“Not too close to that damned French ship!” Avery snapped. “They may have explosives set!”
“Got news for you, sir,” Commander Kieffer said. “With antimatter, they don’t need to worry about explosive charges. If that baby goes, everything on this side of the mountain goes. Shrapnel alone is going to get everything within miles!” He seemed to be enjoying himself.
Rob’s heart was hammering. What about Kaitlin? Where was she? He glanced at David and saw the archeologist’s clenched fists and pale, drawn face. His nephew’s in there, with the computer team, he thought. And Kaitlin…
He’d seen one LAV destroyed out on the crater floor, and he could see another here, holed by a missile. Was Kaitlin dead? Hurt?
He desperately needed to know.
Moments later, the Ranger touched down gently on the Lunar regolith, a hundred meters from the UN ship and gantry. Rob hurried back down to the squad bay to get his helmet and gloves, and David followed.
Neither said a word.
PFC Jack Ramsey
UNS Guerrière, Tsiolkovsky Base
0114 hours GMT
Jack leaned against the computer console, his PAD open, the leads jacked into both the ship computer and to his own suit. Sam could talk to him now over his headset, and she would hear his instructions. “Go to it, Sam!” he told her, after setting up the first sweep sequence with a few keystrokes. “What are we up against?”
Sam was visible on the PAD screen. It seemed a little strange, seeing her there without a suit, while he was still encumbered with his. For the last month or so, he’d been thinking of her much more like a living person than a simulacrum. In fact, his whole relationship with her had changed.
He kind of liked it.
And—he knew he was anthropomorphizing here—he thought she liked it as well. “I enjoy this new professional relationship with you,” she’d told him once, a couple of weeks before.
“I am detecting computer security encryption, Jack,” Sam said. “It’s asking me for a password.”
Her speech was crisp and precise, with none of the languid sexiness she’d had originally. Her responses were also immediate, or nearly so. Her personality software had possessed a built-in response-delay, so that her conversation sounded more human. Jack had disabled that last week, however, to bring his interaction with her to peak efficiency.
“Initiate nutcracker routine. Run program.”
“Jack, you should know that I have just tried the first word on the first list. The password failed, and at the same time, I detected the reset of an incremental counter, from three to two.”
“Oh, shit….” The Guerrière’s system was set to detect and count each attempt to break security, probably with a three-times-and-you’re-out routine attached. The instructors at Quantico had admitted the possibility of something like that but thought it unlikely, given that the UN wouldn’t be expecting an enemy assault on Tsiolkovsky.
Evidently Guerrière’s programmers had been expecting the attack after all, or else they were simply being cautious. Three-times-and-you’re-out was the perfect way to foil pass-code-cracking attempts that relied on brute force. Three wrong guesses, and…well, there was no telling what would happen next. Maybe a special key was required to reset. Maybe a new set of instructions from an authorized programmer was required. Maybe there would even be a very loud boom.
“Jack, there is something else.”
“What is it, Sam?” He was breathing harder now, and his visor was starting to fog.
“Behind the counter, I am also detecting…something else. I believe it is a timer.”
“The computer clock?” Sweat burned his eyes.
“Negative, Jack. This is a special timer within the security program, and it is counting down. Now at T minus twenty-one seconds.
Maybe there was going to be a very loud boom whether Sam entered more passwords or not. Two more tries, out of sixteen thousand possibilities? There was no way in hell he could pull the pass code out of a hat, not with twenty seconds to go.
“Damn, Sam,” Jack said, feeling sick. “I don’t know how we’re going to pull this off….”