Alien Research

CHAPTER 16

WE REJOINED THE OTHERS. “So, you’re still willing to be my wife?” Jeff asked, sarcasm turned to only about a six on the scale of ten.

“Since Paul insists that he and James aren’t ready to go bi yet, yeah.”

Gower shook his head with a laugh. “No matter what Kitty insinuates, she loves you best, Jeff.”

Jeff put his arm around me. “A man can hope, anyway. So, what’s the plan?”

Gower cleared his throat, all levity gone. “William, please send this through to all bases and facilities.”

“Ready, Pontifex Gower.”

“To all Centaurion Division and American Centaurion personnel, as Supreme Pontifex I’m declaring that, until we know the status of the majority of Alpha and all of Airborne Teams, and the status of Home Base and the Dulce Science Center, we are officially in a state of emergency. Full leadership will reside with our Ambassador and Head of the Diplomatic Corps, Kitty Katt-Martini, who will now be considered as acting as the Head of Alpha Team until the state of emergency is removed. Please obey her orders as you would anyone else from Alpha Team. Kitty, to you.”

Fortunately, I’d been prepared for this handoff. “I’d like all bases and facilities to remain on high alert. If we have Field teams out, I want them brought in unless they’re dealing with a superbeing. In which case, they need to contain it as fast as possible and get back to a base.”

Superbeings weren’t nearly as common as they had been, in large part because we’d taken the ozone shield down on Alpha Four, and in other part because we’d eliminated the in-control Mephistopheles superbeing. That Mephistopheles had been joined with Ronald Yates was just the kind of fun that we associated with Centaurion got to have on a regular basis.

“What about other threats or the return of missing personnel or communications?” Jeff asked me quietly. “Who will personnel report to in case you’re not available?”

Resisted the urge to hug him. He wasn’t asking because he was curious. He was asking in this way to ensure I covered all the leadership bases. He’d been the Head of Field for over a decade, after all. And he’d been training me, in that sense, since we met.

“Advise the Embassy immediately of any other threats identified,” I shared in my Official Giving Orders Voice. “But barring an immediate threat such as fire and the need to evacuate a facility, don’t take action without it being approved by me, Richard White, or Rajnish Singh.”

Got a lot of shocked looks for that one, other than from White and Raj. Christopher opened his mouth. I put my hand up and he shut it.

“I want as complete a roster of missing personnel as possible. We have a lot of people who went to Dulce today who aren’t there normally. If you can’t verify that someone’s where you think they should be and can’t reach them to verify their well-being, that information needs to be sent to us immediately. By the same token, should personnel presumed missing turn up, let us know that immediately as well.”

Time to shoot for the rosy outlook. “The moment anyone establishes contact with either Dulce or Home Base, or any individual known to be at either location, determine situation as fast as possible and advise the Embassy immediately.” Okay, so not rosy so much as hopeful. Whatever. “Let’s keep calm, carry on, figure out what’s going on, and stop it. Embassy out.”

“You’re back to just the Embassy Complex, Ambassador,” William said.

“Great. I need a team to assemble so we can head to Caliente Base. We’ll gate over there, then take jets to see what’s going on at Dulce and Home Base.”

“What do you mean ‘we’?” Jeff asked.

“I mean me and the rest of the team I’ll be taking. Which won’t include you.”

“Then you’re not going,” Jeff said firmly.

Everyone in the room gave him the “really?” look. “She’s the Head of Field Operations right now,” Chuckie pointed out. “Kitty essentially has to go lead whatever action she wants to initiate. And she’s right—you, as a representative, can’t go.”

“You have to act like nothing’s going on, Jeff. So that our enemies don’t know for sure that we’ve figured out that something is wrong.”

“Something’s more wrong, Kitty,” Stryker said. “We’re being hacked.” As he said this, all five of them, even Omega Red, leaped up and started pulling plugs out of the walls and flipping switches.

“The Embassy?” Chuckie asked.

“All of Centaurion Division,” Stryker replied as he and the rest of Hacker International continued to run around the computer lab hysterically.

Raj and White both zipped out of the room, Tito right after them. Decided not to ask where they were going. Hopefully to pull plugs out of walls and such.

“I think it was triggered by the search for personnel,” Ravi added as he leaped over a desk and yanked two computer towers out of the wall. Henry, Big George, and Omega Red were working on getting the big servers unplugged. We had a lot of them, though.

But happily Raj appeared momentarily on screen, then suddenly all the machines in the room were clearly turned to the “off” position.

“William! Send me to all bases again.”

“Go, Ambassador.”

“This is Ambassador Katt-Martini. We’re at DEFCON Bad. Everyone unplug everything electronic and computer based—our system is being hacked. Pull the stuff out of the wall if you have to, turn off any Wi-Fi or Bluetooth devices, get off the ’net at the fastest hyperspeeds possible, whether humans are watching you or not.”

“Reports coming in, Ambassador,” William said. “All bases are affected, including NASA. Determining extent of damage now.”

“Take me off the all-speak or whatever.”

“Back to Embassy complex only, Ambassador.”

“Thanks. Now, what the hell? Eddy, how can we be hacked? You guys installed firewalls and all that jazz, didn’t you?”

“The best there are,” Big George shared. “You already had a top-of-the-line system in place when we joined you. But we made it better.”

“We made the Centaurion system impenetrable,” Henry added.

“And our firewalls and defenses are being cut through like a light saber cuts through Qui-Gon Jinn,” Ravi said. He sounded freaked out. This wasn’t good.

“I recognize the signature,” Omega Red said. He sounded frightened. We moved from “not good” to “really scary.”

“Whose is it?” Chuckie asked.

“It’s not real,” Stryker said firmly. “There’s no way it’s real.”

The hackers started arguing amongst themselves while still furiously doing things. I caught some of it, but nothing they were saying made sense.

“Dudes! I want answers, and I want them now. And I want them in this order—can you stop it, how bad is the damage, and who the hell is it Yuri thinks is responsible?”

More hacker snarling but finally Stryker shared. “We can’t stop it. The ‘it’ was a virus that infiltrated our systems, stole our files and then destroyed them.”

“At the root,” Ravi added. “Meaning we can’t get them back.”

“What about backups? Surely we back things up? I mean, I back up my iPod, surely you’ve backed up our systems.”

“We did, all of Centaurion has a massive backup system in place.” Stryker’s voice was clipped. “We’re off the ’net, so I can’t be sure yet, but it looked like all backups were affected, too.”

“How? Aren’t the backups housed somewhere else?”

“Yeah, they are,” Chuckie said. “They’re housed at Area Fifty-One.”

“It gets better. Super duper, so, while we wait to hear what we’ve lost and what horrible things have also been done to our systems, who’s behind this? And I don’t want to hear the ‘it can’t be’ line, because ten minutes ago you’d have said Centaurion Division couldn’t be hacked like this.”

Stryker sighed and, for the first time looked right at the camera in the computer lab. He looked angry and freaked. “It’s a myth, okay? But the myth is that there’s a super-hacker, almost like a hacker god, and he’s responsible for all the really big, insidious hacks that happen. But this one person doesn’t exist.”

“He does exist,” Omega Red said, with more than a hint of stubbornness in his tone. “Because the only one who could have hacked through all of our defenses and into a system that’s more secure than any government on Earth is Chernobog the Ultimate.”