Back to the Moon-ARC

everyone here will remember—and we clearly don’t want that being the sound bite on tonight’s news!”

I dunno, I kinda liked it. Shows we’ve got balls, Paul thought to himself. If he’d been holding the pointer, he could have smacked it in his hands like a billy club for effect. He stood sternly anyway and glared with a slight grin at the press members—the boss’s enforcer. He decided then and there that he liked Childers and had every intention of keeping his job and his boss happy, no matter how annoying the passengers got.

Chapter 8

During the tour, while Caroline O’Conner was charming the four dozen or so reporters and their accompanying camera crews with her knowledge of Space Excursions, Dreamscape, and space exploration in general, Gesling’s telephone buzzed in his pocket, almost startling him. Somewhat annoyed, he took a deep breath and then fished it out of his pocket. Paul thumbed the center key and then the number key to unlock the thing, and then it dinged at him, saying that he’d received a text message from Childers.

The message read:

after the tour, meet me in my office asap.

Gesling was used to getting boss-grams and didn’t really give it much thought. At that point, he couldn’t imagine that the text message and Childers’s reaction to the question asked by the reporter from the China Daily were related. But he was soon to discover that, unfortunately, they most certainly were. He plopped the phone back in his pocket and ignored it for the time being.

Completing the tour and seeing the reporters to the heavily monitored exit from the Nevada test facility took about another hour and a half. Pual’s stomach croaked at him a time or two and then started in with a full rumble. He had skipped breakfast and by now was ravenously hungry. He debated whether or not to grab a bite before hotfooting it off to Childers’s office. He opted to grab a candy bar and a soda from the break room first. The candy bar at least quieted, if not appeased, the rumble in his stomach. The soda helped, too.

Gary Childers’s Nevada office was not nearly as spectacular as the one in Kentucky. A desk, credenza, and table were the only furniture pieces, and only a few deep-space photographs adorned the walls. By the time Paul got there, he saw that a meeting was already taking place. In the room were Mark Watson, Space Excursions’ chief of security, Helen Jones, the “IT Lady,” who kept the computer network operational, and David Chu, the lead systems engineer for the Dreamscape itself.

It took only seconds for Gesling to determine that everyone in the room was agitated about something. They were all seated at the meeting table and all looked up when he entered the room. He couldn’t tell if they were upset with him or were welcoming an interruption to their apparently intense discussion. Paul was beginning to feel agitated himself, because he didn’t have a damned clue what all the hubbub was about.

“Come in, Paul. We’ve got a problem.” Childers motioned for him to take a seat at the table next to him. Paul took the last sip of his soda and dropped the can and the candy-bar wrapper in the garbage can by the door. The IT Lady sneered at him as she looked back and forth between the garbage can and the recycle bin beside it. Paul bit his tongue to prevent him from saying the word hippie and ignored the sneer as he sat.

“Sure. What’s up? You guys look like we’ve lost the vehicle or something.”

“Well,” Chu commented, “in a manner of speaking, we have.”

“What?!”

This time, the IT Lady picked up the discussion. “Paul, we’ve got a major security breach. One of my team began to suspect something was up last week when he noticed an uptick in outgoing data volume from e-mails, file transfers, et cetera. You know, the usual stuff. But this uptick wasn’t from any particular user or at any specific time. It was about a twenty-percent increase in everyone’s data usage. When we looked more closely, we saw that every single file being transferred was statistically larger than it should have been, given our past few years of data.”

“Really?” He leaned forward.

“When we moved from looking at the overall system level and began looking at specific outgoing messages, we saw that each and every message had some additional data encoded and attached to it. Sort of a hidden attachment, as it were. Then we noticed that messages were also being cc’d to an additional e-mail address. And not the same e-mail address—hundreds of different ones, not one being the same. In a matter of a few days, the extra data volume that went out of here was over a terabyte. And that was before any flags had really been raised. Had a single user been sending that much data, we would have shut him down immediately.”

Gesling was not an information-technology expert, but he was pretty smart, and what she was describing sounded deceptively simple. Almost too simple to be possible.

“What data was being sent? Financial? Technical?”

“Good question.” Chu was quick to respond. “Technical. Whoever did this got most of the Dreamscape design and a lot of performance data.”

“That’s the way it looks now.” Jones continued her explanation. “Yes, it was technical. Somehow, a Trojan software program was latent in all of our computers until it was activated last week. Once it turned on, it began to systematically carve up and send out selected data files from every computer in the office. It found our engineering drawings, customized software design tools, parts specifications, test reports, everything. You name it. We haven’t found a single computer that wasn’t compromised.”

“Goddammit all to hell! I can’t believe we let this happen!” It was Gary Childers’s turn to add to the tempest.

“By the time we realized what was happening and cut off our access to the outside world late last night, it was too late,” Jones said decisively.

“Hundreds of e-mail addresses?” Gesling asked. “Is there a common link? Do we know who we’re dealing with here?”

“China” was the answer from the IT Lady. “I asked Phil.”

Phil was on Helen’s team and was well known by just about everyone in the company as the guy you called when your system went down. He seemed to be able to fix anything. He was also an ex-hacker. When he was in