Hugh Howey - Molly Fyde and the Fight for Peace

Simmons . The card owner’s name was uncomfortable to even think , leaving a residual hiss in Walter’s mind. But that wasn’t what really stood out about the ID badge. What was weird was that the Human had two official names. He seemed to go by Drummond while he was on Palan—at least to the markets, the Regal Hotel, the passenger shuttle office, and the cabbies. To the Navy, however, he went by the name of Simmons, and as far as Walter could tell, he wasn’t even supposed to be on Palan. He was on what Walter would call a rogue mission, and what the Human Navy referred to as “clandestine.”

It was the first time Walter had gotten to rummage through the file of anyone in Special Assignments—the first time he’d heard of anyone getting the chance . But that wasn’t the big surprise, either. The big surprise was how unbelievably sloppy Simmons was to be so seemingly well-connected. Walter hit a goldmine when he came across a file named “Passwords.txt.” He had thought it was some sort of joke until he opened the file up and saw its contents.

The next thing he had to do was immediately raid the snack closet for some Chedder Puffs and a warm Pump Cola. Like his trainees before him, Walter was about to pull an all-nighter.

Simmons, it seemed, answered directly to a Navy admiral, one Wade Lucin. Their entire message history was logged in a Navy database, opened as slick as grease with the contents of the passwords file. It appeared Simmons was on Palan to secure a “package” of some sort. He even had two accomplices heading his way from Earth. Walter scanned these messages, but none of it seemed too terribly interesting. What caught his eye among the terse lines were the words “username” and “password.” For some reason, the Admiral had given Simmons temporary access to his own account. It was a one-time login and no longer any good, but it was enough to get Walter guessing the Admiral’s full-time passcode. He knew from hacking Human laptops that all their passwords were slight variations on a single theme—either their limited noses kept them ignorant to the threats swirling all around them, or they just couldn’t hold more than a few tidbits in their brains at any one time. Walter suspected it was a blend of both.

It took less than a dozen tries to log in to the Navy database. All the Admiral had done was transpose the two words in his password and increase the four-digit number by one. When the login screen disappeared and the master account page popped up, Walter nearly spilled his can of Pump. He whipped around to make sure nobody was behind him, his entire body tingling with the thrill of found treasure. Pulling the keyboard into his lap, Walter began flipping through account tabs. The overwhelming choice of devious tasks to perform made his head spin.

Walter scanned the Personnel page first. The Admiral had almost complete control over what looked to be thousands and thousands of Humans. Walter briefly considered transferring every staff member with an ‘S’ in their name to the front line. He laughed to himself at the thought. There was a massive sub page for Humans ranked as mere “cadets.” With half a thought, Walter could’ve flunked or expelled whichever brats he chose. He thought about changing some grades, or possibly admitting himself to flight school, but like the frontline transfers, these were all ideas that would arouse suspicion and turn out to be no more than practical jokes. Annoyances, sure, but with no real outcome, no payoff other than a locked-down account and someone in Human IT lecturing the Admiral on how not to be so stupid with his passcodes.

The best solution, Walter knew, was going to be to just sell the account to someone off-planet. Take their money and let them deal with the heat their actions might bring. He went to the admin page and set up a few secondary logins so he could access the account even if the primary password was changed. He then went to the Admiral’s inbox and deleted the automated messages warning of the account changes. He also opened the IT log file and removed the entries for his last actions and reset the time stamp for the last logon. Satisfied, Walter went to log out, but after closing the IT tab and just before he exited the Admiral’s inbox, something caught his eye: An older message entitled “Delete After Reading.”

But it hadn’t been deleted.

And with a title like that, there was nothing Walter could do but read it.

TO: Adm. Wade Lucin

FROM: IT Specialist Second Class Mitchell

Admiral,

The alterations to the simulator were completed today, and I even stamped Hearst’s name on the modifications in case anyone looks. I promised I wouldn’t ask about these mods, but I want you to know how hard that promise is to keep. I’m dying to know. Anyway, everything was done remotely and I covered my tracks good. I expect to see those reprimands expunged from my files like we talked about.

As for the hyperdrive question, I can only assume you’re talking about hypotheticals. For the sake of discussion - assuming for a moment you had a drive that could ignore gravitational permutations - there are ways to remotely input jump coordinates and bypass the Navy control boards. It isn’t easy, but it’s doable. The radio interface for sending out coordinate verification can be turned around the other way, but you’d have to come up with a master key for the hack to work. I just don’t see why you’d want to. Why not input the jump arrival directly in the nav computer, as per usual? The only thing I can think of is not wanting a log of the jump - or maybe wanting to avoid those annoying alarms. Does that qualify as a question? Hey, I didn’t make any promises about not inquiring into this. Feel free to tell me more if you need help with this, I’m insanely curious.

Attached you’ll find a classified white paper on jump drive overrides, which might help. I also threw in the hardware schematics you wanted. On second thought, whatever it is you’re doing over there at the Academy, I’m thinking it’s best I don’t know. Oh, and I’ll be pulling my internal affairs file up in a few weeks. It had better be a lot thinner than the last time I looked at it! ;-)

From one war dog to another: Be Easy.

Walter frowned at the message. It sounded like a bunch of military stuff, but the Mitch guy was obviously a coder of some sort. Even if it was boring, he was pretty sure there was something in there for a nice piece of blackmailing—it just wasn’t as juicy as he’d hoped, especially for something with a dire warning to be deleted. He clicked on the attachment, wondering if the schematic might be something he could fence.

The first file was a technical paper, almost indecipherable even to him. There were also schematics labeled “Hyperdrive,” the drawings making even less sense, as they were perfectly laid out and didn’t have a dozen replacement parts tacked-on willy nilly like he was used to. He scrolled past them, annoyed and disappointed, until he came to the lines of code that followed.

Programs. Written in G++. The formatting was perfectly clear, with nested levels of indentation, just how he liked to lay out his own code. Even better, the code was full of detailed comments by the programmers, explaining what the next few lines did for whoever else might be maintaining it. In fact, Walter saw that there was more than one person involved in the writing of the code. As neat and standardized as they tried to make it, some of the lines bore distinctive imprints of their author. One coder stood out from the rest with a much higher degree of elegance. Walter could almost see the program coursing through a piece of electronics somewhere; the syntax practically sang to him, giving him goosebumps.