Michael Kube-McDowell - The Quiet Pools

But he was only one man, one person pretending to be five, one mortal attempting to live up to a myth. He could not be everywhere, could not scatter his energies on a thousand points of light. His focus had to remain at the center: Sasaki, Dryke, Memphis , the strategy for a killing blow against the Diaspora. The window was starting to close, and he could not bear to fail.

Mustering a decisiveness he did not feel, he began to sift through the priority items in the queue, dispatching them from the displays at a rate approaching one a minute. Even as he did, new messages and stories appeared on the list, underlining the Sisyphean futility of the task.

But making its way to him that moment was a message which would make him forget that futility for a while. Originating with Katrina Becker in Munich, it was following a tortuous path to reach him—bounced twice to a DBS, its headers stripped and replaced by a relayer, back-coded into a transparent file on DIANNA, and then unlocked with a key that had been sent weeks earlier.

When it appeared in the queue, his face brightened. And when he read it, he laughed and clapped his hands together in a moment of celebration.

For sometime while Jeremiah had been napping, the Munich virus had gone to war.

It had been months in the making, as almost all operations were. It had begun with a suggestion from without, as almost all operations did.

“Tell me your ideas, and Jeremiah will tell you when the time is right,” was the message which went out to the network, to newly vetted friends. And they looked into their own lives for the special opportunities offered there, building for Jeremiah a catalog of choices.

“I can do this to hurt them,” they said. “I can do this to help.”

Katrina Becker had come into the fold more than a year ago. Her vetting had been unusually prolonged, for the special opportunity she represented was dangerously attractive. Becker was a systems security technician in the engineering section at AT-Munich, the primary technical center for the Diaspora. Through her, he could have access to the closed world of Memphis’s operational and management engines—to the delicately tuned mind of the ship itself.

From the first, he had viewed Becker with dark suspicion. Nine years into a career with Allied, she claimed a change of heart prompted by a book she had read and a man she had met. The book was Danya Odon’s Earthsong , an obscure collection of nature-experience poems. The man was Peter Corning, an obscure rad-left Bundestag member from Schleswig-Holstein. One sensitized her to the “organic wholeness” of Gaea, the other to the “soft fascism” of Allied Transcon.

Or so she claimed.

It took three months and several significant leaks of technical material from AT-Munich before Jeremiah was satisfied that her conversation was sincere. It had taken many more months to pick apart the secrets of the engineering network and build a virus capable of surviving its defenses.

Even then, he had hesitated. To use Becker to deliver the virus would be to sacrifice her. She was willing, even eager, but he had no one similarly placed, no way to replace the intelligence she delivered. Without a guarantee of success, and with a plenitude of other options, Jeremiah held both Becker and the virus in reserve, waiting to be convinced that the time was right or her usefulness was about to end.

Then came Dryke’s transparent attempt to trap him with the open gateway into the test environment. Jeremiah had at first been amused, then insulted. Did Dryke think that he could not tell the difference between real and calculated carelessness? Did Dryke think he would expect anything in the test partition except antibodies and backtracers?

Ego prodded him to answer the insult by making Dryke look foolish. But it was the fact that the delivery of the finished command package to Memphis would bring Becker’s usefulness to an end which finally swung the decision.

The day after the gateway opened, the virus was hard-coded in a tamper-sealed chipdisk and ferried to Becker in a delivery of perfume from a Belgian company. Two days later, it was installed in the Munich network. It had been waiting in hiding there ever since, watching for its trigger key. When the gateway was finally closed, the countdown began.

The virus was meant to alter the command package in a subtle way, modifying a calculation here, a data point there, changing a pointer, closing a loop. If it had succeeded, no one would have known of its handiwork until Memphis herself, basking in the spotlight of what was to be her sailing day, refused to leave the Earth.

But an antibody program, monitoring cryptographic checksums and integrity keys, spotted the change and came hunting.

In response, the virus abandoned its stealthy subversion and went wild.

All solutions are contingent . Content in his lesser victory, Jeremiah traced the virus’s progress by monitoring skylink traffic between Munich and Prainha, Munich and Houston.

“We tried to tag it and it stripped the tags. When we finally got system control back, we tried to freeze it and it self-destructed,” the Munich systems supervisor reported to Dryke. “But there must have been a fragment hiding where we couldn’t get it, because when we came up again, it went right after us again and broke our control just like that.”

Jeremiah nodded to himself. In fact, there were five copies of the virus in the system, each waiting their turn to wreak havoc.

“It’s running through the libraries now,” he heard Feist tell Sasaki. “We’re taking nodes out of the network the hard way, pulling blocks and cutting cables as fast as we can. But Mods Five and Six are completely gone.”

More good news. Mod Five was the navigation archive, Mod Six ship management. The only plum left was Three, the command engine.

But the biggest self-satisfied smile came later, when a weary Dryke told Sasaki, “Jeremiah did what we expected him to do. But he didn’t use the door we had open, and we didn’t get him. His virus was better than our antibodies.”

“We are facing a major reconstruction because of that, Mr. Dryke.” Sasaki’s voice was brittle. “It was your job to prevent such a disaster. It was your job to protect our Malena Grahams. And you failed at both.”

“Don’t you think I know that?” Dryke snapped back. “You want to give this assfuck job to someone else, go ahead and do it. He beat me. All right? Jeremiah beat me. You got someone else that wants to take a shot, bring ’em on.”

It was not until the excitement in Munich began to fade that Jeremiah thought to ask who Malena Graham was.

Lila’s answer was straightforward and chilling. “A Memphis staff counselor, killed last night near Houston. You are implicated. Stories are in the queue and marked.”

There were dozens of stories, for the murder had taken place fully six hours earlier. Troubled, Jeremiah viewed the stories one after another from the top of the queue, trying to grasp what had happened. Not one of them left him untouched.

When a State Police medtech described in graphic detail the condition of the corpse, Jeremiah’s mouth went dry, and his hands trembled. When Mother Alicia recalled that her daughter was “naive about people, because she wanted to love them,” Jeremiah wept with her. And when Evan Silverman proclaimed proudly that he was “Jeremiah’s hands,” Jeremiah rose out of his chair and raged at the screen.

“Liar—liar! You’re no part of me. Not one fragment. Bastard animal—” Then a horrible fear overtook him. “Lila! Search the archives. Is there anything about this man? Have we had any contact with him?”

“I’m checking,” it said. “Done. There are no entries except for those connected with Malena Graham. We have had no contact with Evan Silverman.”