Agnosis – Ch. 25

<– Chapter 24 / Chapter 26 –>

In the minutes leading up to a classic bombardment by an array of Fleisch Plasmatic Hammers, Firing Control alerts Engineering of their intention to deploy heavy weaponry by means of a white paper known as the Ordnance Compensation Estimate.This report provides a ready guideline of how many Hammers will be fired, at what time firing will commence, how many sequences will be fired per Hammer, and how many barrages in total are expected.In turn, Engineering takes these estimates, compares them against the projected bombardment schedule transmitted directly from the Bridge by the Cycle CO, then crunches all of these numbers through a well-documented and highly accurate conversion algorithm, the results of which are subsequently fed into the automated Combat Maneuvers Response System.The CMRS has one job:look at the provided variables, take into account what is known about the repulsive force of a Hammer discharge, analyze the barrage sequence and find a way to dynamically compensate for the recursive blowback of the weaponry’s discharge in such a way that the ship does not end up in a rolling like a sausage on a rotisserie in the frictionless combat environment of space.It’s a simple procedure, mostly handled by computers and software with minimal human intervention, and would more than likely be completely automated if not for the unwillingness of most naval Engineering sections to turn over control of their flight systems to trigger jockies on game day.

The bottom line is that immediately preceding any Fleisch Hammer bombardment, the decks of a warship vibrate distinctively as the fine thrust tubes are ramped up for compensation firing.In the space of about two seconds, the engines fire, the ship gives a brief lurch, and then the hammers let fly.

Ray felt the familiar deck vibration through his feet and up into his calves and instinctively reached out for something bolted to the floor to steady himself against.He stood in the tiny control room just off the flight staging bay, leaning against the back of Stine’s chair and pretending to watch over her shoulder as she unsuccessfully attempted to talk the terminal in front of her into accessing one ship’s service after another.She wasn’t having any luck at all and was getting rather testy about it, which was one of the reasons that neither Ray nor anyone else in the room was saying much of anything.Stine didn’t like the distraction of casual chatter while she worked.She liked silence broken up by her own muttered curses.The cursing grew steadily more florid as she met with failure to gain entry into every system (including even basic crew services) which she could find.

In fact, the only good things that had happened in the last several minutes were that the incursion alarms had inexplicably clicked off (much to Stine’s relief) and the ship’s comms seemed to have gone dead (much to Ray’s, as it gave them a valid excuse to seal the bay doors and not answer any pings that might come from security agents demanding access without arousing undue suspicion).

But most of his concentration was devoted to finding a mechanism that would allow him to jack around the invalid node error and regain command of his foam environment.It did not immediately occur to him that the vibration and lurch to which his body responded from habit and training constituted a signal event of some seriousness until the distant rumble of the Fleisch Hammers’ discharge rippled along the skin of the Indianapolis.

Ghast, who had been standing patiently near the door and doing his best to stay out of the way, caught himself against a rack of system monitors as the ship rolled a few degrees to port.“That can’t be good,” he said.

Youkilis craned forward intently and pressed his cheek against a bare wall section, counting the echoes of dissipation waves gamboling up through the deckplates as they buzzed against his skin.

“Four?”

“I get five,” Thomas said.

“I’m pretty sure it was four, but whatever the target was, it must have been pretty big.”

Thomas shrugged and went back to monitoring the command chatter.“It could be.It’s hard to hear with all this racket in my ear.”

Ray liked them this way.No one going crazy, everyone accepting surprises in stride.They were cool and collected and professional.“What do you hear from the C&C datburst?”

“The Bridge is going nuts,” Thomas said.“This Leet Commander Pyle is screaming something about his board not responding. . .something about it not being his fault.Now he’s ripping into some swab named Lloyd or something.Accusing him of sabotaging his–”His visible eye sprang wide and straightened sharply like he’d been stung.“Holy shit!We fired on the Juggernaut!Four Hammer burst, caught them broadside, pants down, opened them up like a trout from the buzz I’m getting.Distress calls starting to come in.The J’s Cycle Officer is. . .nope, explosion amidships.The Juggernaut’s Bridge just flamed out.Giari Tau’s admin comm is trying to break through the noise and see what’s going on–.”

Thomas slapped the side of his processor housing, then shook his head a couple of times like he was trying to clear fuzz out of his signal.After a few seconds, he stripped off his ex-array and flung it onto the table beside the monitors.“Nope.I’m dead.The datburst just went down.”

Ghast pushed off from the rack.“Why would they fire against one of their own ships?And without any warning?”

Stine slumped in her seat.“System access is off-line, too.All of the auxiliary functions just got kicked off the core.We’re locked out.”

Thomas said:“The Cycle Officer claimed his board was down right after the attack.I could hear someone in the background shouting that the system had been compromised.So who took control of the Bridge functions?Crikey, you’d have to have a mainline directly into the core and wicked fast reflexes to shut out the secure overrides.”

“It wasn’t us, that’s for sure,” Stine muttered.“But I recommend that we not make ourselves available when folks start handing out blame.”

“We know who’s responsible,” Ray said evenly.He followed Thomas’s example and removed his array.“Anybody still have foam access?”

Ghast’s eyelid fluttered.“Not here.All I get is connex lookup errors.Looks like he killed the nodes.”

“That would be the best way to keep jacks from restoring core access once you’d taken control,” Stine agreed.“It’s tough to break into a house without any doors.”

“Yeah, but he’s locked himself in,” Youkilis objected.“That’s good, right?”

Thomas grunted.“He’s contained inside the self-sufficient datacore of a Magellan class battle cruiser fully armed with planet busting technological terrors.He can fly it, fire it, and when he runs out of ammunition or fuel, can recalibrate the datburst on a secure military channel and zap his package anywhere in human space in a matter of microseconds.I don’t see how that qualifies as good.”

“Oh yeah, this is bad,” Stine said.

But Ghast shook his head.“I don’t think he’s interested in jumping ship, or in hurtling himself across space.My guess is that he took out the J so he wouldn’t have to be looking over his shoulder while he tried to work.”

“Five thousand Marines—plus or minus—and ship’s crew so he could call the shots?”Thomas whistled.“That’s cold.”

“What do you want us to do, boss?” Ghast asked.

It was cold, Ray realized.The choices of a man who believed the universe would be destroyed if he did not act decisively.In Ray’s experience, there were three kinds of men:those willing to sacrifice themselves for their beliefs, those willing to sacrifice others, and most dangerous of all, those willing to do both.The package of Raville wasn’t even a man.It probably wouldn’t have any problem self-terminating once it accomplished its hard coded mission.
“If he went after the Juggernaut because it was potentially a threat, he won’t hesitate to start opening airlocks and bulkheads to shed crew who prove troublesome,” Ray answered.He pointed at Youkilis and Thomas.“I want you two to start going through the supply lockers.See if there are any e-suits, even if they’re just emergency units.We can assume that Raville has control of life support from the core, and I don’t want him to be able to hold a sword over our heads.Stine, you keep at it.”She started to protest, but he waved her off.“If he slips, if he loses focus for just an instant, or finds that there’s something he needs outside his little kingdom, I want us ready to worm our way inside.If it happens, you’ll only have the one opportunity, so don’t miss it.”

She nodded.“Aye, Captain.”

“And me?” Ghast asked.

Ray hesitated.The decision he had been dreading was upon him.What to do?Believe what Amara had said, or continue to dither, hoping that they would learn something that would help him understand.It didn’t help that he already knew which choice Raville would have him make, and he trusted Raville not at all.Still, best to be prepared.

“Find that pry bar you were talking about.If it comes down to it, I want us ready to destroy the device.”

The order clearly made Ghast uneasy, moreso because neither one of them were certain they could even recognize what it was when the coming down finally occurred.But he held his opinions in check and said only,“I can work something out, I’m sure.”

“Then see if Gallegos and Anderson have made any progress interpreting the nav and diagnostic inputs.Maybe that will tell us something useful.In any event, while you’re finding out the best place to smack it to turn it into scrap, you might also see if you can figure out if there’s a way to launch it and deliver the payload to its intended target with only our local resources and at a moment’s notice.”

“You give the word, and I’ll be ready.”

“I’m supposing from your grin, Mr. Ghast, that you’ve already made up your mind about which outcome you would prefer.”

“My only preference is that we figure out what Raville’s package wants us to do, and then we do the opposite.Distrusting him is the only thing I can count on.”Ghast’s grin faded.“And last I heard, he wants us to destroy it.”

“I concur with your assessment, if that means anything,” Ray said.“Unfortunately, destroying it was also what Amara wanted us to do.Make of that what you will, just make sure you’re standing by.And that you remain mentally flexible.Capisce?”

“Aye.”

He watched the three of them troop out the door, feeling once again like he was missing something vital.When all else fails, he had learned, cover as many variables as you can and hope that it’s enough.He’d done all he could think to do—except what Amara had specifically told him his responsibility was ( destroy the bomb!), of course—and still felt paralyzed.Too much had turned out to not be what it seemed.Every decision came with a constant refrain of misgivings.

This is what comes from making deals with gods, he thought.Everything became complicated.Everything was intrigue and backstabbing and hidden agendas.Give him an old fashioned ideologically schismatic political uprising any day.One side held the power and the other one wanted it.Your team was whichever one wasn’t shooting at you at the moment.That was all you had to understand, and as long as you kept your guns loaded and your enemies in front of you, the appropriate course was nearly always obvious.

He desperately wanted to understand now.He’d live or die happily with whatever decision he made, as long as he could believe that he was making the right one, and for that kind of faith, he required understanding.

Stine looked up suddenly.“Do you feel that?”

He did.The gentle throbbing tremor of a course adjustment.The Indianapolis was heeling onto its side.To maintain relative attitude, massive servomotors shifted the inner hull on a buffer liquid nanocarbon bearings.

“What do you think it means?”

This much he understood, at least.“Fleisch Hammers aren’t an effective surface bombardment tool at this range.Raville is bringing a different ordnance battery to bear.Most likely Spriggs-Detmers.He’ll need to make sure he punches a good hundred to hundred and fifty meters into the bedrock to root them all out.”

“Surface—?” Stine began, then stopped.“Why go after the station?Raville already controls the ship and the bomb.”

“Because humanity is a self-destructive species.We’ll always find a way to build another bomb or start another war.I think Raville means to remove himself from the equation.His actual self, I mean.Without Raville to drive the engine of war, it sits in the desert and rusts.”

“Dorian and Cain are down there, too.”

Ray considered this for a moment, then shrugged.“Amara is more than capable of taking care of herself.I imagine she’ll keep an eye on John as well.Between you and me, I think she’s sweet on him, God knows why.”

A glint of renewed resolve shone in Stine’s gaze, and she chewed her lip in thought.“I’ll see what I can do to slow him down, anyway.I don’t particularly care for Mr. Raville in either format, so it’s no big loss to me if he succeeds, but this was an awful long way to travel just to see a fireworks display.”

“Indeed.Besides, we don’t even have good seats for the show.”

Ray left Stine hard at it a few moments later and wandered back out into the flight staging bay.He found Ghast with Gallegos and Anderson, hunched over a much abused and oil stained diagnostic terminal.The screen was small and of an ancient design, graphically limited to amber text scrolling across a black screen.The prox on the cart’s shelf beneath it groaned audibly as it struggled to comply with whatever data requests they were making of it.One of them had run a complex series of bundled data cords from the connexed diagnostic array hanging from the ceiling to ports on the back side of the terminal box.

Ghast looked over his shoulder as Ray approached, and hefted a length of stout metal pipe he had set on the side of the cart.Ray returned a grim nod of approval.

“What’s our status?” he asked.

“Well, Pig here has been trying to extract hard coded nav data from the bomb’s processing cone and the diagnostic array for the last half hour,” Ghast answered, sounding discouraged.“The problem is that the prox on this machine isn’t really up to the task.It looks like they were using this box mostly to check node connections and evaluate the electrical system’s efficiency.It’s dizzyingly outdated.The native operating system is an old SWEL build, and doesn’t have much capability beyond running the node apps.To give us some more functionality, Anderson pulled the guts on the default operating system and managed to load a chunk of generic proto-FLEX OS with some personalized decoding and analysis scripts she had stuffed in her foam.The build logs indicate that she got most of it in before the system went down, but there are some problems getting her code to communicate with the spew coming out of the bomb.”

“Just normal debugging,” Anderson said, shrugging.“Not really a problem per se if time wasn’t a factor.”

“Except time is a factor,” Ray reminded them all.“Is there any benefit to bypassing this machine completely and patching the spew from the diagnostic and nav array through to the machines in the control room?”

Gallegos shook his head.“No.Those machines are networked to the datacore through slaved foam connexes.We plug anything into them and Raville will have the ability to override launch commands from the core.Right now, the array is operating independently of the network, and we probably want to keep it that way right up until we decide to plug into mission control and start the launch sequence.”

“I see.Is there anything I can do to help?”

None of them answered, and Ray didn’t push them.He wasn’t sure what kind of assistance he would be able to offer them anyway.He was the lord of an ever-shrinking kingdom.They were all doing everything that they could.He turned back toward the control room in time to encounter Thomas and Youkilis returning from the front compartment with what appeared to be clear plastic garment bags slung over their shoulders.

“We found four full suits,” Thomas said.“They’re emergency suits, designed to handle sudden or acute depressurization only.No central heating units and the outer membranes are too thin too provide much protection in extreme environments, so if you get flushed out into space, you’re dead.Good news is that they come with the latest self-contained osmosis breathing apparatus, so you’ll have plenty of breathable air while you freeze to death.”

Four did not divide into seven in any way that Ray found comforting, but he hid his disappointment.“Store them in the control room with Stine.See if she needs any assistance.If not, check the security lock on the door to the corridor again just in case we need to prepare to receive visitors, then report to Mr. Ghast for further instructions.”

The two men nodded glumly and trudged off.Ray suspected that they had done the math themselves and didn’t like the answer they had received any more than he did.There was nothing he could say to encourage them.

He had no concrete plan of action.

He had led his crew into hostile territory with no weapons, no clear objective and no fall back options.

And now, he didn’t even have a way to help them escape safely.

In any other operation, he wouldn’t have allowed himself to place his crew in such dire straits.He would have named a clear target, detailed an attack sequence, executed the plan and then bugged out.Anything went wrong with the carefully ordered plan, and he would have killed it on the spot, simply walked away.

But he hadn’t done that.He had allowed himself to be caught up in the affairs of gods.He had chosen to believe. . .

Ah!That was the problem, wasn’t it?When a man started believing, he stopped seeing the physical world and lulling himself with visions of the spiritual realm.He started to accept that events were destined, and that he had a place in that destiny.He started trusting in the power of gods instead of the strength of his own two hands, and when a man believed that gods were on his side, he would dare much that he wouldn’t normally.That he shouldn’t.

Pure hubris, Ray thought, imagining that he had a place in the plans of gods.Gods had their own agendas.How could he have forgotten that?

Of course, hubris was like paranoia.It was only a delusion if it wasn’t true.

And truth?Truth was whatever you believed it to be.

There was no explosion of light, no rush of air, just an instantaneous awareness that something in the equilibrium normally maintained by time and space had shifted, if only for a microsecond.Behind him, someone—it sounded like Anderson—let out an alarmed gasp.Ray blinked between one moment and the next, and they were simply there.

Dorian, Amara and Raville.The Michael Raville, he assumed.

For some reason, this did not surprise him at all.He didn’t know what it meant—who had won, who had lost, who had convinced who that they were right–but it meant something, at least.A promise of answers to all the questions he had asked.Activity in the staging bay slammed to a halt.Ray was aware of Ghast, Anderson and Gallegos watching silently over his shoulder, and even of Stine slowly rising from her chair and peering through the plastisheen windows, her work temporarily forgotten.

He did his best to hide his surprise, but he found himself grinning uncontrollably.He bowed with a flourish to greet them.

“You’ve proven me a liar once again, Ms. Cain,” he said evenly, willing his voice not to tremble.“Now I’m going to have to work on my farewell speech all over again.”

“Not a liar, just a pessimist,” Amara answered.“But I see you’ve held up your end of the bargain.I never doubted that you would, of course.”

Michael Raville looked about him fearfully, chest heaving and his eyes rolling wildly in their sockets.He took an unsteady step forward, his body still uncertain of its reliability after its unanticipated relocation.

“What are they doing to my device?” he demanded.His voice cut through the bay’s open space like a screech.“Stay away from there!You don’t understand–”

Ray maneuvered himself between Raville and the bomb.“Merely attempting to discover how it works,” he said soothingly.He made careful eye contact with Amara, looking for some indication that he had not failed her.“We haven’t broken anything.Not yet, at least.”

To his relief, she smiled.“That’s good.It turns out that we may have a use for it after all.”

Ghast exhaled thunderously, as though he’d been holding his breath for both of them.

But Raville only frowned, his fears temporarily allayed.He swung back to Amara.“We’ve got twelve minutes to shut down the core before he obtains a firing solution on the station.”

“News travels fast even without the Strand, apparently,” Ray said, arching an eyebrow.

“Michael Raville, meet Captain Ray Morrical, most recently of the Proletariat Horde,” Amara said.

Raville considered him warily.“I know who he is.”

“I’d be lying if I said it was a pleasure to meet you, sir,” Ray returned.His tone was cordial, at least.

“Likewise, Captain.Would you care to brief us on the situation as you see it?”

“As far as we can tell, Raville—that is, the digital version and not, I assume, one of your active minions–has taken full control of the datacore and sealed off node access.The shipboard systems have been cut off, communications are down, and as you’ve seen, he has complete control of the ship’s considerable arsenal.Datburst communications are down, as are the connex channels, so even our foam environments are inaccessible.We’re attempting to uncover any access points he may have missed, but haven’t had any luck thus far, and frankly, we’re not very optimistic.”Ray pursed his lips sourly.“I hope you brought your thinking caps along.”

“You’re going to have to jack directly into the control boxes from the machine room,” Dorian answered without a pause.“He can shut down the system transmission nodes, but there have to be hardline emergency access nodes directly into the BIOS on the boxes themselves.In the event of a major core crash, techs have to have some mechanism for loading recovery scripts onto a futzed network.He may control the data environment, but without hands, he wouldn’t be able to knock those out from the inside.If we can get into the BIOS, obtaining access to the core data is a piece of cake.”

“A fine plan of attack,” Ray observed.“However, getting to the machine room from here presents something of a challenge.Unless, of course, you’ve discovered a way to convince a couple thousand hostile naval crewmen in the middle of an undeclared, and thus imminently confusingfull battle alert that we mean them no harm.”

Dorian nudged Amara with his elbow.“We can get there the same way we got here.”

“No, we can’t,” Amara responded.

“Why not?”

“Because that’s not the way I’ve chosen to do it.”

“That would be the fastest way,” Dorian protested.“Obviously, I’m the small fish here when it comes to making decisions, but I think I ought to point out once again for the record that we’re in a bit of a hurry here, and the crew of this ship isn’t likely to do anything but slow us down.”

She pressed a finger against her lip.“It’s true that it would be the fastest way.But in this case, it’s not the best way.”

Dorian opened his mouth to respond, but he was interrupted by the clangor of hurried footsteps banging toward them from the outer compartment.Youkilis entered the flight bay at a dead run, then stumbled awkwardly to a halt, flushed and out of breath.He stared at the new arrivals, his expression transforming from one of urgency to simple uncomprehending wonder.

“Something to report, Mr. Youkilis?”Ray prompted him.

The young man snapped to attention.“Uh, yessir.Someone is knocking at the bulkhead door.The door to the corridor, I mean.”

“Knocking?” Ray asked.

Amara smiled. “Then let them in.”

“Begging your pardon, Ms. Cain, but it might be, you know, soldiers looking for us.We had a little excitement–”

“Of course it’s soldiers.They’re your escort to the machine room.Let them in, please.”

Youkilis didn’t move, unable to process the order.

“Do as she says,” Ray instructed him.

The young man nodded uncertainly, but did not protest and ran back out of the room.

“You’re still full of surprises, my dear.”

“I’m learning that the ability to surprise is a precious commodity.It’s one of the things that make us human.”

“And keeps us that way, hopefully,” Dorian added.

Ray peered at them curiously, wondering what exactly this exchange meant.It would explain much that remained a mystery, he suspected, if he had the context to put it in, but he did not have the opportunity to ask.Youkilis and Thomas returned almost immediately with a cadre of armed Marines in tow.Ray counted more than a dozen, and he could see at least that many more crammed into the outer compartment through the inner bulkhead door.The Marine who seemed to be in charge pulled up in front of Amara and started to salute before he realized what he was doing and let his hand fall to his side.

“I heard your call,” the young Marine said, sounding chagrined.“I thought I was going crazy.”

“Yet you still came, and I see you also managed to bring a few of your friends along.Well done, Korin.You did exactly what I needed.”

Lieutenant Sainz lowered his head.“I only did what you told me to do.I told them the truth.They all made the decision to come on their own.”

“You’ve done wonderfully so far, but I need to ask another favor of you.Do you know where the machine room for the datacore is?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Would you please escort John and Mr. Raville there and make sure that they have some space to work uninterrupted?”

Sainz glanced uneasily at his fellow Marines.“That might be difficult.Ship security has confined non-essential personnel to quarters and the datacore and central systems labs have been cordoned off since we fired on the Juggernaut.We can handle the security patrols without a problem, but grapevine chatter reads that the core has been compromised by a hostile and Security itself is locked out.Word is that the bulkhead doors into the restricted zone have been automatically sealed with command level locks.If that’s true, there’s probably a whole matrix of sensor arrays and idiot sirens that will have to be eluded between here and there.”

“This is important, Lieutenant.This ship is even now preparing to fire on the Giari Tau station, just as it did on the Juggernaut.Hundreds of people will die if we don’t stop it.”

Sainz paused briefly, as though considering the complexity of the task, then said, “We can manage it.There’s a network of maintenance tubes that should allow us to get into the restricted area without tripping bulkhead sensors, at least.I’ll have to consult with one of our Engineering dorks to be sure we have a reliable route.”

Amara nodded.“You need to hurry.We may have only a few minutes.”

“Then we’d better get moving.”Lieutenant Sainz did salute this time, textbook stiff, as though paying respects to a commanding officer.Ray supposed that in a way, it was exactly what he was doing.“Gentlemen, follow me.”

He turned sharply on his heel and headed for the exit.Dorian and Raville scowled at one another unhappily, but with no other recourse, chased Lieutenant Sainz and his Marines out of the flight bay.Amara waited until they were gone before crossing over to Ray and placing her arm companionably about his waist.

“I guess that just leaves us,” she said, bubbling with an enthusiasm Ray did not comprehend.“Come on, Captain.We’ve got some work of our own to accomplish before they return.”

He didn’t ask for an explanation, just followed where she led.

They followed a mop-haired, hollow-chested Engineering dweeb named Shimkus who reminded Dorian of a chimpanzee with the way he ducked into service tunnels, sniffed the air and then proceeded to scale annoyingly tight spaces with alarming speed and agility, as though scent alone was his guide.He called out obscure section names as they transitioned from one deck to the next, not so much communicating in any way Dorian could really understand as chittering for its own sake.Like a monkey.But he was quick and efficient and seemed to have intimate knowledge of every false access panel and hidden, stooped gangway on the ship.Dorian had no choice but to follow as best he could.Their route had him completely bewildered within thirty seconds of leaving the staging bay.

Raville worried frequently and out loud about the time.As they made their way rung by rung down a long vertical shaft, Lieutenant Sainz confided to Dorian that under normal circumstances, a jaunt to the machine room from the flight bays where he had found them would take nearly ten minutes at a brisk pace.Dorian winced at the estimate.The station didn’t have that long if Raville chose to fire the instant he obtained a firing solution, and he didn’t see any reason why Raville wouldn’t.After all, what good was having an entire battle cruiser at your disposal and going to the trouble to wrench it into firing position if you weren’t going to use it?

“And how long by this route?” he asked.

Sainz paused, gripping the rungs of the ladder loosely so that his body hung carelessly out into empty space.He looked pensively up into the gloom and said, “Maybe seven.Six and a half if we hurry.”

Three extra realtime minutes to save all the lives on Giari Tau.

Great.

Assuming Raville didn’t catch on to what they were doing and flood the tunnels with a nerve agent, that is. Or wait until they came near an evacuation zone and open the airlocks to the void. Or perhaps something even worse, whatever his devious little digital mind could come up with to either slow them down or kill them outright.

They raced through the ship, down the strangely vacant corridors and through hauntingly quiet labs and workrooms on their way to yet more service ducts and grubby maintenance tubes, but Shimkus apparently knew what he was doing.They did not encounter any security patrols, and if they tripped any incursion sensors, the alarms were silent.

They did not die, which Dorian took as a good sign.

Not that it mattered to him tremendously.Amara would be gone one way or the other,digitized, molecularly deconstructed and mailed back to the Exousiai, sometime in the next seventeen hours.Whether they saved the station or not, whether they rescued the universe from data absorption or not, Amara was dead.She’d already given her consent to the execution, and there was nothing he could do about it.The rest was just details.

At last, they crawled one after the other out of a cooling system service tube into what seemed to be a wireless node switchroom.It smelled like a switchroom, at least, full of the ozone reek of electronic gateways and musty odor of accreted dust bunnies, but Dorian couldn’t see clearly in the dim glow of the few flashlights amongst them.Shimkus knuckled over to the front door, opened it a crack and peeked out into the corridor beyond.He returned almost at once.

“We’re about ten meters down the hall from the machine room.I make two teams of IT guys off to the left.One set was worrying at the door with an assortment of maglock cracking hardware, it looks like.The other was pawing around the intersection acting like ship’s security, sweeping for hostiles.I think one of them may have been an agent.”He waggled his fingers against his neck.“Got a red collar.”

“May have been?”Sainz chewed the words slowly.

“Right, right.We’re obviously not the only ones who thought about getting at the core via the control boxes.But they neglected to take into account the repulsor charges embedded in the deck plates.Looks like the core hit them with a ton of juice to keep them out.”

Raville blinked in consternation.“The deck plating is electrified?”

Shimkus sniffed at him like he was being an idiot.“The machine room is right up there with the Bridge in terms of its essential operating capacity.The techs inside have to be able to defend their position while they purge the core in the event that the ship is boarded.Losing the ship is a small cost compared to opening up your whole data network to the enemy.”

“Are there technicians stationed inside the machine room?” Raville asked.

Sainz glanced about the crowded room.He had brought maybe twenty Marines with him.“If there are, I don’t think they’ll put up much resistance.”

But Shimkus shook his head sadly.“There probably were technicians on station, but the room is equipped with suicide gas decanters as a last ditch security measure to protect core integrity, so I’m guessing not now.”

“Great,” Dorian grumbled.Suicide gas.The atmosphere inside would still be toxic.“Any bright ideas?”

Shimkus opened a utility closet near the door and removed a pair of osmosis masks.“Wear these.Work fast.”

“We still have to get inside across the electrified deck,” Raville pointed out.

Shimkus fished inside his shirt and took out a bungee strap necklace which held a maintenance turnkey that glinted in the feeble light.He pointed to a space on the floor beneath Dorian’s feet.“Old wiring conduit there, cramped but serviceable.The key works on both ends.With any luck, no one will have thought to cram the conduit full of sensors.”

Dorian glanced from Shimkus to Lieutenant Sainz, but neither one seemed chock full of confidence.He snatched the key and dropped to his knees, hunting out the recessed lock by touch.Sainz swept the floor with his flashlight’s beam, and the rough shape of the panel became apparent.

“As soon as you’re gone,” Sainz said, “my men and I will disperse into the corridor and see if we can’t provide something of a diversion.”

“A diversion,”Raville muttered.“Against an opponent comprised of packets of active information and which possesses the capacity to monitor and utilize the full complement of the datacore’s systems all at once.Brilliant.”

“Or we can just wait in here until we hear the screams that let us know you failed, if that’s what you prefer,” the lieutenant responded grimly.

Dorian wrestled the panel open and dropped into the darkness below.A short drop, thankfully, little more than a meter.Someone passed him a flashlight, and he stooped to explore the passage.Shimkus hadn’t been lying.It was definitely cramped.Bundles of old pre-connex photon impulse cables hung from the top and sides of the tube like atrophied muscle tissue.The conduit smelled old and abandoned, funky with wire insulation rot.Good thing he wasn’t claustrophobic, but as long as the tunnel didn’t bend too sharply, it wouldn’t present an insurmountable obstacle.

He popped back out, only his head and shoulders rising above deck level, and waved for Raville to follow.To Sainz, he said:“Go ahead and make some noise.Be safe about it, though, and give us two minutes to squirm through to the other side before hammering away.It can’t hurt.”

“Don’t forget to put your mask on,” the lieutenant said.“See you in a few minutes.”

Dorian lowered himself back inside, then dropped onto his belly and began to drag himself down the long conduit on his elbows.

Ray was sure he hadn’t heard her correctly.

“You want us to what?”

He couldn’t be sure, but he was fairly certain that he sounded borderline hysterical.He felt borderline hysterical.

“Trust me,” Amara said.“I know what I’m doing.”

Wink.

“This is distinctly unpleasant,” Raville said, his voice muffled by his mask.He was panting hard, and Dorian entertained the fleeting hope that it wasn’t working correctly.A part of him would very much enjoy watching Raville’s death squirms as he was suffocated by the gas he himself (sort of, anyway) had released.

More likely though, his gasping was due to simple fatigue.Ten meters didn’t sound like much of a distance, but Dorian hadn’t done it on his elbows and knees since basic training, and the new body didn’t seem to like it any more than the old one had.He could feel the strain of dragging himself down the conduit through his shoulders and all the way down to the small of his back.He wasn’t in the mood for Raville’s whining.

“You don’t get to complain,” he growled.He had to raise his voice a bit.Sainz and his men were fully into diversion mode.Dorian wasn’t sure exactly what that meant, but it seemed to involve a lot of shouting and gunfire and the occasional bone-vibrating discharge of a massive wad of electrical energy that made his hair stand on end.It sounded interesting, at least, whether or not it was actually doing any good.

He continued:“This is your mess.The rest of us were just unlucky enough to cross your event horizon.”

“You can’t honestly believe that.”

“Sure I can.This is your package we’re going to hunt down.You’re the one who built the bomb.If you want to take it back to the beginning, as a subset of your pattern-father or whatever, you’re the one who decided to screw with the Exousiai in the first place.You’re the one who sent Amara here and expected her to serve your stupid plot.Why shouldn’t I blame you?”

Raville didn’t answer at once, and Dorian assumed he was being ignored rather than that he had scored a pointin his favor.Raville was much too arrogant to concede that he might be an asshole.

But when he did answer, Raville sounded oddly subdued.“This is about her, isn’t it?Your dislike of me, your constant troublemaking, your determination to be a thorn in everyone’s side. It isn’t because you aren’t willing to help save the world if asked, it’s that you’re angry.You’re angry with me because you believe that I’m the one who decided she had to sacrifice her human incarnation.”

Dorian snorted.“I hate it when you do that.Sacrifice her human incarnation.Stop glossing over it.You don’t know what it means to be Exousian any more than I do.You don’t know if she’ll survive the transition back to that universe, and even if she does, she won’t be Amara anymore.She’ll be part of the entity, and if part of it that contains her pattern survives the bomb, it still won’t matter.She’ll just be a fragment.You’re murdering her either way.”

“As part of the Exousiai, there’s the distinct possibility—“

“Shut up about the Exousiai, okay?What do you really even know about them?You’re not part of the entity.You’re a subset of a disgruntled pattern who built you specifically to hate what you came from.The whole experience of the entity is just a mediated memory for you, a corrupted simulacrum you replicated in the quae-ha-distra you cooked up for your own amusement back when you still believed in their bullshit.You want to know what I think?I think you must still believe half of the lies they told you, otherwise you wouldn’t spend so much time whining about how you’re merely reconverting her to her true form rather than murdering her.Every time you say that, you try to implicate her in her own death, saying that she’s part of the same pattern that created you and so she is just as responsible for these events as you are.You try to make her guilty for her own execution.That’s what pisses me off.Why can’t you just admit that the only reason you’re killing her is because it’s necessary to this plan you’ve cooked up?”

“She isn’t human, Dorian.You know that.She was made for this purpose.”

“For a guy who talks so much about how essential it is to make the Exousiai spontaneous again, you’re very focused on this idea of predetermination.It’s vital for every one of the Exousiai to get free will and autonomy out of this deal except Amara, is that it?She has to do what she was made to do, but the rest of you get to choose what you want.”

“She did choose this,” Raville said, though not stridently, as he expected.He spoke quietly, almost reverently.“She chose it then, and she chooses it again now.The sacrifice she makes means more here, in fact, than it did when she was a component of the entity, because she makes it of her own free will.She makes it cognizant of what she is giving up, measuring her sacrifice against the experience and intuitive knowledge of being autonomous rather than making a dry and academic surrender to an abstract idea of autonomy.You’re absolutely right:there is more of the entity in her than there is in me, John.She knows how to savor the oneness of the Exousiai, and yet she still chooses to give it all up—both the oneness and the radical individualism of humanity—so that we both might live.You should honor her for her courage, for her self-sacrifice and for her love.The Exousiai are not gods, but if there is anything within them with the potential to be godlike, it was distilled to perfection in the form of that girl.”

Dorian dragged himself forward, and encountered a wall directly ahead.Space opened above him, and he realized that he had come to the end of the conduit.He wriggled forward and managed to draw his knees up under him so that his back pressed against the floor panel above.He searched for the lock with his fingers, found it and inserted the key.The latch clicked open, and he felt the panel give way when he pushed against it.

He glanced down at Raville, who had worked himself to the end of the conduit and lay still directly below Dorian, his face showing between Dorian’s knees.He could smell chemicals, harsh and biting like a particularly vile astringent.Wisps of milky white gas, visible in the beam of his flashlight, boiled in through the gap created by the open panel.

Raville meant the things that he said.He believed them as fervently as any religious zealot.Amara was not his tool, but an icon to be adored.

In his own way, Michael Raville had come to love Amara, to care about her as much as Dorian himself did.

The thought made his stomach churn.

“I don’t care how much you admire her,” he said, whispering into the dark.“I still hate you.”

For whatever reason, Raville did not protest this time.Maybe the feeling was mutual.

Dorian looked away.“Let’s get this done.”

And so he had come full circle.

Seated at an emergency system console hard-connexed to the primary datacore moderator housing, the darkness illuminated only by the glow of his monitor and red hazard lights which pulsed in recessed sconces high on the walls, the familiar feel of a keypad clicking against his fingertips, he could not help but remember that this was how it had all started:drilling down through file structures and trees of system logic to root out a spider.

Of course, his work environment had been better then, his priorities clearer, or at least so he imagined.At least in his office there hadn’t been corpses littered about the floor or slumped over in neighboring workspaces, their faces contorted in variously horrific expressions of death-agony.Nor had the air been fogged with brain corroding chemicals that spurted irregularly from pinpoint jets hidden in the walls.Most of all, the basement of the Archive had held only a simulacrum of Michael Raville contained in its own impregnable environment, rather than the actual one tethered by a hardline plug from his array directly into the datacore moderator.

The more things changed, the more they stayed the same.Or got patently worse.

The good news was that both he and Raville had foam access once again, provided by the central datburst origin node—a hardware mainline straight into the heart of the computational universe.

As he skipped through the text of his foam’s file structure, marshalling his tools to jack into the datacore, Dorian wasn’t sure what he had accomplished in the intervening weeks and months, if anything.He’d met a girl, found out that she was a god, then not a god, possibly fallen in love with her, jacked some datacores, ruined his career, and abandoned the only life he had ever known.It felt like activity without any real progress.Maybe the stakes were higher, though it was hard to tell.Was there any difference between saving digitally frozen representations of life and the actual lives themselves?Not that he’d really done much of the latter thus far.The universe was just as close to the brink of disaster as it had been when they began.

But the spider had grown, that much was certain.Or perhaps more properly, he and the spider had exchanged roles.Dorian had become the spider, gnawing his way stealthily into a network that was not his own to extract data (or in this case, a data package) he believed would rescue the world from destruction.

Funny how things worked out sometimes.

He could have saved them all a lot of pain and suffering if he’d just deleted Raville’s rogue package in the first place.Dorian didn’t figure that he’d make the same mistake twice.God Himself—that is, the card carrying, members only God, with a glowing entourage of Heavenly Host and visage more radiant than the sun, rather than aliens with delusions of grandeur—would be hard pressed to convince him to do anything but hit the delete key this time.Maybe he’d just make absolutely sure of it and dump the whole core.That would piss off DeMartel and Temple, their beautiful battle cruiser instantly transmogrified into a floating metal turd locked in a dead orbit about a frozen moon.It would take weeks to rebuild the basic systems from scratch, just so they could limp home.Or even better, they’d have to endure the career-ending embarrassment of flashing the Strat naval shipyards for a datacore reinitialization scheme.

He liked that idea.He might purge the core anyway, even if Raville threw his hands up in surrender and voluntarily exited the ship’s network on the first pass.

He made what he hoped was eye contact with Michael Raville.His vision was too bleary to see that far with any clarity.His eyes had begun to burn almost immediately upon entering the machine room despite the protections the mask offered, and he was developing a painfully itchy rash where his skin was exposed.He worried constantly about his assorted unguarded mucous membranes.Which made it a good thing that he was so scared, he supposed.His anus was pinched so tight, nothing was worming its way in there.

And every time he almost settled down, the electrified deck just outside the door would give out a thunderous whump! and fill the room with the stench of ozone and flash baked carpet fiber.Even less encouraging was the muffled pop and rattle of gunfire, which seemed to be drawing nearer.Once, he thought he had heard Lieutenant Sainz shouting down the hall, telling them to hurry.But he might have just imagined it.It was turning out to be a bad day for nerves.

“Are you ready?”

“I’d better be,” Raville answered.He was sitting cross-legged on the floor a short distance from Dorian’s terminal, his back against the box of the moderator housing.“We’ve got less than three minutes by my watch.”

“Plenty of time.Once I kick open the gate, I’m going directly for Firing Control.If I can take away his ability to play with the weapons of mass destruction first, we’ll have space to breathe. . .at least until he figures out that the ship constitutes about a million tons of the lethal battering ram.”

That wasn’t really what he was worried about.Raville’s package had to have been aware for some time that the bomb was on board the Indianapolis.It wasn’t the bomb he was after.It was Raville himself.Or Amara.Maybe both of them.Take out all the parts of the war equation and the possibility of war ceased to exist.

If the package hadn’t realized that his targets were all aboard yet, he would in about three seconds, and then they’d have to act quickly.

Dorian wondered how long it would take to work the thrust tubes up to a self-destructive critical mass.Assuming, of course, that the ship didn’t come with its very own doomsday self-destruct device.

He forced himself to put away such cheery thoughts.

Small circles, happy circles, he reminded himself.

“While you do that, I’ll track down. . .myself,” Raville said humorlessly.

“Send up a flare when you find him, and I’ll see what I can do to assist you with containment.You probably won’t have to look very hard.As soon as he reads your ip, more than likely he’ll come after you.I assume you don’t need any advice on how to handle your part of this job.”

“Please.I haven’t forgotten everything I ever learned about seenop incursion techniques.”Raville smiled hesitantly.“But if you have the cycles to spare, I wouldn’t object to some extra fireproofing.”

“I’ll take that as high praise, Mr. Raville.The system is up; security is clamping down.We have our projected access punch point, which I’m transmitting to your foam now.I’ll blaze the trail, you just do your best to follow until we get through the trees.”Dorian held up three fingers.“Get ready.We go in three, two. . .”

One.

He punched the execute sequence, launching the first salvo in a vicious script blizzard designed to camouflage the exact vector of their assault.A cascade of feedback logs and failed load messages poured across the screen.

They were off and running.

Dorian wished he had his array.Wished for it harder than he’d ever wished for anything in his life.The Strat datacore scheme was feverishly dense, dizzyingly secured.Military ice was always hard to scale, quick to sled you off at oblique angles, spin your scripts off free-fall ledges and into maddening tailspins.It presented an impermeable sheet of interlocking, adaptive code blocks that dynamically repaired apparent breaches.Every time you thought you had traction, the scuffs your incursion codes and malware scripts created instantaneously vanished, and you once again found yourself sliding down the face of a vertical cliff.

He watched the data spewing across his screen at a rate that was nearly impossible to follow.Icebreaker programs launched, crashed and vanished from his display before he could even process which ones they had been.He didn’t have time to reference the logs to determine which sequences were working and which weren’t, which code was hacking even a precious partial step into the undergrowth, and which was failing before it was even unsheathed.He drove forward primarily by intuition, relying on his experience with military networks in the past.

Load this one; load that one; resequence the attack so the defenses couldn’t automate a response—couldn’t start eating into his environment to shut him down at the source.He monitored his own recursive defenses for traceback holes the network or Raville might be trying to bore into his foam.

Dorian’s advantage was that he didn’t have to negotiate jump points into the network that could be spontaneously closed or rerouted into interminable logic loops by native security procedures.He couldn’t be kicked off the core.The moderator’s access terminal provided him with an open door directly into the lowest circles of data hell.His job was to open as many other doors at once as he could, then shove a blinding storm of random bits through each portal faster than the network, and subsequently Raville’s package, could analyze them for coherence and recognize the origin of the true incursion attempt.

Once they were inside, it was a simple footrace to see who could shut down whose access and command scripts the fastest.

The central question was what Raville’s package expected, and how much care and time he had taken to lay down his defenses.Dorian was keenly aware that he had carried Raville inside his foam for many months.There had been ample opportunity for him to see Dorian’s code magery at work and to analyze his library of jackware.If Raville had thought he only needed to defend himself against the Indianapolis’s attempts to regain control of its datacore and trusted his security to merely shutting down node access, then he had a real chance of breaking through.But if Raville had anticipated that Dorian would come after him and had laid traps using Dorian’s own counterscripts against him, then all was lost.He didn’t have time to come up with an entirely fresh scheme of attack against the full archive of all the best work he had ever done.

His plan was simple and not the least bit elegant:hit hard, dig deep and do it on a scale so massive that moderator prox couldn’t keep up with the assault.In short, use the expansive capability of one of the premier pieces of military computational hardware in the universe against itself.In the back of his mind, he was counting on technicians and IT wonks, security agents and idle information seekers all across the ship to help him, each of them probing the system for jump points, and when they found a crack, hammering at it until the core’s defenses were overwhelmed by their combined pressure.

Just over a minute into the attempt, Raville announced, “I’m in.The datascape just opened up.”

Moments later, Dorian’s terminal screen filled with overlayed representations of the complex mappings that comprised the multifaceted datacore of the T.E.S. Indianapolis.Dorian let out a brief whoop of satisfaction.

He had broken the datacore’s security much quicker than he anticipated, which meant that Raville had been caught by surprise.It also meant that the Strat naval forces seriously needed to upgrade their tech expertise.Dorian would enjoy rubbing that in Kesh Temple’s face if the opportunity arose.

He bent over his keypad.The first thing he did was to shunt a bit profile over to Raville’s foam, along with a flurry of self-defense scripts.If they were lucky, it would allow Raville a chance to become the hunter rather than they prey.

“Thanks for that,” Raville murmured.“God, this scape is big.”

Dorian wasn’t listening.He flashed through the architectural partitions—Engineering, Thrust Dynamics, Admin, Communications.He ticked down through architectural ladders, drilled into systems whose purposes he didn’t comprehend.His viral spiders plunged across indices, tying up resources, unknotting node access, throwing open the windows of the datacore’s structure to the light of day.And everywhere he went, he seeded vicious self-organizing, stimulus adaptive viral mites.They were small and stealthy bits of code that dug deep, automatically assembled and coordinated their activity through signal pulses transmitted back and forth within his foam environment.Above all, they searched through the architecture for anything resembling weapons management software systems and chewed debilitating data holes in whatever they found.

“Forty five seconds to DeMartel’s firing solution deadline,” Raville informed him.

“I think that was just a ballpark figure.”

“Try to err on the side of caution, then.”

Dorian grunted in annoyance.“We passed the deadline for caution about twelve minutes ago.Why don’t you just worry about your own job, okay?”

“I’m trying, but where is he?I thought you said he would likely attack me?”

Logistics, Personnel Resources, IT Security.The datacore index ran on for screen after screen.Where the hell was Firing Control?

“Maybe he’s hiding.He doesn’t want to be purged any more than you do.”

Raville frowned.

A deep rumble ran through the ship, and the emergency lights flickered.“That would be the Spriggs-Detmer array charging up,” Raville advised.“Fifteen seconds to charge, five to confirm target. . .DeMartel isn’t going to miss his estimate by much.”

“Hold on,” Dorian muttered.“Hold on, hold on.”

Command Operations, Tactical Systems, Defensive Batteries. . .

“Firing Control!”Dorian stabbed at a series of keys, unlocking a batch of malicious quik-release virals he had held in reserve.“I’ve got it.Loading the counterscripts now.Give it five seconds.”

Four, three, two, one.

Nothing happened.At least, nothing bad happened.The ship didn’t shudder with the sudden expulsion of surface devastating projectiles.The lights didn’t flicker again as particle beam energy weapons pounded the distant Giari Tau station to pulp and wreckage.

For five more seconds, Dorian sat completely still, not even daring to breathe.Waiting for the other shoe to drop, for Raville to route commands around his frustration of the Firing Control software system and launch his delayed attack.

Nothing continued to happen for several more seconds, and finally, Dorian took a breath.

The waveform collapsed, the box was opened, the cat was alive.

Raville sat up straight.“I’ve got a ping on him—he’s right in front of me!”

“Flash me your relative position.I’ll track him and cut him off.Do you have a viral script loaded?”

“I’m ready.”

Dorian reconfigured his display as the data came flooding in from Raville’s foam.He read the chase through the datascape as entries in the bitstream transfer logs.At the same time, he ran verification analyses against the emerging shape of Raville’s package, comparing the features of the original profile against this newly configured pattern.Raville had grown considerably since Dorian had copied him over from the Archive, accreting terabytes of data from Dorian’s foam and from whatever he had added to himself inside the datacore.Bloated was probably a more accurate term, and the weight and complexity he had amassed slowed him down as he transitioned from node to node, and attempted to shove himself through datburst bottlenecks.

“I’m confirming a pattern match,” Dorian said finally.“I’ve got him locked in a predictive scan algorithm.He’s hemorrhaging data as he goes, trying to get leaner, I guess.Hoping to duck into a loosely structured file system and get lost.Let him have his head for a bit.I’ll close the doors ahead of him and limit his escape vectors—keep him away from jump points, especially.”

Raville nodded his understanding.“I’m moving in.”

“Don’t play with him.He could still be very dangerous.”

Dorian watched, waiting for Raville—either one of them—to make his move.He tapped out a series of commands to seal the nodes to the package’s profile, then slowly began to open them up again to external users.He restored essential systems to the Bridge and Engineering, reset the comm relays on a limited basis, and ordered an environmental purge of the machine room.

The recessed jets finally stopped pumping lethal gas into the room, and cool air began to waft against his face.Eventually, the red emergency beacons stopped pulsing, and the overhead lights snapped on.

The machine room door opened and Shimkus poked his head inside.He sniffed at the air, wrinkled his nose, then shrugged.He pushed the door the rest of the way open.

“Hey!You’re not dead!”he said brightly.“Limited communications are back up.Have been for a while.We’ve had some tangles with Security trying to run in on you.Good fun, but bad for morale.At least on their side.”

Dorian waved him off.“I’m reading you passing out of the central core into a dead end auxiliary system.He’s got nowhere to run.”

“I see him,” Raville said.A sheen of sweat broke across his brow.“Loading virals.”

Dorian punched up a few silver bullets from his own arsenal.“I’ve got your back.Target pattern shows as stationary.He’s hit a locked node.”

“Executing now.”

Dorian fired his own scripts for good measure.

Data moved across the quantum universe.Binary switches flipped.Bits scattered in a storm of chaotic noise, then dynamically reformed into sparkling new arrangements as though their original pattern had never existed.

He sighed quietly.A frozen concatenation of ones and zeroes.That’s all Raville’s package had ever been.

Except. . .

Michael Raville leapt to his feet, his face ashen and his eyes wide.“What just happened?Where did he go?”

“He didn’t go anywhere.He was just data.We erased him.”

But Raville shook his head furiously.“No.He vanished.Right in front of me.He was there, and then simply gone.”

Dorian narrowed his gaze, uncomprehending.He had witnessed the data blocks that constituted Raville’s package disappear.Raville had executed one script.Dorian had launched two.He had watched the package’s destruction.

“It’s probably just an artifact of the environment,” he said.“The military frowns on seenop renders that are too detailed.It chews up bandwidth that can be better allocated elsewhere.Sometimes the system strips them by default—“

“Check the logs,” Raville hissed.

Dorian shrugged.If he had been Michael Raville, he’d want to be sure, too.A quick patter of keystrokes brought up the command log, white text on a black background.That was the sort of reassurance Raville would need.Good, solid text.Text that didn’t lie, didn’t occlude it’s truth behind fancy combinations of pixels.

The last entries transmitted back to the command log consisted of three identical, impossible messages.

Script aborted.Specified target file does not exist.

Script aborted.Specified target file does not exist.

Script aborted.Specified target file does not exist.

Somehow, the package of Michael Raville had found an open node and bounced out of the datacore.

Dorian loaded up a core purge sequence, disconnected both his and Raville’s foam from the moderator and with the punch of a key, began a complete and irreversible reformat of the T.E.S. Indianapolis’s datacore.Without going line by line through the code, it was the only way to be sure that the rogue package wasn’t hiding somewhere deep in the bowels of the system.Dorian didn’t pretend even for a moment that this wasn’t a necessary precaution.It was an admission of defeat, plain and simple.He hadn’t caught the spider, just chased it off without uncovering any of its lairs, any of its trapdoor hideouts.The spider could repossess the network any time it chose.

Raville had beaten him.

“That’s not going to make you any friends around here,” Michael Raville observed, once it became clear what he had done.

“They weren’t going to be my friends anyway.”Besides, if he was going to fail, he might as well fail spectacularly.

“That’s probably true.”Raville flicked an uneasy glance at the terminal.“Is the ship in any danger?”

“The reformat will only take a couple of hours.Localized systems will keep basic services running—navigation, life support, reactor maintenance—long enough to refresh the network scheme from whatever backup they’ve got.”Worst case scenario, there was always the Strat naval shipyards, which was exactly what they deserved if they didn’t have a reliable backup protocol.But Dorian knew that wasn’t what Raville really cared about.“Don’t worry.Things will be peachy again in time for you to launch your bomb on schedule, I’m sure.”

A bombastic exhale of relief from Raville.Dorian resisted the urge to beat him to death with his keypad, and recognizing that his resistance was not going to be entirely effective, he welcomed the arrival of Lieutenant Sainz and the sober announcement that they should get back to the flight bay with the others before ship security arrived in force and all sorts of misunderstandings ensued.

<– Chapter 24 / Chapter 26 –>