you and you can’t tell them where to find us.”
Hong didn’t seem annoyed, which Sula might have understood, but rather deeply and sincerely concerned, as if he’d just learned she’d come down with a serious illness.
“Are you all right about this?” he asked. “You’re not having second thoughts about our assignment, are you?”
“None whatsoever,” she said flatly, and held his eyes until he dropped them.
Second thoughts aboutyou, she said to herself, are another matter.
That evening, out of more than merely idle curiosity, Sula used the display and touch-keypad in the surface of the old desk in a corner of her apartment’s front room, and logged onto the archives at the Records Office to see if her passwords still worked. They did.
But she knew they wouldn’t work much longer: passwords of this sort were changed frequently as a matter of routine, and when the Naxids arrived they might well demand exclusive control of the system.
“Ada,” she said to Engineer/1st Spence, calling her by the cover name assigned her by the Fleet. “I can use your advice.”
Spence brought a chair to where Sula worked, and sat. She was a short, sturdy woman of around thirty, with short straw hair and a pug nose. “What do you need?”
“I’m in the Records Office data system. And what I’d like is to make certain that I can keep my access even after they change the passwords.”
Spence was surprised. “Is that legal?”
Sula suppressed a laugh. “I have a warrant,” she said, and hoped her face was straight. “The problem is that the Naxids aren’t going to honor it.”
Spence considered the display. “Can you get into the directory?”
Sula gave the command, and a long list, thousands of files, began rolling across the desktop.
“Apparently I can,” Sula said.
“System: halt,” Spence ordered. “System: find fileExecutive .”
Two file names glowed in Sula’s display, one a backup of the other.
“There you are,” said Spence. “You want to rewrite the executive file to give you permanent access.”
“Will it let me?”
“I don’t know. Whose passwords are you using?”
“Lady Arkat,” Sula said. “She’s the head of System Security.”
Spence laughed. “You’d think the head of security would have thought to change her passwords the second you were out the door.”
“She’s rather old. Maybe she’s a creature of habit.”
“Or maybe she’s, well, on our side.”
Sula thought that the elderly Torminel was not as sympathetic as all that, but conceded she might be wrong.
“System,” she ordered, “open fileExecutive. ”
The file sprawled out before her, thousands upon thousands of if/then statements. Sula gave a low whistle.
“How good are you at programming?” she asked.
“Iuse computers,” Spence said, “I don’t program them.”
“My programming courses were a while ago,” Sula said. Though she did some programming now and again, her skills were hardly first-class.
“Back up everything,” Spence advised, “go very slowly, and make use of any help files.”
“Right,” Sula said, and backed up the executive file first thing, both onto the Records Office computer and into the system in her desk. She made herself a pot of strong, sweet tea and prepared for a long night.
“I’m very good at puzzles,” she reminded herself.
It was the copy on her desk that she worked with. Fortunately the actual changes that she wanted to make were minor, even though they had far-reaching implications.Whenever you change the password, send me a copy. How complicated could such an order be?
She told the computer to send the copy to her hand comm, the one she carried with her. After a few catastrophic syntax errors, the program seemed to run, at least in Sula’s desk.
Sula took a deep breath and scrubbed her palms on her thighs, drying any hypothetical sweat. She would now have to load her altered program back into the computer at the Records Office. She pictured the thousand consequences of this attempt going wrong, Hong’s fury at one of his secret team being exposed, official reprimand, scathing reports in her file.
She sent her altered program to the Records Office and held her breath. Nothing happened.
Sula slowly let her breath out, then reached for her tea. It had turned cold, and the thick liquid was like a stripe of molasses on her tongue. She went to the kitchen for a few moments to reheat her tea, and when she came back, nothing had changed.
She sent herself some simple mail—“hello”—using the Records Office computer, and opened her hand comm to discover the mail waiting for her.
The next test was to see if she could create a set of identification. If she succeeded, she could simply mail the documents to herself here at the apartment. She began work, but stopped when an incoming message icon blinked onto her hand comm. She triggered it, and a text message appeared on the small screen.
My Lady Arkat,
We have detected an attempt to rewrite the Executive File of the main computer at the Records Office. This attempt occurred at 01:15:16. We will erase the corrupt copy and reload the Executive File from backups.
You have been assigned a new, temporary password: 19328467592.
Please change your temporary password to a permanent password of your choice as soon as you arrive at your desk in the morning.
In service to the Praxis,
Ynagarh, CN5, Assistant Data Administrator
Words leapt to Sula’s lips, words that would disconnect her at once from the Records Office computer.
She didn’t utter them.
Instead she tried to work out what had just happened. Though the intrusion had been detected almost ten minutes ago, she was still inside the computer. If the administrators had bothered to check to see who was connected remotely, they would have found her to be Lady Arkat, their own chief, a fact that would have made them reluctant to disconnect her.
Whatever the case, she still had access to the Records Office computer. She had Lady Arkat’s temporary password, which would be good for the next few hours, until Lady Arkat arrived at the office and changed it. But after that Sula would be frozen out, because the executive file that Sula had ordered to send copies of the new password had been erased.
As long as Sula stayed connected to the computer, she was still able to make changes, at least as long as she avoided whatever error it was that had caused her altered program to be detected in the first place.
She took another sip of her tea, jasmine and citrus honey gone tepid, and wondered what her error could have been.
Sula looked again at the error message.01:15:16. They had her intrusion down to thesecond.
That gave her the first clue. Some rummaging in administration files revealed no less than six automated messages that had been sent toAssistantAdministratorYnagarh, each stating that the executive file had been replaced by one of a later date.
“Ah. Hah,” Sula said.
