Okafor simultaneously hung suspended in virtual space and sprawled upon the couch of her tiny suite across the street from the massive Government House complex.
She’d spent a frustrating evening working on the material captured from the Saljuan team in the lab at Constabulary headquarters. Resigning herself to needing to allow the decryption routines time to work, she’d ridden the transit system back to the trailing ring, wishing the High Commissioner’s office had been able to find her quarters closer to Constabulary HQ. Still, the bandwidth available at Government House was equal—if not superior—to what she could get at Toiwa’s office. The Constabulary had better coffee, though.
Too keyed up to sleep, she had returned to her long-term project: probing the oldest and strangest of the illicit networks buried in the station’s infonet. Calling her map a work in progress was something of an understatement. She suspected that all the work to date had barely sketched the shadowy outlines of the hidden web. The fact that peripheral nodes continually came and went as the polymorphic code bounced from system to system didn’t help. Still, concealed beneath the ever-shifting layers lurked a central core of nodes that made up the heart of the secret grid. She was sure of it.
A slender fiber-optic cable linked her torc-like djinn to an auxiliary processing unit resting across her legs. Her VR trodes were likewise physically connected rather than wirelessly, the way most would. In part that was due to the increased bandwidth Okafor used, but in large measure it was because she fundamentally didn’t trust any network she didn’t control herself.
If her djinn was her workaday toolbox, the aux unit was like an entire machine shop, foundry, and fabber facility rolled into one. She arrayed the input fuzzers, packet analyzers, decryption toolkits, stack smashers, and all the rest of the tools of her trade about her virtual form as she contemplated her target. One of her smart agents had identified a potentially long-time compromised node, part of the command apparatus for the station’s dynamic trim system, the physical infrastructure that maintained the balance of the massive conglomeration of rock and metal and composites. She didn’t plan a full-scale assault on the node, not tonight anyway. Confident as she was in her skills and code, tampering with something so fundamental to the station’s operations without backup, or without expert assessment of the potential for causing problems, was far beyond her personal risk threshold.
But that didn’t mean she couldn’t poke around a bit, and perhaps see about mapping and tapping the node’s links to the rest of the dark net.
She felt the buzz of her physical-anomaly alarm against her neck and shifted her perceptions of her sensorium partially from virtual space to physical space. Finding nothing amiss in her quarters—no temperature flares, no chemical traces, no sudden movements of the objects around her—she realized the signal came from the smart agent she’d tasked to monitoring the hallway feeds outside her rooms. After she’d cracked them, of course. She’d send the local sysadmin a debrief memo detailing how she’d suborned the cameras when she moved out...
Cameras that at the moment showed four bulky figures, one in power armor, arrayed outside her door. She immediately fired off digital probes at each and got hits consistent with the same family of polymorphic code as the compromised node, just as her virtual form was cast out of the station network like a vase knocked off a high shelf.
Dumpshock threatened to overwhelm her sensorium, but this wasn’t her first experience with rapid exit from VR. Still, her pulse raced and her hands threatened to twitch from the adrenaline dump. Discipline and long practice helped her still her hands, to breathe deeply, to ride out the physical reaction while responding to the situation, which became immediately kinetic as the soldier in power armor—and it had to be a soldier, only the Army had any armor on the station—kicked in her door.
Physically, Okafor was no match for two hundred-fifty kilos of armored soldier. But they were well within the ten-meter peer-to-peer range the aux unit gave her djinn—
Time seemed to slow as she went into full virtual-engagement mode, aiming every scanner in her collection at the armored form. She ran her virtual fingers across it, feeling the warmth of the IR hotspots and sensors, the chill of the blacklight, and there it was, a buzzing sensation under her fingertips as she located the communications array. The door sailed across the room and the soldier took the first step across the threshold, right arm with its integral mini-gun raised to sweep across the space. One of Okafor’s agents counted the signal streams passing in and out of the suit, while she grasped her RF fuzzer and spammed the inputs, seeking a way in. The door crashed into the far wall as the trooper stepped fully inside, turning towards her supine form.
Aha! A diagnostic input. Her body remained still but for her hands as her fingers trembled, echoes of her virtual motion she couldn’t fully suppress. She launched another agent with orders to brute-force the diagnostic mode, cycling first through her painstakingly compiled dictionary of default login credentials used by manufacturers over the years.
Success came almost immediately—pure luck really. No time for triumphant crowing, though, as the trooper took another step forward even as the diagnostic menus opened before her like popcorn kernels. Damn, it was read-only access. She called forth a cavalcade of stack smashers to hammer the diagnostic system, each one pumping volleys of code, trying to find a sequence that would crack open the memory space she needed...
“Josephine Okafor?” The voice projected from the suit’s speakers was surprisingly high-pitched. “Wake up, please. You will come with us. Resistance will be suppressed.” The other three, two constables and another soldier, all dressed in their services’ tactical gear and light armor, stepped into the room and fanned out on either side of the armored trooper. Her forearms buzzed as her sensorium mapped their positions.
Moving slowly to buy time, Okafor rolled to a sitting position, taking care not to dislodge her aux unit. “Why are you here?” she asked, trying to make her voice sound fuzzy, as if she’d just woken up.
“Disconnect the electronics and stand up,” the soldier ordered, ignoring her question.
“Whose authority are you operating under?” she asked.
“Acting Prime Minister Miguna,” one of the constables said in a flat voice.
SCORE. One of her stack smashers caused the diagnostic system to fail, opening the memory space to her arsenal of malware, which flowed into the space like spilled water, and there was the mobility-control module, and there were the weapon systems, and there the suit’s built-in medical kit. Her agents seized control of these systems and now she let herself feel the exultant rush.
“I don’t think I will,” she said, and took over the suit like a puppeteer.
A flick of thought sent a massive dose of sedative into the trooper’s veins. She punched right with one armored fist, knocking the intruder on the left into the wall with a bone-crunching thud. She raised her right hand and the suit mirrored her action, then swung it sideways and triggered the mini-gun. The tactical armor was no match for the armor-piercing rounds, and her first burst simply cut the next intruder in half. Blood and viscera sprayed everywhere, and the room flooded with a coppery smell. She felt the warm splatter of it across her face and almost lost control.
The fourth attacker screamed and ducked before fleeing into the hallway. Okafor gathered herself, doing her best to ignore the horrible smell, and walked the armor out of the room in time to register an additional three people in the hallway. She raised the suit’s right arm again, only to lower it in surprise when one of the newcomers shot the fleeing intruder in the head.
One of the interlopers raised a rocket launcher to their shoulder before the one in the center smacked their arm. “Don’t be an idiot,” the center figure hissed, as Okafor realized that the suit was ‘seeing’ them on radar, not in the visible spectrum. “Backblast will fry us all indoors.”
She found the external audio controls, cracked them, and spoke. “Who are you, and what the hell is going on?”
One of the figures stepped forward and reached up to pull a phototropic stealth hood up and away from their face. “Are you Josephine Okafor? My name is Myra. Pericles Loh asked me to watch over you.” Myra pointed at the armored trooper standing before her. “We didn’t expect this, though.”
Pericles Loh? The rumored head of the Fingers on-station? What did he want with her? The post-combat crash started to take its toll, and she felt her control slipping away. “You only answered one of my questions,” she snapped.
“Apologies.” Myra took a tentative step forward. “The Treasury Minister has launched a coup. His people are attacking Government House now.”
Her control, already fragile in the wake of dumpshock, nearly gave way at the news. A coup? She knew the High Commissioner had her suspicions about Miguna, and rumors—low-voiced, one person to another—of probes into his dealings and the One World party had circulated for months. To launch a coup, though—Miguna clearly had backing in the military, and the Constabulary. Her breath caught and her body trembled as she fought to maintain a semblance of composure.
A quick check of the suit’s comm systems seemed to confirm Myra’s second assertion, at least. She identified ten suits of power armor—half the garrison’s complement—as they crashed through the Government House complex across the street, accompanied by perhaps forty or fifty more combatants. The sounds of gunfire were audible now, and people were starting to stir about in the quarters block around her. “Damn,” she said. “We can’t fight our way through that.”
“We don’t have to,” Myra said. “If you come with us, right now, we can get you somewhere safe.”
“I need to get to Constabulary HQ,” she said stubbornly.
Myra threw up her hands in exasperation. “If we’re not out of here in the next sixty seconds, madam, the only place you’re going is wherever Miguna wants to take you. Even if you’re in a suit of power armor. However the hell that happened.”
Okafor took a shuddering breath, returned her primary attention to her physical body, and sat up. She was reluctant to put her fate in the hands of criminals whose colleagues she’d chased for years, but they had shot one of her attackers. Enemy of my... worse enemy. Making her decision, she dropped her full arsenal of destructive malware into the suit’s systems and carefully stood up. An armorer would have to completely rip out and replace the control systems before that suit would be functional again. Popping the emergency medical releases to retrieve the drugged soldier inside wouldn’t help the rebel cause either. Scratch one enemy asset.
“I’m not in the suit,” she said. “I’m in the apartment.” With care, she undid the cables connecting her gear as the Fingers team hustled forward. “Let me grab my cane and we can go.”