Domain code, p.8
Domain Code, page 8
Yellow. Yellow and purple. “Are we running a special compartmentalized information network through here?” he asked softly.
Miranda stopped. “Yeah. JWICS and something else, some Army system.”
“This room isn’t rated for that,” he hissed.
“This room will handle it because it needs to handle it,” said a voice behind them. Garcia turned. It was an Army officer with one single gold bar on his chest, somewhat overweight and sporting a haircut so high and tight it was impossible to tell his natural hair color. He had the slightest hint of an East Coast accent. “Second Lieutenant Dixon. I’m in charge of our cyber connectivity. Any problems you have, you address them to me.”
Garcia turned back to Miranda. Fucking butterbars. “Like I was saying, this room is only rated to SECRET. What are we doing? Where are we even running the umbilical from?”
“We are”—and her eyes flicked over to the lieutenant, who was clearly considering his options on how to deal with Garcia’s slight—“following orders. Or whatever it is the military does.”
Garcia sucked air, then looked at the kid. For a second, he almost slipped into a tech-sergeant mindset, dealt with this little idiot like an NCO would. But then Garcia remembered he was in civilian clothes today, one of his old Orpheus Watch T-shirts and his favorite pair of work jeans. Navarro had said they’d been doing some hands-on stuff, so he hadn’t bothered with anything better. He wasn’t a sergeant right now. Right now, he was one of NASA’s technical experts, and he wasn’t in this kid’s chain of command.
“I don’t know if you learned about this in ROTC, Dixon, but there are very specific requirements for operating certain classified networks and—”
“I’m the lead officer for First MAB’s cyber support. I know what’s required to support our JWICS and ADRASTA networks.”
“Then who the fuck installed this?” Garcia snapped, looking around.
“Base Cyber from the 121st. I agree, it’s a fuckin’ shit show,” the lieutenant said. “That’s why we’re fixing it today.”
Garcia rubbed a hand over his face. Base Cyber. Of course. Goddamn Keyes. Couldn’t even hook up the umbilical properly. “Just stay away from my shit and let me do my job,” he grumbled. “Look at this damn mess.”
Dixon left them alone after that, off to go talk to one of his own sergeants who’d just come in and was now staring daggers at Garcia’s back. Garcia ignored that guy and went over to help Miranda sort out whatever it was that Base Cyber had been attempting to do yesterday.
She’d already gotten a work terminal set up and entered most of their tasks for the morning into the tracking system. Garcia, out of habit, started scrolling through the ticket list. Old projects, new initiatives—there was a ton of shit that needed to be coordinated with the Army, and not just on this network insanity, but on ongoing problems that neither the human nor abiota team had run to ground yet.
“Are we still doing that thing this weekend?” she asked, sitting down with her water bottle, dumping in one of those post-workout supplement shake mixes.
“With the 991st? Yeah. It’s Halloween.”
“My last girlfriend still hasn’t picked up her panoply from my place. It’s been months,” Miranda said casually. “I was thinking about maybe trying it out. Doing a nice officer impression, instead of the penal unit grunt.”
“Your grunt outfit’s good,” Garcia told her, wondering where this was going, not really caring. “They’re popular characters in the show. You should stick with it.”
“Yeah, I don’t know,” she said lightly, eyes moving. “Might be time for a change.”
“It’s the charity event for Houston Children’s Hospital,” Garcia said, and followed her gaze. Just in time to see Dixon roll his eyes and gesture to his own sergeants. Leaving the room. “The kids don’t have AR. Without AR, you’re just the chick in a white catsuit. Why are you even talking about this?”
“Got him out, didn’t it?” Miranda said.
Garcia looked at the now-closed door. “What’s going on?”
“We have the list of the US candidates who’ll be coming through here, on their way up to orbit.”
Huh. “Okay?” Garcia said and smiled. “Still kind of bummed it’s not me.”
“Yeah, you and me both, Station Commander,” she said, using his rank from the 991st. But when he looked at her, there was no humor in her eyes.
That unsettled him. Miranda was rarely serious. Garcia chewed the inside of his cheek. “So, uhh, do we know what’s going on with all that yet? NASA, I mean.”
“Not much. The Envoy’s been vague. There are some streams saved if you want to look at them.”
Where was she going with this? “Uh-huh, okay. Well, if there’s nothing else, looks like we’ve got a real fucking mess on our hands, and—”
“You should look at the list, Ivan,” she said, and patted his shoulder.
Dixon wanted to call a meeting after that. Talk to them about priorities. Tasks for the day. Garcia blocked it out. Annoying. Like he didn’t already know what to do. But when the butterbar was done, he finally left the workspace and Garcia had a little bit of breathing room.
Just enough to pull up that list.
It wasn’t hard. He didn’t even have to search for it. It was part of the information packet that was out there for the entire organization. Seemed a little odd, he thought, especially since there was medical information attached to it—every name on the list had an associated file. There were only thirty-seven, he noticed. Thirty-seven. Seemed a bit small for what they were building over there, but maybe—
Then he saw it.
What Miranda had been trying to tell him.
LARA MENENDEZ
Name number thirty-five.
She was on the Unity candidate list.
A list of people who were all supposed to be volunteers. Willing. Eager to go. That was what the president had said during his speech the other night. That was what Cactus had put in his email to the Wing, reassuring them this was, in fact, okay.
But Lara…
His finger strayed over to the PRINT key.
“What are you looking at, Garcia?”
He blinked. That was Navarro, standing right behind him. The man was in civilian clothes today: business casual, khakis and a polo with NASA embroidered on the left breast. Still, that was somehow more intimidating than his Air Force OCPs.
Garcia froze like a deer in the headlights.
“I, uhh, I was just, umm, trying to familiarize myself with the Unity space-lift thing, and…”
“We need to be focusing on this mess that Sergeant Keyes left us.”
“I get that, uhh, sir, but—”
“But Dixon’s a puffed-up little shithead and you don’t want to listen to him, right?” Navarro sighed and leaned in. “Where’d you get this? I don’t think this has been cleared for release yet.”
Garcia’s heart sped up. “I was just looking through the daily supporting documents for the director’s brief, I swear. I didn’t go snooping.”
“Uh-huh,” Navarro said, and took the computer mouse away. Clicked out of it. “Any idea how it got in there?”
“It wasn’t me.” Garcia chewed on the possibilities. Had Miranda put this in for him to see? “I just got in.”
“Well, doesn’t matter, I guess, if nobody else has seen it yet.” Navarro clapped him on the shoulder. “Let’s just get through this, okay? Halloween’s this weekend, this space-lift thing should be done by Thanksgiving. Everything’ll be calm again by Christmas.”
Garcia tried not to let his relief show. “You really think it’s going to be that easy?”
“They’re either going to wipe us out or help us.” Navarro shrugged again. “Either way, there’s nothing guys like me or you can do about it.”
“Right,” Garcia said.
After Navarro moved on, Garcia scrubbed the data. Belatedly, he realized he had indeed hit print on the damn thing. Scrambling, he made for the shared printer over in the next room, grabbing the sheets before anybody else saw. Before anybody noticed.
Garcia folded those up, tucking them safely into a cargo pocket in his khakis. Then he went to go wipe the print server. A few moments of work and the record of what he’d just done was gone.
Hopefully.
Lara.
Lara? His girl? A Unity candidate?
She never would have volunteered for this.
So what the hell was going on?
12
“So, this is legal?”
“This is backed by the Fish and Wildlife Department. You have any idea how bad hogs are in this part of the country?”
“Doesn’t seem sporting,” Argo said.
Before, Daelia might have made a joke about grizzly bears or something, but after Numina, she never wanted to think about hunting again. In fact, she didn’t want to be here at all. She’d had enough violence to last her the rest of her life.
But they needed what this place sold. So here they were. An hour west of base, way out past Richmond. An hour to drive out, anyway. Probably more like ninety minutes to get back. Traffic was going to be hell when they were done here.
Or maybe not. People were still staying home. Scared.
It was hard for Daelia to remember that. Everything before Numina felt like another life.
Argo was on shift today, but he was flying with Emily, and she had scheduled herself for an 1100 departure time. After Daelia had talked to her, of course.
Daelia felt guilty about dragging other people along with her in this. Argo, Emily, they both had something major to lose when it came to the military.
But then she thought about Numina and all her doubts vanished.
Fuck Unity. Whatever she could do to jam a monkey wrench into whatever it was planning, she was damn well going to. Argo and Emily agreed with her on that. At least, she thought they did. They’d asked to help, and this morning, she needed the help.
Walking through the grass, tall stalks painting his jeans dark with morning dew, Argo was clearly taking it all in. The corrugated metal structures. The helipads. The tours office, set up in a trio of old shipping containers. “Your dad knows these people?”
“Yeah, we had a support contract with them, years back, when BR was bigger,” Daelia told him, still trudging.
“When your mom was still around, right?”
She hugged her arm tighter to herself, rubbing her elbow. “A lot of things were different back then.”
Argo didn’t press it, changing the subject instead. “It’s kind of hot, isn’t it?”
October in South Texas was downright schizophrenic; it was unseasonably warm today, but the temperature was supposed to drop twenty degrees tomorrow. A breeze, humid after the dry air up on the station, was just starting to kick up. The first indication of a front moving in.
“Miserable,” Daelia agreed.
The land was flat here, crisscrossed with low coastal forests and broad agricultural fields. It was also out here, beyond the dense urban regions of Houston and its suburbs, that wild hogs were intensely problematic.
The place they were at dealt with that problem. It offered helicopter hunting packages, but also accepted state and federal commissions to keep the hog population down. These days, the best way to manage that was via specialized aerial kugu.
The front screen door of the shipping container office banged open.
“Daelia!” said the man, striding out to meet them. “Good to see you! How’s college treating you?”
Daelia could feel Argo looking at her. She chose to ignore it. “It’s good, Greg. Did you, uhh, get my message?”
“Sure did,” he said, and held his hand out to Argo. “Greg Griggs, owner and operator of Heli-Hog. Welcome to my domain.”
“Nice to meet you,” Argo said.
“You one of those 121st boys?” Greg asked, waving them along, headed for the furthest structure. Daelia fell into step behind him. “You’ve got that look, no offense.”
“What look’s that?”
“Military, but not real military.” Greg laughed.
“Greg was Air Cav,” Daelia said.
“Damn straight I was. Flying helos over in the Sandbox. Wasn’t that a good time?” He pointed at the left side of his head, where a huge chunk of his ear was conspicuously missing. “Until I got in a fight with one of our so-called allies. Got court-martialed for it. Army didn’t want me flying much after that. I can’t imagine why.”
“He lost it in a bar brawl,” Daelia whispered.
“I lost it to one of the Northern Alliance boys who was pissed off at a guy in my unit and decided the best way of handling shit was to shoot up the mess tent one morning,” Greg said. “He started it. I fuckin’ stopped it. Fuckin’ blue-on-green incidents.”
“You got court-martialed for that?” Argo asked, incredulous.
“My colonel thought it was bad form for me to have a kabar on me without authorization,” he said. “Never could be too paranoid over there. This was before the Five Days Wars, you understand. Everything was different back then.”
“Do you have that spare kugu or not, Greg?” Daelia asked, not wanting to hear this story again. In truth, the details always changed, and she wasn’t really sure who was at fault, much less what had really happened. But Greg, in addition to his helicopter hunting excursions, ran a lively trade in black-market kugu parts. Illegitimate, sure, but his stuff usually wasn’t traceable, and that was what Daelia was after right now.
“Yeah yeah, we got it, kiddo. Where do you think we’re goin’?”
The parts barn was just as cluttered as Daelia remembered.
Cluttered but glorious.
It was like something out of Orpheus Watch, like Junk Town down on Ratinan Prime, where dealers from across the galaxy brought in strange and interesting parts, from chronographs to spaceship engines. Greg’s place was more mundane. Obviously. There were no aliens here, no extraterrestrial technological artifacts—something that Daelia was grateful for—but there were quite a few kugus, intact or otherwise.
“You said you wanted a wheeled chassis, right?”
“Yeah,” Daelia said as they walked through haphazard aisles, canyons in the scrap mountains. “Double axle, reprogrammable command node. If the central computer unit is entirely gone, that’s fine too.”
“We got plenty of that.”
“You said you have one that runs Ubuntu, not Delphi, right?”
“Sure, but that thing’s a mess. If you’re looking to upgrade Ginger with a kugu, like you said, you’d be better off with something that runs off Delphi.”
“Why’s that?” Argo asked.
Greg looked back at him. “Class makes a big difference for abiota. Predictives, whatever, they’ll run whatever you tell them to, but when they’re lupine-class or below, it pays to have a simpler OS.”
“I thought they ran things with TGLP.”
“That’s not the control interface,” Daelia said. “It gets kind of technical, but—”
“Ah!” Greg said. “Here we go. The boys did get it out for you.”
In front of them, pulled out of a small paddock of wheeled kugus, was exactly what Daelia was looking for.
Or at least most of it.
“It’s missing wheels,” she said, squatting down to examine the thing. It was roughly car-shaped, front and back symmetrical. The dull gray body shell was pitted, the paint chipped, rust evident across the frame. But it was the right size—two feet long, under eighteen inches in height—and more importantly, it didn’t run Omphalos. She tapped the top housing with a metal-wrapped finger. It sounded hollow. “And the command module.”
“I’ve got those in the office. Pulled ’em when it came in.”
“Why’s that?” Daelia heard Argo ask.
“These things? Open-source OS? Only a couple companies even still make ’em, and the ones that do charge an arm and a leg.”
“What difference does it make?”
“It’s damn hard to jailbreak an Omphalos-equipped Toyota or Ford or TGI kugu. But one of these, an Ubuntu BMW model? Very customizable. Some abiota really don’t like the presets,” Daelia said, still examining it. It was rough, but they could get it functioning. Hopefully she could get the bodywork done in the next couple of days. Not for Ginger. For Emily. “Remember? We talked about that with…”
And Argo picked it up, right where he was supposed to. “Yeah, right, right. So this’ll work for that?”
“Should.”
Argo turned to Greg. “What do I owe you for it?”
“Given its condition, I’ll take fifteen grand for it.”
“Fifteen grand?” Daelia protested. “What the hell, Greg! In this condition, it should be around eight!”
Greg shrugged. “I don’t set market prices,” he said, and dropped his voice conspiratorially. “I’m guessing you’ve heard then. That these things keep running, even in those klaatuu-affected areas.”
Daelia couldn’t keep the surprise off her face. Argo, on the other hand, ran with it. He laughed a little, nodded.
“That’s just a rumor, Greg.”
“One you can confirm?”
“You know how that goes. Can’t confirm shit,” Argo said, and shrugged, like none of it mattered. Greg’s expression changed, and Daelia realized confirming it was exactly what Argo had just done. “We can give you sixteen. If you agree to wipe every record, every mention, you have of this being in this place.”
Greg whistled. “Is this personal or… unit related?” he asked.
Daelia stood back up, dusting off her knees, and nodded sideways at Argo. “I don’t ask the pilots what they do with their shit. I just fix it for them.”
Greg nodded again, slow, like he was thinking hard about this. “I’m sure I could get more for it from a private buyer, but me and the Interdiction Wing go back a long way. You can have it, with adjusted records, for seventeen grand. You gotta promise me somethin’, though.”
“Yeah, what’s that?” Argo asked.
“Keep it away from the 290th. God only knows what those knuckleheads would do with it.”
