“Show me the layout of this floor,” I said. Trixie projected the image in front of me. More by luck than skill I was now less than a hundred yards from the vault that held the Navigator. And by ‘vault’ I mean something comparable to a bank vault. The Navigator was the most valuable thing on the ship and the precautions taken to protect it reflected that. I’ve seen perhaps half-a-dozen bank vaults in my time – most of them from both the outside and the inside. Manufacturers like to strongly hint that their vaults are impenetrable but they know better than to guarantee the fact. Vault makers are aware that there are people like me around who see the phrase ‘impregnable vault’ as a challenge – and some of us are very good at what we do. Of course, when rising to such a challenge I would normally make sure I had all the state-of-the-art equipment that stolen money could buy. At this moment I had at my disposal a small tool roll and a fire axe.
The Celestia’s Navigator was a fully-fledged artificial sentience – which was a good few rungs higher on the evolutionary ladder than an artificial intelligence. Where an AI could control a robot or even a team of robots, an AS could control a whole city. Or a battleship and all of its Warbirds. An artificial sentience is like a human brain – only more so. The earliest ones had been based on a mapping of the human brain. But then AS’s started improving themselves. Today only an AS can understand and build another AS. This fact makes a lot of people uncomfortable.
Artificial sentience, like a lot of military hardware, had been outlawed after the War ended. People didn’t want their cities – their lives – being controlled by machines. It is no exaggeration to say that people were terrified of them. An artificial intelligence is just a collection of clever algorithms that you could take apart and understand, but a sentient is altogether different. Manufacture of them had ceased almost twenty years ago. When an AS stopped functioning – because of damage or sabotage or whatever – it wasn’t repaired or replaced. Those that remain are rare and therefore valuable. More valuable now than when the Celestia’s Navigator had been placed in its vault. That’s why I wanted to break in and retrieve it. But I was going to need more than an axe. Luckily I was on a military warship that was stuffed to the gills with hardware. Everything I needed would be here. Somewhere.
Chapter Nine
The vault that housed the Celestia’s Navigator was an hermetically sealed room. Almost. It wasn’t quite self-contained and had some services piped or wired in from outside. These external connections were vulnerabilities that could be exploited – if you knew how. It’s not like you see in the movies – there are no conveniently placed wide metal air shafts that a thief can crawl through. A rat couldn’t fit through the widest pipe that passed into the vault. A cockroach might just about manage it, as long as it didn’t trigger the intrusion countermeasures when it got inside.
There were three types of sensor in the vault to detect intruders. The floor was one huge pressure mat, sensitive enough to pick up anything heavier than a housefly. Around the walls was a network of heat and motion detectors watching every corner of the vault including the ceiling. And finally there were video cameras linked to the security database. These used facial and gait recognition to check whether a person entering the vault was authorised to be there. If you triggered any of the sensors or your face or movements didn’t match an authorised profile, you would be fried by one of six high-power lasers that could target any spot in the room. There was nowhere to hide.
Forty years ago, the defences in the vault would have been state-of-the-art and military-strength – and even today they were pretty effective. The vault’s active anti-intrusion measures can only be deactivated for someone who has an appropriate level of authorisation according to the Celestia’s security database. I didn’t have security clearance of any kind.
The Navigator itself was housed in an oblong case like a sarcophagus – though people in my profession tended to refer to these cases as ‘treasure chests’. When the artificial sentience was sealed in its case, it was virtually impervious to external attack. The case also contained an explosive device that could be triggered remotely, destroying both the Navigator and whoever had tried to steal it. This in-built bomb cannot be disarmed locally, so it is best not to do anything to trigger it.
All of these details about the vault’s security were publicly available and had been when the Celestia first came into service. Vault manufacturer’s always like to boast about how good their security systems are. It serves to warn off anyone who might think of trying to break into it and it is great publicity for the manufacturer. What you don’t find out in the open are details about the internal workings of a new vault mechanism.
With most old technology, you can usually find detailed specifications and video tear-downs that show you how the thing was put together. Bank vaults and safes tend to be an exception. Manufacturers never allow these details out into the wild – because there is always someone somewhere using a twenty-year-old safe. Details only leak out if someone manages to obtain one of the old safes and takes it apart. Manufacturers prevent this by offering good money to buy back old examples. And details are never leaked by disgruntled employees because the manufacturers have ways of dealing with such people. Permanently.
But no matter how good a vault is, it is always placed within a structure of some kind and connected up to that structure’s systems. In this case, the vault was
