The Defense of Exeter Station by Thom Bedford

Author:Thom Bedford [Bedford, Thom]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Amazon: B088PPSN87
Goodreads: 53427789
Publisher: Thom Bedford
Published: 2020-06-27T07:00:00+00:00

Chapter Ten

Malware

Ninety minutes later, Sandorn and Durand were in the engineering bay of the Scorpion in full hazard gear. Durand’s legs protruded from a crawlspace while she accessed one of the battery’s maintenance panels directly, interfacing it with her datapad. She searched for the source code for ‘command subroutine 5130867’ that could only be reached from here, though it was hidden behind several layers of abstraction.

Engineering here differed vastly to its counterpart aboard the Kadpass where the pair had spent their last eighteen months. In place of low ceilings, hanging pipes, and a mess of conduits was a spacious deck with plenty of headroom. The main core spanned three decks, and the engineering bay with it, resembling the inside of an underground missile silo. Ten small corridors led off the central chamber, housing various different subsystems.

“Found it!” She called from underneath the battery, her voice slightly muffled in the tight space. “Transferring code to my datapad now…” She continued, followed by a moment of silence, then: “Alright, coming out…” She wriggled out of the crawlspace, stood back up, shook herself off, stretched, then started tapping at her datapad. “Right, got the source code, let’s take a look…” She said to herself, though the invite was open to Sandorn as well who placed himself at her shoulder, looking down at the datapad while she scrolled through.

The datapad was a mess of text, boxes, arrows, and more text, it made little sense to Sandorn, but Durand ran through it smoothly pointing several parts out. “Here’s bridge helm control,” she said, tapping on one of the boxes that opened up another window full of the same mess, “here, it’s set to lock for maintenance.” She paused for a second while she read some more, then tapped again. “And there, that’s the engineering head’s authorization code, that lieutenant—Bjorn— programmed it in to make it look like it was all standard process, and put his sign-off against it all.” She tapped several more times on her datapad, closing and opening various windows. “It’s the same for every station, this is insane!”

“What does this all mean?” Sandorn finally interrupted, starting to get a little lost.

“It means he’s been planning this for ages, this subroutine would’ve taken months to write! Look, each console in engineering has a failsafe to stop them all being locked out simultaneously, but he’s changed the timecode for each one before locking it.”

“Aren’t there failsafes against changing the time on everything?” Sandorn asked.

“Yes, but that’s why he’s tied it into the jump to warp, any ship that transfers from one system to another will adjust its clock to the new local time during the journey…” Durand tapped a few more times. “Here, look. The timecode failsafe is disabled for point-oh-one of a second while warp system status checks are carried out.”

“So he found the only hundredth of a second where he could lock everyone out of their consoles, and… killed them all? While they had no way of reacting?” Sandorn said rather bluntly.

“Yes, Tan.

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