David Policar 1992
Between the two of us, Tasha and I had no problems avoiding the complex's security once we were inside. I could hear the guards coming at least three corridors away, and any of them who got close enough would suddenly remember something suspicious in the corridor a dozen yards back, or a closet they forgot to check, or something else to distract them. As long as we kept moving, the central computer wouldn't notice any significant hole in the random-path coverage.
Of course, getting into the complex was never the hard part. The hard part would be getting Danny to the control node, to work his particular brand of magic.
The other hard part (for me, at least), was the waiting. Even before the Change, I was hardly the patient sort; afterwards, it was all I could do to keep from climbing the walls... or at least gouging them a bit.
"Dammit, stop fidgeting. Everything's going fine, by the numbers. No problems."
The thing about Tasha is, when she says things like that, she makes you believe them. She says she was always like that; not many people believe her. I suppose I can't blame them, espers make lots of people nervous, including me. On the other hand, I couldn't imagine Tasha ever being any less quietly commanding than she was when I met her.
Not that it helped, of course. I was still nervous, and that meant I was twitching, and the damned claws were popping in and out of my hands, and all the other nervous tics that took up residence in my new body when the old model got traded in were going full swing.
Tasha closed her eyes for a moment, and strained. "Castell's fine," she added. "He left the van at the transmission point about ten minutes ago, no problems. He's probably within sight of the complex by now."
I thought about glaring at her, but there was no point. It had been a damned stupid stunt for her to pull, with who-knew-what kinds of watchdogs around the complex, and she knew it. But it was also exactly what I needed to hear, and she knew that, too. I went back to listening.
Sure enough, it was only a little while later that I picked up the bike's hypersonics, and heard the guard dogs go wild. The damned whistle gave me a headache too, but I didn't have a few thousand bucks worth of hardware boosting the gain on my hearing. I almost felt sorry for the dumb critters, and even more for their handlers -- guardian cyberdogs are vicious at the best of times, they're designed to be. With the grandmother of all feedback in their skulls, they'd be impossible to handle with anything less than a fully-armed security regiment.
So far, Tasha was right. By the numbers. I signalled her and we moved out carefully, avoiding the emergency foot patrols as we made our way out of the building.
This was the gamble. They needed their walking patrols on the north side to put down the dogs. The textbook response was to go red-alert and activate the emergency floater patrols to take up the slack. They were expensive to operate, but state-of-the-art -- powered by broadcast wave from the complex's fusion core, simultaneously controlled and monitored by the central computer system, equipped with full-spectrum scanners and a plasma rifle that could put a serious dent in the complex itself. They were built to be impossible to control from anywhere other than the complex, for that reason; the control code was supposedly unbreakable, and changed every few seconds. Any attempt to alter and rebroadcast the command signals was a waste of time, since the signal code included the time from the complex clock, and the floaters would ignore any commands that didn't sync to within hundredths of a second with their internal shielded clocks. Both internal and complex clocks were continually synchronized to the atomic clock broadcast from the Pentagon, which was even better protected than the complex itself. According to theory, there was no way for anything but the central computer to control the floaters.
We had no intention of challenging theory.
On the other hand, we had no intention of controlling the floaters. What we did have was a fairly sophisticated high-power directional radio broadcaster built into a van parked nearby, conveniently aligned along the broadcast beam from Washington. If everything was going according to plan, it was now masking the time signal with its own output, subtly slowing the complex's internal clock. Not much, of course; just a fraction of a second, not enough to bother any of the system software. It was all designed to handle much higher error tolerances.
All of it, of course, except for the emergency floaters, now being broadcast commands that were obsolete as soon as they were received -- a billion bucks worth of state-of-the-art security equipment floating harmlessly a few feet above the ground.
At least, that was the plan. Of course, some hotshot systems designer might have caught on to the hole in the last month and recalibratedthe testing threshold on the computer's internal clock. In which case we'd be fried as soon as we stepped out the door. I might be able to dodge the blast, at least enough to survive. Tasha and Danny wouldn't stand a chance.