Madlands

22. The Bad Choice

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The mood on level eight had gone from relaxed to bored and then to cutthroat once the Dejarik board had appeared.

It had been well over a week since the last major wave of personnel had been packed up and shipped back off-base and off-world, leaving just a handful of mission-maintenance specialists, a few mid-ranking officers from the original command structure, and two squadrons of Troopers running on a gruelling two-shift security schedule. There were also the lingering, brutish Ministry "liaisons," but the officers and therefore also the Troopers preferred to pretend that they didn't exist. They had served their purpose.

As to what the actual purpose of any of this was, very few among the lean crew that remained at the base were precisely clear. Likely another mining operation. Knowing anything beyond immediate orders wasn't the concern of the lower ranks.

Level eight was base surveillance, but even the on-duty squad leader had drifted away from his post to watch the latest match. Wagers had become involved, and another day of staring at monitors filled with mostly empty rooms had little hope of holding anyone's attention over ration and duty-roster stakes for the winners and losers.

The four small figures on the monitors, making their way around the lower levels, owed unknown gratitude to their holochess counterparts on the game board.

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You were looking up the outer terminal functions; it seems like you have a plan for how to do this.

I hope so. You're rather experienced with data systems, yes?

Enough to get by—maybe enough to do some damage, if I know what I'm looking for.

Then I'm sure you know that smashing up this room won't do anything except summon security. We need to use the system to deliver the blow for us. And simply deactivating parts of the operation is too easy to undo; they'll just turn them back on. I think we need to make some of the key components think they've been damaged, or that it's unsafe to continue to function. It'll be harder to figure out what we've done and harder to fix.

How do we do that?

There's two of us, so we should each take one part of the system, doubles our chances of having an effect. I'm thinking that one target is pressure monitoring—we feed the system false readings, making it think that there is a massive pressure-build up. That should cause fail-safes to kick-in, powering down some of the equipment until it's safe to resume. Even if they manage to undo what we've done, which will be hard if I'm right and few people are left, some of the equipment is likely to have a minimum time requirement before it re-engages. That's the easier one.

You might want to give me that one, then.

I should be able to show you the basics.

And the second?

Wipe-mining seems to involve injectors; they've been drilled way down into the mantle, and I think there's a good chance that they're essential to starting up the liquefaction process. But, it's only an educated guess.

No, it seems logical. I saw them on the diagram of Cereda, too.

One of the terminals monitors the integrity of injector shafts, and I'll try to convince it that it's picking up fractures along as many of them as I can, but there are dozens if not a hundred of them. Hopefully Case and Ingrid's efforts, combined with ours....