Back to the Moon-ARC (8 page)

The message read:
 

after the tour, meet me in my office asap.
 

Gesling was used to getting boss-grams and didn’t really give it much thought. At that point, he couldn’t imagine that the text message and Childers’s reaction to the question asked by the reporter from the
China Daily
were related. But he was soon to discover that, unfortunately, they most certainly were. He plopped the phone back in his pocket and ignored it for the time being.

Completing the tour and seeing the reporters to the heavily monitored exit from the Nevada test facility took about another hour and a half. Pual’s stomach croaked at him a time or two and then started in with a full rumble. He had skipped breakfast and by now was ravenously hungry. He debated whether or not to grab a bite before hotfooting it off to Childers’s office. He opted to grab a candy bar and a soda from the break room first. The candy bar at least quieted, if not appeased, the rumble in his stomach. The soda helped, too.

Gary Childers’s Nevada office was not nearly as spectacular as the one in Kentucky. A desk, credenza, and table were the only furniture pieces, and only a few deep-space photographs adorned the walls. By the time Paul got there, he saw that a meeting was already taking place. In the room were Mark Watson, Space Excursions’ chief of security, Helen Jones, the “IT Lady,” who kept the computer network operational, and David Chu, the lead systems engineer for the
Dreamscape
itself.

It took only seconds for Gesling to determine that everyone in the room was agitated about something. They were all seated at the meeting table and all looked up when he entered the room. He couldn’t tell if they were upset with him or were welcoming an interruption to their apparently intense discussion. Paul was beginning to feel agitated himself, because he didn’t have a damned clue what all the hubbub was about.

“Come in, Paul. We’ve got a problem.” Childers motioned for him to take a seat at the table next to him. Paul took the last sip of his soda and dropped the can and the candy-bar wrapper in the garbage can by the door. The IT Lady sneered at him as she looked back and forth between the garbage can and the recycle bin beside it. Paul bit his tongue to prevent him from saying the word
hippie
and ignored the sneer as he sat.

“Sure. What’s up? You guys look like we’ve lost the vehicle or something.”

“Well,” Chu commented, “in a manner of speaking, we have.”
 

“What?!”

This time, the IT Lady picked up the discussion. “Paul, we’ve got a major security breach. One of my team began to suspect something was up last week when he noticed an uptick in outgoing data volume from e-mails, file transfers, et cetera. You know, the usual stuff. But this uptick wasn’t from any particular user or at any specific time. It was about a twenty-percent increase in everyone’s data usage. When we looked more closely, we saw that every single file being transferred was statistically larger than it should have been, given our past few years of data.”

“Really?” He leaned forward.

“When we moved from looking at the overall system level and began looking at specific outgoing messages, we saw that each and every message had some additional data encoded and attached to it. Sort of a hidden attachment, as it were. Then we noticed that messages were also being cc’d to an additional e-mail address. And not the same e-mail address—hundreds of different ones, not one being the same. In a matter of a few days, the extra data volume that went out of here was over a terabyte. And that was before any flags had really been raised. Had a single user been sending that much data, we would have shut him down immediately.”

Gesling was not an information-technology expert, but he was pretty smart, and what she was describing sounded deceptively simple. Almost too simple to be possible.
 

“What data was being sent? Financial? Technical?”
 

“Good question.” Chu was quick to respond. “Technical. Whoever did this got most of the
Dreamscape
design and a lot of performance data.”

“That’s the way it looks now.” Jones continued her explanation. “Yes, it was technical. Somehow, a Trojan software program was latent in all of our computers until it was activated last week. Once it turned on, it began to systematically carve up and send out selected data files from every computer in the office. It found our engineering drawings, customized software design tools, parts specifications, test reports, everything. You name it. We haven’t found a single computer that wasn’t compromised.”

“Goddammit all to hell! I can’t believe we let this happen!” It was Gary Childers’s turn to add to the tempest.
 

“By the time we realized what was happening and cut off our access to the outside world late last night, it was too late,” Jones said decisively.

“Hundreds of e-mail addresses?” Gesling asked. “Is there a common link? Do we know who we’re dealing with here?”

“China” was the answer from the IT Lady. “I asked Phil.”

Phil was on Helen’s team and was well known by just about everyone in the company as the guy you called when your system went down. He seemed to be able to fix anything. He was also an ex-hacker. When he was in high school, he was expelled for hacking the school’s computer system. When he was in college, he was arrested for hacking a computer at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. There was a story about how he’d managed to get out of jail time, but Paul had never heard it.
 

Phil had always said it was because he did it just for the sake of doing it—sort of like the answer people gave when asked for their motivation in climbing Mount Everest—or for going to the Moon. He never tried to take anything or cause any problems, he just had to prove to himself that he could do it.
 

He never graduated from college, but that hadn’t kept Helen Jones from recognizing his talent and convincing the company to pay him enough that he would not consider climbing any more Mount Everests while employed by Space Excursions. Phil was good at his job and had outside connections that could help him in situations like this. Helen didn’t want to ask who some of these outside connections were.

“Phil nosed around some. He said that we were getting IP port probes on a regular basis now and that the packets that left here went where the probes are coming from. He thinks it all went to China.”

“Do we know how our systems were compromised?” Mark Watson asked.

“Uh, well,” Jones responded. “Mark, look at your cell phone. Where does it say it was made? Check yours, too, Paul. Gary, flip over that laptop and tell me where it was assembled.”

Childers picked up the laptop that was sitting idle in front of him and read from the back.
 

“Assembled in China.”

“Same here,” Watson replied.

“Mine, too,” said Gesling.

“Of course they are.” Knowing that she had their full attention, Helen Jones continued her explanation. “All of the computers in the facility were either made or assembled in China. The company name on the outside is as red, white, and blue as you’d ever want. But the lure of cheap labor is too much for the CEOs—present company excluded, Mr. Childers. We’ve outsourced almost all of our computer-manufacturing base to China.

“I believe our computers came with some additional software embedded in the operating system. It was then triggered or turned on by someone who knew what we were doing here.”

“Wait a minute.” Childers leaned forward in his seat. “Are you telling me you’ve figured all this out since last night?”

“Oh, heavens no,” Jones responded. “No, at this point it is just a theory. The idea wasn’t mine. It was Phil’s. It seems this is an active discussion among the hacker community and pretty well known there ‘unofficially.’ There have apparently been other incidents that Phil knew about. When we started looking into our problem, he told me about them.”

Watson could contain himself no longer.
 

“Folks. Are you aware of the implications here? Yes, we’ve lost some expensive and important technical data.
But what about the rest of the country?
We aren’t the only ones who own this brand of computers. What about the banks? Other defense contractors? The government, for God’s sake. If her theory is correct, then we could have a security breach of national importance!”

“Alright, alright, let’s settle down a bit.” Childers took back control of the meeting. “All in good time, Mr. Watson. We need to ascertain the degree to which we’ve been compromised, fix the leak—no, stop the leak—and then we can figure out who to report it to. And we will report it—but not just yet. First, I need to understand what this means to us.

“I need to know something for absolute certain.” Childers looked at Gesling and Chu as he spoke. “Is there anything someone can do with this data that will compromise our flight? We have a manifest of paying customers and a launch date. I need to know if this leak will force a delay.”

“Gary, if all they did was copy our files, then we should be okay,” Chu said. “But are we sure that’s all that happened? What if this Trojan program did more than copy the data? What if it changed something in the procedures or, God forbid, in the specifications? Paul might be halfway to the Moon and a bad command dumps all his fuel. We’d better make sure none of these systems are connected to the wireless on the ship.”

“God, a wrong requirement could vent the cabin to vacuum,” Paul added.

“Or God knows what else,” Chu said. “What we need is more work at this point. I can’t tell you about the launch or the safety of the vehicle until my team has had time to review the files and compare them with the backups. How do we know they weren’t compromised, too?”

“The backups appear to be okay,” Jones said. “They’re stored on external drives and isolated from the computers here in Nevada. Before we bring any of them up, I want to have my team check the machines that host the backups and make sure they don’t have the same bug.” She carefully placed her cell phone on the table in front of her as she continued. “Gary, this scares the crap out of me. I’ve never seen anything like this—all of our computers had the Trojan embedded in the operating system. The OS is propagating the program
everywhere
. We’ve got to tell someone.”

“Hmm.” Childers rose from his seat, pushing the chair back with deliberate slowness. “I hear your concerns, and we will report it. But we’ll do it quietly, and we certainly won’t talk about it to the media. As of now, whoever
they
are—the Chinese, whoever—they don’t know that we know about the leak. Computers go down all the time, and this just might be one of those times. Who knows?”

“Gary, hold on a minute.” Gesling, remembering the numerous counterintelligence briefings from the years he spent in the military, had an idea. “Let’s follow your suggestion and inform the FBI of the breach. I suspect they’ll want us to resume normal operations, leaving the software in place. That way they might be able to better track the e-mails back to the source, or perhaps they might want to use us to send specific information that they know will be received and acted on. This might be like some of the black ops the British did back in the Second World War with the captured German Enigma coding machine.”

“You want to play spy versus spy with our systems?” Watson asked. “Paul, you’ve been reading too many books. I want this place locked down and secure as fast as possible. We need to let the government know about what happened—sooner, rather than later—but we also need to secure our systems and make sure that nothing else is lost or damaged.”

Paul watched Childers, who had begun pacing during this last interchange. The CEO had reached a decision. Paul could tell by the expression on the man’s face.
 

“Okay. Mark, I want you to call the FBI and let them know what happened. Helen, you need to first make sure this bug is cleaned out of our systems and then bring them back up online. From this point forward, we will work only from the backup files. They are the only ones we know aren’t tainted.

“David, before we use them, I want you to double-check the files from the backup server to make sure they
are
accurate, and then get them to those who need them. Just tell the engineers that some data was corrupted and they’ll be okay working from the backup files. Please, please, please do not tell anyone else about the leak. And we will fully cooperate with any official investigation. Let’s move out, people.”

Chapter 9
 

One week later, the Altair lunar lander was being prepared to take off from the surface of the Moon. Poised on the barren and scorched lunar surface was a robotic emissary from Earth, lifeless, peopleless, but controlled by people back on Earth.

Chow was once again sitting in the same conference room at the Johnson Space Center facing down his own demons from
the
dream, which had recurred four out of the last seven nights. The team’s sense of optimism was palpable. So far, all lunar-surface operations had gone flawlessly, and their confidence in the lander was growing daily. All that remained for it to do was lift from the surface of the Moon into low lunar orbit. There it would rendezvous with the Orion for the trip back to Earth.

Taller than a three-story house, the massive Altair would eventually be the home away from home for four astronauts who would be two hundred forty thousand miles and at least three days’ travel from the nearest park, coffee shop, or hospital. Built for functionality and not comfort, many would question it being considered a home away from anywhere. But to the astronauts who were going to live in her, she was a beauty, a masterpiece.
 

Perched atop the Altair was the ascent stage. The entire lander would not make the return journey into space, as that would require too much fuel. Newton’s First Law, force equals mass times acceleration, governed everything regarding rocket propulsion. To get something, the mass of the rocket and its passengers, moving, meant accelerating it. And that acceleration required a hefty force. The greater the mass, the greater the force required to get the acceleration. The lander, which at the time consisted mainly of empty propellant tanks that were depleted during the landing, was simply too massive to lift back into space. Too much fuel would have been required to get the acceleration needed to escape the gravitational pull of the Moon. Instead, a small portion of the lander, the ascent stage, would be lofted by a single modified Pratt & Whitney RL-10B engine. That engine produced just under twenty-five thousand pounds of thrust.