She caught sight of her boss and winced. The man wasn’t as bad as some of the others she’d had, certainly not compared to the one who’d spent most of her time trying to get into her panties. But she’d betrayed him, as badly as anyone had ever been betrayed. It the chip was truly dangerous, it wouldn’t be just her neck that paid the price…
Colin Venture had endured an astonishing amount of teasing from his colleges since the name of the rebel leader had leaked out. They’d asked him when he planned to rebel, then why hadn’t be rebelled yet and finished by demanding to know why he hadn’t led a commando raid on the kitchens and secured some good food for once. Normally, by the time the manufacture crews were back on the station, the good food was gone. Colin had ended up punching the loudest loudmouth in the face, which had resulted in him being given extra EVA duty.
His supervisor didn’t seem to realise that it wasn’t exactly a punishment. Colin loved drifting in space, watching as the automated systems slowly put the starship together. There was little for him to do, unless something went very badly wrong. Indeed, he wasn’t entirely sure why they bothered with EVA operators at all. Maybe it was just some long-forgotten safety precaution that had never been repealed, even though it was outdated…
There was a sudden crackle on his radio, then silence. Moments later, the suit’s internal life support system — an ever-present background hum — faded away to nothingness. Colin blinked in surprise, then hit the reset button. Nothing happened. Panic flickered at the corner of his mind as he realised the oxygen was going to run out… then he looked up at the shipyard. The whole system seemed to have gone crazy. Each of the giant automated arms was now tearing into the starship they had been building, ripping it apart piece by piece. The whole superstructure was coming apart.
And it was suddenly very hard to breathe.
The alarms went off just as Marian and her co-workers were about to take their lunch break. Grumbling, they stood and made their way to the emergency shelters, even though there was no hint of just what had gone wrong. Marian had a feeling she already knew. Their system was intimately connected to thousands of other systems, while her workstation had clearance to access most of them without needing passwords to break through the firewalls. It wasn’t meant to be that way, but it was efficient. All of a sudden, she had a feeling that efficiency was about to bite her ultimate employers on the backside.
It was nearly an hour before they received any word from their superiors. “There has been a chaos attack on the main computer datanet,” the boss informed them. His face looked pale and sweaty in the dim light. “So far, forty-two people are reported dead. We have no idea just how much money has been lost, but it is certainly over a billion credits.”
Marian blanched. What had she done?
“Work has been cancelled for the day,” the boss continued. A low cheer ran through the compartment. “Security Techs are currently investigating the source of the chaos attack. If any of you have any suspicions you wish to share with them, please do so when you are interviewed. I must remind you that failure to cooperate will be taken as grounds for a full interrogation, even if you are innocent.”
He turned and left the compartment. Marian watched him go, thinking hard. Chaotic attacks, by their very nature, were extremely difficult to pinpoint because the virus erased all traces of its passage before it attacked. In theory, it should be impossible to identify her workstation as the source of the attack. But in practice… she had no idea. Would the designers have bothered to ensure her identity was protected? If they hadn’t, she was likely to find herself under arrest shortly — and she would never see her children again.
Tiberius looked down at the report, bitterly. “How much damage?”
“The chaos virus caused one hell of a lot of damage,” Hanno said. She was the family’s expert on computer security, one of the few people everyone trusted. “Right now, over seventy people have died. We also lost about five billion credits worth of infrastructure and starship hulls — so far.”
Tiberius blinked. “So far?”
“This was a particularly nasty virus,” Hanno told him. “The designers ensured that it infiltrated every processor it could reach, but it didn’t go active everywhere. Right now, there are processors that have to be regarded as suspect, even though they worked as designed throughout the crisis. I think we will simply have to strip them all out and destroy the units rather than trying to recycle them. There may be fragments left behind even if we completely reformat the processors. Replacing them all is going to be a headache.
“Then there’s the manufacturing complex itself,” she added. “Is that trustworthy or is it going to start churning out chaos-infected processor nodes. And then we have to ask ourselves how long the virus infected our system before it went active. We produce hundreds of processors a week. How many of them are infected?”
Tiberius blanched. At the very least, the family’s reputation had just taken a bloody nose; at worst, they would have to replace thousands of computer processors, including ones that hadn’t been infected during the first outbreak, but might have been infected by now.
“Give me some good news,” he said. “Do we have anyone to blame yet?”
“Not so far,” Hanno said. “We do know the virus was inserted from a workstation inside the firewalls, but that only narrows it down to thousands of possible suspects. I believe that the security officers are currently carrying out interrogations — gentle interrogations. But we don’t know if this was a lone protester, someone connected to the underground — or someone linked to the rebellion.”
“Or both,” Tiberius said. “The rebels are bound to make contact with the underground here, aren’t they?”
He scowled at the thought. The underground was very good at hiding, unsurprisingly. They had plenty of experience. The ones who didn’t learn how to avoid attracting attention died, sometimes at the hands of their fellows. They knew they couldn’t risk bringing the full might of the Empire down on their heads.
“Almost certainly,” Hanno agreed. She straightened upright. “With your permission, I will return to my station. We have already barred all further shipments of computer cores from Luna, but we have no idea how far the problem has already spread.”
“No, we don’t,” Tiberius agreed.
He watched her go, then turned to stare out of the window overlooking the High City. The Families Council was going to be very sarcastic about the whole affair; by now, they would have at least a general idea of what had gone wrong. And, once the full story sank in, they would be reluctant to use anything from the factories. Tiberius couldn’t blame them for it, but right now they didn’t have a choice. They had to get Home Fleet up and running before the rebels arrived.
And that, he reasoned, proved that the rebels were involved. It was hard to see how the underground benefited, but the rebels certainly did. Unless, of course, they had already made an alliance. The rebels could easily have dispatched couriers of their own from Sector 117 to Earth, perhaps even before the Battle of Camelot.
He shook his head, bitterly. There was no point in worrying. All they could do was tighten security and hope it was enough to prevent a second disaster.