Excerpt: Station Jove

Kisho had to admit that travelling aboard a transport was more comfortable than flying a runner, but it wasn't as much fun. It was also a bit of a bore to be separated from Gunther, but there had been no helping that. The operation called for coders, not for pilots or sensor techs. And Gunther, for all his good points, just wasn't a coder. Neither was Kisho – officially – but he found he could easily hold his own with the military coders who made up most of the code room's crew.
And unlike any of the military coders he had tackled Russian systems before. That made him the one they all automatically turned to when something looked a bit difficult. He'd tried to protest that he was just an amateur the first few times, but being able to point out what was going on was too much fun. It wasn't that the guys around him couldn't have figured it out as well, but the weird way the Russians built their systems meant it was often a tough call.
Unless you'd had some experience rooting around in those, and Kisho had made sure to study as much of the system he could when he'd taken over the enemy runner. Those systems weren't really the same thing as the control nets he was helping to tackle now – they were a lot smaller to start with – but like a lot of code the basic workings had been similar enough. Indeed one of the main quirks of the Russian code seemed to be that it had been upscaled in a brute force style where more subtle purpose written systems would have been infinitely more logical.
"Jaguar Six to Puma Alpha," he said told his com. "We're going to have this one cracked open pretty soon, are you boys ready?"
"Puma Alpha, Jaguar Six," the reply came instantly. "If you're going to be here much longer you might want to learn proper com protocol. But yes, 'we boys' will be ready. Just give us the word as soon as they're down."
Kisho grinned but made no reply. Major Rana, the Indian officer in charge of force Puma wasn't a bad sort, but he did get just a little upset about Kisho's decidedly non-military style at times. Which only made Kisho more determined to keep it up, just to make it clear he wasn't another army boy. Then again it was probably strange enough for the major to head a combined force of Indian and European troops, without mixing in an Oceanian Civilian functioning as a temporary spy, who'd somehow found himself as head coder on the operation.
It certainly wasn't a situation Kisho had expected to find himself in either. And he had to admit that was part of what made him act up like that. But it was still working, and the major was at least dealing with his part of it better than Kisho would have. Of course that might have something to do with the fact that the operation so far was a resounding success. Which was good for everyone involved, even thought it was starting to make Kisho a little nervous.
"Be sure to keep an eye on these as we knock them over," he instructed the coders around him. "I can't be sure, but I have a feeling there's going to be some resistance this time."
He'd wanted to say that just about any time they'd tackled a group, but had managed to hold back so far. There'd never been a clue, and there was nothing definite even now. But there had been a few non-standard lines of code in one or two runners. Those might just have been maintenance tinkering with the ships, but Kisho was worried some of them might have been put in by pilots trying to boost their performance. And anyone who could do that could at least try to ride the lock.
"We'll be ready for them," one of the coders next to him claimed.
Kisho turned to him with a grim look. "Just for that you, Lieutenant Paulson, get to be the one in charge of the main codestream on this one," he said. "If you're so sure you should hardly have any trouble keeping the Russians out."
Paulson paled a little at that, but to his credit didn't protest.
"Understood," he said. "Ready to switch over the main stream when you say sir."
Kisho nodded and studied the displays in front of him. His position as head coder, and chief liaison, had at least earned him the best seat in the hastily assembled room, with display just about anywhere he could easily find them. Most of them were turned over to various code streams, but the top left display was a tactical navigation chart. That allowed him to judge the range to the enemy ships and choose the moment of attack.
"Flip the stream in two minutes," he said. "And let me know the instant you do so I can keep Rana informed on this."

"New stream going live!"
Normally it was Kisho's shout, but this time it was Paulson's and to his credit he managed to keep his voice from betraying any nerves. His code was a slightly different matter, Kisho saw as he watched his repeater display. But even that was steady enough for the basic switch over. The real question was whether they were going to see any opposition.
"Jaguar Six, Puma Alpha," he told the com. "The new code is going up. Stand by for further data."
It was much more by the book this time, but he was too worried about those stray lines to think about needling Rana. The displays were still all clean, but...
"We've got defence code!" His voiced exploded through the room and over the com. "All coders immediate localisation. Puma Alpha stand by."
It was probably bad form to give the commander of the operation actual orders, but there was no time for subtlety. Kisho's hands were back on his console running code before he'd even finished speaking. There was a definite attempt to break the group net that had just been hijacked. And while force Puma had been equipped to deal with that, Kisho's orders were not to let that become necessary if it could be avoided.
"Fighters Alpha through Charlie are clean!" he announced.
"Delta and Echo are clean as well," Paulson reported.
"Getting a hit on Foxtrot... I think."
Kisho turned to look at the speaker. It wasn't like Carla Varati not to be sure of herself. In fact anyone of mixed Indian and European origin who'd managed to be made a lieutenant in the Indian army had to stand firm. The prejudices against children of mixed parents might be fading, they certainly weren't gone by a long shot, especially not in the military.
"Can you be more specific?" he asked.
Varatis shrugged. "I can't see him fighting me, but at the same time I don't seem to be getting the right responses to my queries."
Kisho nodded. "Anyone else got a hit?"
There were no calls and he nodded again, this time to himself. "In that case I'm going in on Foxtrot. Everyone get ready to go in behind me, but stay back a little."
There was a general affirmative grunt, mixed with what sounded like a few sighs of relief, and Kisho focused on his console. He was feeling anything but relieved, but he was still, by whatever freak circumstance had put him in charge of these people to begin with, the best person to tackle the job.
He ran the same standard queries over the squadron net he knew Varati must have run. And he got the same standard answers back. It was looking good, but there was something off, she'd been right about that – and had done well to spot it. The answers were right for the squadron, but not for Foxtrot. Foxtrot was starting its engines, even while reporting complete idle along with the others.
"Jaguar Six, Puma Alpha." The room around him suddenly grew quiet as people strained to hear what was going to say. "We've got a definite code fight on our hands from Foxtrot. We'll try to solve this in the code, but stand by to take him out the other way if that should fail. Jaguar Six out."
He dropped the link and turned to his attack code again. These runners were a slightly different model from most of the ones they'd run across, which meant his standard code wasn't likely to be as effective. But at the same time he had to start somewhere. He put the code on the com system – tweaked it a little on some hasty readings from the rest of the squadron, and then sent it, now it remained to be seen how Foxtrot would react to that.
Kisho didn't even listen to the murmur of voices around him as he watched the display. The attack code was on its way in, with a simple mission this time. It had been tasked to shut down the engines again. The rest he could deal with once that corridor was open. But of course the question was whether the code would get that far.
His eyes twitched back and forth between displays. The sensors did show a slight drop in engine power now. Not a lot perhaps, but Foxtrot was heading further away from engine readiness, instead of closer to it. That meant his code must have worked at least a little, and after making sure his backlinks were blocked Kisho followed it in.
He could almost sense the watching code behind him. The rest of his team was waiting to back him up, and trying to watch what he was doing. It wasn't the way he really liked to code, but in battle there was little importance to what he liked at a time like this. The point was getting his code in and beating off the Russian's code. If he could do that the rest mattered very little.
The first counter attack nearly got him. In fact it would have been dangerous if his back links hadn't been secured. But even then he felt confident it would have failed. The blocked links might influence his enemy a little, but the plain fact was that he'd sprung his trap too soon. The code had clearly been waiting to be used, and he'd used it before Kisho's code was deep enough in his system to really be surrounded by it.
It was a style of thinking that had taken Kisho long enough to get used to, and he wasn't surprised it didn't instantly occur to someone only really used to peacefully tinkering with the code of his runner. It was also a sign that it was high time to set up some sentry programs along his code line, and he heard a few whispers around him as he did. Clearly his audience had never seen that trick pulled quite the way he'd done it. But then none of them had ever had a chance to watch Ryan's moves in order to pick out things to steal.
With the sentries racing back and forth across his code link, and a second pair spreading out and essentially building new code paths back to the enemy's com system Kisho took a few moments to await any other attack code the pilot might have in store. There was none. He gave it another minute, in order to let his sentries thoroughly test his enlarged network and then sent another batch of code forward into the enemy defences.
The Russian had been expecting him, but clearly hadn't thought of the most logical strike path when dealing with a runner. His code had been in place to defend his core systems, and looked rather cobbled together when it suddenly had to do something else. A few well placed attack bursts knocked his processes out of line and Kisho moved on. Within moments his code was where he wanted it to be and the Russian had nothing left to do but to watch as his interface system was taken down from the inside out.
In a larger ship it would have been futile to even try that, there were too many interfaces to switch to. But Kisho had had a lot of time to think of the best ways to battle a Runner, and with only one limited interface system node, enough to handle just two sets of interfaces, it was easy enough knock out all local input and leave only the remote commands to play around in the system. The Russian might still be in his own ship, but he didn't even have enough access left to order the code to be restored. At least not without opening her up and directly accessing, the processors.
"Enemy code resistance has seized," he reported over the com. "Expect to get the final ships into ghost formation within in the next three minutes. Jaguar six out."