Aphelion by Mel Keegan

Author:Mel Keegan
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Science Fiction
Published: 2011-02-05T07:00:00+00:00

Chapter Thirteen

Leo Michiko was pale, cold and exhausted, but he was on his feet and sheer fury blazed in his eyes. He was also frightened. Stone saw the ghost of terror for just a moment before Michiko buried it. Harry Del was still deeply asleep when his patient pulled a chair up to a dormant workspace in the corner of the ops room, and took a plate of AutoChef food. At any other time Michiko would have scorned the food, but here, now, he gave Jarrat a mute nod of thanks and ate. Yvette McKinnen was at the adjacent workstation. The CRTs relayed data from her lab, where her processors were discreet, quarantined from the ship’s mainframe. Stone had watched over her shoulder for some time and at last surrendered the attempt to follow what she was doing. Multicolored filaments wove themselves into a Gordian knot so complex, he wondered how the AI she had designed would unravel it.

The program was essentially the same AI she had sent into the archives of the Data Access Corporation during the Scorpio assignment. She had spent three hours nipping and tucking at it, tailoring it specifically for DAC Tokyo, and she seemed guardedly optimistic. The AI was almost ready to go now, she was triple-checking every parameter and attribute against the tight-squeeze entry and exit points in the DAC mainframes. Their hardware was located a hundred meters under downtown Tokyo, but Stone could have guessed that the entry point for the AI would be Itzhak Loyola.

The program had to enter the data conduit from a point outside the home system, and he watched McKinnen remove the current, genuine data tags, and replace them with fictitious tags which identified the search/retrieval application as originating on Sheckley. Node One on the deep space data conduit was much more than a beacon and comm relay station. Like every node in the data chain, it was a monstrous mainframe inhabited, controlled, by a ‘daughter’ or ‘avatar’ of the DAC Tokyo parent AI. Comm packages were received into the data conduit and stored until they had been accessed and downloaded by ships en route, because comm access was usually impossible from within the hyper envelope.

The dual nature of data in the conduit, both static and dynamic, made McKinnen’s work possible. Comm packets were identified by their tags, and unless a security AI actually tracked the incoming search/retrieval application out of the homeworlds and tried to match it with the transmission logs from nodes further out, the incursion was safe.

“I can hack my way into Nodes 2 and 3,” McKinnen was saying, hands still flying over the keypad, “which gives us a hedge. I can’t get further than 3 because of the comm lag. Remember, this work is done in realtime or close to it. Node 4 incurs a lag of more than three hours, and I’d be noticed. It’s suicide. Understand?”

“Perfectly. I waded ankle-deep in this stuff with Tactical.” Stone was always impressed with McKinnen’s expertise. If she had not worked for NARC, she would have been dangerous.

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