And almost collided with a woman in tan overalls. She recoiled from the glare of Al Shei’s lamps. Al Shei opened up the suit’s intercom.
“She was here all right,” she said. “Pulled out the wafer stack in there and headed for the ether.”
“Ashes!” cursed the woman, holding up her hand to try to shield her eyes from Al Shei’s lights. “She’s got two whole levels out of commission. Any line on where she went?”
“Probably trying to find her husband. Where’s he at?”
“Med bay level ten…” The woman bit the sentence off. Al Shei clasped both fists together and swung hard at the woman’s temple. She connected, and as the motion drove her backwards, she heard something heavy hit the wall. She took her own impact on her shoulder and shone her light around. The woman’s body floated limp and still in the middle of the corridor.
The maintenance closet had done one other thing for her. Al Shei swam to the far wall and used the dead waldos to pull herself along it. It told her which were the inner and outer sides of the corridor. The next hatch she came to on this side should be the stairs.
Yerusha cycled back the hatch on the comm center. Schyler stood next her with his mouth slightly pursed. They had been back aboard after what she was calling their “little jaunt” for about three minutes. Resit had coolly told them there was an uproar from the Landlords because the station was now off balance and they were struggling to correct it, and to contact the can, but no one was looking for them specifically. Then, Lipinski had called up through the intercom and asked them both to come down to the data hold.
Lipinski hunched over the boards at Station One, writing out commands one painstaking word at a time. He didn’t look up as he waved them over.
“Do you recognize this?” He pointed at a program-and-connector diagram with a slew of numbers underneath it.
Yerusha studied the conglomeration for a moment. “It’s an AI diagram, but it’s a lot bigger than average.”
“Good, I got it then.” Lipinski finally did look up. The rings under his eyes stood out starkly against his pale skin. “That, or things like that, have been bopping back and forth in the network for the past twenty minutes.”
Yerusha, although she thought she’d been prepared for the idea, felt a shiver crawl down her spine. “You think the battle’s started?”
Lipinski nodded. “Now, if we’re right about anything, it’s that this, what’s his name, Curran, his AIs are out in the net trying to take out the monetary transactions. Eventually, they’ll all be coming back here. They won’t be able to get to can 56, because that’s in free fall. No stable reception point. But they can still get back to Port Oberon.”
Schyler’s gaze was so steady, Yerusha realized he had passed stoic calm and come out on the other side. “What are you getting at?”
“I think I can use Tully’s catburglars to get them.”
“How?” demanded Yerusha.
“I’ve been watching the signal flow between transmission points. You get a big pattern passing from a designated transmission-receiver device, to a second transmitter-receiver, and then it goes back from there to where it came from. Then, you immediately get another similar pattern going from transmitter to receiver, and then nothing.
“I think they send through copies of themselves to make sure the link’s stable between point of transmission and point of reception before they send themselves through. It makes sense. A signal can’t do anything until it gets some hardware to respond to it. You’d want to make damn sure there was hardware there to catch you, or you’re going to become just another bunch of photons heading for Kingdom Come.”
“And how were you able to figure all this out?” Schyler waved at the boards.
“You can’t track a signal in hardware without getting a program into the hardware, but you can track a signal between hardware points without trouble. You just need a working receiver, unless its encrypted. Those AIs are big, clever and fast, but they’re not encrypted, and Pasadena’s got a very good receiver.”
“So,” Yerusha’s head was spinning. “With all these years, nobody’s ever spotted them bouncing around before?”
“Nobody knew what they were looking for,” said Lipinski quietly. “I mean, if anybody spotted them while surveying the lines, which is illegal as all hell in most systems, they would just think somebody was transmitting a copy of AI code to somebody else. What’s weird about that? It happens all the time.” He paused. “Anyway, we don’t know that nobody else has spotted them. I mean, Al Shei found out what was going on, and look what happened to her husband. We don’t know they haven’t done the same thing to other people.”
Yerusha felt her stomach turn over. This was not how it was supposed to be. This was like Lipinski finding out that God’s angels were only interested in humanity’s destruction.
“So, what’s your idea?” Schyler shoved both hands in his pockets.
“We take Pasadena away from Port Oberon so we’re an isolated transmitter-receiver. I set Tully’s catburglars to break the security on the receiver telescopes. Then, we watch the outlying transmitters. There are six capable of reaching Port Oberon directly, and, after Free Home Titania, it takes a full four seconds for a signal to get here from the closest one. Add in the time for the copy-bounce and you’ve got twelve seconds of transit time.
“So, we get the Free Home to shut its receivers down. Then, when I pick up a concentration of AI signals doing the initial copy bounce, it’ll give me an alert and I can set the catburglars in motion and take out all the receivers on the station.”
“You’re going to order them to shut down?” asked Yerusha.
Lipinski shook his head. “No. That could be counteracted to easily. We might not get all the AIs with this trick. Some of them might be here already. We don’t want them to come undo what I’ve done. We need the receiver hardware thoroughly disabled. The communications signals are light, right? The receivers are all telescopes. All you have to do to disable a telescope is order it to point at the Sun and order it to look at the pretty bright light really, really hard. Even at this distance, good old Sol can burn out every optic in every ‘scope on the station.”
Yerusha swallowed hard. It could work. It really could. If the signals were in transit and the receivers suddenly shut off, they’d just keep on going out into the vastness of the universe.
“And you don’t think they’ll spot this little maneuver?” she was surprised at how small her voice sounded.
There was a dangerous light in Lipinski’s eyes. He was attacking the monster that had haunted him for years. Finally, he had the chance to strike back at the thing that had brought down his whole world. “I don’t think they’re taking us into account right now. I think they’re going to find out that’s a massive mistake.”
Schyler nodded slowly. “There’s one problem. Pasadena is still impounded. How do you plan to get us away from the station.”
That took Lipinski aback. “The catburglars?” he suggested. “The alarms are still down…”
“And risk the AIs spotting us as soon as we make one too many transmissions using the same encryption tricks?” Yerusha sighed heavily. “You two just don’t think right for this kind of thing. Have we got a roster of who’s on shift at flight control?”
Lipinski wrote a command across the board, calling up a list of names. Yerusha looked them over and spotted Louise Berryman. “Great, we’re set, as long as our accounts haven’t been touched yet.”
“What are we going to do?” Schyler almost sounded bemused.