“I wouldn’t be a bit surprised.” David chuckled. “So, what is a nutcracker, anyway?”
“Oh, well, the UN ship will have its own computer system, right? To control power, life support, all that stuff, just like our ships.”
“Okay.”
“If we’re going to capture that ship, we need to talk to the computer. Program it to respond to our commands. But it probably won’t be that simple. There’s almost certain to be some sort of password protection, just so some unauthorized guy like the janitor or a bunch of invading Marines don’t screw things up.”
“Gotcha.”
“Sam’s got a database of…I don’t know. How many passwords do you have, Sam?”
“Sixteen thousand, three hundred, eighty-four,” she replied immediately.
“Okay. Sixteen thousand possible passwords, compiled by the NSA. They put together files on all the people they figured might’ve been involved in programming the enemy ship’s systems. They got names of wives and girl-friends and kids. Birthdates of family members. Titles of favorite books. Places they’ve lived or gone to school. Known passwords they’ve used before. All kinds of trivia that a programmer might’ve used as an easy-to-remember password.”
David’s brow furrowed. “That still seems like kind of a long shot. I mean, that sort of code isn’t going to be easy, or what’s the point?”
“I think the idea is that the UN isn’t expecting us to come and try to take their ship away from them, so the password’s going to be relatively simple.”
“Still, so many possibilities….”
“Well, they’ve also put together some code-breaking algorithms that Sam can draw on. And she’s pretty slick herself, now. I’ve used her to get into places I wasn’t supposed to be.”
David’s eyebrows went higher. “Oh? And what places would those be?”
“Oh, password-protected stuff.” He didn’t elaborate. Two weeks earlier, however, Sam had broken into the main personnel files at Quantico to see if Jack had been selected for this mission. He hadn’t intended to change anything in those files, just to look around.
As it happened, he’d had the second best scores of all the trainees, after Diane Dillon, and had been given a slot aboard the Ranger.
And then there’d also been the time when he’d taken a peek at some of his uncle’s working files on aliens from the Cydonian underground site. He simply hadn’t been able to resist that siren’s call.
“So…how come you’re here?” Jack asked David, shifting the subject to safer ground. “Is Tsiolkovsky another alien site?”
“It’s distinctly possible.”
“The An again? Or the…what are they called? The Hunters of the Dawn?”
David looked at him sharply. “How much do you know about the Hunters?”
Damn. He probably shouldn’t have brought them up. “Not…not a whole lot. There’s been some stuff out on the Net.”
“Liana got some things out of my files she shouldn’t have,” David said, “and uploaded it to her cult church. From there it went…everywhere. But there’s a lot of speculation and misunderstanding and just plain idiot stuff mixed in. Don’t believe everything you hear.”
“That’s it, though, isn’t it?” Jack said, pushing. “There’s something about the Hunters of the Dawn at Tsiolkovsky?”
“I don’t really think so,” David replied. “If anything, there’s just an An base back there. From what Intelligence picked up, though, from some French scientists they questioned, our UN friends are very interested in the Hunters. Almost frantic. And our people would like to know what they know. What they’re afraid of.”
“The answer to the Fermi Paradox?”
Again, David gave Jack a long, hard look.
“I, uh, had Sam out looking for everything she could find on the Hunters of the Dawn,” Jack admitted. “The little bit I found on the open Net, well, like you said, it didn’t seem very reliable. Ancient-astronut stuff. So I guess maybe she did a check on everything you’d written on the subject.”
“Including some classified reports?” David shook his head and grinned. “Okay. I should have guessed as much. Don’t put too much store in any of that stuff, though, Jack. It’s all still very preliminary.”
“Yeah, but it’s important,” Jack said. “Alien civilizations that think they have to wipe out every other civilization they find, just to survive? I can see why the government would be interested in that. We might run into them ourselves, soon.”