long ago with their satellites, if I had not done that.'
Allison held up her hand. 'I believe it. From what I've seen, they don't have the resources or the admin structure for wide air recon. I just meant that given time we could have sabotaged their old comm and recon system — in such a way that the Peacers would think it was still working.' She smiled at the astonishment on their faces. 'These last weeks, I've been studying what you know about their old system. It's really the automated USAF comm and recon scheme. We had it fully in place right before... everything blew up. In theory it could handle all our command and control functions. All you needed was the satellite system, the ground receivers and computers, and maybe a hundred specialists. In theory, it meant we didn't need air recon or land lines. In theory. OMBP was always twisting our arm to junk our other systems and rely on the automated one instead. They could cut our budget in half that way.'
She grinned. 'Of course we never went along. We needed the other systems. Besides, we knew how fragile the automated system was. It was slick, it was thorough, but one or two rotten apples on the maintenance staff could pervert it, generate false interpretations, fake communications. We demanded the budget for the other systems that would keep it honest.
'Now it's obvious that the Peacers just took it over. They either didn't know or didn't care about the dangers; in any case, I bet they didn't have the resources to run the other systems the Air Force could. If we could have infiltrated a couple people into their technical staff, we could be making them see whatever we wanted. They'd never find us out here.' She shrugged. 'But you're right; at this point it's just wishful thinking. It might have taken months or years to do something like that. You had to get results right away.'
'Damn,' said Paul. 'All those years of clever planning, and I never...'
'Oh, Paul,' she said softly. 'You are a genius. But you couldn't know everything about everything. You couldn't be a one-man revolution.'
'Yeah,' said Mike. 'And he couldn't convince the rest of us that there was anything worth revolting against.'
Wili just stared, his eyes wide, his jaw slack. It would be harder than anything he had done before but, 'Maybe you do not need spies, Allison. Maybe we can... I've got to think about this. We've still got days. True, Mike?'
'Unless we have real bad luck. With good luck we might have weeks.'
'Good. Let me think. I must think...' He stood up and walked slowly indoors. Already the veranda, the sunlight, the others were forgotten.
It was not easy. In the months before he learned to use the mind connect, it would have been impossible; even a lifetime of effort would not have brought the necessary insights. Now creativity was in harness with his processors. He knew what he wanted to do. In a matter of hours he could test his ideas, separate false starts from true.
The recon problem was the most important-and probably the easiest. Now he didn't want to block Peacer reception. He wanted them to receive... lies. A lot of preprocessing was done aboard the satellites; just a few bytes altered here and there might be enough to create false perceptions on the ground. Somehow he had to break into those programs, but not in the heavy-handed way he had before. Afterward, the truth would be received by them alone. The enemy would see what Paul wanted them to see. Why, they could protect not just themselves, but many of the tinkers as well!
Days passed. The answers came miraculously fast, and perilously slow. At the edge of his consciousness, Wili knew Paul was helping with the physics, and Allison was entering what she knew about the old USAF comm/recon system. It all helped, but the hard inner problem — how to subvert a system without seeming to and without any physical contact remained his alone.
They finally tested it. Wili took his normal video off a satellite over Middle California, analyzed it quickly, and sent back subtle sabotage. On the next orbit, he simulated Peacer reception: A small puff of synthetic cloud appeared in the picture, just where he had asked. The satellite processors could keep up the illusion until they received coded instructions to do otherwise. It was a simple change. Once operational, they could make more complicated alterations: Certain vehicles might not be reported on the roads, certain houses might become invisible.
But the hard part had been done.
'Now all we have to do is let the Peacers know their recon birds are `working' again,' said Allison when he showed them his tests. She was grinning from ear to ear. At first Wili had wondered why she was so committed to the Tinker cause; everything she was loyal to had been dead fifty years.
The Tinkers didn't even exist when her orbiter was bobbled. But it hadn't taken him long to understand: She was like Paul. She blamed the Peacers for taking away the old world. And in her case, that was a world fresh in memory. She might not know anything about the Tinkers, but her hate for the Authority was as deep as Paul's.
'Yeah,' said Paul. 'Wili could just return the comm protocols to their original state. All of a sudden the Peacers would have a live system again. But even as stupid as they are, they'd suspect something. We have to do this so they think that somehow
'Okay,' said Wili. 'I fix things so the satellites will not start sending to them until they do a complete recompile of their ground programs.'
Paul nodded. 'That sounds perfect. We might have to wait a few more days, but-'
Allison laughed. ' — but I know programmers. They'll be happy to believe their latest changes have fixed the problem.'
Wili smiled back. He was already imagining how similar things could be done to the Peacer communication system.
