It passed.
Kolodny disappeared, and Cohen was back, as if nothing had happened.
‹Problem?› Li asked.
But if there was one, he wasn’t admitting it.
They dropped into the northwest corner of the compound, snaking down rappelling ropes between the dog patrols. As they slipped into the shadow of the beet plant, Li saw her squad’s skinbugs cycle through their camo programs: sky gray, dirt brown, rusted orange.
The lab’s door was tucked into a sidewall of the processing plant, just where Intel had said it would be. Li stood aside while Catrall jiggered the lock. Then she and Dalloway triple-timed down a corrugated virusteel staircase, secured the landing, and brought the others in after them.
According to Soza’s schematics, the landing fed onto a long gangway that accessed the outer row of labs. Li tossed off a quick and dirty heat scan to make sure the adjoining labs were empty, then sprinted down the gangway at eighty-two kilometers an hour by the clock—just the way they’d marked it out. As she ran, she felt a warning twinge in her left knee. She’d pay for that burst of speed later; bones and ligaments couldn’t keep pace with ceramsteel. But right now, time was everything.
She reached cover and pumped her first fire team down behind her. She listened, scanned, eyeballed. Then she brought up her second team and leapfrogged the whole squad around the corner in textbook fashion. They regrouped at one end of a long ultramodern virufacture bay. The whole lab was built from ceramic compounds. White walls, white lights, white floors and ceilings. The only flash of color was a stylized biohazard red sunburst stenciled on the floor. No corporate name below it. But then there wouldn’t be. Not in a lab that was so obviously illegal.
Open virufacture tanks stretched down the length of the bay between a bewildering tangle of feedlines and biomonitors. Half the tanks were empty. Half were filled with clear, high-grade viral matrix.
‹?› Li shot to Cohen.
‹Nothing here,› he answered.
They secured the lab and moved on.
They swept the next three labs on schedule, still finding nothing that piqued the AI’s interest. In Lab Four, Li guarded Kolodny’s back while Cohen jacked in and made a first cautious foray into the mainframe. It took him less than a second to confirm the Intel data. Lab Five stood out like a black hole on the lab net: a total absence of output. Whatever illicit wetware work was going on here, Lab Five was its epicenter.
A blind corner led into Five—the only blind corner in the complex. Li reached it first. She paused, scanned, motioned Catrall over to the far wall to cover her. On his nod, she juiced her internals and accelerated around the corner—straight into a withering blast of white light.
She pushed forward and through it; no matter what the danger the worst possible response was to lose momentum, risk being stranded in the kill zone. Then she rolled behind a stack of sterile saline canisters and stopped to tally the damage.
None.
She’d run through an automated irradiation beam, installed at the door to protect the contents of the lab’s unsealed virufacture tanks. Her skinbugs handled it, masking her presence, killing the intrusion alarm before her passage tripped it, protecting the weapons-grade virucules on her skin and uniform from the assault of the radiation. No problem.
Except there was a problem. The beam should have been on the schematics Intel gave them. Should have been, and wasn’t. She wondered what else Intel had missed—and if the next surprise would be this harmless.
As soon as she was sure she hadn’t set off any alarms, she waved in the rest of the squad. They had twelve minutes and twenty-three seconds left before the hopper returned. No time to waste on unnecessary precautions. When the perimeter was secured, she split the squad in pairs and had them scan the tanks. She set her realspace feed to toggle if anyone’s pulse rose above combat-normal. Then she picked up Cohen’s feed and rode in on his shoulder while he jacked the system.
The lab’s security went far beyond the deadwall. There would be no slipping in under the radar; Cohen was going to have to meet their best stuff and better it. The network was broken into half a dozen separate zones. He’d have to crack each zone separately, and at the same time elude the quasi-intelligent game-playing agents that defended them. There was no back door, no way in or out without running the gauntlet of the security programs. And even if Cohen got by them, Kolodny would still be physically jacked in to the lab mainframe, vulnerable to whatever wet bugs and bioactive code the system threw at her.
As Li watched, Cohen spun out a sleek silver thread of code, tweaked it into a loose Möbius strip, and floated it into the main corporate site on a public-source message. Trojan horse, she thought. Oldest trick in the book.
Cohen was laughing before she finished the thought. ‹Good hacking requires a familiarity with the classics, Catherine.›
‹Did we just go off duty?›
‹No, ma’am.› The dark-haired schoolboy floated across her internals again, one arm buried to the elbow in a brightly colored cookie jar.
Li glared. The boy popped like a soap bubble.
‹Keep your mind on your job,› she said.
The security program caught the horse, just as it was meant to. In eight seconds alarms were going off all over the network. In twenty-three seconds the system’s anti-incursion software had corralled the horse and routed it to the off-site virus zoo. For a moment nothing happened. Then an area of confused activity boiled up inside the virus zoo and ballooned into a roiling mushroom cloud of self-reproducing, randomly mutating code.
Li held her breath, trying to follow code that was spinning faster than even her military-grade wetware could track it. She shut down her VR interface and dropped into the numbers, a swimmer in the shifting ocean of Emergent networks that was Cohen.
His strategy was working. Or at least she thought it must be. The security program tracked each new virus, broke its code, sent antidotes shooting off to its entire UN-wide customer base. But this was a game the defense lost before the first whistle. The virus mutated constantly, generating new code faster than the system broke the old code, causing the system’s outgoing mail to increase exponentially. And each new antidote-paired copy of the virus contained an embedded packet of active code that attacked the receiving system and sent yet another help request shooting back to the virus zoo.
In twelve seconds the off-site provider’s network exceeded capacity, locked up, and went down. The target was cut out of the flock, and Cohen was ready to go to work in earnest.
Li maxed her realspace feed. Her squad was still sampling tank contents. They moved systematically down the rows of tanks, scanning and logging their contents. No search and destroy on this mission, just information-gathering.
‹Retrieval minus 8:10,› she told them. ‹Keep it lively.› She went back on-line just in time to watch Cohen fish a series of clearance codes out of the lab’s personnel files and drop into the database as a system administrator. ‹All clear?› she queried.
‹Nothing left to do but sniff out the bone.›
‹Well, sniff faster. 7:41 to retrieval.›
And back to realspace.
They were running late. Li sent Shanna and the two new recruits over to the far end of the lab, signaling that she’d cover the middle rows herself. They were flirting dangerously with missing their retrieval, and she didn’t want to contemplate the possibility of a delayed pickup in the dust storm that was still raging above ground. Nor did she want to find out the hard way that Soza hadn’t arranged backup retrieval.