Prisoners of Tomorrow (3 page)

Dr. Jonathan Watts, a civilian adviser with the decade-old US Space Force, who had come with Kehrn from the Pentagon, interjected for Paula’s benefit, “Big-mother X-ray lasers. Nuclear-driven microwave pulses strong enough to melt metal. A giant accelerator track buried inside the main ring—what you’d use to feed batteries of matter-zappers.” He tossed up his hands and shrugged. His face was constantly mobile, changing expression with each thought progression behind black, heavy-rimmed spectacles. “Other parts of the place seemed to be for launching ejectable modules, probably fission-pumped eggbuster lasers. And according to other reports, certain key parts of the structure are double-shelled and hardened against incoming beams.”

“Yet nobody else has seen a hint of all this,” Paula remarked. “Enough visitors have been through the place, haven’t they?”

“Just on the standard tour,” Colonel Raymond said from his seat opposite Watts. “They only see what they’re allowed to see. The place is over three miles around, not counting the hub. There’d be enough room backstage to hide the kinds of things we’re talking about.”

Paula nodded and looked again at the image on the screen. Except for its inner surface—the “roof” facing the hub—the main torus was not visible directly; it moved inside a tire-like outer shield of sintered lunar rock which, to avoid needless structural loading, didn’t rotate with the rest of the colony. The shield was to exclude cosmic rays. Supposedly. Or was that another part of the defensive hardening? The question had doubtless occurred to other people too, so she didn’t bother raising it.

In the center of the group, informally chairing the proceedings, was a broad-framed, craggy-featured man with a dark chin, moody eyes, and gray, wiry, short-cropped hair. He was Bernard Foleda, deputy director of the Pentagon’s Unified Defense Intelligence Agency, and had arranged the meeting. The UDIA was essentially an expanded version of the former Defense Intelligence Agency, now serving the intelligence needs of the Space Force in addition to those of the traditional services. He had said little since Paula’s arrival, tending instead to sit back for most of the time, watching and listening impassively. At this point, however, he leaned forward to take charge of the proceedings again.

“Obviously this was something we had to check out.” Foleda spoke in a low-pitched, throaty voice that carried without having to be raised. “We put a lot of people on it. To cut a long story short, we succeeded in recruiting one of the people who worked on
Tereshkova
—a Russian, who was code-named ‘Magician.’”

Paula’s eyebrows lifted. “As a source? You mean you actually got yourselves an inside man up there?”

Foleda nodded. “Luck played a part in it. He was someone we’d had connections with for a while. The details don’t matter. Magician was an electrical maintenance supervisor, which meant he moved about a lot—exactly what we wanted. He worked there for almost six months. But as you can imagine, it wasn’t the easiest place to extract information from. The snippets he did get out to us were tantalizing. He indicated that he’d collected a whole package together, but he couldn’t get it down to us. The security checks on everybody who came back for leave or whatever were too strict. He wouldn’t risk it. But what he said he had up there sounded like dynamite. We christened it the ‘Tangerine’ file.”

“Dynamite,” Jonathan Watts repeated, tossing up his hands again. “Weapons specs, pictures, firepowers, ranges, configuration data, parts lists, blueprints, test data, installation dates . . . the works.”

Foleda resumed, “Then somebody had an idea.” He stopped and then looked at Colonel Raymond. “It might be better if you explain the technicalities,” he suggested.

Raymond turned his head toward Paula. “It involved the packet-header and checksum protocols used in the Soviet communications link down from Mermaid.” Paula nodded. The terms related to data-communications networks.

In many ways, communications networks are like road systems: their purpose is to move traffic quickly from one place to another with minimum congestion. They therefore present similar problems to their designers. Speed is important, of course, and so is safety, which means essentially the same in communications as it does on highways: what arrives at a destination should bear as close a resemblance as possible to whatever left the departure point.

Also important in both fields is using system resources efficiently, which means avoiding situations in which some channels become choked while others are not being used at all. Thus, morning commuters seek out alternative routes for getting to work, which spreads traffic out over all the available roads, to come together at a common destination. A standard technique for sending large files of information from one computer to another through a communications network works the same way. The sending computer breaks the file up into data “packets,” which follow different routes through the network to the destination, with different computers along the way deciding from moment to moment which way to route any given packet, depending on the conditions at the time.

To guard against errors due to interference, equipment faults, or other causes, the computer at the sending end uses the data content of a packet to compute a mathematical function known as a “checksum,” which it sends along with the message. The receiving computer performs the same calculation on what should be the same data and compares its checksum with the one that has been sent. If they match, then the message is clear; or more precisely, the chances against it are astronomically remote.

Raymond went on, “We figured out a way to transmit Magician’s Tangerine file down, using the Russians’ own Earthlink. Basically the idea was very simple: rig the packets to carry a bad checksum, which means that the receiving Soviet groundstation throws them out as garbage. But NSA is watchlisting the mismatches. Get it?”

Paula was already nodding and smiling faintly. It was neat. When the checksums failed to match, the receiving computer would simply assume that the message it had assembled was corrupted, disregard it, and signal for a repeat transmission. What Colonel Raymond was saying was that the checksums for the packets containing the Tangerine file would be
deliberately
miscalculated. Therefore they would, in effect, be invisible to the message-processing computers at the Soviet groundstation. But the computers in the US National Security Agency’s receiving posts in Japan, Australia, Britain, and elsewhere, which eavesdropped on the Soviets’ communications all the time—and just about everyone else’s, too, for that matter—would be programmed to look for just those mismatches. Thus they would be able to intercept the information that the Soviet system ignored. (It went without saying that it would be a simple matter to abort the retransmission attempts for each packet after a couple of tries, to avoid getting the system into a loop that would otherwise go on forever.)

“Tricky, though,” Paula said. “Magician would have to get inside the communications center up there.”

“He was a maintenance supervisor,” Raymond reminded her. “That part was okay.”

“Yes, but it would involve actually getting into the system software somehow, and tampering with it. Was that really Magician’s field?”

Foleda gave a heavy sigh. “You’ve hit it, right on the nail.”

Paula glanced around quickly. “I take it from the way we’re talking that this didn’t work out.”

“We worked with what we had,” Foleda said. “Magician wasn’t an expert on Soviet software. But we got the job down to what seemed like a straightforward procedure, and he was confident he could hack it. . . . But something went wrong. He got caught. The last we heard he was back in Moscow—in the Lubyanka jail.”

“The Tangerine file wasn’t transmitted?” Paula said.

Foleda shook his head. “Nothing ever came through.”

“Presumably they got him first,” Kehrn said, still below the wallscreen. He came back to the table and sat down at last.

Paula looked away and gazed at the image of
Valentina Tereshkova
again while she thought over what had been said. So, if it was a disguised battle platform, in combination with the other weaponry that the Soviets were known to have deployed in space, it would outgun everything the West had been putting up for the past decade. But why did that call for the meeting in progress now, and in particular her presence at it? Then it came to her suddenly what the meeting was all about. She jerked her head away from the screen to look at Raymond and Foleda. “That file is still up there,” she said.

“Right on the nail, again,” Foleda confirmed. “Magician managed to get a message through to us after he was arrested—it doesn’t matter how—saying that as a precaution, he created a backup copy of the file. Apparently the Soviets never found out about it.” Foleda gestured at the screen. “It’s up there right now, inside a section of Mermaid’s databank, stored invisibly under a special access code. We have that code. What we don’t have is somebody up there who would know how to break into a Russian computer system and use it.”

Paula stared hard at him as the meaning of it all became clear. They had risked using a nonspecialist, and the gamble had failed. But by a small miracle, the prize was still waiting to be claimed. This time they wanted an expert.

She swallowed and shifted her gaze from one to another of the faces staring back at her questioningly. “Now wait a minute . . .” she began.

CHAPTER TWO

“Now wait a minute,” Paula had repeated in the privacy of Colonel Raymond’s office an hour after the meeting ended. “My degrees are in electronics and computer communications. I’m a scientist. If I wanted to get mixed up in this kind of business I’d have joined Foleda’s outfit or the CIA, not the Air Force.”

“But this job needs your kind of expertise,” Raymond had said. “And the way they’ve got it figured out, it wouldn’t really be that risky.”

“Tell that to the last guy who tried. He’s in Lubyanka prison.”

“This approach would be different. You wouldn’t have to get inside the computer center—or anywhere that’d be all that difficult.”

“Except a Soviet space station nearly two hundred thousand miles out.”

“Kehrn explained how that could be arranged. . . . Paula, just promise that you’ll take a few minutes to think over how important this is, would you, please? It’s not only the potential military value of getting detailed intelligence on those weapons. The political implications are monumental. The unaligned great powers that we’ve seen emerging in this century—Japan, China, Brazil, the Southeast Asian alliance—have tended to regard both us and the Russians as equally crooked in the long run, and played us off against each other. But
this
would prove to the world, irrefutably and finally, that all the assurances we’ve been hearing about how the Soviets have changed but nobody understands them are just as much horseshit as everything else they’ve told us over the years. It would show that we are not victims of paranoia . . . that our suspicions all along have been grounded in reality, and their aim is still to spread their system worldwide, by force or otherwise, as much as it ever was. But against the lineup of global power that this could generate, they’d be powerless—ruined politically. This ‘Pedestal’ operation that Foleda’s people are talking about could do it, Paula, the end of the line for them—
kaputski.
That’s what this job could mean.”

That was when she had made her first mistake, she decided: she’d agreed to think about it.

A male voice that incongruously blended an American twang with a guttural Russian accent spoke from a loudspeaker somewhere overhead and interrupted her reverie. “Ladies and gentlemen, we are now approaching
Valentina Tereshkova
and should be docking in approximately twenty minutes. Arrival formalities will be minimal, and there will be refreshments while we hear a short address in the hub reception lounge before commencing our tour. The Soviet Ministry of Space Sciences hopes that despite the limited space aboard the transporter craft, your journey has been comfortable. Thank you.”

On the viewscreen at the front of the cabin,
Tereshkova
was almost a full circle, highlighted as two brilliant crescents slashed in the black background by the Sun off to one side. Around Paula, the other passengers were stirring and becoming talkative again, and those who had been asleep were stretching, yawning, patting hair back into shape, and refastening ties and shirtcuffs. There were a hundred or so altogether—mainly political and military figures, scientists, and reporters from Western and Asian nations—invited on a special visit to the colony to commemorate the Soviets’ centennial May Day. The voyage from the low-Earth-orbiting transfer platform where they had boarded the transporter from surface shuttles had taken over fifteen hours. Although this was probably the first spaceflight for most of them, the initial excitement had lasted only so long, even with receding views of Earth coming through on the screen periodically to relieve the unchanging starfield. Now there was something new to see.

“Time to wake up,” she murmured to the man sprawled in the seat next to her, a still-open magazine resting loosely between his fingers. “We’re here. Welcome to Orbitskigrad.”

The man whom she still knew only as Lewis Earnshaw stretched against his restraining belt, held the pose for a few seconds, while emitting a long-drawn mixture of a yawn and a groan, and relaxed. Then he rubbed his eyes, sat up in his seat, and looked around. “Home, home at Lagrange?” he murmured.

He was in his late thirties, solid but athletically built, and had straight dark hair parted conventionally, brown eyes that were alert and humorous most of the time but could be reflective when the occasion demanded, and a clean-cut, square-jawed face with a tight, upturned mouth. This kind of thing was his business. He was a civilian agent from a department that Bernard Foleda ran somewhere in the murkier depths of the UDIA, known nebulously as the “Operations Section.” Like Paula, he was wearing a badge that identified him as representing Pacific News Services of California, USA.

“Quite an experience, eh, General?” someone inquired in the row behind them.