Part 27 (2/2)
And quite without thinking or calling on her artifi- cially augmented memory banks, Nancia was oft jjtfc !$* The farmer's daughter had soft brown hair, ? ? b.u.t.ter and eggs and a pound of cheese, ' 1 And I met with a poem, I can't say where, Which wholly consisted of lines like these....”
There was a young brainshxp of Vega.... ”
”Fhairson swore a feud against the clan MTavish; Marched into their land to murder and to rafish, for he did resolve to extirpate the vipers Withfour-and-twenty men andftue-and-thirty thirty pipers...”
Nancia went through Ser Vospatrian's entire reper- toire until she was giggling internally and floating on the natural high of laughter-produced endorphins.
Then, floating quite calmly in her blackness, she set about testing her sensor connections one by one.
She got the mental equivalent of burned fingers and light-blinded eyes more than once during the testing process, but it wasn't as bad as she had feared. The lower-deck sensors were completely useless, as were her navigation computer and the new mathematics and graphics co-processors she'd just invested in.
Everything, in fact, that contains hyperchipsfrom Shemati...
and with that deduction, Nancia knew just who was striking at her and why.
She opened the upper deck sensors one by one, first taking in the sleeping bodies tumbled in the pas- 302.
& sageway and cabins. Sev, slumped over the isometric spring set in the exercise room with his hands and feet still in the springholders; Alpha, strapped in her cabin- Blaize, floating just above the pa.s.sageway deck, with an angelic expression on his sleeping face and a nasty bruise coming up on his chin.
Mutiny. And somebody released sleepgas. But which side} She opened the control cabin sensors slowly, cautious- ly. The port side sensors wavered and gave an erratic display. Somehow Polyon's hyperchips must be work- ing to contaminate the entire computer system. 2 don't have much time....
Even less time than she'd thought, Nancia realized as she took in the standoff in the control room.
General Questar-Benn disabled - of course, the hyper- chips in her prostheses - and Darnell holding her needier on a defiant Forister while Polyon sat in the pilot's chair and played his commands on the com- puter console. That, at least, she could do something about. Nancia struck back, sending her own com- mands to the computer, disabling the console section by section, garbling Polyon's commands as they came in. He tapped out a sequence she did not know; she traced it to its source and with shock recognized her own access code. The musical tones were already sounding in the cabin. But the accompanying syllables weren't stored in the same location.... They have to be somewhere, though. In some part of memory not accessible to my conscious probe. Otherwise my sh.e.l.l wouldn't recognvze and open to them. Nancia felt proud of herself for figur- ing that out, then cold and sick as she wondered how long it would take Polyon to make the same deduction.
And if the syllables aren't where lean consciously retrieve them, how can I block Polyon against doing so ?
She felt queasy from the repeated looping through four decomposition s.p.a.ces, but there was no safe way to leave the loop until she regained full computing and303.
navigational facility, first, let's repair the damage..,. Nancia worked furiously, permanently disabling the sections of her computer system that had been contaminated by the Shemali hyperchips, finding alternative routings to ac- cess the processors that remained untouched. At the same time the worm program unleashed by Polyon squirmed deeper into her system, changing and mutat- ing code as it went, erasing its own tracks so that she could only tell where it had been by the sudden flares of dis- orienting sense input or the garbled mathematics where it had been. She had to find and stop that code before she could do anything else.
Deep in the intricacies of her own system, Nancia agonized as Darnell struck down Forister.
Don't listen. Don't think about that. She would need all her concentration to disable Polyon's rogue code, more concentration than she'd ever brought to bear on the comparatively trivial problems of subs.p.a.ce navigation. Nancia remembered Sev Bryley's training in relaxation and deliberately, slowly calmed herself, drawing energy away from her extremities and center- ing her consciousness on the internal core of light where she existed independent of computer and sh.e.l.l and s.h.i.+p. With some remote part of her awareness she sensed the failure of gravitational systems and the dimming of lights, the shock and concern of her pas- sengers, but she could not afford to divert consciousness to those semi-automatic functions now.
The automatic datacording routines Nancia had set up continued to operate as Polyon began Micaya's tor- ture. Nancia could not counter his commands without breaking her trance; she could not even restore gravity and lights to rea.s.sure Forister. Ignoring Micaya's pain was the hardest thing she had ever done. For the moment, Micaya does not exist. Nothing exists outside this place, this mo- ment, this center. There was the rogue code; she annihilated it in a blaze of energy, destroying deep 304.
fcf memory in the process; like an amputation, she thought, the shaft of pain and the nagging ache afterwards. Now to restore lost functions... Ruthlessly she cutback on the frills and luxuries of her programming, reducing the power that normally fed her autonomic functions. Lights dimmed even further in the control cabin, and the softpersons made comments about an acrid smell in the air. They would just have to put up with it; she needed that processing power to restore her crippled nav programs. Three of the four major math coprocessors were lost; the graphics processor could double for one of them. No time to think about the others. Naritia erased unnecessary programs and dumped others to datahedron, making s.p.a.ce in what little remained of her memory for the processes she had to have. Would that be enough? No chance for tests, no time for second thoughts. She struck back, once, with everything she had; felt hyperchips shriveling to blank bits of permalloy, felt inactive sensors and processors become dead weights instead ofliving systems.
Some animals will gnaw off their own limbs to get out of a trap....
No time to mourn, either. With the ”death” of the hy- perchips within Nancia's system, the transmissions that tortured Micaya's cyborgans ceased. The sound of her amplified heartbeat ended between one drum beat and the next. Forister groaned. He thmks fm dead. He would be rea.s.sured in a moment Nancia activated full artificial gravity; Darnell fell to the deck from his wall perch, Fa.s.sa went to her knees. Polyon staggered but remained stand- ing. Nancia beamed commands to the tanglefield wires, Darnell, Polyon and Fa.s.sa were frozen in place, nets of moving lights encompa.s.sing the tanglefield keys at their wrists and ankles and necks. Finally, Nancia spared a t.i.ttle power to bring up the cabin lights and freshen the air.
”FN-935 reporting for duty,” she said. ”I apologize for any temporary inconvenience....”305.
”Nanda!” Forister sounded dose to tears.
”General Questar-Benn, can you take the pilot's seat?” Nancia requested, ”I may need a little help to navigate us out of Singularity.”
”Do my best” Micaya's breathing was still ragged, and she leaned heavily on the chair beside her, but she limped to the pilot's seat without help, the prostheses once again responding to her own brain's electrical impulses. ”What can I do?”
”I am operating with only one mathematics coproces- sor,” Nancia told her, ”and my navigation units are nonfunctional When I start the drives, we will move out of this transition loop and into the expansion of whatever subs.p.a.ce we happen to be in. I'll try to maintain a steady path through the subs.p.a.ce options, but I may need you to aid in the navigation. Since the graphics processor is undamaged, I will throw up images of the approaching subs.p.a.ces. Rest your hand on the palmpad and give me a direction at each branch.”
”Do my best,” Micaya said again, but Nancia noticed it was the prosthetic hand she rested on the palmpad; the other hand was still an ugly purple color, with blackened moons on the swollen fingertips. She remembered what Polyon had said about gangrene.
How much had his hyperchips accelerated Micaya's metabolic processes? Get her to a medic., .but I can't do that, unless somebody helps me surf out of Singularity... and we daren't waitfor the paravenm to wear offfbrister....
. Then Nancia had no more energy to spare for wor- . rying about Micaya or anything else but the waves of transformations that broke over her head, tossed and tumbled her gasping through subs.p.a.ces that j,deformed her body and everyone within, streams of [calculations that escaped her processors. Lost and choking, she sensed a firm hand guiding her up-
wards... out... She crunched the last numbers into a tractable series of equations and broke through the 306.
chaos of uncountably infinite subs.p.a.ces into the blessed normalcy of Reals.p.a.ce.
Before she had rime to thank Micaya, a tightbeam communication a.s.saulted her weakened comm center.
”Back so soon, FN? What's the matter? I thought you were headed for Central.”
It was Simeon, the Vega Base managing brain. ”We had a small virus problem,” Nancia beamed back.
”Returned for... repairs.”
The rest of the story could wait until she had ab- solute privacy. There was no need to alert the galaxy to the fact that an unknown number of their computer systems were contaminated by Shemali hyperchips.
”Is everything under control now?”
”You could say that,” Nancia replied dryly, turning up her remaining sensors and looking over her inter- nal condition. Half her processors burned out, sleeping bodies littering the pa.s.senger quarters, three High Families brats secured in tanglefield and mad as h.e.l.l, Forister twitching with the pins-and-needles of paravenin recovery, and a crippled general bringing them safe into Reals.p.a.ce - ”Yes,” she told Simeon. ”Everything's under control.”
* CHAPTERMGHTEEN In the days of repair work drat followed, Nancia began to understand just how much Caleb must have hated being grounded on Summerlands while she went on with a new brawn to complete the task they had begun.
Now she, too, was ”convalescent” and temporarily out of the action. To protect herself from the insidious effects of Polyon's hyperchips she had, in effect, crippled herself^ rendering large parts of her own system inoperable; to keep the worm program he had implanted from contact- ing other hyperchips once they got out of Singularity and could make Net contact again, she had slashed through her own memory, ruthlessly excising whole sec- tions of memory banks and operating code.
”It's a miracle you made it back here in one piece,”
Simeon of Vega Base told her, ”and you're not leaving Base until you've had a very thorough overhaul and repair. Those aren't my orders, they're a beam from CS. So no argument!”
”I wasn't planning to argue,” said Nancia with, for her, unaccustomed meekness. Indeed, after the stresses of that prolonged stay in Singularity, followed by the limping return voyage on one-third power, she had very litde desire to do anything but park herself in orbit around Vega Base and watch the stars wheel by.
Or so she told herself She was tired and injured; she wasn't up to the stressful task of transporting the prisoners and witnesses back to Central for trial It was for more sen- sible to prepare a datahedron of her own testimony, something that could be sent back on the bright new Courier Service s.h.i.+p that came to collect theothers.
308.
6?
Til miss you,” Forister said, ”but you'll be back in action soon, Nanria. Why, at the speed Central works, you'll probably be returning before the trial's over!
And if you don't” - he hefted the gleaming weight of the megahedron in one hand - ”this is as good, for all legal purposes, as having you there. You've trans- ferred datacordings of everything that happened on board or that you perceived through your contact but- tons, right? Should be the most complete - and most d.a.m.ning-record we could ask for.”
<script>