The two figures ahead paused at an intersection and signaled for the others to stop. One of the moderators peeked around the corner while Donal and Pewder half-collided, half-clung to Walter’s back. The two boys, both Walter’s age, were frequent allies in his illicit raids. They had just enough potential to be useful to him—but not so much potential that they could try out for a clan higher up than the lowly Hommul.
Walter felt an unusual degree of annoyance at their presence. Almost as soon as the final test had begun, they had morphed in his unsettled mind into something other than onetime allies and future clan-mates. They had become rivals to be dispensed with, mere pawns in a game meant for much bigger things.
“Okay, let’s go.”
The lead pirate dashed across the empty street, leaping over the wide Palan gutters with practiced ease. The rest of the column followed; they ran between unoccupied cars leashed to floodposts and across old cobblestones worn smooth by the floods. The five shadowy forms slithered like a single snake into the alley behind the Navy headquarters and gathered amid bags of rotting trash. The two instructors calmly indicated the locked comm box bolted to the rear of the building.
A grumble of thunder rattled nearby windows. The group had little more than half an hour for all three of them to pick the lock and hack their way through the Human Navy’s defenses. If they passed this final test, they would win full status. If not, it would be another year of Junior Pirate menial duties and zero pay.
Walter leaned close with his pick set and noted the scratch marks around the locking mechanism where previous teams had conducted their tests. That year’s graduation challenge was to piggyback the Navy’s longdistance array and send a prank message to Earth HQ. It was elementary stuff. The
Walter chose the proper pick from his set, but before he began his work on the lock, he patted the ID card in his chest pocket to make sure it was still there. Nobody but he knew it yet, but that year’s challenge was going to be quite a bit different from what the Clan leaders had planned. There was more to promote that night than Walter’s status, alone. The entire
And not even Walter knew how far…
UNAUTHORIZED COMPONENT DETECTED_
PROGRAM WILL TERMINATE_
END OF TRIAL PHASE_
Walter hissed at the computer. He slapped its side with his silvery hand. Bending over the terminal, he tried another hack he knew.
The machine beeped. The words INVALID ACCESS_ flashed across the screen, and then the entire unit began shutting itself down.
Now Walter was pissed. He shoved the keyboard aside, pulled out his multi-tool, and ducked behind the whirring unit. There was an access panel there. The first three screws came out easily enough—whoever had last worked on the thing had barely taken the time to hand-tighten them. The last one, though, was stripped bare; the business end of the screw was bored out and smooth, completely ruined by the previous attempt to fix the unit.
“Explains why they tossed it,” Walter murmured to himself. He folded his multi-tool away and pried back the opposite corner of the panel with his deft fingers. He kept yanking on it, bending the panel in half until the head of the last screw snapped off and skidded across the floor.
“Flood me,” Walter said.
He tossed the stupid panel aside, pulled his multi-tool back out, and shined its light into the Automated Breathing Machine’s cavity. A motor inside began dying down, whirring to a pathetic stop. Soon after, the loud air pumps ceased operating. Walter could hear a cooling fan continue to run along in a wheezy rattle, the only other sound besides a steady beeping from the display screen warning him that the machine was powering down for good.
Walter traced the ribbon cable from the display back to a control board. The first thing he looked for was the line out to the speaker cable. He found it and gave the wires a quick snip, shutting the flank out of that stupid beeping.
With it stopped, Walter found he could breathe again, his flush of anger subsiding. Part of him wanted to reach in and mangle the blasted machine, but he couldn’t do that. He needed to get it working again, and fast. He thought about it logically: The ABM was just an artificial lung, right? Beyond the security systems that forced users to pay the lease and upgrade the software, it was just a device for purifying and moving air. He felt along several wiring harnesses and tried to deduce their function. Entire mechanical systems had been replaced in the machine’s belly over time. It looked like three generations of Palans had been cobbling the device along from a poor selection of scraps. He could see parts that belonged to taxicabs, parts that might as well be in a spaceship, parts that looked like they were hand-made right there on Palan. As for the pumps, there were two of them, but the original was little more than a rusted ball. The new one seemed to be working fine, but some sort of trial period had ended, and now it was being rejected like a poorly transplanted organ.
Walter studied the problem. He pulled the knife out of his multi-tool and scraped some of the rust off the original pump. It looked like water coolant from above had dripped all over it for a period of time, destroying the mechanism. Even the electronics board was toast, all the solder connections black, bubbled, and touching. Walter forced his head into the cavity and studied the board more closely. Above him, the last cooling fan sighed to a quiet stop as the machine fully booted down. Walter felt a bead of sweat run through his stubbled head and trickle behind his ear. He stuck the point of his knife behind one of the socketed chips in the original pump board and gently pried it out.
The chip popped free, and he could see the socket had remained dry, even though the connecting pins were completely shot. He turned to the other, newer pump and found the corresponding chip. He pried it out and replaced it with the original, hoping to fool the component detector.
Nothing.
Walter smacked the pump with his fist and cursed. He had another vision of tearing the guts out of the machine, but the sensation soon drained away. He went back to the old pump and scraped around the base of another chip. He wasn’t sure what he was doing, but at least it was
“Flanking flanker!” Walter spat. He reached through the tangle of wire and hoses for the small chip and heard his mother groan in agony.
Walter pulled his head out of the machine and peered around its side. His mom, a half dozen tubes and wires snaking all around her bed, had begun to stir from the lack of air. She clawed feebly at the mask over her mouth, her eyes wide with fear. Walter felt the blood boiling below the surface of his skin. He felt a powerful urge to run to her, to hold her hand while she finally slipped away, but he couldn’t. He wouldn’t let the flanking machine outsmart him.
He dove back into the bowels of the antiquated unit, a medical outcast from some Terran world, no doubt donated to the residents of Palan to assuage away Human guilt for otherwise ignoring them. Walter parted the cluttered web of wire and shined his light into the deep pit of the machine. It looked like the floods themselves had once settled there. Bits of broken plastic and metal formed a jumbled layer in the bowels of the unit. The metal shavings from numerous drillings and cuts were sprinkled over everything, the shiny flakes turning to rust. A black slime seemed to hold it all in place, the drippings of grease and hydraulic fluids having turned into some tar-like substance. Walter played his light back and forth across it all, looking for an innocuous bit of black IC chip. He grumbled to himself while his mother gurgled behind him, asphyxiating. The machine seemed to spin around his head, his world tumbling out of control.
And then he saw it: a speck of black on a ball of orange rust. Walter reached down, his hand shaking with anxiety. He clasped the chip with trembling fingers, even though he had little hope that the piece would actually fix the flanking unit. It didn’t matter. He just needed to be doing something, anything, fixing whatever he could.
He blew on the back of the chip to remove the flecks of rust before turning to the new pump. With his knife, he pried the corresponding chip out of the working control board and let the thing fall into the bottom of the unit. He pressed the rescued chip into the empty socket and waited.
Nothing.
