It all went wrong when Captain Wilson seized the processing center. The moment Firenze saw that strand harvester parasited onto the Dirac cycler, he'd known everything was fucked. Berenson had been right. That meant that the operation's fundamental assumptions were wrong - this wasn't about hostages. Firenze had done research work. He'd spent enough time in the sciences for an essential truth to be ground into his bones: wrong assumptions made worse results.
Maybe the others knew that, too, but it was hard to tell through the stern faces and terse orders. The captain had ordered an advance to scout the cycler chamber. He'd directed Firenze into the net. There wasn't time to step back, analyze, and retry. They were all 'in the moment', and they were on a timer.
That's when everything had gone to hell.
Every network failed at once, TACNET blanked, and the radio fell to screeching chaos. The local node fell offline, and nothing reported past one gateway. Firenze had tried to reboot the host, regain access to ship systems, but the enemy assault hit within seconds, and he'd been dragged from his hardlink.
Stuck in the hallway, Firenze pried open his box and checked his signal. One green line hung over a haze of amber jamming. He'd restored local net, run tightbeam-to-tightbeam, but that mesh required him to physically verify every device. It meant Kawalski's shooters had data, but every other team was blind.
He needed to get to a server. At this wattage, the barrage jamming reduced wireless to rubbish, friend and foe alike. It was lunacy. Perimeter had blinded everyone and chosen to fight in the dark. If he was going to restore anything, he'd need to coopt the hardwired systems of the Plymouth herself. That meant physical access. He needed back into that room.
He took another peek around the corner, but Kawalski emerged from the smoke like an angry phantom. The rubber sole of her boot slapped against his ceramic carapace, and he tumbled back into safety. She snapped, "Stay down! We need you alive!"
He protested, "I need to get on the terminal! Two rows up! If I get there, I can link everyone-" he tried to point around the corner, but gunfire clattered. He jerked back, clutched his fingers, and counted. All five were still intact.
"It's too hot!" She snarled, then shoved a subgun against his chest. On reflex, he caught it. She said, "You've got three mags, don't get stupid."
He argued, "I need to-"
"You need to stay alive! If anyone but us comes through this door?" she nodded towards the gun. "Do your best." Then she was gone, vanished back into the chaos.
He pressed against the wall, wedged his shoulders between the steel folds of the bulkhead. Beyond the threshold, he could hear the screams and the ear-splitting thumps of gunfire. His hand began to sting as painkillers faded. Tears stained his face and poisoned his tongue.
He had to do something. He had to help.
He rubbed his sleeve over his goggles, over his eyes, tried to clear his vision. He tried to focus on the once-white walls. There, just above his alcove, he spotted a smudge, a scar of soot, carved between two panels. He concentrated on it, make the edges define.
Something was wrong with that char-mark. It came from beneath the panel, not atop it. Firenze blinked, cleared his sight, and made sure he saw true.
This made no sense. Why would there be burning inside the panel?
Firenze rose, drew his multitool, and let the subgun slide to his feet. He jammed his knife into the burnt hatch, pried it open, and revealed the damage. Smoke billowed out, the stench of melted plastic and hot wire overwhelming. He ducked from the shower of embers and tried to make sense of what he saw.
The data conduit was gone, severed clean by a scorched ring-charge. Firenze glanced down the hall, spotted four more char-marks in the distance, smoke leaking from sterile white panels. Perimeter hadn't just jammed the wireless, they'd reduced the network to confetti. This ship was a flying brick, dumb and blind.
A voice rose in the back of his head, reminded him of his training. Donegan had called this scenario 'segmentation'.
They'd covered what to do if the enemy scorched-earth the network. TACNET would default to local. Tightbeam could pierce the jamming. If he could reach the other nodes, he could tie the teams back together.
He closed his eyes, tried to focus, to drown out the pounding of the guns. There was an academic problem here, one he could solve if he could just clear his head.
He needed to bypass the jammer, but how? In his darkened mental cocoon, far from the stink of gel propellant and the clap of gunfire, he ran through his list of 'known facts'. Jamming had rules and limitations. No transmitter could lock down all frequencies, at full power, over unlimited distance. He hadn't seen any massive radio antennae, nor was he cooking alive from multi-megawatt broadcasts. That implied the enemy was using distributed small-scale transmitters to cover a large area. He could work with that.
TACNET was built to defeat enemy interference by sliding around the radio band. With small, distributed jammers, the enemy had to run sensors to detect transmissions and base-blast the offenders. There were two ways to run that - a processing hub in every corridor or a sensor net with central command. The latter was cheaper to install, easier to maintain, and a hell of a lot more likely. It was also something he could target, provided he could get access to the controller.
Firenze was pulled from his thoughts by the whistle-chime of the ship's automated paging system. As the tone faded, and the gunfire returned, he found
