Omnitopia Dawn (35 page)

A flash of light blinded him as someone’s energy weapon thrust blue-white and sizzling between Dev and the spear that was coming at him, slicing the spearhead off at the socket. Someone else grabbed Dev by one arm and pulled him back out of range of the attackers. The pressure around him grew truly unbearable for a moment, then suddenly lessened as a crowd of armed and armored shapes crashed into the faceless, inimical program-fractions nearest to Dev and pushed them back. He gasped for air as more of the armored defenders surrounded him, shoulder-to-shoulder, backs toward him. “You okay, Boss?” one of them yelled.

“Yeah—”

“Good. Better part of valor now, okay?” The whole circle, with him inside it, started moving back away from the line.

Beyond the circle, Dev saw more defenders starting to fill in where his group had been. It was hard to be sure, but he thought his people were gaining ground again as he and his sudden bodyguard pushed back out of the press and got their backs up against the massive glittering code- trunk of the Pastorale Tree. “Double up,” shouted the one who’d spoken to him first, “and get some more backup over here!”

Within moments the ring of steel around Dev was so thick it was impossible to see any of the enemy beyond it. The nearest of his impromptu guards, the one in the armor who’d first called for help, now turned to face Dev. His round worried face Dev knew, but couldn’t place—not that this was unusual in Omnitopia. The man was bald and had big shaggy eyebrows, under which those piercing blue eyes were looking out at Dev with a truly furious expression. “Dev, you goddamn lunatic,” he said, “forgive me, but
what the shit were you thinking of?
What would’ve happened if one of those guys got through to you?”

“I, uh,” Dev said, and then stopped, because there was absolutely no point in doing anything but apologizing. “You’re right,” he said. “Sorry.”

“Good,” his employee said. “Now you
stay
here until things are safe, okay?” And he vanished out through the ring of defenders, who generally were looking at Dev with expressions suggesting that they agreed with Blue Eyes.

Dev nodded and leaned against the tree. Gradually his field of view started to clear a little, so that he could see that the attack at large seemed to be falling back, pushed toward the river and past it again by the Omnitopians. Shortly thereafter the ring around him gave way a little, and Tau pushed through it and strode over to Dev.

“Don’t yell at me,” Dev said, for Tau was scowling. “They did that already.”

“Nothing like I’m going to do it,” Tau said. “Is it possible for you to be left alone and
not
find a garage roof to jump off?”

Dev wiped his brow with his forearm, panting. “Yeah, fine, guilty as charged. Save it for later, okay? How are we doing?”

Tau let out an annoyed breath. “All right for the moment. There were four big fronts where they tried to break through. We stopped the first two right away, but the other two were much worse, and one of them, right here where our people were shoved back into the river, was the worst of all. Maybe a hundred thousand zombie logins hit us in that spot—”

“But they didn’t punch through.”

“No thanks to those of us who went in without adequate safeguards and diverted resources that were needed for the defense!”

Dev made a face. “Okay, I guess this is later . . .”

Tau rolled his eyes. “Sorry. But this was not the walkover we thought it was going to be, Dev. Our defenses were hard pressed: Mike wasn’t kidding you when he said this was a much worse attack than anything we’ve had before. There were some minor breakthroughs into the accounting routines, and though we cut them off fast, now the question is what those people on the outside learned. The attacker programs were adapting as fast to what we were doing as we were to them.”

“You think the attacks weren’t entirely machine driven?” Dev said. “They had people riding their routines the way we did?”

“Why not?” Tau said. “
We
thought of doing it. Why shouldn’t they?”

Dev let out a breath. “Okay,” he said. He looked out over the battlefield, which was clearing rapidly: all the forces of zombie-bot darkness had now been pushed well back from the river and were being forced right out toward the battlefield’s horizons. Behind them the pursuing Omnitopians were also flooding over into the real- world side of the battle, pursuing their enemies down the world’s networks to isolate the access gateways the enemy had used and lock them down. Others would doubtless open later, but these would not be used again.

Tau was watching the retreat of the dark forces with a grim look on his face. Most of the Omnitopians who had been behind them had now headed forward to help their comrades with the mopping up. Dev let out a breath. Then, startled by something seen out of the corner of his eye, he turned.

Something among the roots of the tree. Flitting, passing—gone—

And now, nothing. Dev became aware that Tau was looking at him strangely. “What?”

“Did you see that?” Dev said.

“See what?”

Dev shook his head. Now that Tau asked, it was hard to say. “It was like—” He shrugged. “A shadow.”

Tau turned an uneasy look on him. “A virus, maybe?” They had seen such things before when viewing the Omnitopia subterverse this way: introduced code, insufficiently or incorrectly described or camouflaged by the ones responsible, would display itself against the more fully realized background as something splotchy or inchoate.

Dev shook his head. “Down here? You were the one telling me how well this area’s protected.”

Tau scowled. “Usually, sure. But after what we’ve been through it’s not beyond possibility that something sneaked in. Or that this attack was used as cover to
allow
something to sneak in . . .”

“Have a security crew give the place a good scouring,” Dev said. He chucked the Sword of Truth into the air, and the system caught it and vanished it: when his hands were empty, Dev rubbed his eyes. “They can report off after we do our debrief.”

“Right,” Tau said. “See you in the Tower.”

He vanished.

Dev stood there looking at the trees and the shadows under them for some little while longer: then vanished as well.

Two hours later, Dev, Tau, Mike, and four of Tau’s senior security and infrastructure people finished their debriefing in the Tower room around the big dark table, while outside the last embers of sunset were burning down into darkness. Dev pushed his laptop away, sighing, and closed its lid on a long report that would need closer examination later in the evening. “So,” he said. “Bottom line: all the prep we did, all the ready-rolled attack strategies, turned out not to be more than enough—they were barely enough. And we’re going to get hit again, and we have no good answer to the question of whether we’ll be ready.”

“That about sums it up,” said Tau. He dropped the pen he’d been fiddling with and leaned his elbows on the table, running his hands through his hair. “At the end of the day, the strategies and responses improvised and executed on the fly turned out to be as effective, or more so, than the stuff we had in the can.”

“Which leaves me wondering yet again about what moles have been buried in the company waiting for this moment to arrive,” Dev said. “And how we haven’t found them by now, and how they got into the shot locker and sent news to their handlers about what we were getting ready to use on them. Something else for system security to investigate in quieter times . . . assuming the company survives to have any.” He leaned back in his chair, trying to stretch some of the stress kinks out of his back. “Later for that. For now: are we secure?”

“For the moment,” said Mike. It was strange to see him looking little and slim again after watching him fight in the Bloomberg suit—it had fitted him unusually well.

“And how long will the moment last?” Dev said.

Tau shook his head, bit his lip. “I give it six more hours, eight at the outside.”

“So what we just had was simply a feint.”

“Almost certainly. Not at all big enough to be the main attack.” Tau scowled, his eternal doing- math-in-his-head expression. “Oh, they took forty or fifty million off us, yeah—”

“Not nearly enough to repay the effort and the danger they went through to stage this,” Mike said. “They’ll be back for more. Lots more.”

“Besides, tactically it makes sense for a bigger attack to follow this one,” said Tau. “This was meant to make us think we’re out of the woods. But also we’re supposed to think that nobody could possibly follow up with another attack of the same intensity.”

Everyone around the table sat morosely silent for some moments. “And the second one,” Dev said, “will not only be far worse, but probably entirely different.”

“What I hate is that all we’ve got to determine the timing by is guesswork,” Tau said.

They looked at each other. “If it was me planning all this,” Dev said, “it’d still happen inside the attack window we originally worked out. Tactically, in terms of access to our hardware, it’s still the best time.” He scowled for a moment, thinking. “And this too: the ego junkies among the hackers who’ve designed this will be expecting us to put out some PR about how we beat off this attack. Then they get to come back at us, rip us off properly, and brag that we’re twice as stupid as they thought we were.” He grinned. “So. Let’s start damage control. Has everyone who took part been messaged with instructions to keep quiet about what’s been going on?”

“Those e-mails went out within minutes of the battle being over,” Tau said.

“Good,” Dev said. “If there are leaks, I want them tracked back to the source.”

Donna and Mal, the security people, both nodded. “Also,” Dev said, “make sure the space we were fighting in today is checked for any little presents our visitors might have left us. I saw something down there that I couldn’t identify.”

“We’ll take care of it,” Mal assured him.

“Thanks,” said Dev. He stood up and stretched. “Anything else?”

Tau and the others got up too. “I had a call from shuntspace security just before we sat down,” Tau said. “They’ve been seeing some operational anomalies tonight. Tomorrow morning can you find some time to go over to the Palace and have a word?”

“Sure,” Dev said. “Call Frank, have him schedule it. The earlier the better, if you think we’ve got trouble within the next six hours . . .” He yawned. “Make sure I’m called if something starts. Thanks, folks.”

Mike and his security people waved good night and headed out. Dev, meanwhile, waited until the lift door closed behind them, then said to Tau, “Want to come up for a beer?”

“Don’t tempt me,” Tau said, looking down into the courtyard. “I’ve got too many things to do before I go to bed: I don’t dare take the edge off.”

“Well, walk me back, then,” Dev said. They went over to the elevator. “Anything from Jim?”

“He says there’s nothing to get too excited about yet,” Tau said. “The news got out too late to do anything to the North American business news cycle. But almost as soon as the attack started, our PR people on the Asian side of the dateline started papering the wire services with news about how the attack had been sidelined.” He sighed. “Tomorrow’ll be worse, Jim says: the Asian markets are open now, they hate insecurity worse than anyone else, and they’re going to take other markets down the slide with them. But for tonight, for the moment, we’re okay.”

The door slid open; they stepped in. “All right,” Dev said as the door closed and the elevator headed down. “I’ll get up to Castle Scrooge in the morning if I can.”

“Why?”

“So he can yell at me,” Dev said, resigned.

The door opened and they stepped out into the downstairs lobby. The doors to the courtyard were open: the scent of warm evening was flowing in through them, a baked-pavement smell fragranced with bougainvillea, jasmine, and magnolia from the flower beds in the middle garden. Dev breathed it in gratefully as they went out and headed for the doors to the residence side. “Jim’s not going to yell at you,” Tau said, sounding surprised.

“Oh, yes, he will,” Dev said, “because
you
did, and you told him you did.”

“How do you know I told him?” Tau said, sounding faintly outraged.

“Because it’s what you’d do,” Dev said as they stopped by the downstairs doors.

Tau gave him a look in the dimness, but didn’t deny it. “So,” Dev said. “Call me in the morning as soon as anything new starts to happen. Don’t give me that look! Yes, detail me a bodyguard this time, whatever. And, Tau, thanks.”

“You’re welcome,” Tau said, “you idiot.”

Dev grinned at him, weary. “Guilty as charged. Good night.”

“Night, Dev,” Tau said, patted him on the shoulder, and headed off across the plaza.

Dev sighed and went upstairs. He paused briefly by Lola’s quarters, finding the place in nighttime mode and Crazy Bob holding down the front office, eating a burrito and watching a foreign soap opera on the screen next to the monitor that showed Lola’s bedroom.