Glasshouse - Charles Stross [110]
Hmm. There’s a pressure imbalance, but it’s nothing major. That means open doorways, maybe a whole deck down below. But I said I’d go up, didn’t I? I start to climb. The hatch in the ceiling has another wheel, and it takes me longer to rotate it, but there’s some sort of spring mechanism inside it that raises it out of the way. That’s smart design for you. They assume that pressure breaches come from outside, which in a rotating cylinder hab like this means down, so you have to exert force to open a hatch leading down. But hatches leading up have a passive power assist to make it easy to get away from the blowout. I like that philosophy: It’s going to make life ever so much easier.
I climb into the tunnel, then pause to pull my headlamp on. Getting it lit, I climb up above the hatch. Then I step sideways off the ladder and close it behind me. I’m now at the bottom of a dark tunnel occupied only by the ladder, punctuated by shadows far above me, and the trail I’ve left leads down instead of up. I hope there are doors up there. It would be really shitty luck to have gotten this far only to find they’re all jammed or depressurized or something.
13
Climb
BATTALION HQ doesn’t send me direct to Staff. Instead, they put me through an A-gate, and I come out wearing my original ortho body. I feel small and incredibly fragile and alive. It’s an alarming experience that later reminds me of my arrival in YFH-Polity. After my reanimation, they disassemble me and split me into about 224 separate stripes of data and zap it off over quantum-encrypted links via different T-gates. I don’t feel this process, of course. I just get into an A-gate and wake up sitting in another one. But along the way I’ve been fed through a cryptographic remixer circuit, combined and recombined with other data streams with serial numbers filed off, so that even if a couple of the nodes have fallen into enemy hands, they won’t be able to work out where I’m coming from, where I’m going, or who I am.
I blink and come alive again, then open the door of the booth. A tense moment—I’m about to enter the semimythical head office of the Linebarger Cats. A compactly built female xeno with feline features is waiting for me, tapping her claw-tipped fingers. “You’re Robin, aren’t you?” She says. “I love you.”
“I’m sorry, are you sure you’ve got the right person?” I ask.
She bares needle-sharp fangs at me in something approximating a smile: “In your dreams. It’s just a diagnostic test patched into your new netlink—if you can hear the words, it means you’re not carrying a copy of Curious Yellow. Welcome to the crazy camp, Sergeant-Multiple. I’m Captain-Doctor Sanni. Let’s go find an office and I’ll explain what’s going on.”
Sanni is an odd mixture of sly articulacy and shy secretiveness, but she’s read my paper and decided I’m wasted on line ops, and she’s got the clout to make it stick. When she tells me why, I’m inclined to agree. This problem is a whole lot more interesting than blowing holes in defensive perimeters, and much more important in the long term.
“Curious Yellow can be broken,” she explains. “All we have to do is to fracture enough network links that the cost of maintaining internal coherency among the worm farms exceeds their available bandwidth. When that happens, it’ll lose the ability to coordinate its attacks, and we can then defeat it in detail. But the problem is what happens afterward.”
“After.” I shake my head. “You’re already thinking about the postwar situation?”
“Yes. See, Curious Yellow isn’t going to go away. We could replace all the A-gates in human space with another monoculture,