The Jennifer Morgue - Charles Stross [112]
Having OwnZored the box, I go looking for network interfaces. First results aren’t promising: there’s a dedicated TV tuner card and a cable going into the back, but no wired Ethernet. But then I look again, and see the kernel’s autoloaded an Orinoco driver. It hasn’t come up by default, but . . .
Hah! Five minutes of poking around tells me what’s going on here. This box probably came with an internal WiFi card, but it’s not in use. The PC is simply being used as a television, hooked up to the ship’s coaxial backbone, and nobody’s even configured the Ethernet setup under Windows. Possibly they don’t know about the network card? The Laundry-issue USB stick detected it straight off and started running AirSnort in promiscuous node, hunting for wireless traffic, but it hasn’t found anything yet. After about thirty seconds I realize why, and start cursing.
I’m on board the Mabuse. The Mabuse is a converted Type 1135.6 guided missile frigate, from the Severnoye Design Bureau with love, by way of the Indian Navy. They may have stripped out the VLS cells and the deck guns, but they didn’t remove the damage control or countermeasures suites or rip out the shielded bulkheads. This used to be a warship, and its internal spaces are designed to withstand the EMP from a nearby nuclear blast: WiFi doesn’t tunnel through solid steel armor and a Faraday cage very well. If I’m going to hack my way into Billington’s communication center I’m going to need to find a back door in: an occult network as opposed to an encrypted one.
I pop the other USB stick out of the distal end of the bow tie. It’s a small plastic lozenge with a USB plug at one end and a handwritten label that says RUN ME. I plug it in, then spend ten minutes adding some modifications to its startup scripts. I pop it out then reach down and pick up my dress shoes. What was it, left heel and right shoelace? I strip out the relevant gizmos and stuff them in my pockets, hit the boss button, and flip the cummerbund upside down so that it’s just taking a nap in front of the TV. They haven’t given me back my gun, my phone, or my tablet PC, but I’ve got a Tillinghast resonator, an exploding bootlace, and a Linux keydrive: down but not out, as they say. So I open the door and go looking for a source of bandwidth to leech.
A MODIFIED TYPE THREE KRIVAK-CLASS FRIGATE displaces nearly 4,000 tons when fully loaded, is 120 meters long—nearly twice as long as a Boeing 747—and can slice through the water at sixty kilometers per hour. However, when you’re confined in a luxury suite carved out of the vertical launch missile cells and what used to be the forward magazine and gun turret, it feels a whole lot smaller: about the size of a large house, say. I make the mistake of going too far along a very short corridor, and find myself eyeball to hairy eyeball with a guard in standard-issue black beret and mirrorshades. One sickly smile later I’m staring at a closed door: I’m on a long leash, but this is as far as I’m going to get.
I’m about to go back to my room when two guards step into the corridor ahead of me. “Hey, you.”
“Me?” I try to act innocent.
“Yes, you. Come here.”
I don’t have much in the way of options, so I let them lead me downstairs, along a corridor under the owner’s territory, and then out into the working spaces of the ship. Which are painted dull gray, have no carpet or woodwork to speak of, and are full of obscure bits of mechanical clutter. Everything down here is cramped and roughly finished, and from the vibration and noise thrumming through the hull they’ve only soundproofed the executive suite. “Where are we going?” I ask.
“Com center. Mrs. Billington wants you.” We pass a bunch of sailors in black, working on bits of who-knows-what equipment, then they take me up a staircase and through another door, down a passage and into another