The Six by Mark Alpert

Author:Mark Alpert
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Juvenile Fiction, Action & Adventure, General
ISBN: 9781492615293
Publisher: Sourcebooks Fire
Published: 2015-07-07T00:00:00+00:00

From: The National Security Adviser

The White House, Washington, DC

To: General Calvin Hawke

Commander, Pioneer Base

Cal, I have more information on the firefight at Tatishchevo Missile Base, so I’ve ordered Colonel Peterson to fly to Colorado and deliver this message to you. The news isn’t good.

The incident began last night just outside Tatishchevo’s eastern gate. The Russian soldiers assigned to that area came under heavy fire from the base. At least sixty of Sigma’s driverless tanks emerged from the gate and advanced east along the highway that leads to the city of Saratov. The attack caught the Russians by surprise. When the unmanned tanks roared out of the base with their guns blazing, the troops panicked and retreated into the woods.

Before the Russian commanders could organize a counterattack, a convoy of three trucks sped down the highway from Saratov, heading for the base. The trucks entered Tatishchevo, and then the tanks immediately pulled back behind the eastern gate and reassumed their defensive positions. The attack was apparently a diversion. Sigma launched it just to clear the highway so the trucks could get into the missile base.

Unfortunately, it gets worse. Russian investigators have figured out who was driving the trucks and what was inside them. Twelve hours before the firefight there was an incident at the Russian army’s bioweapons laboratory, five hundred miles northeast of Tatishchevo. A group of terrorists, most likely from Chechnya, broke into the lab and captured a large supply of highly lethal anthrax bacteria.

The Chechens also stole equipment that mixes the bacteria into an aerosol spray, making it easy to spread the germs over a large area. Witnesses at the bioweapons lab said the terrorists escaped in three Ural tractor-trailer trucks. That matches the description of the vehicles that entered Tatishchevo.

So it looks like you were right when you said Sigma’s preferred strategy is to kill off the human race without destroying our machines. Spreading anthrax over our cities would accomplish that goal quite efficiently. The Russian army is pushing hard to attack Tatishchevo before Sigma can release the germs. We’ve given them the results of our analyses, all the studies showing that Sigma could easily launch its nuclear missiles long before our own missiles could hit the computer lab, but the Russians are growing impatient. If we want to pursue the Pioneer option, you’ll need to get your team ready soon. Even two weeks may be too long. We may have to load the Pioneers on a flight to Russia in just a few days.

In the meantime, we need to be very careful. The attack on the bioweapons lab shows that Sigma can persuade people to carry out tasks that the AI can’t do by itself. It looks like Sigma made contact with the terrorists through its communications satellites, which give the AI access to the Internet and the telephone networks.

And there’s evidence that Sigma has used this access to hack into the computer systems of several major banks. The AI has apparently stolen millions of dollars from

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