“What the fuck?”
Staff Sergeant Richard Simone was a data security specialist code five, about the highest level available. He’d previously been assigned to the Pentagon after several minor but politically embarassing hacking attacks on secure systems. Dick Simone had been coding at the age of eight and “script kiddying” by the time he was ten. But after a while he realized that it was much more fun trying to stop hacking than actually doing it. He still maintained his connections with the cracker community, if for no other reason than to keep up on the latest slang. A few of the cooler elements even knew that he’d gone “legit;” there was a certain cachet among the really good crackers out there when they found an “enemy” that was their class.
Dick could have made much more money in the civilian world, especially since the military mostly left data security to relatively low-paid noncoms. But he had the “mentat civitas,” that sense of honor and duty that was the core of being a soldier. Eventually he’d stop reenlisting and go get a job where he could make some real money.
Well, he had had that as an option until the bots got here. Now, being in Weeden Mountain was about as safe, and well paid, as it got.
But despite the total chaos in the world the Internet was still, more or less, functioning and there was still the occasional jackass that tried to crack the system. And he’d just spotted one.
The guy was using a fairly simple buffer overflow attack but with a nice little fillip of an encryption packet designed to overcome Blowfish. The point seemed to be to create a zero day exploit, which he didn’t have a chance of managing. So far, nobody had cracked Blowfish. A “zero day exploit” was trying to crack it on the fly. Wasn’t going to happen. The cracker had hit the first firewall and thought he’d made it past. But Dick had set that one up as a trap; when a cracker using any of a thousand or so methods cracked the firewall it set off an alarm. Then Dick could watch them try to crack the second wall. And the second wall, if it detected the cracking, actually sent the cracker into a bypass loop that looked like a computer system but was really a very elaborate ruse, a honey trap. And all the while, Dick could be backtracking the crack and cracking the other guy’s computer.
Dick called up a spider to follow the cracking back and got his first shock of the incident when a message popped up.
“Ah, thank you for detecting me. I need, very very urgently, to contact Dr. Reynolds. Tell him this is Megiddo and I’ve got the codes he needs. This is urgent since I understand that you are under attack.”
RocketRog: Megiddo?
Megiddo: The same. I have completed a program that I believe will permit you to control the bots. It uses the same frequency spectrum as the IBot program that Dr. Pike developed. However, this one gives you the ability to stop them, have them land and reset their passwords so that you can lock out higher controls. I’m working on further refinements, however this should do for the time.
Rocket Rog: Boss. When can I get it?
Megiddo: The kind sergeant that contacted you gave me a secure point to which I might upload the program. It is currently uploading from a mirror site I placed a trojan on some time ago. And tell the nice sergeant that the tracer bot he just sent goes to one of the few remaining servers in Australia. Good luck.
‹Meggido has signed off›
“…three! AAAHHH!”
There wasn’t much to do but scream and pull the trigger. As soon as Jones put his head over the edge of the bluff all he saw was a wall of metal. The bots were actually flying through the tops of the trees, which had been sheared off by the laser, just under the beam. And the lead wave was no more than a pickup-truck’s length from the edge of the bluff, headed, as far as he could tell, right for his face.
The exploding rounds were not designed to penetrate armor, and Jones could see even in the split second that he had, that these bots were much heavier than the ones that they’d brought back from Greenland. They were thicker top to bottom and the metal had an odd sheen to it. For some reason a battlefield in Iraq came to mind but he couldn’t figure out why. The thing that went through his head in a flicker was a smell of all things. A hot, metallic stink that he couldn’t quite place in the chaos that was this moment’s existence.
Despite the fact that they were not armor penetrators, the explosive rounds had an effect. Enough small explosives in a small area can sometimes make up for larger explosives, even if in very odd ways. The main thing that they did was throw the bots off course. The probes were packed in wingtip-to-wingtip and running in a narrow gap between the ground and the lasers overhead.
As the rounds, hosing out of the modified paintball guns at over six hundred rounds per minute, began to slam into the packed-together probes it created chaos. For the probes. Probes hit on a wingtip tumbled sideways, slamming into the probe next to them or jinked up or down or knocked even into a spin. Up meant a brief shower of crackling electric metal as the probe, armored as it was, hit a multimegawatt laser at very short range. Down meant slamming into a tree, the ground or the onrushing bluff. Probes crashed into each other in a shower of metal, turning into nearly ton-weight balls of shattered metal and electrical discharge.
But momentum wins every time, and the probes had been headed for the cliff. Which meant that all that shattered metal was headed for the five people lining the cliff-top.
Jones couldn’t look sideways as he saw a chunk of probe the size of a large bicycle pass through the space to his right but he didn’t really have to; there was a sudden spray of arterial blood that wasn’t really survivable. Whatever had happened to Nelms, the sniper wasn’t going to be going home to Des Moines, Iowa.
Top was next to him, hosing just as he was and screaming just as loud. There was just something about the situation, a seemingly unstoppable wall of metal winging towards them at four hundred miles per hour with only a wall of very small exploding rounds keeping the metal from hitting them, that called for one primal scream after another. Top’s was just a lot deeper than everyone else’s.
One of the vids on the laser bunker had a good shot of the firefight going on at the edge of the cliff and Shane nodded to himself as he watched. There was only one thing wrong with the picture from his perspective. Too many of the probes were getting too high before being hit by the laser. Two had made it over the edge of the bluff but the backup team had managed to hit them before they did whatever they intended to do to the laser bunker. So he keyed his mike.
“Platoon, get lower. The laser is coming down.”
Jones didn’t really hear the CO. He could only focus on the onrushing wall of metal. But he did notice when the probes started exploding much closer overhead.
This led to louder screaming. But he kept his finger firmly planted on the trigger.
Two thousand rounds. Six hundred rounds per minute. Three and a half minutes. How long as this been going on? It seems like about a year… I think I’m already in hell.