Free Radical (32 page)

8:33

He tried again. The latch had finally failed and the gate moved slightly.

Deck managed to pull the gate open less than half a meter before it stopped again. It began to push back. He could hear a small motor on the other side of the door, fighting against him. It was overpowering his arms.

He let it slam shut again and changed his position. He lay on his back against the gate and braced his legs against the bulkhead. He hooked his fingers through the fence and pushed with his legs.

A furious whine came from the opposite side as the motor fought against him. He drew in a deep breath and held it, and pushed again. The fence gave, finally sliding open. It felt like he was going to dislocate his fingers if he held on much longer. The motor howled in protest, spinning at full speed. Deck could smell it burning itself out as it fought against him.

The gate was open a meter or so, but he couldn't go through. He couldn't hold it open and go through at the same time, and he was afraid he would just get crushed if he tried to dive through from where he was. He cursed again and released the gate in disgust.

7:02

From his position, he could just see the outline of the motor mounted on the wall on the opposite side of the gate. He drew his pistol again and drove a single bullet into the motor. The whine stopped.

It wouldn't budge. He changed position and pushed with his legs as he had before, but he couldn't get it to move at all now. It had seized up.

He cursed and hammered his fist into the metal sign. He could see the detonator from where he was. It was just a few meters away, quietly counting down...

6:12

Giving up on the gate, he climbed up the ladder and tried again to hack the hatch at the top.

He hit the open button, and it refused. Checking the error, he found that it refused to open because - according to the internal regulators - the other side was decompressed already. The door was equipped with a system that prevented the door from opening if only one side was pressurized. All doors had this safety mechanism on them, to prevent people from accidentally opening a door that they shouldn't during a decompression emergency.

4:41

But why would the regulators claim it was decompressed? He wondered if that was even true. Shodan probably couldn't decompress the area herself. It was mechanically impossible to open both doors of an external access airlock at the same time.

It didn't matter anyway. If the other side had decompressed, he was dead no matter what, so he would simply proceed assuming it wasn't.

The only way to open a door if one side was decompressed was to use the emergency override, but that part of the interface was shielded by Shodan's unbreakable ICE.

He needed some way to make the computer realize that there really was air on the opposite side of this door so he could open it.

The control panel had a pressure gauge built into it. He could change its reading to whatever he wanted, but he couldn't do anything about the reading on the opposite side.

3:24

He tried to access the opening mechanism directly, but it was blocked by the safety program. He tried to circumvent that, and found it was guarded by emergency override, which was in turn guarded by Shodan's ICE.

He banged his head gently on the bulkhead in front of him. How could he beat this?

In just a couple of minutes, the bombs would detonate and decompress the entire area, if they didn't just vaporize it outright. He decided if he didn't get out, he would wait at the gate to ensure the explosion killed him, instead of waiting to die from decompression.

Shodan had beat him. He had completed the mission but it had cost him his life. He realized that this was exactly what TriOptimum wanted. This was going to put a stop to both of their problems at once.

He pounded his fist impotently against the hatch. How could he be trapped here? He was a hacker. This was what he did, he opened doors and got into places where he didn't belong, and now he was trapped between a set of ordinary doors, about to die from a bomb he had planted himself. They would go off, this chamber would decompress and -

Suddenly he realized the answer.

2:11

He jacked in. The door wouldn't open because it believed one side was pressurized. He couldn't change the reading on the other side, but he could make it think his side was decompressed as well. His face turned red from embarrassment as he realized he had almost sat still and let himself be blown up when such a simple solution was right in front of his face.

It took him a minute to understand how the gage worked. It was actually made up of several components that needed to be manipulated at once. He tried to put the bombs out of his mind as he worked. Panic would just slow him down. He was either going to finish on time or he wasn't, and worrying about the bombs wouldn't help.

Once he had it working, he altered the pressure gage so that it appeared as though this side was also decompressed. The red light stopped spinning and changed to a slow strobe, like all of the airlock lights on the station's exterior.

0:53

The doors finally parted. Deck pulled himself through and scrambled for the catwalk. He wanted to get as far from the explosion as he could.

Halfway up the stairs, he realized he should have closed the hatch behind him. The explosion would just enter this chamber. Was it worth climbing back down to close it, or should he just keep climbing?

He hesitated. He should close it. He ran back down and closed the hatch, wasting precious seconds he didn't have to spare. He started running again.

0:10

Deck reached the top of the chamber and began climbing the next shaft.

0:00

It was like setting off dynamite inside an aluminum can. The explosion ripped easily through the metal walls, vaporizing the lower chamber. The support beams buckled outwards and then snapped, and the communications array was ejected from the base of the tower like it had been launched. Eventually it would slam into Earth's atmosphere and burn up. There was no way Shodan would be recovering it.

The blast sent a shockwave through the entire station, causing earthquake-sized tremors.

Deck glanced down to see a fireball rushing upwards from the chamber below. It expanded violently, reaching outwards to incinerate everything within its fiery embrace. Then - just as violently - it began to retreat. The roar became barely audible as the fireball was pulled from the ship and dissipated in the vacuum of space.

The downdraft became a hurricane, and Deck struggled to keep his grip on the ladder. He had to escape this before the reactor level ran out of air.

Fighting against the howling wind, he ascended the ladder. He fought for air. It was like trying to breathe while sticking your head out the window of a fast-moving car. At the top of the ladder, he searched for something to grab onto. The force of air threatened to pull him away the second he released the ladder.

He glanced down the shaft to see more and more of the structure being torn away. There was another explosion that he could feel but not hear, and the chamber below was ripped from the station.

Deck found himself staring down the shaft into space. Beyond, he could see the Earth.

The force of the separation jolted the shaft violently. The ladder was ripped from his hands. The wind picked up his body like a scrap of paper and tossed it down the shaft. He twisted in the air to see the gaping hole below as he fell towards empty space.

"How's the battle going?," Buchanan asked dryly. He'd been calling it a "battle" since Shodan started grabbing satellites, but they didn't really have any way to fight back. All they could do was sit around and count down to the next loss, and come up with various projections on how long the total conquest of the network would take her.

One of the networking guys spoke up, "Looks like she's ignoring smaller birds so she can grab the critical ones. Our old projections assumed she would just expand outward and grab everything, but she's focusing on the major network arteries."

There was a long pause while Buchanan absorbed this. Finally he spoke, "So how does this affect your projections?"

"Well, total acquisition time is the same. It's still going to take her another nine hours to get everything, but since she's cutting sections off from each other, the network will be almost useless in about three hours or so."

"Useless?"

"In three hours we will still have about a third of the network left, but it won't be a network anymore. All the nodes will be isolated from each other." He glanced down at his console. "Next one goes down in thirteen seconds."

Buchanan turned his back on the bad news and faced Rebecca, "Any word?"

She stopped clicking her pen against the console. "Nothing."

Suddenly almost everyone began speaking at once. First several people spoke up with reports of heat signatures and decompression coming from the station. Then came a grainy telescope view of the base of the station "falling" away. Seconds later someone else reported the hacking had stopped.

Within seconds the relentless attack had halted and the entire network was freed of Shodan's control. Applause erupted

Bachanan let out a slight sigh, "Good. Now memory-wipe our comsats, reboot them, and get them back in service."

The smiling face of Morris poked up over the bank of consoles in front of them. "I have a better idea. How much data storage space do we have available here?"

Deck awoke to the sensation of icy droplets of water slapping him in the face. He was laying on some unidentified slab of metal. He didn't open his eyes, but was aware of a red light flickering somewhere above him. He regarded the falling water with a sort of disinterested confusion and slipped back into unconsciousness.

Time passed. There was no way to tell how much. He started to wake up. He knew something was wrong. He needed to wake up. Where was he?

He dropped off again without even opening his eyes.

There was another expanse of time.

He finally forced his eyes open. It was dark. What little illumination there was came from a red light somewhere behind him. All he could see was a curved metal wall. He was in a large puddle of icy cold water.

He rolled over onto his back, the water sloshing around him. Looking up, he could see a circle of light filtered through a thick black haze.

His limbs were numb, and he was groggy. It reminded him of when he woke up from surgery.

He lay there for several minutes, ignoring the obvious questions. He had been here for a long time; a few more minutes wouldn't hurt.

Eventually, he sat up and a wave of dizziness washed over him. It felt like his brain was sloshing around in his head. He was at the bottom of a round shaft, like a shallow well. He pulled himself over to the curved wall and leaned against it.

He looked to the opposite side, where a red light was mounted in the wall. It seemed to be a marker for a control panel.

Now that his head was no longer immersed in cold water, some of the numbness was going away and he became aware of a dull pain on the side of his face.

He leaned against the wall, looking up into the haze for several minutes before moving again. When he did, he crawled on his hands and knees over to the control panel. He had no idea why there would be a control panel at the bottom of a hole, but there it was. It had some airlock buttons, some other stuff he didn't recognize, a dataport, and an emergency light. He turned on the light.

Stinging white light came from a fluorescent unit mounted in the wall. He cried out in surprise and threw his hand up over his eyes.

Slowly, his eyes adjusted. He worked his eyes open and took in his surroundings.

The first thing he noticed was that the fingertip-deep water he was sitting in was red.

There was a ladder running up the wall. He knew where he was.

This was the shaft he had been climbing when the bottom of the station was blown off. The shafts all acted as airlocks. As the chamber below was torn away, emergency systems kicked in and shut the door at the base of the shaft. It had probably closed just in time for him to slam into it. He didn't even remember the impact.

The cold water was sapping his strength. He needed to climb out while he still could.

His weak, shaking hands pulled him upwards; out of the shaft. Despite the low gravity, his body felt like a sack of wet cement.

He pulled himself over the edge of the shaft and flopped onto the floor, facing up. Pink water streamed out of his suit and onto the floor.

The chamber was filled with a thick, acrid smoke. The top of the chamber was scorched and covered in black soot. Automated fire suppression systems had managed to put the fire out, which explained the water.

The walls were covered with small, puffy lines of expansion foam. The usually pink foam had been blackened by the fire.

Deck lay there for several minutes, fighting sleep.

He ignored it. He didn't feel like talking to anyone. It was good to know they had their satellite back, though.

Picking himself up, he began the long climb out of the communications tower.

When he reached the top, the hopper was gone. He was glad. He didn't have the energy for a fight.

He limped back to the elevator. Every step was an ordeal. Every breath was a major undertaking. His limbs were heavy and numb. His ribs hurt. The wound on his leg hurt. His head was heavy. There was so much pain coming from so many sources he couldn't focus on any one pain in particular.

When he reached the elevator, he waited for the doors to close behind him and then he sunk down in the corner. He didn't even know where he was going.

There was no point in returning to level one. The hospital didn't have anything except roving bands of mutants and cyborgs. The research level was out - there was a bot patrolling the elevator exit. The executive level had the same problem.