Such a simple thing, and it really fucked her plans. She didn’t have time to jimmy a lock.
Okay, but what’re the odds that there’s someone in there? Pretty good, right? Tetsami nodded to herself. Most folks would have at least one human supervisor on a project like this. That was the guy who had shut things down when the shit hit the fan.
Guy probably got a big bribe to let sniper number three take his position up there.
External sensors had to see her, so how to do this?
“All right, I’m addressing the a-hole inside this can.” Tetsami put a hand in her coat and put on her best crazy expression. “I’m carrying a few AM grenades—you know how twitchy they are—if I buy it out here, you probably won’t have to wait for my partner back there to frag the trailer.” Zanzibar punctuated that with another spectacular shot into the superstructure. Tetsami silently thanked her.
Hell, if she had been carrying some antimatter grenades and the bottles went, they could probably say good-bye to the whole building. AM was a sneak weapon, no one was fool enough to carry it into open combat where a stray shot or EM pulse could turn you into a two-hundred-meter crater. Terrorists liked them because they were small and you couldn’t really detect one—except when they malfunctioned.
Whether it was the AM threat, or Zanzibar behind her taking potshots with a plasma rifle, the door slid open for her. She piled inside, pushing aside a pale straw-haired guy who couldn’t be any older than she was. He stammered, “L-look I don’t know what’s going on. I don’t want any trouble here. The company is going to—”
“The company’s going to hang you, boy, for letting that marine geek up there.”
“I had nothing to do—”
“Shut up.”
Tetsami made her way down the length of the trailer. One end was dominated by a control center. The walls were alive with screens showing the POV of various robot workers. There was a massive computer board, displays showing elevations of the structure being built, blinking lights—a lot of fire warnings, Tetsami noted—a comm tap into the wider computer net, and—just what Tetsami was looking for—a bio-interface jack.
She pulled a small optical cable out of her pocket and checked the connections. They matched.
“Hey, you can’t—”
“Don’t fuck with me, Blondie, or I’ll slice your balls off and jam them up your nose.”
Blondie shut up.
She made the connection into the jack and made sure the terminal was slaved to it. Then she took a few breaths to calm herself, and held the rounded end of the cable to the concavity in the skin at the base of her neck.
The magnetic end of the cable went home with a click audible through the bones of her skull. It took a fraction of a second for software and hardware to engage each other. It always seemed an eternity to her. She knew that it was her time sense telescoping, even before the hardwired interface programming got up to running speed. In a sense, her brain had been hardwired for the job even before she’d been born.
Time stretched into infinity. Her senses shut down. She fell into the bio-interface’s shell programming. First there was a solid blue infinity, white noise, the smell of oranges, the feeling of pins and needles washing over her body. Then there was a jerk as the bio-interface’s reality fell into place and gave her back the senses it didn’t want.
It kept her vision and filled her point of view with a fairly pedestrian field full of control options: cubes labeled with icons, sliding over the same blue background. Her hearing dropped back to the real world, and she could hear Blondie’s breathing. It sounded much too slow to her, as her time sense of the virtual world sped up way ahead of realtime. Kinesthetic and tactile senses dropped out too, except for her right hand, which apparently was the control surface.
The setup was primitive as hell, and buggy, too—she still smelled oranges.
Since the terminal software had given up her skin, she could feel a smile stab her cheeks.
Tetsami began walking through the software. Three levels into the surveillance option, she found out that the oranges weren’t a bug. She tripped something, and the orange smell turned rotten and became a putrid stab through her forebrain. A security measure that would have knocked her out of the shell program if she weren’t a pro.
She had barely noticed the smell change when she’d already started an internal dialogue with the hardware in her skull. She had cut out the olfactory I/O before the odor became crippling.
Should have done that earlier. Should have known the oranges weren’t an artifact.
Didn’t matter. Most folks couldn’t cut out a slaved sense on the fly without losing the contact, but she had, so no harm done.
Since she was on a priority terminal for the construction computers, she didn’t run afoul of any more stringent security. Most of the access-denied stuff was straddling external inputs. In less than three seconds she had cubes up showing windows on the construction scene.
She scanned the views as fast as she could, looking at the world through the eyes of dozens of robots. At one point, she heard Blondie’s breathing change tempo and come closer. She yelled, “Don’teventhinkit”
She didn’t know if he understood what she said at the speed she was operating, but it sounded as though he stopped moving.
Lock.
She found what she was looking for. She had the view from the northeast crane. The other views scrolled until she found cameras with views she wanted. A view looking at the armored marine on the roof of the building to the north, one looking at the sniper halfway up and in the corner of the eastern building, and another of the guy firing on the van from the tenth floor of the construction.
Now to hack the operations software.
Tetsami had to drop to the code to bypass some safety programs, all of which were frighteningly easy to override. It only took a little prodding to get the arm on the northeast crane to allow itself to go a complete 360.
She slipped into the control system of the crane while spinning off a few improv hyperprograms linking her multiple views of two of the snipers to the on-line engineering programs.
The crane was lifting a two-ton girder and rotating north as she fed the vectors and speeds to the engineering program.
The engineering program did as she asked and ran up a velocity profile and overlaid a schematic on her view out the crane’s camera. Tetsami smiled again. The crane itself didn’t reach, but since she’d killed the safety protocols, the engineering program had used its new freedom to get the girder where she wanted. It was easy now that she didn’t require the girder’s velocity to be zero at the end of its track.
She gave the program the okay to take over the placement of the girder.
The crane arm backed up a few degrees and began a rotation north, accelerating near the failure point of the mechanism. The end of the cable shot to the end of the crane arm, and the girder swung out over the road like a stick on a string. At a very specific point, the winches holding the cables let go and the girder was in free fall.
The sniper on the roof of the octagonal sky-rise must not have been watching above him. At almost the last minute he looked up, and the left half of the girder took him off at the knees.
The sniper was mulched by the two-ton bar of steel. The girder kept rolling, tearing up the roof, smashing antennas, landing lights, a few aircars, and the entrance to an elevator.
By then Tetsami had the northwest crane on-line, and that girder was already slicing through the corner of the twentieth story of the trapezoidal high-rise. This girder didn’t have to go into free fall to do its job, and it stabbed through the corner of the building like a pin through a folded flap of skin.