Deadly Impact--A Richard Mariner nautical adventure (32 page)

S
uddenly the starboard bridge wing was very crowded. Captain Ito appeared beside Richard. ‘Have you done this?' he shouted. Captain Endo and the special ops lieutenant were at his shoulder, both looking confused and angry.
Sayonara
's last mooring line snapped with a sound between a gunshot and a whip-crack. The bridge radio became a babble of questions from the shore. Richard held his hands up. ‘Nothing to do with me.'

‘Richard! What's going on?' demanded a distant voice. Richard cautiously lowered his Galaxy. ‘Looks like you and Anastasia had better get ready for company,' he told Robin. ‘
Sayonara
's on her way south again and no one on board seems to have any idea what's happening.'

‘Bloody hell!' she answered. ‘You'd better find out and stop it. In the meantime, Anastasia and I will try to move this thing out of your way.'

‘To hear is to obey,' said Richard. He turned back to Captain Ito, who had swung round to watch the vanishing facility with unbelieving eyes. But it was not the pilot he needed to speak to most urgently. ‘Lieutenant, I really need to talk to Doctor Sato. Whatever programme has just taken over, he either put it in place or has a good idea of who did. And what it's designed to do.'

The lieutenant hesitated. ‘We have two hours,' Richard emphasized. ‘The programmes have been fooled into believing that the final GPS position
Sayonara
has been heading for is forty miles south of here. And that's where she's going now, at full speed. In just less than one hundred and twenty minutes, the computers will have delivered her safely to her destination. But there's no dock there, just a nuclear power station. A power station that we probably won't be able to close down, uncouple and move out of the way in time.'

The lieutenant opened his mouth to speak, but he was prevented from doing so by his personal radio. ‘Can anyone hear me?' came Engineer Watanabe's unmistakable voice, loud enough for all to hear and, like the pilot's, lacking its usual reserve. ‘What
hakuchi
ordered Full Ahead Both? What
baka
's at the helm?'

‘It's the computers,' answered the lieutenant. ‘Captain Mariner is on his way down to see if he can override them.'

‘Harry,' said Richard, already stepping through on to the covered bridge wing. ‘I'll need you. Lieutenant, tell Mr Watanabe I want Mr Murukami through in the sick bay as soon as possible. And then could you find some way of contacting the Japanese Embassy in Rome. Find Yukio Sato, postgrad student of Applied Economics at the University of Cosenza. Ivan has her address.'

‘It won't be easy, but I'll try. However, I must ask, what's the point of doing this?'

‘She's Rikki Sato's daughter. I'm pretty certain that the men who arranged this are threatening her but I need her father's full and immediate cooperation. That's our best chance.' He looked around. ‘The rest of you can go back on the bridge and I suggest that someone starts talking to the people onshore; beyond that, it doesn't really matter where you are if the computers are conning the ship.'

‘Conning,' said Harry as they ran down the rickety companionway. ‘Now there's a good word. We've all been conned, not just
Sayonara
!'

‘You can say that again,' agreed Richard. ‘You see what they've done? Having Macavity and co. vanish, leaving the ship ready to be brought home, then allowing Captain Ito to pilot her in, took the heat right out of the situation. Everyone relaxed. I bet that not even the Japanese navy could get a ship to us in less than two hours now. Not at four a.m. There's no ship nearby with enough power to stop
Sayonara
or even to get a line aboard and tug her off course. I don't see how they could disable her, though if they had a submarine handy they could try and blow the propellers off. I'd guess even Mitsubishi would have trouble scaring up a team of engineers capable of coming aboard and killing the engines at this time of night. The only alternative to crippling her that I can see is to blow her up, which would make one hell of a bang. And which they can't do while we're on board, I hope. But two hours isn't enough time to get us off – unless we all go over the side. And, of course, Macavity took the only lifeboat when he jumped ship. You've got to admit, it's pretty sodding neat. They get their men off safely, make the authorities relax, apparently put us back in control while disguising the fact that their plan is still very much alive. For Lazzaro and co. it's a win, win, win situation!'

‘But we can't just let
Sayonara
collide with a nuclear power station!'

‘That's what I'm saying, Harriet. I'm damned if I can see how they can stop her. Not in less than two hours.'

‘So it's down to us, then.'

‘Looks like it, one way or another. Do or die
.
'

Murukami met them in the sick bay as ordered and the three of them crouched round Rikki's bed while the lieutenant's men stood suspiciously in the background. The chief computer engineer responded only groggily to Richard's urgent hand on his shoulder and blinked owlishly. He tried to sit up but flinched as his wounds tore and he fell back, suddenly pale. He eased his twisted neck, clearly in even more discomfort but more focused, as though the pain had kicked his brain into gear. ‘Where are my glasses?' he slurred. Murukami passed them to him, then slipped an arm round his shoulders and supported him into a sitting position. ‘What happened?' asked Rikki. ‘Last thing I remember I was on the bridge.'

‘The windows came in. You were badly cut up and washed headfirst down the companionway. We were told you had fatal lacerations and probably a broken neck. You were left for dead,' Richard explained.

‘Captain Mariner has saved your life, Rikki,' emphasized Murukami. ‘Now he needs your help to save the rest of us.'

‘But Yukio …'A look of fear spread across his face.

‘I've been in radio contact with the authorities already,' said Richard. ‘We have people gearing up to get her off the campus at Cosenza and out of Calabria by morning.' Rikki looked at Richard, his mouth hanging open with surprise as he tried to get his head round what Richard had learned, deduced and done.

‘Captain Mariner is telling the truth,' emphasized Murukami. ‘You don't need to protect Yukio any more. He's taken care of that. But you can help us. And if you don't, then we'll all die. Was that your plan, Rikki? To die for Yukio?'

‘And to let the rest of us die as well?' probed Harry. ‘You selfish fuc—' Richard's hand came gently down on her shoulder and she stopped speaking.

‘Yukio is safe. You don't need to die. Nobody needs to die,' Richard insisted. ‘Help us break into the programme. Give us back control of
Sayonara
.'

‘I can't,' said Rikki. ‘It's all too deeply embedded. It's not just a question of hacking and reprogramming.' He looked earnestly at Harry. ‘You'd need to actually replace complete sections of the computer itself.'

‘What do you mean?' she demanded.

‘Well …' The language got very technical all of a sudden, especially when Murukami joined in, but Richard was enough of a techie to follow the main gist of what Rikki was explaining. As with the deceptively simple trick of setting a trigger on the ‘finished with engines' setting of the engine room telegraph, Rikki had approached the problem of taking control of
Sayonara
's computers with a combination of malware programmes and physical changes.

Like many commercial computer systems,
Sayonara
's was an amalgam of superfast multicore processors, massive hard drives and banks of state-of-the-art RAM boards where random access memory could run incredibly quickly. But at the heart of the system were the motherboards. As far as Richard was concerned, these individual components hardly seemed to exist as physical entities. He experienced them as a set of electronic interactions. He did not even consider the programmes themselves and it certainly never occurred to him to try to estimate the billions of calculations that were carried out in nanoseconds to access the incoming signal from Robin's phone and to bring her picture on the screen of his Galaxy as her words were transmitted through the speaker, or which sections of the motherboard were involved. He took them for granted and only worried when something caused the computers to misbehave. But he still thought about such interference as electronic, like the attacks of hackers who constantly assaulted the computer systems of corporations, companies and countries worldwide.

The discussion between the three engineers turned on the interrelationship of the processors, the drives and the RAM boards as they were organized through the motherboard of each computer system on board. And it was the motherboards that soon emerged as the cause of the trouble. Rikki had put extra chips in these boards that interfered with the information passing from one place to another. Not programmed, not only hacked after all. He had actually added extra sections to the boards themselves – daughter boards, they were called – and he had slipped them in here and there. Not only had he added boards but, devious as ever, he had put all of the contaminated boards into the back-up control areas, knowing that the systems on the bridge were likely to be the ones that people checked on first. It had been a simple matter to reverse the protocols so that the back-up systems down here took all the vital decisions. And it had proved very effective at first, for not even Murukami had noticed anything amiss when they focused on checking the systems up on the bridge. It was only when Harry started interfering with the systems down here after the whole lot fused that she had managed to restore a measure more of control than Macavity had planned, though finally her work had been of little benefit, for it had been overridden at the moment the pilot had signalled ‘Finished with Engines'.

‘So,' said Harry, ‘what happens if we just take out the infected boards?'

‘The same as what happened when the bridge flooded and the system fused. The back-ups come online and they will still guide
Sayonara
to her destination.'

‘Can we replace them one by one with uninfected boards?' she persisted. ‘With virgin daughter boards?'

‘That might restore some control. But it would only be the beginning. We would need to add new drives to overcome the original programmes.'

‘Could we get them flown out?' demanded Richard.

‘Not in time to replace them. Not in ninety minutes. If we had some here, now, we might stand a chance, but …'

‘Wait,' whispered Harry. ‘OK. I have a range of SSD's with me – the drives we need to add. But the daughter boards are something else. Except that I have a detailed design for a standard daughter board on my laptop. And I mean
detailed
.' She clicked what she was talking about up on to the screen. There was one of these in each of
Sayonara
's control systems, all facilitating the passage of orders. All, according to Rikki, like translators at an international conference mistranslating one language to another, causing calculated confusion and confrontation.

‘That's of no help to us,' answered Murukami, looking at Harry's laptop screen. ‘A design on your laptop, no matter how detailed, is useless.'

‘Not in this case,' said Harry. ‘I also have a 3D printer with a copper granule feed. I could print a gun and shoot you with it. I can sure as hell print a daughter board, with all the wiring in place. In fact, I can print board after board and have SSDs to put on them!' She looked at the three of them, glowing with elation. ‘Oh, come on, guys, isn't anyone going to say,
By heaven, Harry, it might just work?
'

Richard ran back to the bridge and updated the men there, focusing most of what he was saying on Ivan and the Pitman, both of whom went below at once to see if there was anything they could do to move matters along faster for Harry. Then he walked out on to the bridge wing, pulled out his Galaxy and contacted Robin. As briefly and clearly as possible, he explained what the problem was and what Harry was trying to do about it. ‘I think you'd better keep working on moving
Zemlya
out of the way, though,' he concluded. ‘Harry's plan looks like a long shot to me.'

‘Can we think outside the box a bit?' she asked. ‘I could get one of the tugs to come and meet you, maybe pull you offline …'

‘I thought of that. But you need both to stand any chance of moving
Zemlya
, and there's no guarantee that either or both of the tugs could get here, send cables aboard and pull us off line in time. Meanwhile, you'd be stuck at the bull's eye in the target
Sayonara
's heading for.'

‘Could you drop one of the anchors? Try to drag her offline?'

‘I thought of that too but there's no bottom. It's too deep for the anchor chains we have on board. Even if there was some way of joining both chains together, we don't have time. I'm relying on Harry. What about you?'

‘The tugs are ready. The control rods are down and the core is cooling. But there's a problem: we can't get anyone out here to disconnect us from the grid. If we just drop them and run it could be disastrous and
could
's the problem. These people will only act on stone-cold certainty. Could, might and maybe just don't motivate them. If we can't cut loose, we'll have to go the other way; push in towards the land, get really friendly with the nearest city folk and hope you can squeeze past on our seaward side. It's possible, but it'll be close.'

‘How close?'

‘Somewhere between a nose and a whisker.'

‘OK. Let's look at this
cup half full
. If you move a couple of metres and we swing offline a degree or two, there should be clear water between us in just over an hour's time.'