David Weber - More Than Honor

Their shoulders bumped against each other as they dove for the waiting room's communications terminal. McQueen ruthlessly shouldered the older Havenite aside as her fingers danced on the keys. She ignored the public news channels; they wouldn't know anything, and they wouldn't be allowed to say it if they did know. There was a surreal quality to watching bits and pieces of news about aquaculture, the glories of the New Republic, and happy Dolists taking accelerated learning courses—at least that was more or less true, they were finally getting substantial numbers of the idle Prole bastards to volunteer to do something useful, namely enlist for the war effort. More light blinked in through the window, and static cut through the reports. EMP is getting to the relays . Quite a lot of it, if it was getting past the digital noise filters. She cut through to the Naval emergency channels.

"Uh-oh," she said quietly.

"Uh-oh?" the Commissioner repeated.

"Logic bomb," McQueen said. "Look." She extended the screen and pivoted it. "Hash. Rerouting, cross-connections, garbled text, crossed order-response loops, spontaneous memory core dumps . . . Nothing working the way it should."

"Impossi—" Fontein began.

They looked at each other again. Every military service in the human-settled galaxy depended on information systems; every service had unbreakable protection against logic bombs from the outside. Every ship had an emergency response, too; cut all connections to the net to guard against infiltration if the system was compromised.

Which meant someone had done it from the inside , and that they'd effectively cut the Home Fleet into so many isolated units for as long as it took to bring the system back up. Hours, at least, and a good deal could happen in a couple of hours. Any commander would hesitate to act without orders or hard data. Particularly in the People's Navy, where exercising independent initiative without orders tended to get you stood up against the nearest convenient wall.

"Citizen Commissioner," McQueen said slowly. "I think you'd better try the Security Service net. And find out what the hell is happening."

"This is the best I can do, Citizen Admiral," Erasmus Fontein said, fifteen minutes later.

He was acutely conscious of the sweat running down under the collar of his uniform. In a man so precisely controlled, one who'd spent decades perfecting the art of emitting no signal of voice or body except those intended, it was humiliating.

"My clearance is being recognized," he said at last. "But that's triggering some subroutine that shunts my calls—some sort of viral AI parasite living in whatever open memory it can find. Whoever did this is damned clever, it's like having hostile ghosts loose in the machine."

"Can you get anything? "

"I've got a one-way bleed on the Security net. The contacts last about six to twelve seconds, and then the AI kicks me out. Take a look."

McQueen did. The first was a helmet pickup, showing ground level. The Admiral blinked; she'd never seen that many people all at once. Dolists, from their shabby-colorful clothes. They carried signs— Purge the Traitors and Victory to the People , liberally sprinkled with Equality Forever, Equality Now –but what bothered her was the sound they were making. It was nothing like a chant; more like a storm she'd seen once, on another planet. One where long slow waves crashed into a cliff in endless gray ranks, and made the solid rock vibrate beneath her feet. The sound of the crowd was like that, but it was alive. And it hated. The Committee had set out to prod the Dolists out of their apathy into revolutionary fervor, and it had succeeded. Succeeded all too well.

"Fire," she said. "Come on, whoever's in charge, give the order to—"

The helmet camera did a quick glance right and left. A long line of Public Order Police stood there, two deep, armed with riot shields and clubs; a slab-sided vehicle floated behind them, its dorsal turret loaded with soundbombs and stickgel.

"Citizen Admiral, the police can't use deadly force without political authorization. And right now, that detachment can't get authoriz—"

The crowd surged forward, throwing a surf-wave of bottles and rocks before it. McQueen had stood on her bridge without undue difficulty in engagements where tens of thousands died . . . and a flagship was not invulnerable to weapons that could turn it into a ball of expanding plasma. The thousands of snarling faces racing towards the pickup still made her draw back in the seat, the way the sudden appearance of a lion might. It spoke to instincts far older than spaceflight—older than fire or chipped flint.

Just before the screen blanked the pickup slammed forward to the ground. She could see boots going by, and the helmet juddered as the crowd stampeded across it. And across, she realized, the body wearing the equipment .

The screen blanked and then jumped. Another helmet pickup, but this time the scene was a little more familiar; a tac display table, but the groundside model. It carried a holo-schematic of the city, but the information markers were mostly amber blinking lights, signifying "no data."

"Citizen Lieutenant," a voice said testily—the voice of the person wearing the helmet.

"Citizen Captain!"

The lieutenant was wearing chameleon fatigues and the torso portion of a set of infantry armor. The branch-of-service flashes on her collar were red-on-black, and only State Security used that waffenfarbe .

Intervention Battalion, McQueen thought. State Security goon squads, but heavily armed.

"Citizen Lieutenant, something is going on, but we're getting no intelligence at all. Take a floater, get out there, and eyeball the situation. Then report directly to me. Understood?"

"Yes, Citizen Captain!"

The lieutenant put on her helmet, face vanishing behind the facemask, and trotted towards a vehicle park on the outer rim of the tower-top. Then a voice screamed: "Incoming! Incoming!"

McQueen saw figures around the tac display table begin to dive for cover, and the pickup went black with a finality that was different from the system switch she'd seen before. A few seconds later, like an echo, a distant drawn-out booooommm came through the window.

"That's enough," she said crisply to the Commissioner. "We're not going to do anything useful here. There's obviously some sort of attack on the government."

The Committee's watchdog nodded. "Exactly. But we don't have any more information than—" he twitched his hand towards the screen, which showed a bored Security officer sitting sipping coffee before a bank of screens "– they do."

McQueen met Fontein's eyes. "In your professional estimation, Citizen Commissioner, what the hell is going on?"

Fontein was silent for a long moment. Then his face moved slightly, as if he was biting into a bitter fruit. Deciding he has to tell the truth, McQueen thought. That would be unpleasant.

"Citizen Admiral, I think it's an attempt to overthrow the government, through a coup disguised with a popular uprising. As to who . . ." he hesitated again. "I can't say. I'd guess it was LaBoeuf's Levelers. Total crazies, a breakaway faction of the CRP, but they have a small core of very smart people in their inner cadre."

"Pity the Committee hasn't shot them ," McQueen answered.

"Perhaps, although they were useful against the Parnassians. In the meantime, we still have no information at all."