“This perimeter?” Barton asked, drawing a finger along a dotted line.
The whole installation was spread out over kilometers of rough country, patches of housing or machinery sheds in pockets of flat ground separated by forest and rocky hills.
“Well, that’s the problem. It’s hard enough to get people to live up here anyway, you couldn’t at all if you tried to cram them in cheek-to-jowl. We’ve got first-rate all-weather roads, though.” A true rarity on Sparta, outside the capital and some of the larger towns.
“The perimeter guard is sensors and detectors, with blockhouses here”—points sprang out—”manned by the security force and by militia on rotation. If there’s an alarm, all the Citizens and the reliable non-Citizens and their families concentrate here, in the Armory, or at assembly-points throughout the settlement, and move to where they’re needed. All the real non-combatants, kids and so forth, head for the Armory; it’s massive, mostly underground, with a cleared field of fire all around. Not that we expect an attack here, of course, the Helots haven’t been within fifty kilometers of us, but we’re also the coordinating point for the other mining settlements, and the farmlands and ranches all around the north shore of Lake Alexander. There are more of them than you’d expect, with the mines to feed. There’s good land up here, it just doesn’t come in big blocks like it does down in the Valley.
“And then,” she continued, “we’ve got the woods all around the mine sown thickly with disguised sonic and visual sensors; anything suspicious is routed directly through here and to the relevant perimeter posts. Minefields all around; multiple-use, they can be set for command detonation or sonic, thermal or vibrational triggers—cost a fortune.”
Barton nodded. “Okay. Now let’s look at that perimeter.”
“Now?”
“No time like the present.” He led the way outside the room and down the corridor toward the coffee room. When they got there he ushered her inside despite her surprise, and closed the door behind him. A Legion sergeant had set up equipment on the lunch table.
“Secure, Andy?”
“Yes, sir. There was a bug, but I sort of stepped on it.”
“Bug? In here?” Karen Olafson stared at the red-haired headquarters sergeant. “Are you sure?”
“Damn sure. You put it there, right?” The sergeant stared menacingly at her.
“What? General Barton—”
“She’s okay, sir,” Sergeant Andrew Bielskis said, continuing to study the console he had set up on the table. “That’s genuine shock reaction.”
“Right. Was there a bug in here, Andy?”
“Not in here, sir. But there’s a couple in the corridor, and I’ll bet my arse the computer system’s been penetrated. Ma’am, if you’d just put your hand on this plate for me. Now the other hand here. Excellent. How’s the weather outside? Know any Helots?”
Fury and curiosity were fighting it out on Karen Olafson’s face. Curiosity won. “All right, General, what is this?”
Barton got another nod from Sergeant Bielskis. “They’re planning something,” Ace said. “Something big, from the number of troops they’ve been infiltrating into this area. Damned near a regiment.”
“I—how do you know that?”
“Luck. Good and bad luck. The good luck was one of their deserters got to sleeping with a local girl, one night tried to warn her to get away before this week. Bad luck was local intelligence decided not to risk sending it on the wire—”
“Or telling me,” Karen said indignantly.
“Yes, ma’am. But it took a week for the report to reach Captain Alana. Since then we’ve seeded some of Mace’s scouts into the area. Something’s up, all right. Something big and ugly.”
“Oh, God— You said ‘this week.'”
“Yep. So. First thing I want you to do is shut things down,” Barton said. “Close off all mine operations while we do some security checks. Do it slow, make it look like routine maintenance, but start buttoning up and getting your irreplaceables secured, and I mean start right now. I’m particularly worried about that computer system. You rely on it too much.”
“We can’t operate without it—”
“Exactly. Andy, I want Jenny and her techs to go over this place and put in manual backups for the security stuff, especially all the control systems. That bloody computer is a point failure threat, and I don’t like it. It goes down, we have a hell of a job controlling things.”
“Yes, sir. We’ll start in the morning—”
“No, Sergeant, you’ll start tonight,” Ace Barton said. “And we’ll just damned well pray it’s not too late.”
* * *
Warrant Officer Jennifer Schramm poured coffee and sprawled in a plastic chair that couldn’t have been very comfortable. It was well after midnight.
“You look like you can use a break,” Ace Barton said.
“General, that’s a fact.”
“How much have you got done?”
“About half of it,” she said. “I’ve got manual activation lines for the mine fields. Some bypass communications, but we’re running out of optical fiber.”
“More coming in tomorrow,” Barton said. “What does the computer know you’ve done?”
“Nothing, sir. Well, it knows we shut down its access to some controls for a while, but as far as it’s concerned everything’s normal again. What we did, we’ve jury rigged a manual control console. Throw a couple of big switches and the computer’s bypassed, you’ve got manual control.” She sipped coffee. “Frankly, General, I’m amazed at how much they trusted to that damn computer.”
“Think it’s been penetrated?”
“I know it has been.”
Ace frowned. “How do you know?’
“Well, I don’t really, but I feel it. Fault logs. They’re squeaky clean, General Barton, and I don’t like that. It’s like something was erased, maybe. Same for access records. Some of them are missing.”
“Missing?”
“Yes, sir. Again, it just looked too damn clean so I got Andy to have a talk with a couple of the techs, and of course they were playing war games on the damn computer—and there’s no record of it. Like someone wiped the access record files.”
“The techs—”
“No, sir. Look, playing games might get them docked an hour’s pay at worst, if anyone really gave a damn, but erasing logs, that’s a firing offense, and they bloody know it.”
Barton touched his communication card. “Wally.”
“Honistu here.”
“Wally, take a break. Come drink some coffee and put your feet up.”
“Well, a little busy, but that sounds right, sir.”
Jennifer looked a question.
Barton smiled. “Right. Wally’s been with me a long time. My adjutant in Barton’s Bulldogs. Way I asked him made it an order.”
“You really think they’re listening to everything?” Jennifer asked.
Ace shrugged. “This room’s secure, don’t know about the rest. Tell you this, if the computer’s bugged, the control room is. And Andy found a bug in the corridor. It shouldn’t have been there, not smart to put one there.”
“Too easy to find?”
“Something like that. Not obvious, but not that hard to find either. Almost like maybe it’s an early warning? Maybe so when we disable it they know we’ve found it? I don’t know. I can’t think the way the rebels do.”
Major Honistu came in and closed the door. “I’m damn busy, General. What’s up?”
“Sit down, Wally, and let’s talk a minute. Jenny doesn’t like what she’s finding in the computer. More like what she’s not finding.”
Honistu nodded judicially. “I got the same ugly feeling, General. Add in the intelligence reports, and we got problems.”
“Right. What you’re doing out there is important, but so is doing a bit of thinking while we have the chance. Let’s talk.”
* * *
Alarms rang in the corridor.
“That’ll be it,” Ace Barton said. “OK, Wally, get moving. I’ll be in central control.” He led Warrant Officer Schramm up the corridor while Honistu ran off in the other direction.
Karen Olafson sat at the central console. An alarm wheeped softly, and one screen blinked red. She looked up as Barton came in. “Emergency Network. The Torrey estate is under attack.”
The screen showed a man in combat armor thrown on over indoor clothes. Tall, with rather long brown hair and a flamboyant mustache, in his thirties.
“Alan, this is General Barton.”
“Barton. Alan Torrey here,” he said; he spoke with the accent of an American of the taxpayer class. “I’m definitely under attack, by a company or better. They overran the RSMP post up at the Velysen place, then hit here. We stopped them butt-cold.”
A grim smile; Barton decided that he rather liked Citizen Alan Torrey.
“All my people are armed, I won’t employ anyone I can’t trust. That gives us nearly a hundred guns, and we’ve been preparing for this. The problem is the Militia reaction-force from Danniels Mill; they came running, and hit an ambush about four kilometers south of here. Had to fight their way off the road and onto a hill; they’ve taken better than fifty casualties, and they need help bad. I can’t do it, we’re holding in our bunkers but if we come out their mortars will slaughter us.”