Mutiny in Space by Rod Walker Read Free Book Online Page B

your outmoded network interface.” Murdock’s eyes narrowed, but Arthur didn’t back down. “It doesn’t have enough capacity. It can only process sixteen sets of instructions at a time. That’s like taking a fire hose and trying to spray it through a straw.”
    Murdock folded his arms. “If your programming logic wasn’t so inefficient, it wouldn’t clog my interface.”
    Arthur scoffed. “There are thirty-six different cargo drones all running at the same time. Every single one of them has an independent programming set. Of course a lot of data is going to go through the interface. What, you want to run less than half of them at a time? We’d still be loading up at New Sibersk.”
    “You,” said Murdock, pointing at me. “You’ve been quiet. What do you think?”
    I hesitated. Actually, I thought they were both right. Arthur’s programming did tend towards the heavy side, covering contingencies that hardly ever happened. That said, Murdock had locked down access to the main computer to the point that the drones had trouble communicating with it.
    I opened my mouth to point that out, when an alarm I had never heard before went off.
    It was the call to general quarters.
    Arthur was the first to check the main. It seemed someone on the bridge had sighted a ship, and given that the system we were in was supposed to be uninhabited, the assumption was that it must be hostile.
    “I can’t stay here,” said Arthur. “I’m on the damage control team for the cargo bays.”
    Murdock grunted, waving him off with one hand while he reached over to set a flip a row of switches below the monitors. “Then you’d better get going, hadn’t you?”
    Arthur vanished out the door. Murdock started typing commands, and then glanced up at me.
    “Why are you still here?” he said.
    “Well, I don’t actually have an assignment for general quarters.”
    His scowl deepened. “Really? Suppose no one got around to it. Well, you can make yourself useful. You know how to do a CPU usage trace?”
    I nodded.
    “Sit there,” he pointed at one of the chairs below the screen of monitors, “bring up a combined CPU, network, and cooling trace on five, and tell me if it does anything weird. Got it?”
    “I got it,” I said, sitting down. I took a moment to orient myself with the controls, typed a sequence of commands, and brought up the usage display. It was one of the basic principles of cyberwarfare. In battle, ships often tried to hack each other’s systems with various forms of malware attacks. The ideal hack, of course, was one that went unnoticed by both the ship’s defensive software and the ship’s computer operator. Some things were impossible to conceal, however, and one of them was the heat generated from increased activity in the ship’s processors… such as the increased activity from a malware process might produce. So the ship had a system dedicated solely to tracking CPU and network usage, and any anomalous activity got flagged.
    Murdock busied himself by switching the computer systems to battle mode. That meant blocking any outside transmissions, switching priority over to the battle systems, and activating automatic defensive programs. Once that was done, he entered another command, and the sounds of the bridge came over the room’s speakers, and I heard Hawkins giving orders.
    Murdock must have seen my look of surprise. “One of the advantages of running the system. You know about things before everyone else.” He pressed a button. “Let’s see what we’ve got here.”
    The sensor display came up on another screen. Two ships were approaching the
Rusalka
. One was a blockade runner, small, fast, and heavily armed and armored. The other was larger and slower, and looked like a troop transport. Details filled up the display as someone on the bridge ordered a sensor focus of the blockade runner.
    It was a dangerous little ship, and capable of menacing most freighters, but it was no match for
Rusalka
. Once