Source Code, page 22
The S’s dragged out, five lines’ worth cutting through the meat of his brain.
Rover rubbed his temple, fingers brushing the still-unfamiliar metal there. “So where are they?” he asked.
The kugu took off, the dragon form’s wing flapping in a way that wouldn’t have cut it for any real animal. Rover followed, curious. Emily steered the kugu down a winding little path. The abiotic airframes here were arranged without any kind of logic. No grid, no set interval, no defined standoff distance, no groupings of like with like.
But the one at the center, the one she was clearly taking him to, was the AWACS.
The AWACS.
Emily was protective of him. All the abiota here were protective of him. Hell, he was one of the reasons why Rover objected to this place being a tourist attraction to begin with.
He didn’t have a name. He hadn’t been active long enough to give himself one.
He was one of the only aircraft who had gotten off the ground before Kadena was leveled, without much crew to speak of, just the maintenance team that had been aboard when he took off.
From there, he had headed south, circling the worst of the fighting. Refueling in the air. Risking the worst of the A2/AD environment. Guiding his ad hoc crew on how to work the more specialized systems aboard. For reasons still not properly understood, he had been able to evade detection by the CCP where almost everything else had failed.
For three days, he’d provided command and control to a wide swath of the theater. But the human crew had been under-provisioned for that sort of flight; they worked the entire event with almost no food, and very little water. The story went that the team had discussed it and agreed to stay up, but who really knew?
He was the one who made contact with the PLA’s abiota.
He was the one who’d brokered the peace.
Or so the story went.
When the fighting was over, the AWACS made his way to the nearest safe airfield, but it wasn’t soon enough. Of the eight people who’d been on him when he’d taken off, only three made it. Dehydration had claimed them.
The AWACS had flown them back to the States. Brought their bodies home. And then, when he’d delivered the final coffin to Ellington, he bricked himself.
The situation with his crew was, and continued to be, highly controversial. But he had been part of the group that ended the Five Days War, and for that, he deserved respect.
Respect was not being used as a goddamn photography backdrop by the local Orpheus Watch cosplay group.
Rover could see their AR overlay; it was open, broadcasting from a bottle server that didn’t have even the most basic modicum of security on it. That added to Rover’s irritation; what the hell was Garcia thinking?
Without stepping into it fully, Rover could still make out what it was. Hangar walls, big open sections looking out over the star field.
Right now, a bunch of them were setting up for some kind of group photo.
They’re idiots, he sent to Emily. At least his brain had worked out the messaging functions pretty quick.
There is disturbance, Emily replied. It stirs here.
“From fucking cosplayers?” he grumbled.
She tossed one of her heads up.
And then, then, Rover realized what she was saying.
Up in the AWACS cockpit.
A light, blinking.
What’s going on? he asked.
Beside him, the kugu’s small engine revved. Emotional overspill. Do not know, Emily told him. Should not be.
Something’s disturbing them?
All of them. The hum from her kugu’s propellers got louder. This was unusual. She wasn’t normally this on edge. They all stir.
Why?
Emily’s AR form whirled around, one head baring its fangs, the other throwing its long neck back to screech at the sky.
Something moved in the AR overlay.
Of course that was fucking it.
Rover rolled his eyes and moved in.
“Okay, enough of this crap, Garcia. Cut the—”
But before Rover could reach the group of cosplayers, he was plunged into a fog.
A moving, writhing, whispering fog. For a moment, the real world vanished completely, and he was alone in a void-dark hangar. Figures moved in the gray, just out of sight, just beyond what the field offered. It was…well, it was creepy.
And it was playing out inside his optic nerves.
“Emily?” Rover asked, voice sharp.
Waking, the dragon hissed.
“Who?”
Everyone.
The aerial kugu settled down in an open spot between the planes, Emily’s form coalescing around it as it did so. Having a dragon in the middle of the docking bay was bizarre. But even in her diminutive form, Garcia knew how much of a threat she was.
“Don’t you dare,” Garcia warned.
One of Emily’s heads stopped only just above the AR bottle. Stop this or I bite, she broadcast, a trailing list of emojis indicating just how eager she was to do that.
“Not cool,” Garcia groaned.
Turn it off, network-keeper, she shot back. The growl infused with the words made his eardrums hurt.
“We’re not doing anything—”
“Sergeant Garcia! Turn it off, that’s an order!”
And that was Rover, UTV parked at the edge of the central display. Striding up. Clearly pissed.
Asshole, Garcia thought to himself, but only to himself. He could practically feel the idiot smiles spreading across the faces of some of his group. There were a few other veterans besides him and Lara, but none of them Air Force.
All they saw was the flight suit.
“I’m not on duty this weekend. Sir,” Garcia shot back.
“Keep it up, I’ll slap you on state orders for the next month,” Rover snapped at him.
Garcia sighed. He could already hear the ass-chewing he was going to get. From Norris if he was lucky. From Chief, more than likely.
Emily coiled one of her heads. Like a snake, ready to strike. Grinning.
“Emily?” Rover said. “Turn it off.”
Garcia dove forward. “No, no, no, girl!” he snapped, and hit the power switch. The hangar bay vanished. Boring old meatspace reasserted itself.
“Not good enough,” Rover growled, right in his face now. “What the hell are you doing?”
“What do you mean?”
“Don’t you see the fucking smoke?”
Garcia shook his head. “The AR’s off, sir.”
Rover blinked, and then shook his head, fingers massaging the area around his NULI. Garcia wanted to ask what the hell he was talking about. Not a good idea right now.
He really did not want to be put on state orders.
“I want you all out,” Rover said. “Right now.”
That earned a chorus of protests from the group.
“You can’t order us out! This place belongs to the Domain Array,” Miranda said. She had her Caledon Penal Regiment officer’s uniform on, complete with the forehead tattoos.
Rover gave her a once-over, not bothering to hide the disgust on his face, and pointed to Emily. “Despite her somewhat comedic appearance right now—”
Regal, this form, Emily protested in everyone’s ear.
“—Emily is the flock matriarch here and what she says goes. If she wants you the fuck out of her field, you leave.” Rover gave the quadcopter kugu a look, and then sighed. “I’ll get the bus back over here for you, you can still enjoy the show. Now, if you all will head back to the shuttle, I want to talk to your”—and he chuckled—“your commander. You too, Lara. Right here.”
Miranda tried again. “Colonel, I—”
“Keep it up, Watts. Keep it up. I know your supervisor over at NASA.” Everybody just stared back. Rover crossed his arms. “Out!” he barked.
Garcia seethed as he watched his friends trudge away to the parking lot.
Lara waited until everyone was out of earshot. “We got approval, sir, we’re not idiots.”
Disturbing the peace, Emily hissed, and bared both sets of fangs.
“I don’t give a shit who signed off on this,” Rover said. “Look up in the AWACS’s cockpit. What do you see?”
They looked.
“Lights?” Garcia asked, incredulous.
Lara bit her lip. “He’s bricked.”
“And now there’s a bunch of weird shit in the AR field that Emily and I can see, but you two can’t,” Rover said. “So pick that bottle server of yours up, Garcia. We’re all going to go take a little trip over to Cyber Surety.”
27
Base Cyber Surety was tucked away in an old grubby building on the periphery of the base, something that had been there long before Vietnam. Nobody remembered why it had been built, what the original purpose of it was. The brick structure was low-slung, small, plagued by damp, unpleasant smells.
But it sat on top of a small rise, the only elevation change to be found on Ellington. It wasn’t much, but even a few feet mattered. It was the only location on the base that had never suffered water damage during a hurricane, never flooded, so that was where the augmented reality servers were.
And it was here Daelia came. To deal with that nightmare out on the airfield.
She’d only gotten a few hours of sleep before Raijinn had blasted one of Dad’s death metal albums through the Scrap House speakers. Its third attempt to rouse her, it said.
Something was happening out in the Repose.
Daelia’s first stop had been out at the mobile tower, right in the middle of the static display area. There, base cyber had the temporary AR overlay repeaters and antennas set up. Norris had already been there, talking to one of the junior enlisted who was running the place, along with a sergeant from the Storm Gryphons team. There wasn’t any sign of interference there, though.
Daelia wasn’t a programmer by inclination, but she understood AR. The problem would be located somewhere in the local servers. She’d said so, and Norris had agreed.
“Do you think we have some kind of virus in the system?” she asked Norris as they walked up to the Cyber Surety building. She almost had to run to keep up with his long strides. She was sweating, the moisture beading under the thicker sections of clothing and under her brace, irritating the skin. Nothing to be done about it.
Nothing on Ellington was really beyond walking distance, but this little fifteen-minute jaunt was about as bad as it got. Hadn’t been worth the detour to get Ginger, or the UTV.
“I’ve got no idea,” Norris said, expression grim, “but if we do, we’re in a lot of trouble. Means something got past the sentry-bots.”
“That seems incredibly unlikely,” Daelia said.
“Shouldn’t be possible. Military’s got the absolute best cyber security outside of Omphalos itself. The bots on the base boundary are state-of-the-art.”
“Still bots, though,” Daelia said.
Most abiota couldn’t exist dispersed over a wide network like that. She’d never heard of an emergent surviving prolonged direct contact with a network—a minute was enough to dissolve one. Predictives fared little better. There were precautions they could take, of course, but it was unwieldy over long periods of time. Bots, while less functional, were far more stable in that environments, and were used heavily across the military for network intrusion detection and prevention.
“I can hear what you’re thinking.”
“And what’s that?”
“We don’t have the team to maintain these things properly,” Norris said. He nodded north, toward the city. “Most Guard bases, you’re stuck in some crappy little town and the base is the best employer out there. Here, we’re the worst. Impossible to keep good people.”
Daelia actually hadn’t been thinking that, but it explained a few things. “We’ll get it figured out.”
But the scene that greeted her in the main Augmented Reality Hosting Suite office was…not what she was expecting.
“Garcia, what the hell are you doing?” Norris groaned.
Daelia just stared.
Right now, he was wearing a full commander’s uniform from Orpheus Watch. It was quality work, she had to give him that. He’d shucked the breastplate armor off, the high-collared jacket unbuttoned to his waist.
The lining was the right color.
He even had the right logo on his undershirt.
Screen accurate.
Really?
“I dressed up like this for you, Sergeant.”
Norris glared at him, a shut-up-or-I’ll-kill-you glare, and turned at Lara, who was right there with him. “You too?”
“We had a meet-up for our cosplay group, Sergeant,” she said, the brown of her cheeks taking on a red flush.
“And wasn’t that a blast?” Rover asked. He was sitting at the end of the worktable, somehow both bored and irritated at the same time. His NULI had a transmission blocker magnetically stuck to it; it looked like a pill bottle taped to his temple. “Where are we with this review?!” he yelled.
Somebody came out of the server room then, huffing with irritation, and stopped cold when he saw Daelia. Swarthy and athletic, head shaved and undershirts always just a little too tight, Senior Master Sergeant Keyes was the kind of senior NCO one only found in the Guard. At least, that was what Dad always said about him.
He hadn’t gotten his job based on technical competence, leadership prowess, or organizational ability. In fact, he was uniquely lacking in all of those. But all the right people liked him, and that had been enough to keep him on full-time status when so many others had quit to go back to civilian jobs.
He was the Cyber Surety superintendent, and Daelia had really wanted him not to be in today.
“I didn’t call BR,” Keys said, blinking owlishly at her.
“The AR’s fucked,” she replied sarcastically. “You may have noticed.”
“Yeah, yeah, of course. The team’s here, trying to figure it out.” He waved a hand at the little group, clustered around the primary antistatic worktables. “What do you have to add?”
“I want to see what’s going on with the TGLP server,” Daelia said.
“I’ll have to clear you with Kemp first and—“
“She stays, Keyes,” Rover said, in a tone that brooked no argument. He folded his arms. “Just pretend we’re not here.”
Keyes, clearly not happy about having a pilot in his workspace, went over to the computer that ran the ceiling-mounted projectors.
Besides the Operations SCIF, the AR Hosting Suite was the most secure facility on Ellington. The thing was a black hole: nothing came in except through the hard lines, and nothing left except after heavy examination from the security bots. As an added precaution, the tiny building was covered by an AR jammer. Everything, ironically, had to be done the old-fashioned way.
Instead of a diagnostic AR field, which Daelia preferred immensely, everything was 2D.
Irritatingly low-tech 2D.
Keyes brought up several different views. TGLP, slowly flowing. Time stamps occasionally punctuated the code, seconds passing infinitely slowly.
The office’s ceiling projectors cast their light directly onto the largest wall. At some point in the past few years, Keyes had had that surface stripped down and painted over with whiteboard paint. Smudges of marker remained, no matter how often or vigorously it was cleaned. The data was shadowed by it.
“So this is the record of the moment out in the Repose—”
“What happened in the Repose?” Daelia asked.
Garcia looked at her askance. “You don’t know about that? Why are you here?”
“The entire fuckin’ airfield is filling up with mist!”
“What?” Rover asked.
“Shit,” Keyes grumbled. “I’ll go check on that too.”
As soon as he was gone, Norris went over to the terminal that was controlling the code and backed it up.
“Here,” he said, jabbing at the wall. “Here’s the problem.”
Daelia squinted at it. She really hated raw code. But even she could see the problem. “Logic’s broken,” she observed.
“It is,” Garcia said, tapping a pen on the surface of the table. “But it doesn’t describe anything. Not what Rover was talking to us about. Not smoke.”
“Or tentacles,” Lara added.
“Tentacles?” Daelia asked.
“What did y’all see out there?” Norris asked. “I’m with Daelia, I didn’t know anything about this Repose crap.” He looked at Rover. “Sorry, sir.”
The 121st commander shrugged.
“It’s there too,” Lara said, nodding at the new view that popped up, the projector turning on. “Code’s wrong.”
Keyes came back in. “We seeing anything?”
“Yeah, a lot,” Garcia said, getting up and grabbing a whiteboard marker. He started circling errors on the wall. “There are things off. All the code’s out of whack. Missing letter here, wrong command prompt there, punctuation shifted…”
Rover turned to Keyes. “Why hasn’t anybody caught this?”
Keys spread his hands. “It’s just me today.”
“You decided to run this by yourself on air show weekend?” Rover asked.
“What, uhh, sir? No, of course I didn’t schedule myself alone. Lara here asked for the day off months ago. Foreth was having car trouble this morning, and Kim had to go to urgent care, ’cause he was puking his brains up.”
“Kim’s a fucking idiot,” Garcia interjected. “Really?”
Lara sighed. “He’s not that bad.”
“Yeah? What about that time he—”
Daelia tuned them out, staring at the code. Something was definitely inside the system. This was what was spooking the abiota. This was what they were all reacting to. But how? “Have you examined the base boundary?” she asked. “Talked to the bots?”
Keyes sounded injured. “Of course. And I’ve got the cyber defense team out at Randolph giving it a once-over too. So far, everything looks good. We’re not seeing any intrusions on the network.”
“And we’ve ruled out some other kind of interference?” Lara asked, glancing over at Rover. “Like, I don’t know, some new area-denial weapon?”
