Spin State - Chris Moriarty [8]
A blind corner led into Five—the only blind corner in the complex. Li reached it first. She paused, scanned, motioned Catrall over to the far wall to cover her. On his nod, she juiced her internals and accelerated around the corner—straight into a withering blast of white light.
She pushed forward and through it; no matter what the danger the worst possible response was to lose momentum, risk being stranded in the kill zone. Then she rolled behind a stack of sterile saline canisters and stopped to tally the damage.
None.
She’d run through an automated irradiation beam, installed at the door to protect the contents of the lab’s unsealed virufacture tanks. Her skinbugs handled it, masking her presence, killing the intrusion alarm before her passage tripped it, protecting the weapons-grade virucules on her skin and uniform from the assault of the radiation. No problem.
Except there was a problem. The beam should have been on the schematics Intel gave them. Should have been, and wasn’t. She wondered what else Intel had missed—and if the next surprise would be this harmless.
As soon as she was sure she hadn’t set off any alarms, she waved in the rest of the squad. They had twelve minutes and twenty-three seconds left before the hopper returned. No time to waste on unnecessary precautions. When the perimeter was secured, she split the squad in pairs and had them scan the tanks. She set her realspace feed to toggle if anyone’s pulse rose above combat-normal. Then she picked up Cohen’s feed and rode in on his shoulder while he jacked the system.
The lab’s security went far beyond the deadwall. There would be no slipping in under the radar; Cohen was going to have to meet their best stuff and better it. The network was broken into half a dozen separate zones. He’d have to crack each zone separately, and at the same time elude the quasi-intelligent game-playing agents that defended them. There was no back door, no way in or out without running the gauntlet of the security programs. And even if Cohen got by them, Kolodny would still be physically jacked in to the lab mainframe, vulnerable to whatever wet bugs and bioactive code the system threw at her.
As Li watched, Cohen spun out a sleek silver thread of code, tweaked it into a loose Möbius strip, and floated it into the main corporate site on a public-source message. Trojan horse, she thought. Oldest trick in the book.
Cohen was laughing before she finished the thought. Li glared. The boy popped like a soap bubble. The security program caught the horse, just as it was meant to. In eight seconds alarms were going off all over the network. In twenty-three seconds the system’s anti-incursion software had corralled the horse and routed it to the off-site virus zoo. For a moment nothing happened. Then an area of confused activity boiled up inside the virus zoo and ballooned into a roiling mushroom cloud of self-reproducing, randomly mutating code. Li held her breath, trying to follow code that was spinning faster than even her military-grade wetware could track it. She shut down her VR interface and dropped into the numbers, a swimmer in the shifting ocean of Emergent networks that was Cohen. His strategy was working. Or at least she thought it must be. The security program tracked each new virus, broke its code, sent antidotes shooting off to its entire UN-wide customer base. But this was a game the defense lost before the first whistle. The virus mutated constantly,