Easy to Be a God, page 31
“Gotcha!” Darski leaned back in his chair, letting the bored lieutenant look at the display. The red windows reported the detection of a code that wasn’t compliant with the standards of the system.
“Great!” Valdez stood up, stretching his lips into a triumphant smile. Glancing at the reader screen, he beamed even more. He hadn’t expected such early completion of the first phase. “It’s been only four hours, and we already succeeded.”
“True, but it’s only a partial success,” Darski immediately extinguished his enthusiasm.
“Excuse me?”
“That’s the first modification, but certainly not the last. I’m familiar with this system, so I know that you need at least three similar modifications to make absolutely sure that everything will work as it should.”
“As many as three?”
“Sometimes even four or more. It depends entirely on the scale of the changes the hacker wants to introduce.”
“Oh no …” Valdez dropped heavily into his chair.
“Don’t worry,” Henryan comforted him, “now that I know what to look for, locating other changes will take much less time.”
“How long?”
“Sixty minutes, ninety in the worst-case scenario—” Darski paused, seeing Valdez’s uncertain expression. “Watching this junk,” he added, “won’t be necessary anymore.”
“It’s music to my ears.” The sleepy lieutenant grinned. Inaction was killing him; whenever he had nothing to focus on, he slowly zoned out.
“When I detect all the modifications in this terminal,” Henryan assured him, “I’ll use a tracker, which will automatically search for and block any overwritten pieces of code. This way, we will check and clean all the terminals in this sector in just a few hours. They will work as before, responding to the test signals, but they won’t execute any external commands at zero hour. Gods won’t know till the very end that we’ve found and neutralized malicious content.”
“Fantastic!” This time, Valdez responded more enthusiastically.
Darski delayed his next move until the lieutenant’s swollen eyelids began to close involuntarily. Mindless looking at the display, on which a cascade of lines of code flowed, could dull a person’s mind as well as narcotics. The only difference being that drugs worked much faster, and they gave much more colorful visions …
Henryan snapped out of his reverie. Here, that was the best proof of what such a monotonous job can do to a man. Although he had work to do, he began to zone out, too.
Another glance at the lieutenant, and he knew he could start.
“I’m ready,” he said, without turning to his superior.
“Ready?” Valdez mumbled, roused from his stupor. “Can we go now?” he asked dreamily.
“I wrote a scanning program,” Henryan clarified, and showed him a crystal, just removed from a portable encoder.
“Right. Right.” Valdez tried to concentrate.
“Can we start?” Darski moved closer to the console, looking questioningly at his superior.
“Sure …”
Before the sergeant put the pyramid into the slot, he’d felt Valdez’s hand on his shoulder.
“One moment!” the lieutenant said suddenly.
Henryan groaned loudly, so that Valdez heard him, then slowly moved away from the desk.
“What now?” he asked.
Valdez held out his hand.
“I must see what’s on the crystal first.” Seeing the pleading look in the subordinate’s eyes, he explained, “I don’t make the rules, Pry.”
“I see.” Darski handed him a gleaming pyramid, and it went immediately to the lieutenant’s analyzer.
A few minutes later Henryan received the crystal back, and reassured and satisfied Valdez rubbed his eyes, at the same time yawning widely as if to swallow the whole world. That was just what the sergeant had been waiting for. One quick movement of his hand was all he needed to swap the storage devices. An identical pyramid went into the slot, and with it the appropriate software. Five minutes later, the displays showed a message assuring that the terminal is totally secure.
Henryan retrieved the crystal, turned to put it back into its box, but froze in mid-motion, then extended his hand toward Valdez. The lieutenant looked blankly at the crystal that had been swapped for the second time as if he didn’t understand what was going on.
“You’d better keep it,” Darski said, fighting a yawn. “It will save us further controls.”
Valdez nodded, again glancing at the reader screen to check the time.
“Good idea, Pry,” he muttered. “Let’s go. We need to get some sleep.”
Henryan grimaced mentally. Isn’t the lieutenant going to contact Rutta to inform him of the success … ? When he looked down at the display, and saw how late it was, he understood why this point of the plan wouldn’t work.
Too bad … He would have to wait until morning.
Valdez stood up, reached for the reader and walked unsteadily to the door. He stopped, however, before he crossed the doorstep. He let Henryan leave first, looking at him apologetically.
“Wait in the corridor,” he ordered.
“Something’s wrong?” Darski faked concern.
“No, not at all. I just need to report to the old man where we stand.”
The sergeant shrugged as if he absolutely didn’t care.
“Please, hurry …” he said, leaning back against the cold bulkhead. “I’m exhausted.”
Valdez nodded, and went back to the cabin. Henryan smiled slightly when his superior disappeared from sight. Also, he reached instinctively into his pocket and dabbed his headreader. After all, he wouldn’t have to wait until morning to verify the Gods’ message.
FORTY-ONE
The military used two means of communication. Under normal circumstances, cryptograms were conveyed at the speed of light to the courier ships stationed at the entry points—as the hyperspace gateways were called colloquially—and these delivered them to the target star systems, which of course took time. Scientists, therefore, did what they could to come up with alternative means of information transmission, especially across the distances of hundreds of light-years. Thanks to quantum mechanics they managed to achieve half-success. Using the phenomenon of particle entanglement, they perfected the mechanism of data teleportation—a process known (theoretically, of course) already at the beginning of the twenty-first century. This method allowed for conversations in real time, regardless of the distance. This was all very good in theory, practice, however, had shown that there was one fundamental problem.
The Admiralty spent gargantuan amounts of money on research, the Federation’s scientific department kept promising a breakthrough any moment, decades passed one after another, and the hypers, as the quantum communication modules were called, still did not go beyond the initial phase of development.
It was all about the cost of transmission, namely the amount of energy required to teleport data. The principle was simple: the greater the distance, and the “heavier” the message, the more terawatts were necessary for it to reach the recipient. For this reason hypers were used much more rarely than the military would like. They were great for intra-system communications, especially when the messages were sent from the surface of planets, where the loss of a significant amount of energy was not as painful as onboard a ship. This could be illustrated with an example. Let’s imagine that we want to transmit data between objects five light-hours apart, since that is more or less the radius of an average planetary system. The reactors of the mightiest battleships, working at full power, allowed less than a minute of holo transmission, five minutes of primitive audio-visual messages, thirty minutes of audio transmission, or five hundred megabytes of text files. And this with redirecting to the hypers a hundred percent of the power of the mightiest ships constructed by Humankind.
Widespread quantum communications between ships located a few dozen light-years from bases and the headquarters was therefore impossible. At this distance, all the power of reactors would be used up to send just a briefest text message. For this reason hypers were used only to a very limited extent, and placed almost exclusively on the surface of planets, where sources of energy needed to power these monsters were easily available.
Henryan was understandably stunned when he discovered that Draccos communicated with Rutta by way of hypers. Only a moment later, after the first shock faded away, he remembered the fact that there were three huge plants processing helon ore in the Sturgeon Belt, which possessed sufficient energy supply to gratify every whim of the despotic warden.
The history of the correspondence between the two colonels dated back to the day when Seifert had been caught and arrested. A few hours after taking him into custody, Rutta sent a cryptogram to the headquarters, describing the situation and asking about the names of communications officers serving long sentences. Two days later, the Admiralty handed him over a short list of candidates. Only three inmates in the Federation’s penal colonies had a level-five security clearance—Darski among them. The other two were sent to the mines for swindling and smuggling. Rutta ran a check on all three, and the next day he presented a request to Admiral Okonera. His choice had fallen on prisoner number seven two one.
It all happened very quickly—a text message was sent via hypers, and it reached Xan 4 just when Darski was getting off the shuttle. Draccos demanded that Rutta rethink his choice, and when the latter told him to fuck off, the former sent an overlong screed, the content of which was most interesting to Henryan.
I’m not sure if you know, Colonel, that our institution is considered one of the harshest penal colonies. We are dealing with the worst villains that ever donned a uniform. The man, for whom you asked the Admiralty, is one of them. He is an unscrupulous killer. He shot his superior in front of the commodore and almost the entire officer corps. What’s more, he never apologized for this act, neither did he express his remorse, although the investigation showed that he had killed a totally innocent person who, let’s not forget, hadn’t done anything to earn such a fate. And that’s not all, because the list of heinous crimes of this apostate is long. Yes, it’s not the only crime that prisoner seven two one can be accused of.
By submitting attached relevant documents, I wish to inform you that while serving a sentence in our institution, the abovementioned inmate committed a series of murders. We are talking here about a very intelligent villain who knows how to plan a murder, and knows how to cover his tracks. It is only because of this that he hasn’t yet stood before another tribunal, but believe me, it’s only a matter of time. Our investigators are collecting evidence related to three homicides that we can assign to him with absolute certainty. We are also working on six further cases where the perpetrator could have been seven two one.
That’s the man you will have to deal with. I don’t understand why seven two one was selected, I only know that he was promised an early release if he performs a top secret assignment. This promise is a mistake, a huge mistake, which I’m trying to make you realize. I’m appealing to your sense of honor, and I’m asking you to consider the following:
Within the next week we will submit factual evidence to the Admiralty, on the basis of which it will be possible to charge prisoner seven two one for the first of the three alleged acts (please refer to the attached documents, you will see that the evidence, though circumstantial, is unambiguous). We have not impeached him yet, because initially we wanted to gather enough evidence to press charges in all the cases at the same time, so that the court would finally see him for who he really is (we are also working on the other six cases, but gathering evidence requires a lot of time). Unfortunately, your request to release him prevented us from wrapping up a sting operation that we had been planning for some time, and by which we wanted to obtain the proof of his guilt.
I do not know what prisoner seven two one is up to now, or how much freedom he enjoys, but of one thing I am certain: this man will do anything to avoid a return to prison. Anything. If you stand between him and his freedom, he won’t hesitate even for a moment. We are talking about a ruthless sociopath, who will stop at nothing to escape the law. Human life doesn’t mean anything to him.
He can’t know he’s going to get arrested again, because there is a justified concern that he will kill someone or try to take his own life. Prisoner seven two one is well aware of the fact that this time the judges will not allow themselves to be deceived, and will impose the capital punishment, that is determinate life sentence: imprisonment in the harshest penal colony along with forced labor in its helon ore mines.
My proposal is therefore as follows: Please keep prisoner seven two one until a new indictment is submitted to the court, even if he completes the assigned task before that. I have already spoken about this with Admiral Okonera, who has assured me that the command will recall their promise if the evidence proves to be sufficiently reliable, and this should not be a problem. Any day now we expect to get testimonies that will confirm most of the circumstantial evidence discovered so far.
I’m begging you not to do anything that would put you in danger. You must only make sure that prisoner seven two one doesn’t know that he will be prosecuted and convicted again. At the time of the issuance of a new arrest warrant, we will send a set of codes to your cell of Security Department, activating a big surprise that we normally offer each of our wards. Only in this way can we be certain that this degenerate does not escape justice. And I can assure you that—if he sensed he was in for trouble—he would give you hell.
As you can see, Colonel, no action is required from your end. Just make sure that prisoner seven two one is busy until my people enter the stage—
Henryan swore internally. From the letter it was absolutely clear that the warden didn’t intend to let it go. A glance at the attachments made the sergeant realize that Draccos had planned a really nasty surprise for him. Darski was going to get framed for the death of several suicides. The evidence had been manipulated so that everything pointed to the deliberate act of a third party, which the investigators believed him to be. Interestingly, he was also credited for the perpetration of misconduct in the cases he hadn’t even heard of. All that didn’t matter, though. The tribunal would perceive him through the prism of these documents, and that meant sure life imprisonment.
Ain’t gonna happen, Darski thought, convinced that thanks to access to Rutta’s private correspondence he could anticipate every move of the warden. But he soon felt anxiety emerging from the deepest recesses of his subconscious. He read the letter once again, and suddenly he broke out in a cold sweat. What exactly was this big surprise Draccos mentioned? What were the codes for? The ones this slimeball intended to send to the local esdees?
Henryan straightened up, trying to unravel the mystery, but nothing came to his mind.
He got up from his bunk and walked around the cabin for a moment, not knowing what to do with himself. He beamed only when he caught sight of the terminal. With a few flicks of his fingers he contrived a holographic image of Zaitsev.
“We need to talk,” Henryan said.
The black gendarme, jolted out of sleep, rubbed his eyes fervently.
“At this hour?” he croaked, not hiding his surprise.
Darski realized it was the middle of the night. This case was really starting to get to him.
“No,” he said hastily. “I’ll see you in the mess hall. Six hundred hours sharp.”
FORTY-TWO
THE XAN 4 SYSTEM, X-RAY SECTOR
09/15/2354
Following the shift changeover, he couldn’t sit still. Zaitsev said in the morning that he would do his best, but couldn’t vouch for the results. And this was now the most important thing for Henryan.
“Why don’t you deign to look where you’re supposed to, you gloomy yokel.”
Darski flinched at the sound of a familiar female voice that came from behind him. He turned in a flash. The furious shifty little eyes of Dr. Godbless looked at him from above the console pad.
“I beg your pardon, madam, I’m putting you through to the colonel right now.”
“To hell with your colonel,” the head of scientific department snorted. “I want you to send cameras over all the Suhurian settlements.”
“Over all of them?”
“Am I slurring?” she asked someone who was standing out of the holocameras’ line of sight.
Both of them, however, heard the chorus-like response.
“This may take a while …” Henryan noticed.
“Do you, soft willies in ridiculous jackets, know how to count at all?” Godbless bellowed. “What do you mean ‘a while’? Five minutes, ten … ? Maybe fifteen?”
“Probably thirty—” Darski began cautiously.
“What?!” she screamed.
“Dr. Fukkuya—”
“To hell with Dr. Fu—” She didn’t let him finish, but immediately fell silent, too, noticing that she had gone too far. “I’m not going to listen to any half-witted excuses. Cameras. Over all the settlements. Now!”
“I’ll do what I can,” Henryan promised, terminating the connection.
He located the available capsules with cameras, and then reassigned them quickly to specific positions. Dr. Fukkuya had asked earlier for a dozen additional nanobots to intensify the observation of the caves, where offerings were still being made. Valdez, who liked taking the easy way out, ordered to transfer the equipment from the nearby settlements, which meant that now Darski had to fetch the cameras all the way from the orbit. It had to take time—the first sets would appear above the savages’ shacks in a few minutes, the last ones would reach the designated places after nearly thirty minutes. Henryan couldn’t do anything about that. Just in case, however, he prayed that this time Godbless would get it through her head that the military wasn’t at fault, and instead of telling him to go to hell, would crack down on her colleague.
