None that I have been able to contact, Lieutenant.
Drop mecha had them flanked and were overrunning their position quickly. The sergeant checked his visor for Corporal Shelly and Private Kudaf. From the three-dimensional map in his head he could see that they had taken to the underground tunnels on the west of the driving circle and would come up ahead of them to the northeast a few klicks well into the smoke cloud and closer to the crash site of the Churchill. That would put them farther from the evac point.
What the hell were they thinking? Jackson crouched behind the fountain wall of the statue and eased counterclockwise to view the north flank. He rose quickly and fired the HVAR, cutting down another mecha. Without precise aiming, however, the railgun pellets spalled in showers of ionization on the thicker tank armor, doing little damage. The mecha on the other hand were cutting away at the iron statue and the concrete fountain with the forty-millimeter cannons fairly rapidly. The second lieutenant and the sergeant were sitting ducks waiting to be cut up and fried for dinner.
'There is the main elevator to the maintenance floor.' Reyez pointed at an elevator tube more than a kilometer across the middle of the shopping district open court. The shaft was a shiny metal rectangular tube that extended upward more than thirty floors. The city opened up and spread out around it like the inside of a hotel. The shops and offices were on the outer wall of the Open Court Mall with balconies and overhanging restaurants and shops teetering on the edge of walkways over the fishponds and greenery below. The Open Court was on the periphery of a very large Central Park.
'The maintenance floor is on the top, floor thirty-seven. There we switch to the other elevator for seven floors and then we climb a service ladder about ten meters to the dome exhaust catwalk,' Reyez explained.
'Okay. Sounds good to me.' Senator Moore peeked around the edge of the alleyway and looked as far down each open avenue as he could. There was no sign of any activity other than the occasional looter breaking a window of a shop and running off with an armful of something. 'We stay together and as close to the building walls as we can.'
'Alexander.' Sehera took her daughter's hand. 'I'll watch her. You should take the lead.' She nodded her helmet.
'Good. Reyez, you take the rear, all right?'
'Sure, man.'
'You keep a watch behind us for anything,' Moore ordered him.
Abigail?
Yes, Sir?
Can you patch into any of the local street and security cams and track around our position for activity?
Already on it, sir. We are clear right now. Just like back in Elysium, huh?
Shit, I hope not, the senator thought. What about the communications? Ever get anywhere with what is jamming us?
Only one thing. There is a sporadic blip in the data rates between all of the other AIs locally and myself, but the blip seems to be causing an increase in data rate rather than an increased error rate as usually occurs with jamming.
Like that time at Tholus Summit? Moore recalled a battle from decades passed.
Exactly like it, Senator. Abigail emphasized the word 'exactly.'
That . . . can't be. Can it? He thought about how General Ahmi had spoofed the mecha coms in the battle of the Summit by inserting a virus into the system that simply told the communications algorithms that there was no data and to shut down. The virus had been simple and ingenious. But Ahmi here? Now? That was unexpected.
The frequency shift is the same region of the spectrum but I don't know where to start in order to find the frequency-hopping sequence. I've got several of the casino AICs from the north dome gambling district working on cracking it. I'll keep you posted. The AIC understood that the problem was multifaceted. The spectrum-hopping transmission was broadcast at a large range of different frequencies and only one or two of those frequencies would be transmitting at a time and for just a few bits of data. Then the frequency would hop to another set. In order to crack the transmission Abigail would need to determine what range of frequencies the transmission was using and in what order the transmission would hop from frequency to frequency and how often.
Good girl! I'll think on it too. Maybe she has said something in her various public rants over the years that will give us a clue to the spectrum sequence. The sequence could be generated by any random string of numbers or it could be a string of numbers that meant something. Sometimes the sequence was randomly generated by a computer but in many cases it was based on some type of code scheme so that other members of your team or cell or squad could decode it.
Alexander thought of all the latest video footage of Ahmi. She had sent out video clips of her madwoman rants at a fairly steady rate of a few per year, but that had stopped about three years prior. He thought of the years in the Separatist POW camp where he and the other prisoners were tortured and had heard her rants over the intercom daily and nightly. He tried to think of everything she had ever said. Maybe something in there would help to uncover the frequency-hopping sequence code.
I'll do the same. And in the meantime run a dictionary hack on it. Abigail paused for a brief moment and then continued. Senator, there is a convoy of mecha and Separatist troops entering through an airseam on the southwest wall. It appears as if they will be on a direct coincident path with us if we don't hurry. Also, the troops to the north have been overrun and we will probably soon see more Separatist soldiers coming in from that direction . . . very soon. The gambling district AIs tell me that the north dome is basically an occupied territory.
Got it. Time is short.
'Let's move fast people. No telling when the Seppies will show up.' Moore nodded knowingly to his wife. She got the message and did what she could do to hurry her daughter and the Triton woman Joanie along. Alexander had begged Sehera to get an AIC in the past, which would have been beneficial at moments like this, but the Martian in her led her to have bad feelings toward AICs. After all, it was 'tainted' AICs that allowed General Ahmi and her
