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“You’re not talking about storming their base,” Koebsch said.

“Nothing so heavy-handed. They’ll be overwhelmed with their telemetry, and I know we’ve hacked into their net,” Vonnie said, looking at Ash and Frerotte.

Ash pursed her lips, but she nodded.

“We can shut down some of their mecha and lose the rest,” Vonnie said. “That’ll stop ’em.”

“We don’t want to hurt anybody,” Koebsch said.

“If they get stuck, they’ll send a mayday and we can walk them out. Piece of cake. That’s why we need to stop them before they go too far.”

“What do the Americans say?” Metzler asked.

“They’ll help us if they can, but we’re right on top of the problem,” Koebsch said. The ESA and Brazilian camps were only sixteen klicks apart, whereas the Americans and the Chinese were closer to the southern pole. “Ash?”

“Sir, we’re lightyears ahead of anything Brazil has in AI,” she said. “We can do it.”

26.

Vonnie’s crew went on the offensive even as they continued to send urgent queries to Earth. Koebsch wanted the cover of waiting for instructions. Later, if necessary, he could present a convincing record that his team had been frantically, helplessly observing the Brazilians and nothing more.

Ash spearheaded the assault. She already had her elements in place. Part of her job was to ensure the ESA camp was equipped to repel cyber invasions. By necessity, some of those guardians were made to counterstrike. The most insidious weapons in her arsenal were SCPs. Sabotage and control programs were dark cousins of AI, as far evolved from their origin — computer viruses — as people were evolved from the first small hairy mammals of the Mesozoic Era two hundred million years ago.

A malevolent, replicating intelligence whose sole purpose was to corrupt healthy systems, an SCP normally included the seeds of its own destruction, a kill code, like a fuse, to prevent it from coming back at its master. Now Ash specifically tailored fifteen SCPs to pirate and transmit the Brazilians’ datastreams to the ESA camp, which would let her substitute her own signals into the Brazilian grid.

Koebsch swiftly double-checked and authorized her plan. But when she began her uploads, he questioned her.

“What were those? You sent five packets that weren’t on our list, didn’t you?” Koebsch asked, and Ash said, “I always have a few tricks up my sleeve, sir.”

Listening to the group feed, Vonnie, Metzler, and Frerotte donned their armor and walked outside, needing room to operate. They entered a maintenance shed where they would be hidden from spy sats.

Inside the shed, Vonnie studied her companions, itching to go, remembering Bauman and Lam. For the moment, no one said anything. They simply monitored their link with Ash.

She danced.

Surrounded by a virtual display, Ash tapped her gloves into a hundred blocks of data, moving like a conductor. “Slow down, slow down,” Ash said to one program as she cut her fingers through its yellow alarm bars.

Most of her SCPs operated at speeds beyond human understanding, but others required checkbacks or multiple launches. All but the most sinister fed reports to her station. Three AIs helped her govern this mayhem.

“We’re in,” she said. “Go.”

They could have used five people in armor — one each for the five Brazilians — but Koebsch needed most of their crew to generate a hubbub of ordinary activity to maintain appearances. At short notice, they also lacked the structures to conceal more than three sets of armor from the satellites overhead.

Vonnie’s helmet showed her an environment that was not the crowded interior of the maintenance shed. It seemed like she was beneath the ice. Ash had ghosted Vonnie’s systems into the armor of the FNEE commander, Ribeiro, allowing Vonnie to look and listen through his sensors.

Static leapt across her visor as the muscles in her left arm clenched into a severe, painful knot. The hack was imperfect. She began to get a headache.

“Ash, can you correct my feed?” she said. “Cut my neural contacts until you do.”

“I’m trying!”

Ribeiro’s squad was 1.9 kilometers in. They’d navigated a slumping old labyrinth of vents, cutting through veils of stalactites. The ice was coated with minerals in this area. The minerals made the ice more durable, which had helped preserve these catacombs. The map on Ribeiro’s heads-up display showed they were pushing toward the upper reaches of a distorted rock mountain another 2.2 kilometers down.

They’d left beacons and sentries behind them. That was more than enough for Ash to piggyback into their net.

Her take-over was subtle at first. Four mecha reported integration failures. They came back online, failed again, then repeated the pattern.

Inside Ribeiro’s helmet, alarm codes winked on and off like white noise. At the same time, Vonnie introduced contrary movements to Ribeiro’s stride. When he swung his leg forward, she kicked it to the left. As he lifted his arm to compensate, she resisted. The conflicting feedback caused an interrupt. His armor shut down to run emergency diagnostics.

“Something’s wrong,” he said in Portuguese, Vonnie’s suit automatically translating his words. “Santos, I’m getting a lot of interference.”

His lieutenant couldn’t answer. Beside Vonnie, Metzler and Frerotte were randomizing the Brazilians’ communications.

“Base, this is One,” Ribeiro said. “Do you copy? Base, this is One. I’m switching to open channels at max gain. Can you hear me?”

Malfunctions took three more of his mecha off-line as Vonnie kicked his leg again. There was no need for her armor to move in reality. Her suit conveyed Ribeiro’s actions to her body and likewise transmitted her intent to him. Inside the maintenance shed, Vonnie’s armor remained still except for the most dramatic gestures. Frerotte waved his hands again and again as he scrolled through FNEE internal menus.

They harassed Ribeiro’s squad for thirty-six minutes.

Alternately blind, deaf, or lame, the Brazilians verged on losing themselves in the ice. Vonnie didn’t want to sympathize, but those memories were too fresh. Inside her suit, she began to sweat. Her hands balled into fists, cramping and stiff. It was another impairment that haunted Ribeiro. He became unable to open his gloves.

He was very brave. He rallied his squadmates with crisp, rapid-fire decisions, consolidating their few unaffected systems. He obviously suspected their problems were no accident, and he thoroughly cursed the Americans, the Europeans, and the Chinese in turn. “Cowards!” he said. “Rapists! You lick between your sister’s legs!”

Ash snickered at that. “Oh, yuck.”

Ribeiro was almost a cliché, a swarthy macho man, but there was more to him than his bluster. Like the ESA crew, the FNEE were the best of their best. Someday he might learn who was behind the raid on his team, which could be unpleasant. He would make a dangerous foe

“Okay, Koebsch says we’ve done enough,” Ash said. “Looks like Ribeiro’s about to get the order to pull out.”

“Nice work,” Vonnie told her.

Ash hesitated. “On my mark, let’s slam them one more time. Ready? Mark.”

Vonnie blinded Ribeiro again as she caused interrupts in  both legs, causing him to crash against the tunnel wall — but  in the next heartbeat, she reactivated his radar and infrared. She needed to see.

Behind him, a digger and two gun platforms were convulsing. The digger shook so ferociously it bounced from the tunnel floor. As it rolled over, Vonnie realized what had drawn her attention. Its legs writhed in familiar patterns like a sunfish.