Fade to Black (12 page)

"Right," Rico said, glancing around at the team. "Lock and load. Namecodes only. Stay alert."

Slides snapped and clicked. Spring-fed ammo clicked into firing chambers. Rico slipped past Bandit and motioned Shank into lead position. They advanced past the ruined barrier, keeping to intervals of about three meters, weapons at ready. Dok and Filly would handle rear-guard. That put Bandit right in the middle, right where he belonged.

This passage was just like the main one, but with one crucial difference. It led directly to the principal utility and engineering building of the Maas Intertech facility. The walls were seeded with vibration and motion sensors. Taking them out was part of Piper's job. She should be in the Maas Intertech computer nexus by now, doing her thing.

If she wasn't, the five of them in this tunnel were meat.

Every system cluster, like every individual system, had weaknesses, and those could be exploited.

Piper's map showed that the interconnected mainframes that composed the Maas Intertech computer cluster had one serious flaw. R & D mainframes were the most vigorously protected, rated at Security Code Red-4. Intrusion Countermeasures guarding the access nodes to these systems would be black, as vicious as IC ever got. The corp knew where its most important assets were located and spared no expense in defending them. The primary security mainframe, however, was merely Code Orange, tough but by no means impenetrable. And the main engineering system, which monitored and controlled the facility's physical devices such as water, light, and heat, was only moderately defended by Code Green security. And that was the cluster's flaw.

Besides controlling heat and light, elevators, automatic doors, and the like, the primary engineering mainframe was also responsible for such operations as supplying power to security monitors and related devices. The flaw that Piper would exploit.

The sculpted interior of the engineering CPU had the look of a power station control room or maybe the bridge of a trideo starship. The heart of the node took the form of a chief engineer icon seated at an immense, semicircular control console. An array of huge display screens ranged across the walls facing this console. Data blazing like electric neon streamed continuously across the wall displays and the main console displays. From millisecond to millisecond, the chief engineer icon would reach out with a stark white hand to adjust some console control or to enter a brief series of commands via the console keyboard.

As Piper crossed the threshold of the CPU node, a window outlined in brilliant green opened directly in front of her face. The enormous eye of another Watcher IC access program faced her squarely. Her masking utility had already changed her iconic appearance. She now wore the dark gray zipsuit of a Maas Intertech exec. The identity card clipped to the lapel of her jacket read, in big bold print, PRIORITY USER, CLEARANCE AA. The window closed, the Watcher vanished. Piper stepped up behind the chief engineer icon. This icon ignored her. Representing the most crucial decision-making circuits at the core of the CPU, it relied on Intrusion Countermeasures to defend it from harm. It lacked both the ability to identify unauthorized intruders into the node and the capability to do anything about them.

Piper initialized a custom combat utility. She called it Power Play. In the consensual hallucination of the matrix, she drew an enormous, gleaming, chrome automatic pistol with a muzzle the size of her fist and put it against the back of the chief engineer's head. In another version of this reality, thirty megapulses of command/override program code infected and interpenetrated the firmware programming of the CPU.

The chief engineer icon hesitated, turning its head just slightly as if to look back at her.

"I'm in charge," she told it.

"Affirmative," the icon replied. "Instructions?"

"Continue normal functions. Do not interfere with any modifications I may make to system operations.

Do not initiate any special activities or security alerts without my approval."

"Affirmative."

The chief engineer returned to making adjustments of the various controls. Piper reached out with her free hand and tapped a key on the console. One of the huge display screens on the walls facing the console went black, then blazed with light as the stark white iconic face of the security CPU came into view.

"Identify," the security CPU said.

"Engineering CPU," Piper replied.

"I don't recognize your icon."

"Manual override has been invoked. Authority assistant director Facility Engineering, code seven-seven-nine-four-nine, clearance double-A. Facility engineering is marking power systems microanomalies and is now beginning level-one manual and computer-directed diagnostic checks."

"I
understand."

"Be advised that facility technicians will be performing unscheduled maintenance in utility passage One Main at zero-zero-four-five hours, and in other utility passages and service corridors throughout the facility.

Disregard all sensor alerts from these locations until further notice. Engineering personnel are on site and will advise when the situation has been corrected."

"Acknowledged."

"End of line."

Piper broke the link with the security CPU, then spent something less than a millisecond shutting down the security sensors in utility passage One Main and other locations critical to Rico and the rest of the penetration team.

It was just a matter of pushing the right virtual keys.

* * *

From five thousand feet, the plex looked like a dark ocean of hazy orange, lit by the brilliant red strokes of fire at the top of chemplant stacks and the hundred million glinting, gleaming lights of towers, buildings, and plants.

The Hughes Stallion helo cruised smoothly through the spectral dark. Inside the chopper's command deck Thorvin kept his sensors moving, his throttle back. No need to rush. Not yet Direct-vision overlays cut up the terrain below into its discrete parts: Jersey City to the south, Newark to the southwest, Union City, the Hudson River, and Manhattan to the east, the Passaic-Ridgefield sprawl directly to the north. Thorvin noted that in passing. He had plotted a hexagonal course around the Secaucus industrial zone. He watched his course and kept his sensors searching for any suspicious air traffic.

The comm cut into his thoughts, first, a beep, then Rico saying, "Beta ... time check."

What freaking time was it anyway?

Didn't matter...

Thorvin checked his radar and navcomp, initialized the chopper's autopilot, then flipped the main switch on his remote-vehicle multiplex controller.

No more helicopter.

Instead, he had the body of a Sikorsky-Bell Microskimmer, a kind of saucer-shaped drone the size of a trash can lid. Sensors provided a full, 360-degree global view of everything around him, disorienting, but only for a moment.

Dok and Filly were just then lifting him free of the carrypak strapped to Shank's back and setting him down on the floor, which looked like ferrocrete. The penetration team was to one of the underground utility tunnels beneath the Maas Intertech facility. From a few centimeters above the floor, the top of the skimmer's sensor pod, Shank still looked like a dumb trog.

"Beta," Rico said, "Take point."

No problem.

Thorvin wound up his turbofans and slid forward, weaving around the ankles of Shank and Rico and advancing to the end of the passage. Directly ahead was a cavernous labyrinth of massive conduits and equipment rising three stories from the floor, all rumbling like a roadtrain on a quicksilver run.

This was Maas Intertech's power and water hub. Thorvin shot straight for the ceiling, then vectored right for a quick recon. Security cameras had every service aisle and catwalk under surveillance, but that was Piper's problem. Thorvin's problem was the odd dozen technicians moving throughout the hub.

He contacted Rico via direct laserlink to guide the penetration team through the maze.

The cat-and-mouse game couldn't last. There were too many techs and they never seemed to stay in one spot for more than a couple of moments. Sooner or later, one or more of them would turn the wrong way and see the wrong thing. Rico knew it-it was inevitable-but he played the game as long as he could.

The longer he and the team went without putting people down, without doing anything that would rouse suspicions, the better their chances of getting out of this alive.

They were moving up a service aisle between conduits at least half a meter in diameter, stacked up two stories on both sides of the aisle, when Thorvin reported, "Contact ahead, passage right, three meters in."

No choice, no alternate routes, ho time to wait for the contact to wander away. Rico tapped Shank's shoulder to get his attention, then quickly pointed and gestured to indicate the new threat, somewhere around the corner of the passage coming up on the right. The instant Shank nodded, Rico turned and motioned Bandit forward. A quick whisper and Bandit nodded, then did something with his hand.

About five meters ahead of them, something banged and clanged. That was followed by what sounded like the sharp, shrill shriek of an alley cat.

"What the
frag
was that?" a man exclaimed.

A big slag wearing a gray and blue technician's jumpsuit stepped into the aisle just ahead, first looking up the aisle, then back.

Rico saw the man's eyes widen, but Shank was ready, crouching, Ares Special Service gripped and uplifted in two big blocky hands. The weapon thumped. The technician grunted, lifting a hand toward his ribs, then stumbled and collapsed.

"Larry?" a woman called. "Larry! Oh-!"

A woman in the same style jumpsuit stepped hurriedly into the aisle, bending toward the fallen man.

Shank fired again. The woman jerked, falling onto her hands and knees, then, head lolling, slumped to the floor.

Here was one advantage of soft ammo. The two techs would be out for maybe an hour, but nothing about them gave any obvious evidence as to what had happened. No damage to clothes, no apparent signs of injury. Nothing that would necessarily instigate a full-scale security alert. The pair could have passed out drunk. Inside this power and water hub, they could conceivably have contacted some toxic substance or even high-voltage electric and been accidentally stunned or knocked unconscious. Whoever found the fallen techs would probably take a long, hard look at the surrounding pipes and equipment for signs of some technical malfunction. That was good because it would waste time, and one man's loss was another man's gain.

Before this was over, they'd need every millisecond of advantage they could get.

Control of the engineering CPU was just the beginning. By manipulating aspects of the engineering mainframe, Piper could extend her control and manipulate other aspects of the Maas Intertech facility that might impinge on the run.

The chief engineer icon, the critical circuits of the engineering CPU, was now working for her voluntarily. In addition to preforming its usual duties, it was monitoring the progress of the penetration team, it was also disabling security monitors and sensors in an ostensibly random pattern designed not only to safeguard the team and prevent discovery, but also to conceal the team's objective.

Abruptly, a warning tone sounded.

"Medic alert," the chief engineer informed. "Automated signal. Sublevel two, section seven, Advanced Water Purification unit."

"Intercept the signal," Piper said.

"Negative. Signal dispatched via radiolink. Facility MedStat responding, E.T.A. three minutes."

That was too fast, because the site of the alert was too near the penetration team's location. Piper brought up facility maps on the big display screens on the walls. The Maas Intertech emergency medical unit responded from a central suite. They would have to enter the Engineering Facility through a ground-floor entrance. "Cut power to all north-facing ground-level entranceways and lobbies for the next five minutes. Advise security CPU that we are experiencing scattered power outages related to the anomalies detected earlier. Also, reroute all priority A, double-A, and triple-A engineering terminals to the database management CPU."

"Acknowledged," the chief engineer replied. "Executing. Except I don't have authority to reroute triple-A priority terminals."

"If you had that authority, which key would you use?"

"The big red one there."

Piper reached over and tapped it.

Utility Passage Nine Main led out of the north end of the engineering building and into a series of auxiliary tunnels leading to the engineering sublevel of Residence Quad One, which was composed of four residence towers rising to fourteen stories. The majority of Maas Intertech's corporate citizens and their families lived on-site in this and other quad condoplexes.

The game of avoiding facility technicians ended at the service hatch for Elevator Three West. The hatch swung open as they approached. That was Piper's doing.

The inside of the elevator shaft was about twelve meters square-not a lot of room for five bodies that included a husky ork and a shaman who didn't seem to be paying complete attention-but they'd all been through this drill before.

Secure hatchway. Secure weapons. Secure kevlar-reinforced web-straps to body harness. Crouch low and wait.