Goblinopolis, The Tol Chronicles, Book 1 (9 page)

Before he could get very far with coding, though, his apps got axed once again. He didn’t have time to deal with this sort of smek right now—it was rapidly crossing the line from merely annoying to pissing him off. He reset the connection, reattached, and started up his proggies once more, but this time, on a hunch, he turned on a sniffer first and had it dump to a file in the background while he was working.
T minus 38
.

His idea was to combine ‘all-scan,’ a generic enterprise node identifier/enumerator used for network management and provided as a DOORS module, with the standard search utility ‘fileseek.’ Basically, it involved piping the output from the former into the latter—not exactly a revolutionary idea—but there was a fair amount of munging that would have to get done either just before or just after the pipe in order to produce any readily useful output. The formats were different, for one thing, as were the file types. It would take a few minutes of dedicated effort to hack together a working search engine. Time, unfortunately, was not a commodity with which he was blessed in abundance.

Lempo winced. He’d just gotten access to RNET—via a backdoor he’d planted some months earlier while working under contract to the Arnoc doing software quality reviews—when his applications all faulted at once, forcing him to restart the whole process. He figured it was an operating system glitch; they weren’t all that uncommon on DOORS, especially given that he was using a stealth program that tiptoed around the usual OS checks and balances. While he was waiting he slammed out a script to automate the startup process, in case it happened again. Good thinking.

His strategy was to rank all the available locations for the target file by their probability as hiding places using an algorithm he’d concocted based on his experience on RNET. He knew the guys who set this contest up, and was pretty sure he also knew how they would think. Once he was back up and running, he set the search program to ‘auto’ and settled in to watch the results pile up.

His program scanned all the active RNET nodes and mapped out a probability hierarchy based on the dates of last modification of each directory. The odds are that the file in question had been uploaded quite recently. Of course, so had thousands of other files across the enterprise, but at least this was a logical starting point for his search.

He’d covered about 35% of the visible nodes when his apps exited abruptly. Again. This was getting irritating. He checked the system log for any hint of what was causing the kickoffs, but there was nothing to indicate unusual activity. Just a line stating that the apps had closed due to each receiving an ‘end process’ signal from the kernel. Damn stupid DOORS. This smek was really crinking up his neatly-planned schedule. He threw his restart script into gear and scanned some of the saved results as it did its thing. He noticed a couple of patterns that gave him a pretty good idea where to look next—if he could keep his stuff from crashing, that is.

Lempo glanced over at the king. He was looking a little bewildered—not at all like his smug and confident expression a scant ten minutes or so ago. Maybe he was having the same difficulty with this confounded operating system. He couldn’t help smiling about that. Soon that happenin’ jeweled band would be around
his
head, and then this cursed kingdom would get the ‘tude adjustment it so desperately needed and richly deserved.

He closed his eyes and was momentarily lost in reverie as he visualized the vengeance being king would enable him to enact for various affronts against his person, real and imagined. The revenge of a goblin is never a pretty sight. The sudden realization that he wasn’t quite on the throne yet yanked Lempo back into the here and now, and set his fingers flying over the keyboard.

Rexingrasha waited confidently for the official start of the contest. His strategy was simple: he had a script already in place to accomplish the objective, and an assurance that his blatant disregard for the rules would be overlooked by the officials. Nothing whatever to worry about. He coolly surveyed his opponents. Not a regal bugger in the lot. Most of them looked like downright peasants to the king, but then, just about everyone did. Coming from a long line of monarchs tends to color your vision in that regard. He couldn’t even begin to imagine any of them wearing the Royal accoutrements. They just didn’t have the proper bearing. The gods only knew what trashy third-rate educations they had, if any at all.

The signal to begin had been given. His Majesty decided it would be unwise to win
too
quickly, so he typed some random characters. He did it very fast, so it would sound as though he knew what he was doing. After three and a half lines of gibberish, he stopped. He wondered what would happen if he hit ‘enter.’ He shrugged, and did it. The computer seemed to pause for a moment, in seeming shock and derision, and then simply shut down.

For a moment Rexingrasha didn’t comprehend what had taken place. He just sat there staring at the screen, waiting for it to come back on as though nothing had happened. When it didn’t, he jabbed frantically at some more keys. Approaching a state of panic, he forced himself to calm down and remember what Sildran had told him about freeze-ups. He found the power button and recycled the system. After a couple of minutes he was back to the login screen. Whew. On the plus side, he felt that enough time had passed that he could now safely deploy the ‘kingmaker’ script without looking too suspicious.

The script in question was cleverly designed to simulate an exhaustive search, so that the inevitable audit of the system logs would corroborate Rexingrasha’s legitimacy. The script itself, of course, would utterly self-destruct once its mission was accomplished, as would any incriminating temp files associated with it. He navigated to the place where the script was hidden and tried to start it up. The first attempts went awry, since he’d forgotten the exact syntax, but finally he got it right. The search simulation would take about three minutes, Sildran had said, so he just relaxed and pretended to be engrossed in his “hacking.”

When the search finished, there was a pause while the last part of the script loaded. Rexingrasha knew it would all be over in a few seconds; he tried not to smile too broadly. Premature gloating might raise suspicions, after all. He closed his eyes and took a deep breath in anticipation of glorious victory. When he opened them again and glanced at the screen, something odd had happened. Instead of the little revolving dots that indicated a program in progress, there was a single printed line:

+++Program kingmaker.mod exited on signal t from kernel

What the phlenk was that? If the program exited, shouldn’t that mean he’d won? Why hadn’t the judges halted the contest yet? He pushed a few keys. Nothing changed. He tried listing the directory contents, one of the few commands he actually knew. It worked just fine. The script was still there, though, which was not fine. It meant that something had gone wrong, because it should have erased itself after completion. Rexingrasha had no idea what to do now. He stared dumbly at the screen for a few seconds, and then realized he had to do
something
, and soon. The only thing he could think of was to restart the script, which he did, apparently successfully. He couldn’t even begin to consider the merest possibility of speculating on why his first attempt had been such a miserable fail. He could only hope it didn’t happen again. With luck he still had time to beat his opponents to the prize.

Carnilox grinned internally. It was one of those huge face-wrapping grins you get when things are going really,
really
well, only he was keeping most of it inside so it looked like he was just smirking. His enterprise search engine was working even better than he’d dared dream. He’d already found six copies of the file; now all he had to do was figure out which was the correct one, calculate the proper changes to generate his signature, and drop the file in the designated judges’ account. Everything was going smoothly now, it seemed. Just a few more seconds and...

He couldn’t believe it. Just as he was mapping to the judges’ drive, everything went down again. What in the name of Arfsweener’s Pustulant Bunions was going on here? What could possibly be shutting down applications across nodes? It wasn’t merely a simple OS glitch, after all. It was something much more mysterious.
T minus 17
.

He was getting a little frantic now. Surely everyone else was at about the same point in the process. He now knew in his heart that he was the best hacker in the competition—it would be exceptionally painful to lose due to some stupid machine malfunction. He looked around the stage while the system was coming back up. Everyone, including Lempo and the king, looked apprehensive. That was probably a good sign.

Lempo was closing in. He’d found two dozen directories that had files modified during the appropriate time frame, and narrowed down the potential candidates to about six, based on file size and type. He was already hard at work generating the necessary embedded signature. He figured three, four minutes, tops. That should give him at least seven or eight to spare. He glanced briefly at the rest of the field. No one was looking too happy right now. Good. That’s just the way he wanted it. He checked network connectivity to the judges’ shared node, where the properly tagged file was to be deposited. Everything looked fine. It was just a matter of time now.

Yes! He’d succeeded in embedding his signature. As he started the file transfer that would win him the throne, his apps dropped again. Lempo went through his entire sizeable litany of curse words silently, in alphabetical order just to be thorough. He jabbed at the restart button so hard it popped off on the rebound and skittered across the floor of the stage. A couple of people nearby glanced at it with raised brows; Lempo was not concerned with them. He only had eyes for the screen.
T minus 12
.

Carnilox shook his head in disbelief. It seemed like every move he made had been anticipated and prepared for. Could he have underestimated the king or Lempo or one of the other contestants
that
badly? Was this an RNET employee’s doing? The rules had explicitly stated that no one else was to be on the network. The judges would be only passively watching network traffic from their consoles. He looked at all network connections across the contestants’ subnet and counted nodes. Twelve contestants, three judges. That added up to fifteen. Why, then, were there sixteen active connections?

He quickly eliminated all the legitimate nodes, leaving only one that couldn’t be accounted for. It was a different type of network interface from all the others, as shown by the first eight characters in the physical address. Something was very weird here—there shouldn’t be any heterogeneity on this network segment. That was by design; the segment had been constructed specifically for this contest. Someone had somehow slipped in an unauthorized machine. Either they were doing so with the tacit approval of the judges...or..
.the judges didn’t know they were there
. He slipped back to the OS shell and punched up the native network monitoring utility. The extra node was not visible to it! Good thing he always brought his own tools—an artifact of being involved in too many clandestine hacks with untrustworthy system binaries. He might well be the only one who knew about the intruder.

“Such a smekking
day
I’m having.”

Rexingrasha was beating his head against the wall, mentally. Every time his script got close to completion, it would get terminated and he’d have to start again. The weirdest part was that it didn’t seem to be happening at the same place every time. Not that he had any real technical clue here, but after a lot of stumbling around he’d found the debug utility’s stepwise error log, and the last line processed before the kickoff was never the same twice. Even if he were a programmer, he wasn’t sure what he could do to fix the problem. He glanced out at the audience and caught Sildran’s eyes. With a tiny wiggle of his eyebrows he pled for help. Sildran looked uncomfortable for a few seconds and then abruptly left the audience seating area.

Well, at least the other contestants all seemed to be sweating profusely also. Maybe this confounded problem was affecting everyone. There couldn’t be more than ten minutes left, and no one had yet claimed victory over him, so something was probably holding back the whole lot of them at once. None of the judges even had keyboards—he’d been watching them. Either one of the other contestants was responsible, or something odd was going down here. When Rexingrasha found out who
was
behind this inexcusable delaying tactic, at least one head was going to roll. First, though, he needed to wrap up this ridiculous contest and get back to being king.

Messages suddenly started scrolling across his screen. The script had restarted itself and was progressing much faster than usual. It looked as though someone had manually bypassed most of it, and was just running the portion that had so far failed to complete. Sildran! He owed that sniveling little geek. This time the script did finish, and the transfer took place. His Majesty relaxed.

Lempo had finally made it back to the transfer step. He started several instances of the file transfer program, to make it more difficult for whom—or what—ever to interrupt. He pressed the enter key for the final time, and sat back. Any second now.
T minus 4
.