Douglas Child - The Wheel of Darkness

“What are you doing now?” Hufnagel asked.

“I’m going to use the diagnostic back door to access the autopilot.” Just how he was going to get access, he wouldn’t say: Hufnagel didn’t need to know everything.

A phone rang in a far corner of the server room and one of the technicians answered it. “Mr. Hufnagel, call for you, sir.” The technician had a strained, worried look on his face. Penner knew he’d probably be worried, too, if he didn’t have such a high opinion of his own skills.

“Coming.” And Hufnagel stepped away.

Thank God . Quickly, Penner plucked a CD from the pocket of his lab coat, slid it into the drive, and loaded three utilities into memory: a systems process monitor, a cryptographic analyzer, and a hex disassembler. He returned the CD to his pocket and minimized the three programs just before Hufnagel returned.

A few mouse clicks and a new screen appeared:

HMS BRITANNIA—CENTRAL SYSTEMS

AUTONOMOUS SYSTEMS (DIAGNOSTIC MODE)

SUBSYSTEM VII

CORE AUTOPILOT HANDLING SUBSTRUCTURE

He thought he’d ask a question before Hufnagel started in again. “When—I mean, if—I transfer control of the handling routines, what next?”

“Deactivate the autopilot. Kill it completely, and switch manual control of the helm to the aux bridge.”

Penner licked his lips. “It isn’t really true that Captain Mason seized the—”

“Yes, it is. Now get on with it.”

Penner felt, for the first time, a stab of something like apprehension. Making sure that the process monitor was active, he selected the autopilot and clicked the “diagnostics” button. A new window opened and a storm of numbers scrolled past.

“What’s that?”

Penner glanced at the process monitor, sighing inwardly. Typical IT chief, he thought. Hufnagel new all the latest buzzwords like “blade farm load-balancing” and “server virtualization,” and he could double-talk the officers until he was blue in the face, but he didn’t know jack about the real nuts and bolts of running a complex data system. Aloud, he said, “It’s the autopilot data, running in real time.”

“And?”

“And I’m going to reverse engineer it, find the interrupt stack, then use the internal trigger events to disrupt the process.”

Hufnagel nodded sagely, as if he understood what the hell he’d just been told. A long moment passed as Penner scrutinized the data.

“Well?” Hufnagel said. “Go ahead. We have less than an hour.”

“It’s not quite that easy.”

“Why not?”

Penner gestured at the screen. “Take a look. Those aren’t hexadecimal commands. They’ve been encrypted.”

“Can you remove the encryption?”

Can a bear shit in the woods? Penner thought. Quite suddenly, he realized that—if he played this right—he’d most likely get himself a nice fat bonus, maybe even a promotion. Corey Penner, IT mate first class, hero hacker who saved the Britannia ’s ass.

He liked the sound of that—it even rhymed. He began to relax again; this was going to be a piece of cake. “It’s going to be tough, real tough,” he said, giving his tone just the right amount of melodrama. “There’s a serious encryption routine at work here. Anything you can tell me about it?”

Hufnagel shook his head. “The autopilot coding was outsourced to a German software firm. Corporate can’t find the documentation or specs. And it’s after office hours in Hamburg.”

“Then I’ll have to analyze its encoding signature before I can determine what decryption strategy to use on it.”

As Hufnagel watched, he piped the autopilot datastream through the cryptographic analyzer. “It’s using a native hardware-based encryption system,” he announced.

“Is that bad?”

“No, it’s good. Usually, hardware encryption is pretty weak, maybe 32-bit stuff. As long as it’s not AES or some large-bit algorithm, I should be able to crack—er, decrypt it—in a little while.”

“We don’t

have

a little while. Like I said, we have less than an hour.”

Penner ignored this, peering closely at the analyzer window. Despite himself, he was getting into the problem. He realized he didn’t care any longer if his boss saw the unorthodox tools he was using.

“Well?” Hufnagel urged.

“Just hold on, sir. The analyzer is determining just how strong the encryption is. Depending on the bit depth, I can run a side-channel attack, or maybe . . .”

The analyzer finished, and a stack of numbers popped up. Despite the warmth of the server room, Penner felt himself go cold.

“Jesus,” he murmured.

“What is it?” Hufnagel asked instantly.

Penner stared at the data, confounded. “Sir, you said less than an hour. An hour until . . . what, exactly?”

“Until the

Britannia

collides with the Carrion Rocks.”

Penner swallowed. “And if this doesn’t work—what’s plan B?”

“Not your concern, Penner. Just keep going.”

Penner swallowed. “The routine’s employing elliptic curve cryptography. Cutting-edge stuff. 1024-bit public key front end with a 512-bit symmetric key back end.”

“So?” the IT chief asked. “How long is it going to take you?”

In the silence that followed the question, Penner suddenly became aware of the deep throb of the ship’s engines, the dull slamming of the bow driven at excessive speed through a head sea, the muffled rush of wind and water audible even over the roar of cooling fans in the windowless room.

“Penner? Damn it,

howlong

?”

“As many years as there are grains of sand on all the beaches in the world,” he murmured, almost choking on the words from the feeling of dread.

63

THE THING WHICH HAD NO NAME MOVED THROUGH SHADOW AND audient void. It lived in a vague metaworld, a world that lay in the grayness between the living world of the Britannia and the plane of pure thought. The ghost was not alive. It had no senses. It heard nothing, smelled nothing, felt nothing, thought nothing.

It knew one thing only: desire.

It passed through the mazelike passages of the Britannia slowly, as if by feel. The world of the ship was but a shadow to it, an unreal landscape, a vague fabric of shade and silence, to be traversed only until its need had been fulfilled. From time to time it encountered the dull glow of living entities; their erratic movements were ignored. They were as insubstantial to the thing as the thing was to them.

Vaguely, it sensed it was approaching the prey. It could feel the tug of the living being’s aura, like a magnet. Following this faint lure, it made an irregular progression through the decks of the ship, passing through corridor and steel bulkhead alike, searching, always searching for that which it had been summoned to devour, to annihilate. Its time was not the world’s time; time was but a flexible web, to be stretched, broken, shrugged off, moved into and out of. It had the patience of eternity.

The thing knew nothing of the entity that had summoned it. That entity was no longer important. Not even the summoner could stop it now; its existence was independent. Nor did the thing have any conception of the appearance of the object of its desire. It knew only the pull of longing: to find the thing, to rend the entity’s soul from the fabric of the world and burn it with its desire, to consume it and satiate itself—and then to cast the cinder into the outer darkness.

It glided up through a dim corridor, a gray tunnel of half-light, with the flitting presences of additional living entities; through clouds heavy with fear and horror. The aura of its prey was stronger here: strong indeed. It felt its yearning grow and stretch out, seeking the heat of contact.