"All right," she said, half-smiling at the memory. "I imagine we've taken up too much of your time, anyway. Dr. Mayhew, Dr. Skibow—"
"Jane and Rich, please," Jane Mayhew interrupted. "There's only fifty of us. It would be silly to stay so formal, even if I do keep falling back into my bloody lecture-room habits."
"No problem, Jane, Rich. We'll be moving on."
"Our pleasure, Helen. Drop by whenever you and A.J. feel like it. Who knows, you may solve our problems again."
"Well, you helped solve ours!" A.J. said, with a wink at Helen.
On their way out, Helen said with great dignity: "We didn't have a problem. You did."
A.J. smiled but didn't even try to make a rejoinder. Clearly, his mind was focused on whatever problem he was taking to Ken. There was as much point in badinage with A.J. when he was in that mind-set as there would be trying to swap jokes with a beaver making a dam—or a five-year-old child absorbed in watching a cartoon.
Oh, well. They'd still foiled the tabloids, hadn't they? A feat which, with some experience, Helen had come to rank right up there with taking the gold at the Olympics or deciphering the Maya script. Or winning the Trojan War.
And—although she'd disapproved at the time and still did— Helen couldn't deny that she wished she'd had a camera herself once. To capture the delightfully shocked expression on a paparazzi's face as A.J. sent him sailing through a window.
Chapter 33
"And that's what I found."
Ken Hathaway felt a leaden weight sinking in the pit of his stomach, as he looked over the code and symbols A.J. was showing to him. "A back door?"
"Into the main controls. Covers the entire communications grid. I checked, and there's a similar one in the backup. Checked the rest of the systems—well, to make a long story short, someone has managed to compromise the entirety of our ship's systems. There's a back door into virtually everything on board that isn't completely standalone."
"How did you find this, and when?"
A.J. looked apologetic. "Actually, I found it a few weeks ago. Right when Doc Wu got sick, he told me how bad it might get, so I started trying to improve our automation. A lot of that being perceptual interpretation, I figured I could probably code it better than anyone else. I ran across a minor anomaly in the comm and sensor grid that led me to the first discovery, and then the others, until I realized that most of the ship must be like this. Then I got sick and . . . Well, forgot all about it until today."
With anyone else, Ken would have been furious. How could you forget something like this?! For weeks?!
But . . . That was just A.J.'s nature. The flip side of his ability to concentrate—downside, often enough—was that he could become oblivious to almost everything else.
"The reactor controls?" Ken had a horrid vision of someone having the ability to cause the entire ship to blow up or melt down.
"No, actually." A.J.'s face showed some puzzlement. "That's clean as a whistle. Oh, with some of the other back doors, whoever it is could probably get control of the engines and the reactor. But they'd be doing it through the standard interfaces aside from their initial system entry."
"Any guess as to the purpose of all these compromises? If they don't want to just kill us off, what do they want?" Ken rubbed his scalp. "I've got to call Fathom in on this. We're dealing here with her specialty."
A.J.'s jaws tightened. "That's exactly why you shouldn't call her in."
"Huh?" The captain of the Nike stared at the imaging and data processing specialist. "But she's already got authority to access pretty much anything she wants. She's in charge of security, for Pete's sake. Why would she have back doors hidden in the system?"
"Well, I like the woman, myself. I can't think of anybody who doesn't, really. But then—if you were a security heavy, wouldn't you rather that everyone liked you instead of being paranoid about you?"
Ken thought about it for a moment. "Okay, sure, of course I would. Still—"
"And if you were a security specialist working for the U.S. government, you'd be unhappy about the fact that political horse-trading has made something like thirty percent of the crew foreign nationals, wouldn't you?"
Ken snorted. "Security specialist, be damned. I'm just a soldier and I'm not happy about it. So . . . yeah, I see your point."
"And if—note that I say 'if'—you were the sort that felt that clamping a heavy security lid on things was the best policy if we found something really strategically useful, wouldn't you realize that the scientists aren't necessarily going to shut up on their own?"