Reaching inside his best pocket, Walter extracted the ID badge, his only remaining bit of loot from a night full of complete busts. First, his winnings at Rats had been denied him. Then, his blasted uncle had nabbed his gun, probably worth an easy two hundred. “You better be worth it,” he told the plastic chip. He shook the card so it would know he meant business.

With a deft one-handed flourish, Walter called up a few macros he’d stored in the computer, and his private card-reading program booted up. He inserted the ID into the scanner. With a hesitant swipe, he ran the magnetic strip through—silently hoping for something good. A ticket off-world was almost too much to dream of, but some info he could sell would be nice. Anything to make up for the night’s losses.

The card’s code flashed across the screen, filling the smeared monitor with lines of green-phosphorous text. Walter’s beady eyes flicked from side to side, trying to tease out the pertinent from the mundane.

Gradually, a glimpse of what he’d stumbled onto began to coalesce out of the lines of code, and Walter realized just what he had.

And he realized he had not been dreaming big enough.

•• The Raid ••

The two moderators crouched close to Walter and peered down at their computers as he slid the card through the reader and loaded his program. He watched the moderators press their refresh buttons over and over, expecting his successful hack to appear on the GU website at any moment.

It will, Walter thought. But his complex program had a few other tasks to perform before it sent anything as mundane as messages off to Earth.

He remained perfectly still and tried to exude calm, even as another roll of thunder boomed in the distance. While Walter waited, he imagined what was going on in the ethereal realm of code and connected computers. With his eyes closed, he pictured his elegant hack zipping off through cheap copper wire. He traced its route through Palan, knowing where the main trunks were buried from so many data-jacks over the years. The program would round High street, dash down River avenue, then course up Cobble. That’s where it would enter the Navy’s Bell Phone containment tower—

Walter’s heart raced as he suddenly realized his code could not be recalled. His actions could not be undone. He had pulled a trigger of sorts, knowing what the fired bullet would do, but only after having done so did the repercussions fully seize him. Entire clans would be heading to Earth, taking their ships with them. Or was it the other way around? The play on words evaporated Walter’s dread, replacing it with a sudden urge to giggle. He opened his eyes and looked to the moderators, wondering if they could sniff his mix of fear and humor. Hoping to replace the scents, Walter focused on the fact that his secondary program would soon dutifully reach Earth and perform a successful hack of the GU site. He also reminded himself that his program, swirling in the entangled particles of the Navy’s containment tower, would not be there for much longer. Soon, the floods would come and wash them away, the turbulent waters taking all signs of Walter’s duplicity. He thought of these happy, calm facts and tried so very hard to refrain from thinking about what his program would do in the meantime . . .

•• Two Days Before ••

Simmons. The card owner’s name was uncomfortable to even think, leaving a residual hiss in Walter’s mind. But that wasn’t what really stood out about the ID badge. What was weird was that the Human had two official names. He seemed to go by Drummond while he was on Palan—at least to the markets, the Regal Hotel, the passenger shuttle office, and the cabbies. To the Navy, however, he went by the name of Simmons, and as far as Walter could tell, he wasn’t even supposed to be on Palan. He was on what Walter would call a rogue mission, and what the Human Navy referred to as “clandestine.”

It was the first time Walter had gotten to rummage through the file of anyone in Special Assignments—the first time he’d heard of anyone getting the chance. But that wasn’t the big surprise, either. The big surprise was how unbelievably sloppy Simmons was to be so seemingly well-connected. Walter hit a goldmine when he came across a file named “Passwords.txt.” He had thought it was some sort of joke until he opened the file up and saw its contents.

The next thing he had to do was immediately raid the snack closet for some Chedder Puffs and a warm Pump Cola. Like his trainees before him, Walter was about to pull an all-nighter.

Simmons, it seemed, answered directly to a Navy admiral, one Wade Lucin. Their entire message history was logged in a Navy database, opened as slick as grease with the contents of the passwords file. It appeared Simmons was on Palan to secure a “package” of some sort. He even had two accomplices heading his way from Earth. Walter scanned these messages, but none of it seemed too terribly interesting. What caught his eye among the terse lines were the words “username” and “password.” For some reason, the Admiral had given Simmons temporary access to his own account. It was a one-time login and no longer any good, but it was enough to get Walter guessing the Admiral’s full-time passcode. He knew from hacking Human laptops that all their passwords were slight variations on a single theme—either their limited noses kept them ignorant to the threats swirling all around them, or they just couldn’t hold more than a few tidbits in their brains at any one time. Walter suspected it was a blend of both.

It took less than a dozen tries to log in to the Navy database. All the Admiral had done was transpose the two words in his password and increase the four-digit number by one. When the login screen disappeared and the master account page popped up, Walter nearly spilled his can of Pump. He whipped around to make sure nobody was behind him, his entire body tingling with the thrill of found treasure. Pulling the keyboard into his lap, Walter began flipping through account tabs. The overwhelming choice of devious tasks to perform made his head spin.

Walter scanned the Personnel page first. The Admiral had almost complete control over what looked to be thousands and thousands of Humans. Walter briefly considered transferring every staff member with an ‘S’ in their name to the front line. He laughed to himself at the thought. There was a massive sub page for Humans ranked as mere “cadets.” With half a thought, Walter could’ve flunked or expelled whichever brats he chose. He thought about changing some grades, or possibly admitting himself to flight school, but like the frontline transfers, these were all ideas that would arouse suspicion and turn out to be no more than practical jokes. Annoyances, sure, but with no real outcome, no payoff other than a locked-down account and someone in Human IT lecturing the Admiral on how not to be so stupid with his passcodes.

The best solution, Walter knew, was going to be to just sell the account to someone off-planet. Take their money and let them deal with the heat their actions might bring. He went to the admin page and set up a few secondary logins so he could access the account even if the primary password was changed. He then went to the Admiral’s inbox and deleted the automated messages warning of the account changes. He also opened the IT log file and removed the entries for his last actions and reset the time stamp for the last logon. Satisfied, Walter went to log out, but after closing the IT tab and just before he exited the Admiral’s inbox, something caught his eye: An older message entitled “Delete After Reading.”

But it hadn’t been deleted.

And with a title like that, there was nothing Walter could do but read it.

••••

TO: Adm. Wade Lucin

FROM: IT Specialist Second Class Mitchell

Admiral,

The alterations to the simulator were completed today, and I even stamped Hearst’s name on the modifications in case anyone looks. I promised I wouldn’t ask about these mods, but I want you to know how hard that promise is to keep. I’m dying to know. Anyway, everything was done remotely and I covered my tracks good. I expect to see those reprimands expunged from my files like we talked about.

As for the hyperdrive question, I can only assume you’re talking about hypotheticals. For the sake of discussion - assuming for a moment you had a drive that could ignore gravitational permutations - there are ways to remotely input jump coordinates and bypass the Navy control boards. It isn’t easy, but it’s doable. The radio interface for sending out coordinate verification can be turned around the other way, but you’d have to come up with a master key for the hack to work. I just don’t see why you’d want to. Why not input the jump arrival directly in the nav computer, as per usual? The only thing I can think of is not wanting a log of the jump - or maybe wanting to avoid those annoying alarms. Does that qualify as a question? Hey, I didn’t make any promises about not inquiring into this. Feel free to tell me more if you need help with this, I’m insanely curious.

Attached you’ll find a classified white paper on jump drive overrides, which might help. I also threw in the hardware schematics you wanted. On second thought, whatever it is you’re doing over there at the Academy, I’m thinking it’s best I don’t know. Oh, and I’ll be pulling my internal affairs file up in a few weeks. It had better be a lot thinner than the last time I looked at it! ;-)

From one war dog to another: Be Easy.

-Mitch

••••

Walter frowned at the message. It sounded like a bunch of military stuff, but the Mitch guy was obviously a coder of some sort. Even if it was boring, he was pretty sure there was something in there for a nice piece of blackmailing—it just wasn’t as juicy as he’d hoped, especially for something with a dire warning to be deleted. He clicked on the attachment, wondering if the schematic might be something he could fence.

The first file was a technical paper, almost indecipherable even to him. There were also schematics labeled “Hyperdrive,” the drawings making even less sense, as they were perfectly laid out and didn’t have a dozen replacement parts tacked-on willy nilly like he was used to. He scrolled past them, annoyed and disappointed, until he came to the lines of code that followed.

Programs. Written in G++. The formatting was perfectly clear, with nested levels of indentation, just how he liked to lay out his own code. Even better, the code was full of detailed comments by the programmers, explaining what the next few lines did for whoever else might be maintaining it. In fact, Walter saw that there was more than one person involved in the writing of the code. As neat and standardized as they tried to make it, some of the lines bore distinctive imprints of their author. One coder stood out from the rest with a much higher degree of elegance. Walter could almost see the program coursing through a piece of electronics somewhere; the syntax practically sang to him, giving him goosebumps.

After scrolling up and down, following the snippets of code as it bounced routines from one module to another, Walter got a decent grasp on the overall function. It even helped to make sense of the schematic attached above. What he was looking at was basically a cryptographic system that took one set of numbers and converted them to another—that was pretty much it. A quantum gate was used for randomization, and there were numerous security measures, but he saw how it went together. The input for the program could be any three-number Cartesian coordinate, pretty much an exact location in space, and the output would be a string of numbers and letters that a physical circuit could format back into a location. It was obviously meant to go into the machine laid out in the neat plans above.

Suddenly, the contents of the message made sense. Walter was looking at the Human Navy’s solution to making their hyperdrives unhackable. The master key was hidden right there somewhere!

Walter had to sit back in his chair and consider the implications. He ran his hands over his head, tickling the stubble there.

“Flood me,” he whispered.

Somewhere down the hallways of the HQ, a distant door slammed, and loud voices echoed their way into the computer room. Walter pulled out one of his flashdrives and plugged it into the computer. He copied the attachments over and wrapped them in his very best encryption. He logged out of the Navy database and erased his steps from the computer’s history one final time. He deleted the entire Simmons account from all Navy servers as well, just to cover his tracks further. His last step was to run a sniffer program from his flashdrive to make sure nobody had installed tracking software on the computers in an attempt to cheat for their finals. A quick scan came up clean.

Walter yanked out his drive and tucked it in his front pocket. He kept his hand on it while the voices faded away, eventually pinched off by the slam of another door.

Walter’s brain tumbled. He thought about what could be done with the knowledge in his pocket. Selling it seemed like the obvious thing, but for how much? And was simply selling it really the most elegant solution? Would it give him the most long-term benefits? Or would it mean that someone else would have the knowledge that for the moment he alone possessed? And how long would it be before the Navy found out their program had been compromised and they changed their design? Would the buyers then come looking for a refund in the worst, most Palanesque way?

The questions swelled, growing like moist yeast and pushing on Walter’s skull. There had to be something better. Something that didn’t require sharing the knowledge. Some way to keep it his.

The obvious predicament was that he had no ships to try the code on, so he didn’t see how this windfall did him any personal good. Of all the Palan clans, his Hommul family was the only one holding out on the relatively new technology. When the GN had arrived, all the other clans had been quick to jump on the new transportation boost. Piracy had left the wide Palan oceans where veritable islands of floating debris were the only scraps worth fighting over and had moved out to space, where far greater treasures seemed to beckon. Could Walter use this code to convince his Uncle to buy their first ship? How would that even help? How could he ensure that his clan matched the level of the others? He couldn’t see any way his new bounty would even lift his prospects an inch from his planet’s surface.