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Chapter 33

"And that's what I found."

Ken Hathaway felt a leaden weight sinking in the pit of his stomach, as he looked over the code and symbols A.J. was showing to him. "A back door?"

"Into the main controls. Covers the entire communications grid. I checked, and there's a similar one in the backup. Checked the rest of the systems—well, to make a long story short, someone has managed to compromise the entirety of our ship's systems. There's a back door into virtually everything on board that isn't completely standalone."

"How did you find this, and when?"

A.J. looked apologetic. "Actually, I found it a few weeks ago. Right when Doc Wu got sick, he told me how bad it might get, so I started trying to improve our automation. A lot of that being perceptual interpretation, I figured I could probably code it better than anyone else. I ran across a minor anomaly in the comm and sensor grid that led me to the first discovery, and then the others, until I realized that most of the ship must be like this. Then I got sick and . . . Well, forgot all about it until today."

With anyone else, Ken would have been furious. How could you forget something like this?! For weeks?!

But . . . That was just A.J.'s nature. The flip side of his ability to concentrate—downside, often enough—was that he could become oblivious to almost everything else.

"The reactor controls?" Ken had a horrid vision of someone having the ability to cause the entire ship to blow up or melt down.

"No, actually." A.J.'s face showed some puzzlement. "That's clean as a whistle. Oh, with some of the other back doors, whoever it is could probably get control of the engines and the reactor. But they'd be doing it through the standard interfaces aside from their initial system entry."

"Any guess as to the purpose of all these compromises? If they don't want to just kill us off, what do they want?" Ken rubbed his scalp. "I've got to call Fathom in on this. We're dealing here with her specialty."

A.J.'s jaws tightened. "That's exactly why you shouldn't call her in."

"Huh?" The captain of the Nike stared at the imaging and data processing specialist. "But she's already got authority to access pretty much anything she wants. She's in charge of security, for Pete's sake. Why would she have back doors hidden in the system?"

"Well, I like the woman, myself. I can't think of anybody who doesn't, really. But then—if you were a security heavy, wouldn't you rather that everyone liked you instead of being paranoid about you?"

Ken thought about it for a moment. "Okay, sure, of course I would. Still—"

"And if you were a security specialist working for the U.S. government, you'd be unhappy about the fact that political horse-trading has made something like thirty percent of the crew foreign nationals, wouldn't you?"

Ken snorted. "Security specialist, be damned. I'm just a soldier and I'm not happy about it. So . . . yeah, I see your point."

"And if—note that I say 'if'—you were the sort that felt that clamping a heavy security lid on things was the best policy if we found something really strategically useful, wouldn't you realize that the scientists aren't necessarily going to shut up on their own?"

Ken saw where this was going. "And if you did, you'd want a way to make sure that you could just make everyone shut up. Even if it meant overriding every system capable of communication on the entire ship."

"Yep. Especially since you'd have to be worried that even other Americans on board might prefer the 'information wants to be free' path. And that the kinda apolitical captain might back you up . . . and, then again, might not."

Ken set his jaws. "That's pure bullshit. I'm not into politics myself, that's true. And it's also true that all the years I've spent hobnobbing with you scientific types has made a lot of your attitudes about the free flow of information and knowledge rub off on me. But the fact remains—don't ever doubt it, A.J.—that I'm a professional officer serving in the military forces of the United States of America. Madeline Fathom is the duly-authorized representative of our government in charge of security here, and I would back her up any time she acted in that capacity. Regardless of whether I agreed with her or not."

A.J. shrugged. "Fine. But you think like a soldier. In my experience—thankfully limited—I really don't think security people have the same mentality at all. So whatever you might know you might do, they wouldn't necessarily think you would. If that twisted grammar makes any sense."

It made plenty of sense to Hathaway. A.J.'s analysis, now that Ken thought about it, was a lot more plausible than even the imaging and data expert knew. Unlike the rest of the crew, Brigadier General Hathaway had known General Deiderichs off and on for years. While the general hadn't told him much, the way in which he didn't say certain things was a clear warning: Madeline Fathom carried one hell of a lot of weight, possibly even more than Deiderichs himself.

That meant that whichever intelligence agency Fathom was working for—and Ken suspected it was the HIA, which had more clout than any of them when it wanted to use it—she had what amounted to a direct pipeline to the President. Which, in turn, meant that if the back doors A.J. had discovered did lead back to her, she had the legitimate authority to have them and to use them. That was true regardless of what Brigadier General Ken Hathaway thought personally about the mind-set involved and its readiness to use duplicitous methods.

God forbid the right hand should ever tell the left hand what it's doing. He remembered a wisecrack once made by a fellow Air Force officer: The only difference between the nuts in security and the ones in lunatic asylums is that the security nuts insist their straightjackets have to have clearance and be stamped Top Secret.

"What a mess," he muttered. "All right, A.J. I won't tell Fathom until you do an initial check to see if she's the one who's holding the back doors. If she is, then it's a moot point. You and I know, and we just forget about it. But if she isn't the one, then we've got a real problem with security and I'm bringing her in right away. And in the meantime, we don't tell anyone else. I'm willing to stretch things that far, but I'm not willing to spread this to anyone except Fathom."

A.J. nodded. "No sweat. If for no other reason, I don't want Joe to know. Not from me, anyway. You wanna talk about a mess."

Ken grimaced. To everyone else's surprise—and A.J.'s astonishment—Joe Buckley and Madeline Fathom were often seen together since the voyage had started. By now the two were, if not an item, at least one of the strongest candidates for becoming an item on board Nike. If they were wrong about Madeline, a very nice friendship—or something more—could be torpedoed with no justification. Or, if Joe reacted the other way, A.J. could find his best friend alienated from him.

"Right. In any event, we need to check all the other alternatives— and immediately. If Fathom's the one with the back doors, she has them on official authority. Which someone else wouldn't—and that would be an order of magnitude worse. We need to make sure, if we can, that that's not the case. In the meantime . . . Have you closed off any or all of the back doors?"

"Nary a one. But I've booby-trapped them. When someone activates one of them, I'll be able to catch 'em at it. And of course I can always override them now that I know what's going on. That's why you made me the DP head around here."

Ken gave A.J. a hard look, just short of an outright glare. "Understand something, A.J. If it does turn out that it's Fathom, I'll want you to remove the booby traps. I don't like the idea of her having those back doors, but what I don't like doesn't make any difference. She is in charge of security. But until we know one way or the other, keep them in place. If it's someone else, we do not want those back doors functional."

A.J. nodded, although Hathaway was quite sure that he had reservations. Reservations strong enough, in fact, that Ken would probably have problems with him if it did turn out to be Fathom.

But that was for a later day—which might never come.

In that respect, at least, A.J. obviously felt the same way he did. "Well," the imaging specialist said, "I just hope we never have to find out."

So do I, Madeline thought to herself as she shut off the recording. So do I.

Not that it would make a very big difference. She'd been expecting to hear that conversation, or one like it, right around now. A.J. was good, but he was only second-rate as a security specialist. More than good enough for basic civilian or low-level military stuff, to be sure, and he was probably a hell of a cracker if he wanted to be. But when you had the resources to draw on that Madeline did, a second-rater was only going to find what you wanted them to find.

Everything had to be a double blind whenever possible. One of the best ways of defusing effective resistance was to convince your opponents that they were smarter than you were, always just a step ahead. In this case, she'd arranged for fairly well-hidden back doors to exist—while burying her real back doors far deeper inside the system. It was the same strategy she'd used with respect to her martial arts capability.

Not quite the same strategy, she reminded herself. It wouldn't do to underestimate A.J. Baker. Her martial arts skills were hers alone, while in this case she was only about as good as A.J. in her own right. Not even that, really, given a level playing field.

But this wasn't a level playing field, not even close. The HIA could tap the best people in the world when it came to this sort of work. All Madeline had had to do was arrange access for one of them to assist in the coding. He'd done the rest.

Bugging Hathaway's office had not been difficult. It had been trivially easy, in fact, since no one had been expecting surveillance equipment to be installed aboard Nike. The military people and scientists who made up the crew just didn't think in those terms.

Now she had to decide if she'd gotten all the use out of the monitors that she could reasonably expect, or whether she should leave them in place. The longer they sat there, the more chance there was that someone would spot them.

A.J. was, once more, the major threat there. He scattered his Fairy Dust almost randomly at times. And, unlike those in use in engineering and other departments, A.J.'s sensor motes were not merely cutting-edge but bleeding-edge, customized in both their software and sometimes even hardware aspects. In fact, she had to grudgingly admit that they outperformed even the supposedly top-of-the-line stuff she'd been supplied for this mission. If A.J. ever decided to start looking for other sensor motes, she'd be busted. Martial arts was his exercise and computer systems his sideline, but sensor systems and detecting things that were hidden was A.J. Baker's expertise. He was probably the best in the world at it. She knew without a shadow of a doubt that she could no more beat A.J. on that battlefield than he could beat her in an honest fight.

So the decision wasn't to be made casually. She'd gotten excellent intelligence from them so far. But was the chance of getting more such information worth the risk that A.J.—suspicions already aroused by finding the back doors—might decide to sweep the ship for other unauthorized activity?

"No," she answered herself aloud. She was already tap-dancing on land mines. The monitors she had in place to maintain surreptitious surveillance of Nike's personnel were already stretching the letter of the law. Even the military members of the crew would be furious, if they found out. The civilian members would completely blow their stacks, negating at one stroke all of Madeline's long and careful work to build up their trust and cooperation.

There was no point in keeping around extra ways of detonating the mines if she didn't really need them. She sent out the signal which caused the motes to move into the air system and allow themselves to be filtered out with the rest of the dust.

Then, was surprised at the relief that swept over her. It was disconcerting to realize just how uncomfortable she'd become with her role in this mission. She hadn't gotten the usual satisfaction seeing how neatly Ken and A.J. had followed her script. It had been almost painful to listen to them voicing their suspicions about her.

Jesus! I'm actually feeling guilty about this whole thing!

She shook her head and sighed. She still believed in her mission, even if she'd slowly come to detest it from a personal standpoint.

The worst aspect of the situation was that if she wanted to avoid the eventual confrontation, she had to hope that nothing particularly exciting or revelatory was discovered on this trip. Which meant that either way things went, her friends were going to end up disappointed—either in what they found in Phobos, or in what they found in her.

And this was the first time in her life that Madeline Fathom had had real friends.

Even possibly—she started to shy away from the thought, but forced herself not to—a romantic involvement that went beyond a brief and casual sexual liaison.

Madeline couldn't conceal from herself that the worst part of that whole conversation was the thought of them telling Joe, and the relief she'd felt when they decided not to tell anyone. For the first time in her life, she had an impulse to just get it over with—go to Ken, tell him the situation, and drop the whole thing in his lap. She sat in the chair, feeling one-third of a gravity pulling on her more heavily than anything she'd felt on Earth since she was nine years old.

What am I going to do about Joe?

She had no answer. Or, at least, no answer she liked.

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