In Enemy Hands

'Which means we're not going to be able to sneak in on them the way Harkness did on our guards,' he said, and punched buttons on the memo board. The display shifted scale, losing detail but showing a much wider area, and he pointed into it. 'We're going to have to cross this passage here to the lift, then take the shaft down a deck to the brig. If they're on their toes, they may have cameras in the shaft, in which case they'll be waiting for us. We know they've got cameras in the cars, but Harkness didn't turn up any sign that the shafts themselves are wired. If they aren't, we should still have the advantage of surprise, but we'll be going in blind whatever we do.'

'Hm.' LaFollet grunted, chewing unhappily on the implications of a blind assault against an unknown number of enemies. Venizelos hadn't had to tell him the change in route was going to put them behind schedule, either. Using the lift shaft should help a little in that regard, it would certainly be faster than moving the same distance through these cramped tunnels, but he didn't like coming into the brig from the most predictable direction. The advantage of surprise should make up for a lot, assuming they actually had that advantage when the moment came, but it was still going to be iffy.

'All right, Commander,' he said after a moment. 'We'll do it that way, but give your flechette gun to Bob.' Venizelos' eyebrows rose in question, and LaFollet bared his teeth in a grimace no one would ever mistake for a smile. 'He'll trade you his pulser, but when we hit the brig, you and Commander McGinley will bring up the rear.' Venizelos started to open his mouth, but LaFollet cut him off with a brusque gesture. 'You and she are naval officers. You'll be more useful if it comes to picking alternate ways out of here than me, Jamie, or Bob, so if we have to lose someone...'

Venizelos didn't like it a bit, but LaFollet’s logic was unanswerable. So instead of protesting, he slid the flechette gun's sling off his shoulder to hand it to Robert Whitman.

Carson Clinkscales walked briskly up the narrow passage, and the hatch at its end opened at his approach. He strode through it, trying to look completely at ease... and hoping no one would wonder what a ground force trooper had been doing wandering around down amid the controls for the docking arms.

There were twenty or thirty people in the bay gallery. It looked as if some of them were carrying out routine maintenance on the pinnace at the head of the bay, and two or three men in flight suits stood in idle conversation near the docking tube that led to one of the enormous armored assault shuttles which filled the rest of the bay. Clinkscales glanced around casually, trying to get his bearings quickly. Harkness had briefed him as well as he could, but actually picking up the access slot without ever having been here before was harder than he'd expected.

There it was! He turned a bit to his left and walked onward, reaching into his tunic for the minicomp which Harkness had turned into such a lethal weapon. He pulled it out with a calm he was far from feeling, and the display blinked as the coupling mated with the slot and the connection brought the minicomp on-line.

'Hey, you!' The shout came from his left. He turned his head, and his heart seemed to stop, for a StateSec sergeant stood twenty meters away, glowering in his direction. 'Just what the hell d'you think you're doing?' the sergeant demanded.

He sounded more irritated than alarmed, but the ensign felt a moment of total and absolute panic. But then, as suddenly as the panic had come, he felt something entirely different. It was if the universe's entire time scale had just shifted, and a cold, crystalline sense of purpose replaced his choking terror. He was still afraid, but now he was only afraid, and the fear was a distant thing, small and unimportant beside his absolute certainty of what he must do.

His finger depressed the function key Senior Chief Harkness had told him to press. The minicomp’s display flashed as the stored commands poured through the interface, but Clinkscales wasn't even looking. His attention was on the sergeant, his expression one of casual interest, and he strolled to meet the older man. Their mutual angles of approach turned his right side away from the sergeant, and his right hand fell naturally to his hip. It settled on the butt of his bolstered pulser, and he smiled, cocking his head as if to ask the sergeant what he could do for him while the singing, frozen tension in his brain wondered how the hell long it was going to take Harkness' programs to activate, and what would happen when they did, and, Sweet Tester, that sergeant was getting close now, and...

PNS Tepes shuddered violently as the first explosion reverberated through her iron bones.

Boat bays aren't normally considered especially dangerous places. True, they offer ample ways for someone to do himself in, but so do a great many areas aboard any starship, and the things that pose dangers to the ship, like the connections for things like hydrogen and emergency rocket propellant to fuel the ship's small craft, or the stores of ammunition and external ordnance kept in nearby magazines, are safeguarded in many ways. Proper training in operation and maintenance is the first defense, and so is physical separation, keeping one danger source as far from any other as the boat bay's servicing requirements permit. And in addition to all human safeguards, computers monitor the danger points continuously.

Unfortunately for Tepes, however, her computer net had been compromised. None of her crew knew it... and none of the computers cared. They existed only to carry out their human masters' orders, and the lines of code Horace Harkness had altered made just as much sense to them as the right instructions would have made.

The programs already buried and waiting in the main system began to activate as the execution commands flashed into the net from the minicomp plugged into Boat Bay Four's number five access slot, and all overTepes officers and ratings stared at their consoles, first in confusion, and then in alarm.

CIC went first, and the senior tracking officer swore as her holo display went suddenly blank. It was hardly a life-threatening disaster when the ship was safely in orbit around Hades, but it was irritating as hell, and there was no logical reason for it.

Except that there was one. The display had died for the simple reason that there was no longer any input to drive its imagers. For just an instant, the tracking officer felt relieved by the realization that the display's sudden shutdown hadn't been her people's fault, but then her forehead furrowed in fresh, and deeper, consternation. What in heaven's name could cause every sensor system to go down at once?

The program which had shut down Tepes' sensors finished the first part of its task and turned to the second. In the flicker of an eye, far too rapidly for any human operator to realize what was happening, it used CIC's computers as a launching pad to invade the Tactical Department's central processing system, established control... and ordered the system to reformat itself.

The tac officer of the watch gaped in disbelief as his panels started going down. It began with Tracking, but from there the failures leapt like wildfire, and display after display blinked and went dead. Radar One, Gravities One and Two, Lidar Three, Missile Defense, Main Fire Control... the nerve center of the ship's ability to fight, or defend herself, died even as he watched. Nor was the damage something which could be quickly fixed. The computers would have to be completely reprogrammed to put them back on-line, a nightmare task in a Navy with so few fully qualified technicians, and it all went so quickly the tac officer barely had time to realize it was happening before it was done.

Other programs capered and danced, exploding through the net like a plundering army. Internal alarms and central communication systems became so much useless junk as the software which ran them was reduced to meaningless gibberish. The ship's helm and drive rooms locked down. 'The Morgue,' in which every suit of battle armor was stored, suddenly sealed itself... and the subprocessers which monitored the ready suits of armor to be sure they were always prepared for instant use sent power surges down the monitoring leads to lobotomize their onboard computers and render them totally useless until teams of technicians spent the hours required to reprogram their software.

And while all that was going on, the computers responsible for monitoring the fueling needs of the ship's small craft received their own orders. Valves opened, and in Boat Bay One a technician who'd happened to be working on a minor glitch in Umbilical Two gaped in horror at what was happening. He leapt for the manual controls, trying to override, but there wasn't time... nor would it have mattered. For even if he'd been able to keep the emergency propellant from venting and mixing in Umbilical Two, it wouldn't have stopped precisely the same thing from happening in Umbilical Four.