'Finagle, talk about paranoids,' he muttered. 'See this freeze-function here?'
Ingrid's face was similarly intent, and the rushing flicker of the scroll-display on her unit gave her face a momentary look as of light through stained glass. 'Got it. Freeze.'
'We're bypassed?'
'This is under our authorized codes. All right, these are the four major subsystems. See the physical channeling? The hardware won't accept config commands of more than 10k except through this channel we're at.' 'Slow response, for a major system like this,' he mused. The security locks were massive and complex, but a little cumbrous.
'It's the man-kzin hardware interfacing,' Ingrid said. I think. Their basic architecture's more synchronic. Betcha they never had an industrial-espionage problem… Hey, notice that?'
'Ahhhh. Interesting.' Jonah kept his voice carefully phlegmatic. Tricky kitty. Tricky indeed. 'Odd. This would be much harder to access through the original Hero system.'
'Tanj, you're right,' Ingrid said. She looked up with an urchin grin that blossomed with the pure delight of solving a software problem.
Jonah gave her a cautioning look.
Her face went back to a mask of concentration. 'Clearly this was designed with security against kzin in mind. See, here and here? That's why they've deliberately preserved the original human operating system on this-two of them, and used this spatchcocked integral translation chip here, see?' 'Right!” His fingers flew. 'In fact, if analyzed with the original system as an integrating node and catchpoint… see?'
'Right. Murphy, but you'd have more luck wandering through a minefield than trying to get at this from an exterior connection! There's nothing in the original stem system but censor programs; by the time you got by them, the human additions would have alarmed and frozen. Catches you on the interface transitions, see? That's why they haven't tried to bring the core system up to the subsystem operating speeds. Sure slows things down, though.'
'We'll just have to live with it,' Jonah said for the benefit of any hidden listeners. It seemed unlikely. There weren't many kzin programmers, and all of them were working for the navy or the government. This was the strictly personal system of Governor Chuut-Riit.
'Wheels within wheels,' Ingrid muttered.
'Right.' Jonah shook his head; there was a certain perverse beauty in using a cobbled-up rig's own lack of functional integration as a screening mechanism. But all designed against kzinti. Not against us. Ye gods, it would be easy enough for Chuut-Riit's rivals to work through humans Only none of them would think of that. This is the only estate that uses outside contractors. And the Heroes don't think that way to begin with. His fingers flew. Ingrid-Lieutenant Raines-would be busy installing the new data management system they were supposed to be working at. What he was doing was far beyond her. Jonah let his awareness and fingers work together, almost bypassing his conscious mind. Absently he reached for a squeeze-bulb before he remembered that the nearest Jolt Cola was four lightyears away.
Now. Bypass the kzin core system. Move into the back door. He keyed in the ancient passwords embedded into the Wunderland computer system by Earth hackers almost a hundred years before. Terran corporate managers had been concerned about competition, and they'd built backdoors into every operating system destined for Wunderland. A built-in industrial espionage system. And the kzin attack and occupation should have kept the Wunderlanders from finding them…
“Murphy Magic. The SeCrEt of the UnIvErSe is 43, NOT 42.'!!!
'There is justice,' Jonah muttered.
' joy? '
'Yeah.' He typed furiously.
She caught her breath. 'All right.'
By the time the core realizes what's going on, we'll all be dead. 'May take a while. Here we go.'
Two hours later he was done. He looked over at Ingrid. She had long finished, except for sending the final signals that would tell the system they were done. 'About ready,' he said.
She caught her breath. 'All right.'
For a moment he was shocked at the dark half-moons below her eyes, the lank hair sweat-plastered to her cheeks, and then concentration dropped enough for him to feel his own reaction. Pain clamped at his stomach, and the muscles of his lower back screamed protest at the posture he had been frozen in for long hours of extra gravity.
He raised his hand to his mouth and extended the little finger back to the rear molars. Precisely machined surfaces slipped into nano-spaced fittings in the vat-cultured substitute that had been serving him as a fingernail; anything else would have wiped the coded data. He took a deep breath and pulled; there was a flash of pain before the embedded duller drugs kicked in, and then it settled to a tearing ache. The raw surface of the stripped finger was before him, the wrist clenched in the opposite hand. Ingrid moved forward swiftly to bandage it, and he spat the translucent oblong into his palm.
'Tanj,' he said resentfully. Those sadistic flatlander morons could have used a nerve-pinch.
Ingrid picked the biochip up between thumb and forefinger. She licked her lips nervously. 'Will it work?'
'It's supposed to.' The sound of his own pulse in his ears was louder than the background noise the kzin used to fool their subconscious into comfort. Pain receded, irrelevant, as he looked at the tiny oblong of modified claw. Scores of highly-skilled men and women, thousands of hours of computer time on machines whose price-tags ran in the billions of stars, all for this. No, for the information contained in this… nearly as much information as was required to make a complete human body, it was amazing what they could do these days with quantum-well storage. Although the complete specs for a man were in a packet considerably smaller, if it came to that.
'Give it here.' It ought to be quick. Milliseconds quick. A lot better than being hunted down by the ratcats. She handed over the nail, and he slipped it into his own interface unit. 'As your boyfriend likes to say, here's viewing, kinder.'
She nodded tightly. He raised a thumb, pressed it down on one of the outlined squares of the schematic that occupied his interfacer. 'Ram darn,' he said. The words came from nowhere, and an eerie memory of old Mukeriji speaking flitted through his mind. Dreadful Bride, spare us: ram dam ram dam rant-
'fhe walls pulsed, flickered green, flashed into an intricate strobing pattern and froze. Jonah closed his eyes for a second and felt an enormous thankfulness. They might still be only seconds away from death, but at least it wouldn't be for nothing.
'Finagle!” Jonah said bitterly. 'How could even a kzin be this paranoid?' He kicked the pillar-console; it hurt through the light slipper. There were weapons and self-destruct systems in plenty, enough to leave nothing but a very large crater with magma at its core where Chuut-Riit's palace-estate had stood… but it wasn't clear how any of them could be triggered from here. 'Who ever heard of… wheels within wheels!' Jonah said disbelievingly. 'Am I imagining things, or are these systems completely separated?'
Ingrid shook her head slowly. 'I'm afraid that's a long way past me. Can't you do anything with it?'
'Maybe. There's a chance. Worth a try, anyway.' He touched icons on the screen surface, then tapped in new commands. 'Nope. All right, what does this do? Nothing. Hmm. But if- Yeah, this may work. Not immediately, though. You about through?'
'Hours ago. We don't have much longer.”
'Right. I do want to look at a couple of things, though.' Jonah's eyes narrowed. 'Call,' he said to the computer. 'Weekly schedule for user-CR, regression, six months, common elements.' His finger flicked out to a sequence on the wall ahead of them. 'Got it! Got it, by Murphy's asshole; that's the single common element outside going to his office! What is it?'
Ingrid's fingers were busy. 'No joy, Jonah. That's his visit to his kiddies. The males. They're in an isolation facility.' 'Oh. Bat puckey. Here, let me look-'
A warning light blazed on the console.
'They're coming,' Ingrid hissed. 'Hurry.'
'Right. Plan B. Only-” Jonah stared at the files in wonder. I will be dipped in shit.'
'We have positive identification,' Axelrod-Bauergartner said. The staff conference rustled, ten men and women grouped around a table of black ebony. It was an elegant room, walls of white stone fretwork and floor of tile, a sideboard with refreshments. No sound but the gentle rush of water in the courtyard outside; this had been
