Children of the Fleet by Card Orson Scott

Author:Card, Orson Scott [Card, Orson Scott]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Young Adult, Age Range 2 Older Audience, Science Fiction, Adult, Fantasy
ISBN: 9780765377043
Amazon: 0765377047
Goodreads: 33517540
Publisher: Tor Books
Published: 2017-10-10T07:00:00+00:00

12

From Spanish: your message received door must be in new unfinished sector open eighteen october lunar eight pm no atmo needed

From English: if defensive force ambushes us your mother is dead within half hour if our all clear not sent every half hour be smart

Once Dabeet tried Zhang He’s idea, everything fell into place. The messages read, with alternating letters, from bottom to top, from right to left. The upper left corner contained sixteen letters of Spanish only, since the Spanish message took more letters than the English one. The weirdest thing was “atmo” because that just wasn’t a Spanish word. But their phrasing and spelling must have been shaped by the exact number of letters that would fit into a perfect puzzle square.

Not a hard cipher at all, once Zhang He had come up with the key. But Dabeet had needed that key, so without Zhang’s help he might have been pounding his head into the problem till the deadline passed.

More than a month away, though. And since all the near-Earth stations and depots used Lunar Time, which was tied to Eastern Standard Time in the United States, there would be no problem getting the time right. They had used the English expression “pm” in the Spanish section, because any Latin American or soldier would have written the time using the twenty-four-hour system: two thousand or twenty hundred hours. “Ocho pm” took up the same number of characters as “dos mil,” but they probably expected Dabeet to think like an American, even in the Spanish section.

So his job was to be door-opening again. Only this time, the head of station security would not be giving him a free pass into the unfinished part of the station, and would not be opening an airlock for him. Dabeet now faced a much harder puzzle than the cipher had been—how to get past the tracking system, so he could get where he needed to go without setting off an alarm, and then how to get an airlock to obey his unauthorized hand on the command plate.

Dabeet had already tried to hack his way into the computer system. He did it so easily that he knew at once the system was designed to be hacked—which meant that it wasn’t the real system. Instead, everything the students accessed was part of a virtual machine completely firewalled from the real station operating system. There would be no way to get from inside the student system to the real station system, because nobody with any authority would ever need to access anything from a student desk.

To sign on to the real system would supposedly require having a teacher’s fingerprint and knowing a password. But that was only true, Dabeet knew, if all the teachers followed security protocol all the time. It took careful and constant observation, but within three days Dabeet had a chance to use a teacher’s computer for a few minutes when the teacher stepped away without logging off. What Dabeet quickly discovered was

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.