“You’ve given them new supersmart computers!” Vicky cried.
“For a while,” Nelly allowed. “They’re on probation. One screwup, and we’re out of here.”
There was a soft knock at the door, and it immediately opened to let a small head peer in. “I figured Aunt Abby would be in here,” Cara announced with all the pride of a twelve-year-old who had solved a Nancy Drew mystery a full five pages ahead of her hero.
“How did you get past the Marines?” came from several voices.
Kris wasn’t one of them. “Abby was just leaving with Vicky Peterwald. Have you finished your schoolwork?”
“Dada said there was more to do, but I ignored her,” Cara said, pulling her computer up from where it hung from her neck. “I told Dada that if she kept hounding me, I’d turn her off, just like Aunt Abby does her computer.”
Which launched a storm of unconnected conversations.
“I told you,” Nelly snapped at Abby, “that you were a bad influence.”
“I will not be controlled by my computer,” Abby snapped right back.”
“Even that kid has a supercomputer,” Vicky wailed. “Kris, we have to talk.”
“Yes, but not now,” Kris snapped for her own protection. “Jack, get Sergeant Bruce in here and have him see that a certain little girl is kept occupied. Or in the brig. His choice.”
“Aye, aye, Commander.”
“Abby, you and Vicky get over to my quarters and see what you can patch together. Don’t come back until you’ve got a plea guaranteed to bring tears to the eyes of a stone statue.”
“You bet, boss,” Abby said.
In a series of “Boats right. Boats left,” commands that would have made any admiral proud, Kris herded her various cats off to where she wanted them. Done, she returned to the table with the admiral, Jack, Amanda, and the professor.
“Nelly, are you satisfied with these two working for now with two of your kids?”
“They are just happy to be awake and have a job to do, assuming, of course, that when heads go up on pikes, we computers get left behind in a nice jewelry box. I will, however, monitor this matter closely to assure that my children are not taken advantage of in their eagerness to serve.”
“Amanda, Professor, you understand your probationary status?” Kris said. “Would you rather use your own pet computers?”
Both nodded agreement and assured Kris that they were only too happy to be working with such fine computers. “I will need to download several of my modeling tools,” Amanda said. The professor then confessed to the same need.
“Jack, how much finance and economics was in your degree?”
“Kris, I just did a search on the background of these two poor souls now working for you. I’m not in their league, and, since I’ve had a chance to check out your college work, I know you aren’t either.”
“But Nelly did a high-speed and thorough workup on the Turantic economy,” Kris pointed out. “I expect that she has more practical experience at breaking and entering planetary databases than any of us.”
“You mean we won’t have to send off request after request for data, then wait for some clerk to get around to it or just flat out deny it?” the professor said, rubbing his hands together with glee.
“It sounds like the only stuff we’ll actually have to mess with is the fun stuff,” Amanda said.
“Nelly, make sure you and your kids are very, very careful. I would prefer not to have to deal with some angry cop from St. Pete’s. Vicky’s father is going to be a big enough problem as it is.”
“I’m glad you broached that topic,” said the professor. “While my young colleague’s shining eyes sparkled at the thought of huge amounts of data flowing into her greedy hands for analysis, the thought came to me that a gushing stream of data pointed right at us is bound to attract attention. Attention we do not want.”
The professor turned in his chair. “Chief, who is your new friend?”
“I am Lieutenant Stanislaus Kostka, of the Greenfeld Navy,” he said, somewhat self-consciously, glancing down at his uniform.
“Don’t be so shy. Stan here is the best network man in my squadron,” Admiral Krätz added. “He’s the one who helped Vicky research what little she could of our economy and did the statistical analysis that showed the numbers were too good to be true.”
“What do you know about the network down below on St. Pete?” Kris asked.
“I have the published design specs. I also have done a bit of remapping the system. It is very fragile, what with all the problems we’ve been having,” Stan said, innocently. “I’ve found that there is a lot more net out there than anyone’s admitted. St. Pete’s the sixth planetary system I’ve mapped for Miss Vicky. Every one of them has been loaded with add-ins and extra databases that officially are not there.”
“If you’re going to keep two or three sets of books, you’ve got to have them somewhere,” the professor said with an impish grin. “But again, I say, if we suddenly start copying all of those illicit files to us for analysis, a blind network administrator would notice the flow and investigate.”
“Admiral, what would you suggest?” Kris said.
“Do I look like a criminal? A spy?” the officer said, throwing his hands up.
“No, sir,” Kris said, “but you do look experienced. You have survived in what appears to me to be a very dysfunctional system. More than survived; you, sir, have thrived.”
“ ‘Survived’ is the operative word,” he said. “Now, as my headstrong young assistant has pointed out, we of Greenfeld are behind you Longknifes, but we are not primitives. Greenfeld manufactures a very fine line of smart metal. We also are producing self-organizing matrices for computers. We haven’t had much luck making them work, have we, Lieutenant?”
The lieutenant quickly agreed with his superior officer.
“But you do have a supply of the matrices, and you are working with them, are you not?”
“Yes, sir. Miss Vicky has had me working on them in my spare time.”
“Of which my junior officers have way too much,” the admiral said, and avoided seeing the face the lieutenant made at the table in front of him.
“Lieutenant, take the Gunny and a four-Marine escort. Return to the Fury and bring back the full supply of exotic materials that you have. Also, I think Lieutenant Peterwald would like to have Chief Meindl join us over here. Bring him. You remember him, Commander. He was your prisoner on Chance. You gave him a tour of the trap you were setting for young Hank Peterwald and his military coup. My good friend Captain Slovo was able to use his input to stop the whole slaughter.”
“Sometimes you want a spy around,” Kris said. “I found him to be a good man, Chief Meindl.”
“He may help with a few things I have in mind; now, off with you, Lieutenant.”
The young officer fairly raced to obey his admiral. Kris waited until he was gone before asking the question on her mind.
“Care to share what you have in mind?”
“There is more than one way to acquire a data dump. You kids these days have it so easy. Just say a few words to your commlink, and everything is delivered to your fingertips.”
“Your idea of research is way oversimplified,” Amanda slipped in.
“You’re probably right,” the admiral agreed. “And, this may be just a dumb old sailor’s thought, but if you don’t want to leave footprints on the net, why not avoid hotfooting it around the net. Nelly, you spun off search bots faster than I could think of the idea. I’m sure you can use our fine Greenfeld glop to knock together some very nice bugs. Tell me where the databases are that you want to copy, and I can come up with some reason why a detachment of my sailors needs to march by there.
“Your bots will link into the net right next door to where the data is, copy it out, and fly back to one of my unsuspecting sailors, and bingo, we have the data, and any net manager has at best data going from somewhere to a node that no longer exists and never was on his system map.”