Timothy Zahn - Deadman Switch

Aikman licked his lips briefly, the sense of him abruptly becoming cautious. "I may have seen them before," he admitted grudgingly. "I certainly don't know them personally—"

"Seen them at HTI?" Randon asked.

Aikman's jaw tightened. "Perhaps. I couldn't say for sure."

"I see." Randon nodded. "Well, they've probably changed jobs since you knew them. Happens all the time—people leave low-level corporation jobs for careers with customs."

Aikman ignored the gibe. "What charge are you making against them?"

Randon cocked an eyebrow. "Impersonation of customs officials, for starters. Along with attempted entry into a private spacecraft and probably one or two others as we think of them."

"They have false IDs, then?"

A touch of uncertainty edged into Randon's sense. "Not exactly, but no one knows—"

"Not exactly? What does 'not exactly' mean?"

Randon glared at him. "It means that, yes, their IDs check against the customs records, but none of their allegedly fellow workers has ever heard of them."

"That won't hold up for ten minutes before a judiciary." Aikman was on his own territory now, and he knew it. "An ID record is both necessary and sufficient proof of employment in an official capacity." A grim smile quirked at his lip. "Do you know what the penalty is for illegal detention of customs inspectors?"

Across the room, Seqoya cleared his throat. "Is it anything like the penalty for attempted sabotage?"

We all turned to look at him. In one hand was the younger man's capelet, looking slightly mauled; in the other, a small floppy rectangle that glinted in the light. "What is it?" Randon asked, stepping over for a closer look.

"Not exactly sure, sir, but it looks a lot like the insides of one of our computer data scramblers—see that number on the sicet, there?"

"Probably a scrubber," Kutzko said, giving it a quick glance and then returning his attention to the prisoners. "It's a scrambler gadget for putting into someone else's system."

Randon favored the prisoners with a long, cold gaze, then turned the look back on Aikman. "Any further comments, counselor?"

"Yes," he said calmly. "Do you have any proof that they came here with intent to sabotage?"

"Why else would they be carrying something like this?" Randon snorted.

Aikman's eyes flicked to the prisoners; and the younger picked up on the cue. "We use it to read samples of scrambled data on suspect ships," he said, voice just the right shade of indignation. "Samples that we can then take back and use to decode the scrambler scheme."

Randon glared at them. "Kutzko?"

Kutzko shrugged. "I don't know, sir. You could check with Mr. Schock—he could probably tell you whether this gadget has that kind of capability."

"In other words," Aikman spoke up, "you haven't got proof of any sort that a crime either has been committed or was about to be committed. Correct?"

Randon turned on him. "You can just shut up—"

"No, sir, I will not," Aikman snapped. "My job is the upholding of human rights under Patri law, and I will do that job wherever I find those rights in danger. You will release these men now, or you will hand them over to the Pravilo and formally charge them with a crime. A crime, I remind you, that you'd better be able to prove."

He ran out of wind and stopped, and for a long moment the air was thick with a brittle silence. From Randon's sense I expected him to explode with fury... but his father had trained him better than that, and he waited until his mind was again in control of his emotions. "Benedar?" he invited.

I swallowed. "He's not bluffing, sir. He means it."

Aikman's glance at me glinted with its usual hatred, but he said nothing. "Very well," Randon said icily. "Seqoya: did you run a DNA comparison between those customs IDs and their owners?"

"Yes, sir," Seqoya answered cautiously, clearly wondering if he was about to wind up on the receiving end of Randon's frustration. "They matched perfectly."

"All right, then." Deliberately, Randon turned his gaze from Aikman onto the two prisoners. "They can go. Give them back their capelets."

Seqoya hesitated, then moved to comply. "Not the scrubber, of course," Randon added. "We'll want to let Schock take a look at it."

"That device is customs property," the elder man insisted, his courage clearly having come back with his perception that Randon was giving in. "I must insist on having it back."

Randon gave him a tight smile. "Certainly. Your superior can pick it up in the morning... along with Your IDs."

Both men froze in the act of putting on their capelets. "We need our IDs to do our jobs," the elder said through a suddenly tight mouth.

"Then you'd better get your superior over here tonight, hadn't you?" Randon told him coldly. "Seqoya: escort them to the edge of the perimeter. Make sure they leave."

Seqoya nodded. "Yes, sir."

Behind me, Aikman took a deep breath. Randon heard him, too, and turned around. "You have something to say, counselor?"

Aikman did; and he thought seriously about saying it. But he'd lost, and he knew it... and like Randon, he recognized the futility of simply lashing out in anger. "No, Mr. Kelsey-Ramos," he sighed at last.

Randon watched him for another moment, just to make sure. Then he turned back, and we all watched Seqoya usher the would-be intruders out of the gatelock. "A-minus for effort," he murmured, more to himself than to any of us. "Come on, Benedar, let's go see what Schock can tell us about that scrubber. Kutzko, keep the shields alert—they may not be ready to give up yet."

Behind me, Aikman turned and stalked back into the ship, his sense a silent blaze of anger. "Yes, sir," Kutzko nodded. "Will you be wanting to head back to the governor's dinner later?"

Randon glanced at his watch, shook his head. "No point to it now." He threw me a sly look. "Besides, someone there may be sweating at our sudden departure. Let's give him time to do it right."

—

"Cute," Schock muttered, turning the flexible rectangular mesh over in his hand and peering at its other side with his magnifier. "Very cute indeed. Cute and nasty." He waved Randon over. "Look here, sir—this sicet here, the one with the number partly scratched off? Odds are it's a preprogrammed bookbug, designed to get into the ship's data records and rescramble selected portions according to a new code."

Randon snorted gently. "Pretty primitive," he growled contemptuously. "Also useless. Even if the main sentinel missed it, there are at least two programs in our library for redecoding data that's gotten fouled up."

"True, but then this wasn't supposed to be anything more than a distraction," Schock shook his head. "Something to keep the sentinel—and us—occupied while these other two sicets got to work." He tapped the pair with his probe. "This is the real attack: a highly sophisticated codex mimic, and a miniature phone system switching station. The mimic can—theoretically, anyway—fool a computer into handing control of the phone system over to it, at which point the switching station can set up a link to a phone outside the ship. Without our knowing it, naturally."

Randon swore, the earlier smugness vanished into black anger. The Bellwether's computer could easily defend itself against an autosystem simple enough to fit on a single sicet; defending itself from a human expert with access to a full-range computer was something else entirely. "How hard would it have been for them to hook this into the Bellwether's systems?" he asked.

"Simplicity itself," Schock told him. "There are three induction portals on it, each set to a different voltage and frequency."

"Meaning...?"

"Meaning that all they would have had to do was plant it within electronic spitting distance of any of our electronics," Schock said bluntly. "In a phone, a repeater terminal, even one of the remote locks."