2
Pentagon Annex
Washington, D.C.
Jay Gridley, head of Net Force’s computer section, leading expert and master of virtual reality in all its intricate, complicated forms, couldn’t remember the last time he’d been this tired. His eyes burned, and felt gritty when he blinked. His body had that brittle feeling, like a piece of glass, as though something would shatter if he moved too fast.
The days when he could sit up in VR all night long, then go all the next day without sleep were gone. When had that happened?
That’ll teach me.
Little Mark, his darling baby boy, had run out of milk the night before, and Jay had gone out to the local 7-Eleven instead of the supermarket where they normally shopped. It was closer and faster. That’s why, he had explained to his wife, Saji, they called it a convenience store. . . .
Apparently, as it turned out, however, 7-Eleven cows weren’t the same as Safeway cows.
So at 3 A.M., when the boy had discovered the agony of gas pains, Jay had to get up and take care of him. Saji was pissed off. “What was it you said, Mr. Genius? Milk is milk, no big deal? Tell it to your son. . . .”
Nobody got any more sleep. The time he’d saved going to a convenience store had not been convenient at all. Nosiree . . .
To top it off, he’d been scheduled to brief General Ellis on the computer problem at 7:30 A.M. at the Pentagon Annex. Why so early? Why couldn’t they do it in VR? Because the military said so, that’s why. Screw ’em all. Jay liked being the honcho at Net Force, he’d gotten to match himself against some sharp players, but this military crap was for the birds. Maybe it was time to start thinking about changing jobs.
Jay hadn’t met General Ellis before, and was curious to see what his boss’s boss looked like, although he wished he could have been a bit more rested.
Although if what Thorn was saying was true, he was about to be a general, too. Couldn’t swing a dead cat without hitting one of those these days. Jay wasn’t sure he liked any part of that.
“Sir, the general will see you now.”
Jay stood up and followed the far-too-fresh-looking secretary through a short, dark hallway, and then into the general’s office. Jay’s personal guard and escort stayed in the waiting room.
A picture of the President hung on the wall, along with several photos of an older man shaking hands with various dignitaries. Books cluttered dark-grained bookshelves, and small trophies occupied those areas that weren’t held by books: ammunition, models, and other pieces of hardware. A painting of a bayou that could have come from one of Jay’s own VR scenarios hung on one wall, cypress trees thick with Spanish moss crowding a red-hued waterway, itself tinted by a setting sun.
Eclectic.
Behind the desk sat a man in his mid-fifties, fighting the battle of the bulge and losing. He was pale, and had hair going from gray to white.
“Mr. Gridley.”
The words were stretched out: “Mist-uh Guriddleeee.” A song of the South. Texas? Louisiana? Somewhere down there.
“That’s me,” said Jay.
“Your boss tells me you’re the best bug-squasher we got.”
Jay couldn’t help but grin. He’d never heard that precise phrase put to it before, but it fit. Always nice to hear the word “best” associated with his name, anyway.
“I guess you could call it that,” he said, “although I don’t think that’s what we’ve got here.”
“So, tell me, what do we have here?”
“Well, sir, basically someone has put together something that I call the ‘Archimedes Effect.’ ” Jay saw the blank look on the general’s face. “From Archimedes’ quote. ‘Give me a lever long enough, and a place to stand, and I will move the world’?” The general still looked blank. “It’s technically called a Distributed Computer Project, or DCP, a piece of software that runs on thousands, maybe tens of thousands, of different computers. The program hunts for answers, or, in this case, scenarios, for how to crack Army base security, and when it gets them, it spits them back out. Those are the ‘lever long enough,’ if you see what I mean.”
General Ellis nodded. “Tens of thousands?” he asked. “How does it do that?”
“The software is distributed by a server. After it gets run on the host computers, it sends partial work-packets until the job is complete. At that point, the server redirects the packets back to the server, where pieces of the solution are put together.”
The general frowned.
“The idea was first used in the late nineties. The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence sent out a DCP that worked to search streams of radio-telescope data they’d collected for signals. They’d send out a block of information that was a portion of the search area, and the software on the host machine would process it whenever it wasn’t busy doing something else.”
The general was still frowning. Better reset the listening clock here, Jay, or you’ll put the man to sleep. “The result was like having a huge supercomputer, but broken up into lots of small units.”
“Okay, I got that part—but where are these machines?”
“All over the world. The way it works is the attacker put the thing on the Internet, and people who thought it might be amusing downloaded it. And the interesting part is, whoever did it put it out in the open, disguised as a computer game—a science-fiction scenario called The War Against the Bugs. Only, the designs of the alien bases, in a galaxy far away, were the same as those of Army bases on Earth.”
“How did they get the specs of the real bases?”
“That’s the real question, isn’t it? I’m working on that.” Which was true. He still didn’t have a clue, but he was working on it.
“Um. Anyway,” Jay continued, “the computers sent their information back to the originator, automatically taking advantage of their Internet connection. With most of the civilian high-speed cable and dedicated phone lines, you are linked to the the net all the time. Firewalls stop stuff coming in, but not a DCP going out. That’s the beauty of it.”
The general nodded.
“Since the game is pretty high-tech, it appealed to hard-core gamers, people who have fairly powerful machines, and people who are used to playing games where cracking security is part of the, um, fun.”
“Go on.”
“This is how you set it up: Okay, here is an alien military base on the planet Alpha-Omega Prime. Here are the specs for its computers, security devices, the timing of its patrols, all like that. You are the leader of the terran underground forces on this world, and they are getting ready to attack Earth. Your mission is to bypass their security and delay their plans by crippling their bases. How would you do it?”
“You tellin’ me our Army base was cracked open by a buncha video-game geeks who know jackshit about military procedures?”
Jay gave a little cough to cover a grin. The general seemed to be forgetting that Jay himself was a video-game geek. “Well, yeah, basically, that’s it. The average game player might not be too knowledgeable about such stuff, but give ten thousand of them a few dozen cracks at something? A solution, if it’s out there, is apt to come out eventually. Whoever ran the program had the stats on what was most likely to work, and exactly how to do it.”
General Ellis shook his head again and looked at Jay. “Game players are breaking in the Army’s bases for fun. Crap. What next?”
Jay nodded. He had to admit, it was brilliant. And the attacker who came up with the idea? He had to be pretty sharp. This was the first such DCP Jay had seen used this way. Once word got out, though, there’d probably be others.
Jay continued: “The bad news is, half-a-dozen other ‘alien enclaves’ are in the game, so I’m guessing maybe some or all of those are cloned from real military bases, too. The Army better change security protocols on these before anybody makes another run. I don’t know which alien base corresponds to which real one, or even if they are all real, but somebody needs to work that out.”
“You talk to the Army’s computer security so they can do that, PDQ.”
“ ‘All your base are belong to us,’ ” Jay said.
“What”
“Sorry. It’s an old joke, from my college days.”
“Son, there ain’t nothing about this is remotely funny.”
“No, sir.” Jay kept a straight face, even though he thought it was pretty humorous. But then, it wasn’t his ox getting gored. . . .
“So, son, is there any way to figure out where these games were sending their answers?”
Jay gave the general a little shrug. “It’s tricky—if this had been Real World, it’d be kind of like a bloodhound trying to follow a convict who jumped into the river, then split himself into a thousand pieces the next time he came out onto land, spewing red pepper behind him all the while. He wasn’t making it easy.”
Ellis nodded.
“Plus, he sent the incoming signals back to other gamers to cross-check the results before they were eventually routed back—so, basically, they go back and forth like balls at a championship tennis match. I’ll take a closer look at the code, and we’ve got folks already trying to track ’em, but if I had to guess, I’d say somebody smart enough to set this up was probably smart enough to use cutouts and bounces—leapfrogging from one server to another, changing comsat repeaters, and winding up on a private server that is shut down by now anyhow. We might not be able to untangle it, and even if we do, the physical location could be a rented apartment in Boring, Oregon, that’s been empty for a week. Might have to go at it another way.”
Ellis looked grim. “Stay on this, son. It’s a big deal. We can’t have folks attacking our bases, blowing things up, and hurtin’ people. See my aide, get the contact information for our computer people.”
The general stood. The audience was over.
Jay also stood. Well, he had gone up against a lot of clever bad guys, and he had always come out on top. He figured he’d manage to run this one down, too—well, maybe once he got a nice, long nap in, anyway. . . .
Net Force Shooting Range
Quantico, Virginia
“What you shooting there, General? An old hogleg?”
John Howard smiled at Abe Kent. “Well, General, sir, it is a revolver, but it’s not exactly an antique.”
Kent moved over to stand next to Howard, and the two men looked at the handgun Howard had just put on the shooting bench. Before he had moved on, Howard had held the position Kent now had—head of Net Force’s military arm. Though now that they were being run by the Marines instead of the National Guard, it was a horse of a different color, sure enough. Kent and Howard went way back. The reason Kent even had the job was that John had gone to bat for him.
Howard lifted the pistol and held it out to Kent. It was deeply blued, almost black, and had a barrel that appeared to be rectangular rather than round, with some fancy engraving on the cylinder, which was unfluted. The grip was carved wood, with finger grooves.
“Nice.”
“It’s a Skorpion,” Howard said. “Made by Roger Hunziker and finished by Gary Reeder. Reeder puts out some of the best custom guns in the country, if not the world. This one is multicaliber. It’ll shoot .38’s, .38 Special, 9mm, .357 Magnums, even .380 auto if you’re desperate—got these neat spring devices in the chambers, lines the ammo up properly. The original design was a little different, called a Medusa, from Phillips & Rodgers, down in Texas. They got into other things—our electronic hearing protectors? Those are made by Hunziker, same guy who built the Medusa. They realized they could do better by producing parts and electronics. Most of the DoD’s headphones come from them. Crank up the electronics, you can hear a mouse sneeze across the street, yet still cut off the noise of a shot. Great if you’re a hunter out in the woods listening for game. Smart move on his part, given the diminishing gun culture. But the revolver design was good enough that Reeder picked it up for a little while. I had a Medusa, but I lent it to a friend in the Army who got posted to South America as an advisor in one of the drug wars.”
Howard paused for a few seconds. “He didn’t make it back,” he said.
“Sorry.”
“How it goes when you put on the uniform.”
Kent nodded. He knew.
“Anyway, I went looking for a replacement, and found this. Captain Fernandez is always giving me a hard time about old tech, but I’m a wheelgunner.”
“Nothing wrong with that. If it comes down to side arms in battle, you’re gonna be in deep shit anyhow, doesn’t much matter which one you have.”
“I dunno. You ever read Ed McGivern’s book Fast and Fancy Revolver Shooting?”
“Can’t say I have.”
“He was a trick shooter, back in the 1930s. He could throw a big juice can up in the air, nail it six times with a double-action revolver before it hit the ground. Used to have two guys throw up two cans each at the same time, he’d hit all four of ’em on the way down. Could cut a playing card thrown at him edge-on in half in the air. When he was in a real hurry, he could crank off five rounds into a hand-sized target in two fifths of a second, using a standard S&W .38 Special right out of the box. Not nearly as much gun as this one.” He waved at the Skorpion.
“No kidding?”
“That was just the fancy up-close stuff. With a little more power—a .357 Magnum or a .38-44? He could keep all the hits on a man-sized target at more than two hundred and fifty meters. Man says he can’t hit anything with a handgun? Not the gun’s fault, nor God’s.”
“Don’t start that again,” Kent said, but he smiled to show it was a joke.
Howard returned the smile. “I’m telling you, Abe, our church is different.”
“I’ve heard that one before. Right up there with people trying to set me up on a blind date saying, ‘She’s got a great personality.’ ”
Howard laughed. “Speaking of which, my wife has this friend. . . .”
Kent groaned. “Don’t go down that road, John. Please.”
Howard laughed again.
“So, let’s see if you can shoot this here antique.”
“You ain’t got much room to talk, old son. That slab-side Colt has been around for a while, too.”
Both men laughed.
Gunny’s amplified voice said, “You better leave that fancy shootin’ iron with me to get the smart-gun electronics installed, General, sir.”
“Bullshit I will,” Howard said under his breath. “Mess up a perfectly good gun with all that safety crap?”
“I heard that, sir,” Gunny said. “It’s regulations.”
“Not for me, it isn’t!” Howard yelled. “I don’t work for you anymore. The rule doesn’t say any piece that comes into the range has to be screwed up, only the ones that Net Force ops carry! And I’m not even sure that applies to the military anyhow!”
“I don’t think you have to yell, John,” Abe Kent said. “I do believe our shooting bench is bugged.”
“He’s right,” Gunny said. He added a nasty smoker’s laugh.
“Them cigarettes are going to kill you, Gunny, if I don’t beat them to it!” Howard said.
“Let’s shoot. We can pretend the targets are Gunny.”
“I heard that. Sirs.”