Susan's Plague

Chapter 11 - Dauntless

Nic was bent over a workbench in his lab soldering small transistors onto a circuit board. His Netpod beeped, but in his preoccupation, he ignored it. He had yet to setup all his sound profiles, so everything made a beep, the same beep, whether it was a priority matter or not. As such, the device beeped constantly and Nic was far too busy for interruptions.

He had received the new fuser for the printer, but it did not work out of the box. Instead of sending it back, he opted for troubleshooting the problem himself. It was a nice break for him to do some work with his hands, and the work took his mind off the myriad of other things that were troubling him of late. The Netpod beeped again. He took a sip of tepid coffee and made a face. Katherine clung to some rafters overhead, snoozing quietly. Nic fished through the drawers of a small parts organizer, seeking the right part. The Netpod beeped.

"Dammit, I'm going to throw this thing in the toilet." He cursed, picking up the device. At his touch the screen came alive, the display read:

Jupiter Ascension. Tunnel up. Listener online.

Nic blinked and shook his head slightly, not quite believing what he saw. Tripping as he moved from the bench, he stumbled to his workstation and began verifying the authenticity of the connection. The message included a small file which he transferred to his system, it was a program which would allow him to connect back to the Netpod through the tunnel, in command mode. The present connection was designed to deliver the message and the file, once disconnected it would be lost and the Netpod would not attempt another. More than one attempt would indicate something was amiss. He ran a quick integrity check and found the file had been changed, which gave him pause.

"Katherine? Can you come down here, I need some crypto assistance." He called up to her. She woke instantly from her repose and crept down the wall silently with cat-like grace. Nic connected her up to his systems and started feeding her data.

"The file has been altered, can you verify the encryption?" He requested, it was but a moment later his answer came back, displayed on his screen. The encryption was good. It did not make much sense, but it was definitely his Netpod on the other end of the link, but it was hard for Nic to comprehend that someone would have not only discovered and decoded his trojan, but reconstructed it and repackaged it. It made him very nervous, for the first time in a long time Nic felt like he had met his equal, someone on the other end was every bit as skilled as he was, perhaps more. He disconnected the link.

"Katherine, run a full diagnostic on the firewall."

She chirped and dutifully began running batches of tests.

Nic stabbed a pen at a piece of paper as he was wont to do when a challenging puzzle presented itself. He tapped his console and brought up the locator application which tracked the Netpods at all times.  Just as it had been since the morning of the KTI debacle, all Netpods indicated no contact. For a moment he thought maybe Erik was trying to contact him again, but why would Erik do it through the Netpod, Nic wondered. He dismissed the thought.

Katherine chirped, Nic looked up at the display - all security systems passed, the firewall was functioning as per design and Katherine had even swept the intrusion detection logs for anomalies and found nothing.

Nic decided to try to run the file, but first he brought a number of geographically dispersed proxies online in an attempt to obfuscate his identity and network location. He figured he may be able to discern the location of the Netpod if he initiated the connection, but he knew there was a risk that the person or persons on the other end would be able to do the same.  At this point though, he just wanted to find his friends and help them out if he could and this was his only opportunity, he felt a bit reckless.