The armored glove on Josephine Okafor’s elbow gently guided her to the right. “Low pipe,” Fari Tahir whispered into her ear. They picked their way forward for several more minutes before Tahir pressed gently on her shoulder. “Here. Last bulkhead before the junction. We’re under cover.”
“Will we be here long?” she whispered back. Tahir affirmed it would be a few minutes at least so she parked her butt on the floor. She tugged at her ballistic jacket, trying to shift it to ride more comfortably. As a civilian analyst, her duties had never required her to wear body armor before. She found the weight uncomfortable, and despite having been made to her measurements, it felt painfully tight in the chest, and constricted her movement, limiting her ability to twist and bend.
She felt the warm presence of Tahir as the other woman took a knee beside her, the subtle change of pressure, heard the woman’s slightly labored breathing and the soft hiss of the pneumatics of her exoframe. If things were going according to plan, their assault element should be taking up their final positions before popping the hidden access panel leading from their secret passage—she wanted to chuckle, just thinking of that phrase—into the data junction. She and Tahir formed part of the tiny technical group, along with a Shariff infonet specialist and a Constabulary hardware technician. They were supposed to be holding position five meters behind the lead element. A few meters behind her group lurked the operation’s second-in-command and the rearguard. She was safe, or at least as safe as anyone could be on Ileri station right now.
But she resented her dependence on Tahir, was irritable at having to be guided. Between her cane and her gauntlets, she was used to moving about independently. But her cane was impractical in the tight spaces they’d traversed, and they couldn’t risk the emissions from the ladar, millimeter wave radar, and ultrasonic sensors of her sensorium, at least during this phase of the operation.
That would change once the shooting started.
These smuggler’s ways were deliberately uncharted and fitted, Loh had told them, into something he called ‘squinches’. “Think of the spaces on either side of an arch supporting a bridge,” Loh said. “Our passages fit into spaces like that. The intersections can be confusing to people who don’t know them.” His analogy hadn’t made any sense to her; blind since birth, she couldn’t visualize the shapes he described, and their relationships to each other. Tahir, grasping the reason for her lack of comprehension, had formed the shapes with a couple of foam-covered cable ties and guided Okafor’s fingers across them, allowing her to understand Loh’s meaning.
The ready signal came, and she started to rise, but the insistent pressure of Tahir’s hand on her shoulder kept her down. She shifted back into a kneeling position.
She felt the flash of heat and the mild pressure wave against her skin as the cutting charges went off. The sharp smell of burnt metal seemed to bite somewhere deep in her nostrils as the door clanged to the deck. A brief rush of air blew past her as the flow within the passage suddenly changed, spilling out into the data-node chamber beyond. The mixed force of constables, soldiers, and Fingers people surged forth.
“Up now,” Tahir said. Okafor grasped her hand and came to her feet as the bark of weapons sounded in the room beyond. She activated her sensors, but Tahir hustled her forward before they came online. Her left shoulder pressed against the wall, and she heard the sharp, staccato bursts of weapons, commands across their comm net, and the cries of those hit. The harsh, acrid smell was strong here, close to the breach.
They huddled there by the opening for three minutes and seven seconds according to her timer. By then her sensorium was fully operational, and she carefully swept the space around them, building up her ‘picture’ of the area.
At last the assault commander called them forward. There were new smells, blood and ozone, piss and burnt flesh. She and the other two technical specialists hurried up to the node junction. Okafor heard the assault team bustling around them, rounding up the prisoners they’d taken and establishing a perimeter. The computer tech cursed as he fumbled with his tools and then she heard the sound of an access panel being slid aside. “Got it,” he said, and then he pressed the familiar shape of a fiber-optic connector into her hand. She smiled and snapped it into her djinn. Then she sat down, leaned her back against the node’s housing, and slipped into virtual reality.
Unlike most people, Josephine Okafor couldn’t visualize VR, because she couldn’t visualize anything. But the tactile sensor net had been part of her since she was five years old; she’d grown up with it, expanded it as years went on, learning to distinguish the finest gradations of sensation. At the same time, she grew to live with code. Her virtual experience was unlike anyone else’s she’d ever heard of; but time had shown that for whatever reason, she was remarkably effective in VR.
The difference between this node and a normal, unadulterated one struck her immediately. Instead of one multifaceted junction in the sphere’s center, there were two, one much smaller. That was the piggyback bridge to the Fingers’ private network. She reached out with her right hand, touched it, and felt the connection spring into place. Good; Loh’s access codes worked as advertised.
Haissani, the Shariff datarat who accompanied them, followed suit. He copied her motion, joining the Fingers infonet as she spun digital agents to seize control of this connection point, with orders to replicate and follow the myriad threads of the criminal network to its limits. She wouldn’t cut them out of it, not yet, but the agents carried instructions to copy the data they uncovered, preserving it for later examination. It wasn’t part of Loh’s agreement with Toiwa, but Okafor felt the opportunity was too good to pass up.
“Securing our flank?” Haissani asked.
“Something like that,” she said, and turned her attention to the main node. Okafor spun more agents into being around them as she and Haissani scanned the main node’s input channels. She perceived a loose cloud of packets. Her virtual fingers sifted through them, like through a fall of sand, and discovered they were inbound access requests from djinns, sensors, bots, and the host of smart devices that filled the station. The rebels had locked them out from the infonet, but they continued to seek access.
There. One of her questing agents discovered a series of requests that weren’t being rejected. Interesting. She followed the trace and discovered that the rebels didn’t seem to be using the dark net after all! Instead, they had found a way to lock everyone but themselves from the regular station infonet. Her digital agent harvested data from the stream, and Okafor shunted the computation-heavy tasks of decrypting it over to the Fingers’ network, saving her own onboard processing power.
It was like the difference between trying to pick a lock and simply cutting it out of the door frame with a plasma torch. Within seconds she had the keys she needed. She flipped a set of keys to Haissani and together, they spoofed access requests and fired them to the central node.
And then they were in.
The lockout program hung before her, a soft, amorphous, ever-shifting membrane just inside the outer layer of the node. She called up another agent and set it to trying the supervisory access credentials from the Ministry of Information against the chance the rebels hadn’t managed to change all of them. Another pulsed a message out via the Fingers network, sharing the skeleton key she’d fashioned. Elsewhere in the station, loyalist and Fingers hackers launched their own attacks, hoping to divert attention away from her effort. Hopefully they, too, would be able to slip inside and take the fight to the enemy.
“Shit! Countermeasures!” Haissani said, and a trio of sharp, angry forms sprang into life and began gnawing on Okafor’s avatar, like sharp pins stabbing her in the arms. She could feel the probing spikes of code seeking a way into her virtual form like a series of soft pulses. A flick of her hand brought attack agents of her own into play and she cast them into the fray.
She discovered an unexpected advantage now; she was intimately familiar with the defensive code used within the Ileri infonet, and aside from the access lockout, the rebels hadn’t changed it yet. A mistake on their part; she’d make them pay for that.
Her guardian programs ignored the hostile agents trying to breach her defenses, instead targeting the virtual processors executing the attacking code. One by one, her digital minions seized control, shutting down the hostile programs even as the node tried to spin up new ones. She opened another link to the Fingers network, found her agents there had secured that first node, and ruthlessly slaved part of its processing over to her defensive agents. That, she thought, should give her a little breathing room.
Two options lay before her. One was taking control of the lockout program, freeing up the infonet for the loyalists, and everyone else trapped, while simultaneously locking the rebels out. The other was to push deeper into the infonet, tracing down and in to locate the rebel’s point of control. Fortunately, she wasn’t alone. She reached across the virtual space to ask Haissani to deal with the lockout program—
Only he wasn’t there. The countermeasure programs had forced his avatar out of the system. Unless he could ride dumpshock as well as she, and few could, she was on her own for now. Given time, he’d be back. She hoped. But his absence made her decision easy. She rolled her shoulders out, felt the ghostly sensation of her body echoing the motion. Then she pulled another set of agents from her djinn’s local store. One hand reached out, grabbed hold of the cluster of processing power she’d seized from the attacking programs, and slaved that power to her new programs. It was like going from hand tools to heavy machinery, from pick and shovel to a fusion-powered excavator. And even though she didn’t know just how the lockout program worked, she did know how the system it was corrupting needed to work, knew intimately the potential points of vulnerability.
She slammed her code into the lockout program like an avenging goddess, plunged her virtual hands into it, found the dark heart of its kernel, and crushed it like an overripe grape.
The lockout program disintegrated, and the quality of the virtual pressure inside the sphere changed, from stagnant stuffiness to a breeze, and then to a growing wind, as all the questing systems once again connected to the station infonet.
She sent messages to Toiwa, to the assault team commander, and to the other hackers trying to break through elsewhere, passing on what she’d done, providing each of them with the means to undo the rebels’ work. One of her analysis programs flashed an alert and she laughed as she hoisted out the new keys to the junction. Amateurs. Left a copy in executable space for me. Might as well have used ROT13 encryption on it.
An unseen blow struck her avatar from behind and spun her sideways. In real space her body lurched with a spasm.
She righted herself as her virtual sensorium reported that another avatar hovered before her, and she ‘felt’ heat radiating from the attack code it clutched like a physical weapon. “You won the first round, asshole,” the rebel hacker said. It was a male voice, deep and booming. “Care to go two out of three?”
Josephine Okafor laughed as she flung her imaginary hands wide. Thick channels of data streamed across the infonet as she wielded her master keys and commandeered processing power from not just this junction node, but from the Station Constabulary’s main data center. She reached one hand over her shoulder and drew power from the Fingers network as well. Her avatar swelled, growing in size until it dwarfed the rebel hacker. Her own hands sprouted bundles of attack code that she shaped into massive chains.
“This is my dojo, asshole,” she said, and her voice rolled out across the infonet like a rushing tide. “And I think I’m going two for two.” She flung the chains at her attacker, bound him, plunged her hands into his avatar’s center, and ripped the operating kernel from within it. The avatar collapsed.
She sensed a new avatar in the node and readied her attack code again, but it turned out to be Tahir. “Aren’t you on physical overwatch?” Okafor asked.
“Haissani’s down. We’re taking fire out here, and the rebels are counter-attacking. I wanted to check on you,” Tahir said.
“Almost done,” Okafor said, triumph in her voice. “Infonet access is back, and I’ve locked the rebels out. I just need to deal with the Fingers network.”
“Right, about that,” Tahir said, and her avatar disappeared from the node.
Okafor reached out to trigger the worm she’d planted in the Fingers network—
Pain slammed into her, and the virtual world disappeared. She gasped, or tried to, as what felt like every muscle in her body triggered at once, felt her bladder and bowels release as the stunner scrambled her nervous system. She could hear, distantly, the sounds of gunfire, and stunner shots, and in the distance, a muffled explosion.
“Sorry about that,” Tahir breathed into her ear. “Don’t worry. I’ll hit you with some Pacifine in a moment. Standard treatment for stunner-shot victims. Has an amnesiac agent too, you won’t remember any of this.”
“Why?” Okafor managed to croak.
She felt a sharp, stabbing pain in her thigh, different from the ripping pulses of fire consuming her. She felt herself falling, as if down a deep, soft shaft.
“Because I’m personally obliged to someone,” she heard Tahir say, and then things went black.