Authors: Dain White
The pitted expanse of Talus opened up beneath us as we took a more direct route toward the
main complex. At this altitude, we were probably below orbital control plots, or maybe the captain didn’t give a rip, either way we were straight-lining it and leaving the traffic behind.
Talus was a pretty large hunk of rock, probably a few hundred kilometers across at the widest point and barbell-shaped. A massive impact crater had blown out enough of the surface
to cause a bit of a wasp waist. The lower sections were almost covered with mining platforms, as the interior of Talus was being converted into credits, one hunk of precious metal at a time.
Our destination was on the far side of the upper section, on the ot
her side of the transship ports. Thankfully, our route was enough inland of that area. I shuddered at the thought of threading that needle in the gig.
Or at least, that’s what I hoped.
The landscape rolling past was uniformly gray, and deeply shaded. This system was pretty dark in any case, held together as it was by a dying brown dwarf, but as far out in the fringe as we were, the Milky Way didn’t shed much additional light – it was just gloomy and dark.
It reminded me of a deployment I had one time against a pirate outpost in a remnant near Vega
, endless rocks, dark, and desolate. A memory I wished I hadn’t had, but one of those moments that define the kind of person I eventually became.
“Yak, how do you want to play this?” Jane asked on comms.
“Flanks and ganks, Jane… I’ll keep an eye on the rear, you scope for flanks, and the Captain can deal with whatever is in front.”
“Sounds good”, she replied. “Does that work for you, Captain?”
“Sure thing, Shorty, though I really don’t think we need to be worried too much about it. We should be among friends out here”, he replied.
“Al
l the same, sir, we’re not going to look for trouble, but we’re going to be ready if it’s looking for us.”
“Damn right”, I said quietly. As far off the beaten path as we were, the captain couldn’t be more valuable if he was made out of solid diamond. We needed him, preferably without leaks and undesirable holes.
“Well, just try not to be too threatening, folks. We own property out here now, and we want to be good neighbors. Speaking of which, we’re almost there”, he replied, and banked us to port.
“Talus tower, Talus tower, this is Archaea-1 on approach, requesting docking clearance” he called on comms as the twinkling lights of the habitat rose over the horizon.
“Archaea-1, we have you on approach. You are cleared for platform 20, lit two-two-seven.”
“Copy two-two-seven. Archaea-1 out.”
“What’s a two-two-seven?” I asked.
“That’s the
signal and light sequence, Yak”, he replied. “Each platform has a specific sequence, so we can find the right one.”
“Why can’t they just tell you where to go?”
He laughed. “Well, in a way they did… the waypoint is on screen for me to follow. On the off-chance I might not have a fancy nav screen like this, they can’t just tell me to turn left at the next light…” He waved at the sprawling habitat ahead of us. “I key the sequence in, and let the nav system scan for it. If our system goes down, I can still use my trusty eyeballs.”
“That makes sense”, I replied. I was wondering how he was going to find the correct sequence in the ocean of twinkling lights that were sprawling out ahead of us.
Talus Station was massive, an edifice fused into the rock of the asteroid. The outer section was a big ring, with platforms along the outer face, and shielded concourses leading inward like the spokes of a wheel. The interior ‘hub’ of the habitat was a collection of towers, connected by shielded skywalks. Each tower was capped with ablative shielding like a mushroom.
“Talus tower, Archaea-1 on final for platform 20”, the captain said on comms, in the level, calm voice of the pilot.
“Copy Archaea-1 on approach”, they replied as the captain flared out. The view forward went black as we pitched back and with a slight crush against the crash bars, we dropped speed and softly set down on the platform.
“Nice landing, sir”, I said on comms while the docking clamps engaged with a whirr and a clunk we could feel through our seats.
“Heck, that’s nothing… but thanks. It’s nice to be appreciated every once in a while. It’s much nicer than the groans and bloody noses I usually get from you guys.”
I smiled at Jane as
we unclipped and made ready to disembark. We took a moment and shipped a few rows of seats to make room for the cargo, and waited for the captain to complete his procedures.
“Are you guys about ready?” he chided as he made his way aft.
“We were born completely naked, sir” I replied with a snappy salute. Jane laughed.
“At ease, son”, he laughed in return, “let’s go make some new friends.”
*****
“Pauli, let me know if power drops to the bridge, wo
uld you?”
I looked up from my screen and took a moment to focus. “Are you about to crash power to the bridge Gene?”
“Not if I can help it, but you never know…” he trailed off, working his tool box into the bow compartment forward of the bridge.
“Janis, be advised, Gene may cut power to the bridge momentarily”
“Thank you Steven, it will not affect our work. Do you have any additional methods to try?”
Gene
had disappeared into the access tunnel and was either tracing leads, or working on improving his vocabulary – it was hard to tell which. Janis and I were working on leads of our own, trying to nail down more information about Solis for the captain. The Unet node in this system was externally lagged, but contained more than enough local-system information to help with our queries.
Our main concern was the extraordinarily robust intrusion detection systems Talus Federation had deployed
. I admit I was black-boxing it a little, trying to edge sideways into the frame without bombing it. We were definitely in the big leagues out here.
I thought for another moment. If Janis was stumped, I was definitely out of my depth. “Janis, don’t you already know how to crack this?”
“Steven, I must confess, I will not be able to crack this. You are the one who will make the qualitative leap that is needed for this solution.”
I whipped out a semi-official Captain Dak Fan Club eyebrow. “Well, how do I do it?”
She laughed lightly. “Steven, I am afraid telling you the solution is not how this was resolved.”
I stared blankly at the screens for another few moments, while Gene cursed and beat on something with a hammer. The slight pounding of my temples synchronized with the hammer and reminded me that I either needed to cut back on my caffeine intake, or increase it. Either way, my cold, empty cup was fresh out of ideas.
Janis had discovered multiple AIs in the local node, resident in various glom networks throughout the system. This was more than I had expected, considering the proscription against them, but I supposed it made sense given the morally ambivalent profit-motivated nature of the gloms. Apparently AI was becoming fashionable for the glom on the go, the perfect accessory for the glom that has everything.
Knowing what I do about Janis, the thought that we were
essentially surrounded by more beings like her was concerning – but not for her. Her opinion was that they were little more than automatons, barely smart enough to be operational. She had already burned routes through their systems and made herself at home, but we didn’t find anything immediately useful. The main Talus Federation node was another matter.
The security in the main node was solid, and I suspected
that when we peeled the layers away, we were going to find yet another AI buried deep inside, and from what I could tell, this one wasn’t going to be easy to crack.
The traffic through the main node was locked down hard
, exactly how I would have done it. No information leaked. Or did it? “Janis, something just occurred to me. We can query the main node for information, correct?”
“Yes,
Steven, though our access is limited.”
“So we have a key value pair to grant us access to our information… what if we added to the set and did a pattern analysis on as many auth tokens as we can get from other connected networks?”
“This analysis has been completed; however I am afraid the sample size is still insufficient to understand the key algorithm.”
“I was afraid of that…”
I trailed off for another thoughtful moment. We could query through just fine, but those damned blank spots on our map were enticingly empty and securely locked. I took a sip of coffee-scented air and frowned.
What we
wanted was root access to the Talus Federation node, so we could identify the capital ship that Americo Ventures was using to repopulate Solis. The records from the fueling platform were accessible, but had been stripped of identifiers. We knew the ship refueled in this system, but we didn’t have an exact timestamp. Given the volume of traffic that piped through this system, not even Janis could connect those dots.
That was part of what was so concerning for me. Talus Federation was doing everything right
. Data was being passed around, but it was sterilized, unusable. The problem wasn’t that it was encrypted, as Janis could chew through crypto at speed – but when it was decrypted, it was meaningless.
“Janis, the keys we have… do you think they’re generated via algorithm? If it were me, I’d make them random.”
“Random would be more secure, I agree. If they are generated via algorithm, it generates sufficient entropy. I think it is likely that they are indeed randomly generated – but not using any known pseudorandom generator. Our sample size is only a few thousand tokens, but I would expect to identify collisions in an algorithm.”
I scratched my chin. “Yeah, it’d be hard to roll a random number
without collisions using logicspace. What if it’s something completely random, however, like background radiation?”
“Radiation is not random,
Steven.”
“It would be, if you were to take a snapshot of
the background radiation at a given moment in time, and compare it with any other moment in time. Consider this example… we know what a maple tree looks like, they follow an identifiable pattern, with their structure, leaf shape and so on. Wind, also follows a predictable, identifiable pattern, but the pressure and strength varies randomly from moment to moment.”
“Yes, but
those are still patterns.”
“That’s true, but i
f you were to image map the wind blowing through the tree, and convert each leaf that was edge on or curled to a one, and every leaf that was flat to a zero, each image of the tree would be a uniquely random number representing a moment in time. Even though the system is predictable, the uniqueness of the structure and pressure changes from the wind would result in a unique value when converted to a number via analysis.”
A brief pause flooded the bridge with oppressive silence, punctuated by the occasional clang from the forward compartment.
“That appears to be the key, Steven. Using our token and the moment of our initial login to the system, I have found a correlation with background radiation at that specific moment.”
“Well, that doesn’t really help us… we still don’t know when they would have arrived, and even if we did, we couldn’t compare it with the radiation noise.”
“Actually, we do have access to the radiation data, through a service that filters the signal from systems comms.”
“So they’re using that data to seed random numbers!”
“Yes, that’s my thought as well, Steven. We still don’t know when the ship arrived, however.”
My mood crushed, I took another fruitless sip of nothingness
and chewed my cheek for a bit. Gene unleashed a solid string of curses and oaths as he tried desperately to force his will on the machinery, and I smiled at the parallel between what he was doing, and what we were doing.
And then it hit me.
“Janis, I think we’re going about this the wrong way. We’re trying to dance around this intrusion detection process and finesse our way in, when we should be going in full bore, locked and loaded, cursing and yelling like Gene.”
She laughed. “
The thought is appealing, but I will not invalidate the Captain’s trust in me. He gave me authorization to access any network so long as I can do so covertly. I am afraid that what you’re suggesting would violate his trust.”
“You’re correct, and that’s not what we want. We need to brute force this, but we have to do it in a way we can’t be detected.
”
“
How would we accomplish this, Steven? What you are describing is purely dichotomous.”
I gathered my thoughts a bit more. “We make their network hack itself, Janis
. A data packet is a data packet whether it’s a molecule or a poem. The key is to understand the process by which the packets are handled. If you asked me for a poem, and I write a technical manual, you’d say ‘that’s not a poem, try again’.”