriers and deceptions.
“Step right up, lay right down!” Simeon bellowed. Don’t worry about the others. This is going to take all your attention for a while.
“Raaaaaaaaaaaaa!”
This time the gravity bounced them about as the lights flickered. Belazir turned to the technicians with a well-controlled snarl of impatience.
“What now?”
“Great Lord, there is unexpected resistance. We thought the worm was successfully penetrating the Master Control programs, but they wiggled free. We are making progress, but the AI is exceptionally agile—the parallel—”
Belazir cut them off with a gesture. “I am interested in results, not jargon-laden excuses. Grasp the core in your fist, and quickly.”
He turned back to his prisoners. What naked faces they have, he thought. In a new conquest, it was often so. Those who survived long learned better, but it could be entertaining.
Reports of the station’s assets and supplies were flooding in.
Better than I expected, he thought exultantly. Far better. Unimaginably rich! This facility could build dreadnoughts, given a little time and the plans which were available in the Clan’s computers.
The High Clan’s greatest weakness was the lack of large purpose-built warships. They could turn out frigates, more or less, but for larger craft they could only modify captures. No cobbled-together merchanter could rival the performance of real battlecraft. A warship was more than a ship with weapons and defense-systems: it was a single organism, almost living in itself. Must we abandon the shipyard? The frustration was as agonizing as the satisfaction of taking the station was euphoric, with its destruction as a second orgasmic “hit.” On the other hand, possession of such equipment would cut generations from the great plan, the spreading of the Divine Seed of Kolnar and the power of the Clan.
Even worse was the humiliation the Clan had suffered for too long. The human galaxy teemed with such prizes, yet the Clan fleet must skulk about the outworlds, gnawing discarded scraps: border worlds, miserable settlements of poverty-stricken exile, like Bethel. Skulk like jackals, even as they had been driven from their lands and possessions on their ancient homeworld. Gnawing poor bones, while feasts like this lay spread before them. Intolerable! It was not to be borne!
His pleasure dissolved. “You have maintained physical separation?” he asked, his irritation at this check palpable.
The technician ducked his head. “Of course, Great Lord. No data enters our machines from this system save by hedron. All such hedrons are first analyzed to the last byte of information. Our duplicate backups are kept powered down and physically severed while any captured data is running.”
Belazir nodded. “Continue,” he said, satisfied that elementary precautions were being taken. You will suffer, you will suffer, ahhhh, how you will suffer, he thought, barring mental teeth at the universe that stood between the Clan and its apotheosis. All of them would writhe in the fist, one day. “You have a preliminary report?”
“Affirmative, Great Lord,” the technician said.
Why can technicians never use a simple word where their accursed slang can be stretched to fit? Belazir wondered as he heard the technician out.
“We captured the message logs in the first penetration, before the AI reacted. No nonroutine messages to Central, except the arrival and spontaneous destruction of a large, mysterious ship. Little evidence was left. Central said they would search their files.”
With a white-toothed grin, Belazir condescended to give a nod in reply. “Excellent! Order: launch the message torpedo. Summon the transports, all that can be spared; also personnel for the disassembly.”
He looked around at his fighters, smiling. “Well done. We will settle in, drinking the prey dry and eating it to the bone at our leisure. Staff, draw up a preliminary plan to strip as much as possible as quickly as possible and load efficiently when the transport arrives.”
Smaller, high-value loot would go to the victorious flotilla, of course. He would have to arrange priorities: priorities that would give the Bride the first and best pick, and’t‘Varak’s Age of Darkness the last and worst, of course.
Part of his attention had been on Serig’s interrogation of the prisoners. He brought his head up, smiling at the executive officer’s wit.
“He says,” he translated for the benefit of the scumvermin Serig had been taunting, “that he will explore your internal environment, Environment Systems Officer Coburn.”
No! Channa thought hard at her. Don’t resist, Pa
tsy!
The older woman’s broad fair face was flushed, red spots on her cheeks showing her rage. The pirate reached a hand down her shirt and squeezed a breast casually.
Patsy spat in his face.
Channa started to rise. Belazir jabbed a precisely calculated toe into her bruised stomach. She collapsed to the deck again. The pirate grabbed her ear in strong, almost prehensile toes and forced her head around.
“Watch, scumvermin,” he said pleasantly. “And learn not to defy the High Clan.”
Behind her there was a flurry as Amos tried to rise again. A Kolnari pounded her heel into the small of his back over the kidneys and he collapsed with a stifled shriek, thrashing. Nobody else moved.
Simeon, she thought desperately. Simeon!
Serig touched his face where the spittle ran and spoke in his own language. The other Kolnari laughed or grinned, watching with bright-eyed interest. Patsy took advantage of his inattention, lashing out in a kick at his groin. A fist snapped down and met the rising foot with a sound like a mallet hitting rock. Patsy gave a sharp gasp of pain. With bound hands, she was thrown off-balance and staggered back against the coffee table. The Kolnari laughed as she almost fell, stripping away his harness and tossing it aside. The briefs came away with it, memory-plastic rolling up into the belt. The stationer’s clothes followed, torn away as if they were paper while one hand held her immobilized, clamped to her jaw. He stepped back and stood like a licentious Greek statue, gestured.
“Down,” he said in Standard. “Spread.”
Yes, Belazir thought, looking down at Channa. In the end, this one is mine. But not at once. With subtlety.
As a child, Belazir’t‘Marid had been the despair of his mothers and nurses. For all their whippings and shock-rod treatments, for all the day-cycles spent locked in the hotbox, they could never break him of the nasty habit of toying with his “food.”
Chapter Eighteen
Simeon dropped to the ground, panting. Atop the distant mountain, another wing of the castle crumbled and fell into the gulfs below with an earthquake rumble of rock. The worm screamed triumph and wound itself further around the central tower as flames billowed into the darkening sky. A tiny figure stood on the battlements above the monster, waving a bat that glowed iridescent green. Queasy, Simeon switched viewpoints, just in time to see the open maw engulf his pseudo-construct duplicate. The gnashing teeth ripped it into shreds. The illusion faded and his last sight from it was a rushing universe of light and onoffonoffonoffonoffonoff as the code was disassembled and “digested” by the intruder.
Phew, he thought, shakily turning his Jets cap right-side around again. That ought to hold him. For a while, at least. The worm would be here, always probing and testing, as long as the Kolnari battle-computer stayed clamped to the SSS-900-C’s system. Even if he destroyed the program and purged his system, that would merely ring every alarm the enemy had. They’d only launch another worm immediately, with a different configuration. Despite its self-modifying abilities, he knew this one now!
Gently, stepping backward, brushing his footprints out of the sand, he faded from the blasted landscape of cinders, where pustules in the soil spewed line after line of questing wasps.
“The Knight came home from the quest;
Muddied and sore he came.
Battered of shield and crest,
Bannerless, bruised and lame—”
Channa was weeping. That was his first thought, as his “other” awareness flared back. Everything was a little murky, but he could see clearly enough down into the lounge. She was sitting on the sofa next to Amos, head cradled against his shoulder, sobbing with slow misery. Both of them looked battered, as if they’d been thrown from a moving vehicle. Amos winced every time he moved.
“Channa!” Simeon said when a few microseconds of a scan told him the room was safe. A little further adjustment put an innocuous scene on the security system the Kolnari and their computers were monitoring. “Channa, are you all right?”
“Where were you!” Channa shouted, springing erect. “Where were you, Simeon?”
“I was—”
Simeon noticed what was playing over the general channel, again and again, locked in from the command circuits. Nearing the end of one loop, Channa was kneeling by Patsy’s side, trying to staunch the hemorrhage with the scraps of her clothing.
“Please, Master and God, may I summon the doctor?”
“Of course,” the pirate chieftain said. “We are a reasonable people.” A broad smile. “As you see, you were wrong. I am the ‘bad pirate.’ Serig is the worse pirate.”
Simeon blinked back to the present. He felt his automatic feeds cut in, damping down hormonal flows and adrenal glands, filtering his blood. Even so, he came as close to feeling faint as he ever had.
“I . . . oh, God, God,” he whispered. “Shit.” There were no words adequate in any lexicon.
“Where were you, Simeon?”
“Fighting,” he said. “Channa, they put a worm program into the station system. I had to fight it, it was—is—a monster. If I hadn’t, it would have burrowed right into my brain and eaten me. I’d also be under their control and telling them everything they wanted to know. I couldn’t even self-destruct!”
“I see,” Channa said. “Not that there was anything you could have done for us. Excuse me.” She walked quickly into her quarters: he could hear water splashing.
Amos stood, left hand clenched around right fist. “Though they be thieves from their birth, for this, they shall pay,” he said softly, almost to himself. “For Patsy, for Keriss, for my sister and my father’s house and for all they have done, by the living soul of God, they shall pay in full, every jot and tittle.”
Channa came back, her face set harder than Simeon had ever seen it. She waved Amos back and turned to the pillar.
“What damage did you sustain?” she asked in a professional tone.
“Nothing crucial—yet,” Simeon said. “I’ve got to keep a fair share of my attention and the system’s capacity involved in just watching and waiting. That worm program mutates like a retrovirus: the sort that never gives up. I could clean it out—if I dared. Apart from that, I’ve lost about a third of the memory and computational capacity. That’s what could be termed ‘occupied territory’ at the moment. With luck, their computer will keep thinking that’s all there is. It’s powerful but specialized. They haven’t hooked up their ship computers to the station, yet. Probably afraid of us hacking in to them.
“But,” he went on, “I’ve got to be really careful. Any action I take in what they think is safe territory has to be elaborately screened. I can jimmy the records. However, even I can’t make the impossible convincing.”
She narrowed her eyes. “Could you take back those functions in a hurry?”
“Somewhere from seconds to minutes. They’d know pretty quick, and that battle-computer they’ve got jacked in could . . . hmm. Come to think of it, I could probably take that over, too. But they’d know.”
“No problem . . . later. Can we conference?”
“Yeah, I’ve got all of their people under continuous surveillance.”
“We’d better get moving as soon as we can,” she said.
Simeon made an affirmative sound. “Our people are going to be pretty shook up,” he said. I sure am. “We’ve got to get things in hand, before they start lashing out. It’ll take some time though, for a cycle when they’re all available.”
“Good. Let’s get, hmmm, Chaundra, the section leaders, and—” Amos began.
“Everyone’s gone,” Seld Chaundra said in a low and careful voice. “You sure we oughta do this, Joat? Joseph said—”
“Joe can wait a minute, ‘n so can you, carrot-face,” she whispered. “Now keep that thing running, hey?”
He nodded and bent again over the two modules and the jack clipped to the main conduit above them. This way was very narrow—an adult would have to be a dwarf to get through—but it came in conveniently over the
sickbay entrance.
“Look,” he went on, without glancing up. He was still breathing hard from the effort of crawling up the axial ventway. “Look, maybe Ms. Coburn doesn’t need someone else talking to her right now? It’s been less than a day, and—”
“Yeah, I saw the broadcast, too,” she said. She had. Seld had fainted. His meds weren’t doing him as much good as they should. “You stay here.”
She crawled forward, pushing the local sensor-override unit ahead of her. To the naked eye, the cover of the duct was a panel just like all the others. The only real difference was that it was selectively permeable and much thinner. It recessed obediently and Joat looked down into a darkened room. One floatbed, the usual furniture, and a figure under the sheet. She curled herself into a ball and somersaulted slowly through the opening, holding on with her fingertips and then dropping the final meter to the floor.
“You awake?” she said, moving to the bedside. “It’s Joat.”
Coburn’s eyes were open. She lay motionless, but they tracked through the darkness. Joat shone a small light under her own chin. She had procured for herself a very expensive coverall, made of adjustable light-fibers. Simeon had gotten it for her because it was fashionable, but with a little creativity you could rig it to mimic the ambient background color, which was right now a mottled charcoal gray. Her face floated above it in the lightstick’s feeble low-setting glow.
“Go ‘way, Joat,” the woman said in a dull voice. Her face looked old, under the sealant bandages. “I don’t need any more sympathy. Leave me alone.”
“Great, ‘cause sympathy’s not what I’m gonna give you,” Joat said. She brought her face closer to Patsy’s, and her own eyes held the same flat deadness. “Let me tell you something about me.” She explained, in a flat, matter-of-fact tone all about her father, her uncle, the captain.