Phoenix

40. Venus

The vibration of the helicopter's engine thrummed through the floorboards, a rhythmic reminder of their precarious flight above the dark, churning waters of the North Sea.

Inside the cabin, the air was thick with the scent of tension and adrenaline. Arya held the cyclic steady, her eyes locked on the horizon where the black sky met the even blacker sea.

​"Now what, Jin?" Arya asked, her voice tight with the strain of the escape.
"What's the play? We've got the disc, but we're flying a stolen chopper in a country that's about to have its entire infrastructure melt down."

​Jin shifted in the co-pilot seat, his gaze turning to Tina. The young Uno looked small in the back, her face pale under the dim tactical lights of the cabin. "That depends on our resident genius," Jin said. "What can be done, Tina? I have the antivirus CD, but we can't just distribute this version to the world. If we do, we're handing Elisa the keys to every server on the planet. Her backdoor in this antivirus will harvest whatever she wants from wherever she wants."

​Tina leaned forward, her fingers twitching as if she were typing on a phantom keyboard. "I can fix it. I can strip the backdoor protocols and re-patch the handshake logic. It's a matter of surgical code deletion. I could have started the work ten minutes ago, but your C-4 'distraction' back at the office turned my laptop into a very expensive confetti."

​Jin winced slightly. "Collateral damage. But we can solve that. I'll get you a new terminal the moment we touch down. The real question is the clock. We have barely ninety minutes before the global infection hits the point of no return. Can you fix a polymorphic Uno-code antivirus in that time?"

​"I can fix the code," Tina said, her voice gaining a sharp, professional edge. "But fixing it is only half the battle. How do we distribute it? We're already miles behind schedule. I wanted to use Elisa's own localized uplink because it was already peered with the major global hubs. Without that, we're trying to whistle into a hurricane."

​"She's right," Arya added, glancing at the fuel gauge. "If we can't broadcast this to the world's backbone servers simultaneously, it won't matter if the code is clean. It'll be like trying to put out a forest fire with a water gun."

​Tina sighed, looking out the window at the whitecaps below. "Give me thirty minutes to purge the backdoor. But after that? I need at least an hour to send it to every major internet exchange point (IXP). And that's a conservative estimate. Most networks have proprietary security that will flag a mass-distribution as a secondary attack. I'd need to infiltrate them all at once. That requires massive bandwidth-millions of gigabytes of throughput per second."

​"Should I land, Jin?" Arya asked, her hands adjusting the controls. "Maybe we find a high-speed hub in a business park near the coast?"

​"No," Jin shook his head, his eyes narrowed. "We stay away from the mainland. Bulldog and Elisa aren't just operatives anymore; they're wounded animals. They'll have the Dutch police and every Agency asset in Europe looking for this helicopter. If we touch down near Amsterdam, they'll have us pinned within ten minutes."

​"But the clock, Jin!" Arya protested. "Tina needs a workstation now!"

​"I know," Jin said calmly. "But we have to be alive to save the world. If we're in a jail cell or a morgue, the code is useless."
​Jin turned back to Tina. "Okay, let's simplify. You need thirty minutes for the patch. But if we can find a way to cut the distribution time-something faster than a manual IXP hop-could we make the deadline?"

​"The only way that works," Tina said, her eyes lighting up with a theoretical spark, "is if we have access to a machine capable of parallel-processing the infiltrations. It would need to be a node already connected to the global network backbone, something with the raw power to handle the overhead of a million simultaneous connections."