Goblinopolis, The Tol Chronicles, Book 1 (8 page)

Preotimast stood motionless, watching the king through barely slitted eyes. Actually, as he admitted to an Apprentice later, he had nodded off, but even in vertical repose he was a commanding figure, as old geezers go. Rexingrasha was meanwhile making a mental note to execute whoever had suggested he get out of bed this morning.

There’s not much to say about the rest of Rexingrasha’s day—it sucked. By the time the last sun set, he had come face to face with the fact that he was going to have to fight to keep his crown.
Fight
. Rexingrasha Lungmuch, the sovereign of Tragacanth by right of birth. It just didn’t seem possible that the duly-consecrated monarch of the most powerful goblin nation in the world should have to justify his position of authority—all because of a little worm of a gnome and his sniveling horde of nostril-excavating computer weenies.

A couple of days later a Royal Proclamation was issued inviting any adult male goblin of pure blood native to Tragacanth to apply as a candidate to challenge the king for the right of ascension to the throne. Rexingrasha instructed his aides to screen applicants carefully and reject those who seemed to possess any significant computer knowledge. Preotimast, however, sent over an Apprentice to interview the candidates as a representative of the Magineers. The King’s aides found themselves between a rock and a hard place when the Apprentice insisted on the right to review and supersede the aides’ evaluation of candidates’ suitability. They decided in the end that they were more afraid of the Loca Magineer than a likely lame dabbling-avian monarch.

The contest was scheduled for one month from the day the applications were closed, to give the candidates time to prepare (and to allow the King to take a crash course in hacking). Only about a dozen goblins signed up, most of them barely old enough to participate (Rexingrasha had set the minimum age at fifty, on the grounds that anyone younger than that brought up outside the Royal Family couldn’t possibly have the depth of experience necessary to rule. Preotimast agreed).

Among the contestants was a youngish hacker of impoverished family background by the name of Carnilox. He was employed by the Royal Data Corps as a systems administrator for the Agricultural Support Services Network, perhaps the least prestigious unit of the RDC, although no less vital to the nation’s economy for it. Carnilox’s family were subsistence farmers and rock ranchers; he was proud to be serving in a job that provided them significant assistance. The ASSN kept track of harvests, requests for seasonal labor, subsidized seed allocations, fertilizer shipments, and other logistics related to food production for the kingdom.

Carnilox was not a dedicated hacker in the deep sense of the word. He was a network problem-solver who had very few government-supplied sophisticated tools to work with, so he’d spent his career making due. This had by necessity honed both his programming skills and his ability to think outside the box—talents that now promised to serve him well in his quest for the throne.

There were other viable contenders in Tragacanth, of course, but most of the highly skilled hackers were either too contemptuous of the establishment to have any desire to meld with it or too far underground to emerge safely. Only one of the other declared candidates had any real chance against Carnilox: a shadowy figure who went by the handle “Lempo.” No one seemed to know his real name or anything else about him. He managed somehow to convince the screeners that he was a native Tragacanthan, and he was obviously male, a goblin, and over fifty. Since these were the only conditions the king had set forth for qualification to candidacy, Lempo was allowed to participate.

Carnilox was aware of his opponent by reputation only: as far as he knew they had never before met face-to-face. Lempo was fond of writing exploits that targeted specific computers owned by commercial concerns, then in the spirit of public service offering to plug the holes he’d demonstrated—for a tidy sum. It was a form of extortion, thinly veiled by Lempo’s affectation of Samaritanism, but as yet it was not technically against Tragacanthan edict.

Carnilox found nothing about Lempo in person to change his less-than-favorable opinion. He seemed to be a self-centered, arrogant, crude, sociopath. However, none of this was material at the moment—all that mattered were Lempo’s hacking skills, which Carnilox knew to be considerable. One problem he had in formulating a strategy for countering Lempo’s probably superior programming abilities is that no one except the Arnoc security team who were charged with setting up the contest parameters had any idea what sort of format the challenge would take. After all, this had never been done before. There was a much better than even chance that Rexingrasha would take whatever steps he could to rig the contest in his favor; this went more or less without saying. With Preotimast looking over his shoulder constantly, and his Apprentices supervising preparations at the Arnoc, the king would have to be extremely crafty to stack the deck, though. As it turned out, craft and guile were piranhas that swam freely in the Lungmuch gene pool.

“And this, Your Majesty, is a
pointer
. It’s called a pointer because it points to an area in memory where a value is stored. It’s important to remember that operations performed on a pointer do not affect the value to which the pointer points. If you want to get at the actual data, you have to do so by
dereferencing
that pointer.”

Rexingrasha was struggling with several sensations at once: incomprehension, acute boredom, and incipient panic. He was so totally out of his league here that it felt as though he were learning a completely new language, being taught by an alien to boot. He sighed and tried to grasp what Sildran, the Chief Arnoc programmer, had just told him.

“So if I want to change the value in memory, I have to change the pointer, too?”

“No, not at all. If a house changes occupants, the address of that house doesn’t change, does it? That’s the same principle we’re talking about here.”

The king rubbed his royal temples. “I need a break, Sildran. I’m going to take a walk out on the parapets to clear my head. Amuse yourself. Write some code or something. I’ll be back in a little while.”

“As His Majesty wishes.”

Rexingrasha strolled along the wind-swept walkway perched high above the Royal Palace. From here he could just see the sunlight glimmering off the Sea of Fleriz far to the northeast; to the southwest he could make out the dark wavering line of the majestic Espwe Mountains, to the east the heavily-wooded Bungash range was visible. The vast forbidding desert basin of Asga Teslu lay off to the west. Virtually every nook and cranny of the sprawling city of Goblinopolis could be observed from here, as well, especially through the array of high-definition telescopic surveillance optics spaced regularly up and down the guardrails of the ten kilometer-long parapet that completely encircled the Royal Compound.

Rexingrasha hadn’t made very much use of the monitors himself—he preferred his network of spies and operatives on the ground—but his father had been a regular visitor to the security observation stations. The old boy had always been a bit of voyeur, though. The king chuckled at the thought of his father sitting in a room full of screens, his gaze eagerly darting to and fro among them.

After two weeks of almost non-stop study, it was becoming apparent to Rexingrasha that he wasn’t going to be able to compete successfully in the upcoming challenge if it were a fair fight. He just wasn’t the hacker type. Various possible solutions to this dilemma suggested themselves: sneak in a “pinch-hacker” (hard to pass off as legitimate); find some way to compromise the network beforehand (hard to arrange); see to it that the other candidates were “indisposed” (hard to get away with); or buy off one or more of the judges...yes. This last alternative was much more in keeping with his background, training, and inclination.

Money wasn’t an issue. After all, he was the king, and had the vast Tragacanthan Royal Treasury at his beck and call. No, the critical decision here was exactly whom to bribe, and how to broach the subject diplomatically. Discretion was obviously a key element, as was proper sizing up of potential bribees. Fortunately, Rexingrasha had for just such a contingency retained the services of perhaps the best practitioner of these ancient arts in the world: an antelf named Nessendar. The antelves were so called because they eschewed most of the character traits generally ascribed to their elvish kindred: kindness, bravery, non-violence, optimism, and goodwill chief among them. That’s not to say that they weren’t capable of expressing these characteristics, but they were not part of the normal antelf behavioral repertoire.

Nessendar had been the mastermind behind most of the truly successful underhanded foreign and domestic policy initiatives of Rexingrasha’s reign. He was a genius, and fiercely loyal to whomever held the purse strings. He excelled as a spin doctor, and at arranging clandestine affairs of the heart or of state. Best of all, he was an absolute master at funneling funds to the proper destination without drawing undue attention. All in all, Nessendar was the perfect person to ensure that Rexingrasha retained the throne.

Not that his assistance would come cheaply. Far from it, in fact—he was bound to realize the critical part he was playing in the survival of the Lungmuch royal dynasty and expect to be compensated accordingly. It would be worth it, though. If anyone could save Rexingrasha’s Royal Keester, it was Nessendar.

The day of the challenge dawned a little later than usual, as both suns were retrograde that morning (considered by the superstitious to be an ill omen), but eventually daylight flooded the amphitheater adapted for the event. As expected, thousands of Tragacanthans and a contingent of foreign press were on hand to witness the spectacle. It wasn’t every day you saw a hereditary monarch battle a dozen computer nerds to keep his crown. His Majesty was seated at a terminal in the center of the stage, the competitors arranged around him in a semicircle, facing the audience. The three judges sat at terminals off on far stage left. Spaced evenly throughout was a team of proctors who would keep all the candidates under close scrutiny during the competition.

Rexingrasha went into the contest with supreme confidence. Nessendar had assured him that the judges were “favorably disposed” towards him. All he had to do was run a couple of canned scripts that had been hidden on his workstation by a loyal Arnoc technician and wait to be declared the winner. That would show all those insufferable geeks who the boss of this kingdom was, once and for all. As soon as he was securely in power again, he’d have no difficulty suppressing any investigation if someone cried foul. He’d also make unauthorized hacking of any sort a crime and toss all those little turds into a deep, damp hole somewhere: he already had the Edict drawn up. His royal palms had gone all sweaty with anticipation at the mere thought. Carnilox was seated second from the end on stage right. He cracked his knuckles and surveyed his opponents. Lempo was on the other side, right next to the king. Interesting. The faces of the other ten candidates blurred together for him—he wasn’t sure if it was the breakfast stimulants, the nervousness, or just that he didn’t think any of them were serious contenders. Probably some combination of all three. That, and the fact he’d taken his glasses off to see the screen better.

The head judge made a hand gesture to the chief bailiff, who cautioned the crowd to be silent until the competition was at an end. The judges then went over the rules. All the workstations were identical, with the same operating system version, installed software, network adapters, and so on. The candidates had one hour to find a way into the Royal Network, to which they were physically attached but for which they had no credentials for entry. Once in, they had to find a specific file hidden in the network and change the contents so that the resultant checksum contained a unique string associated with their own workstation. The first person to do so would be declared the winner.

Sounded simple enough, especially since each workstation had the requisite software for manipulating checksums pre-installed.
There must be a catch
, Carnilox thought. He couldn’t know how right he was, of course. To begin with, the computers in the contest had been specifically firewalled off from RNET. The only direct way in would be to defeat the firewall, and one hour wasn’t much time in which to accomplish that. Carnilox decided not even to try, but to look for a vulnerable system that was already whitelisted by the firewall and tunnel through that way.

Five minutes into the contest he got a system message that several of his applications were being terminated. Odd. He didn’t command that; in fact, he was actively using one of them to scan and evaluate a Royal subnet whose address range he’d had sufficient foresight to memorize. Carnilox frowned and fired them up again. With only fifty-three minutes left he didn’t have time to look in the logs to see what the problem had been.

About ten more minutes of scanning and he had found a suitable node. It was in the personnel subnet, used mostly for time and attendance of Arnoc employees, so naturally it wasn’t blocked by the firewall. Even better, he quickly found the credentials for establishing a secure connection between his box and the RNET, using the personnel node as a gateway. A few keystrokes and he was in.
T minus 42
.

RNET was a multilevel maze of mythic proportions. Finding the one file he needed was going to be a formidable task sans a good search strategy, but he didn’t have time to plot one out formally. It would be great if he had a ‘find’ command that worked across the entire heterogeneous enterprise, but alas, that didn’t exist. Carnilox stared off into the distance, wheels grinding furiously. Correction: didn’t exist
yet
.