Nano (25 page)

84

Base One, Tintara

Tom gazed at the holoscreen. ‘So far, so good,' he said to himself. Then to Sybil, ‘Ready, Syb?'

‘I am. But as I warned you, I can only keep Light Touch's system open for a maximum of 11.2 seconds. I'm not totally convinced you can fulfil the task in that time.'

‘Just watch me, babe.' Tom tapped at his keyboard and studied the figures and symbols shimmy across his screen. ‘Right . . . here we go.' Stabbing ‘Enter', he was inside Light Touch's primary computer, a laptop that Sybil had traced to an apartment on East 65th Street, Manhattan.

Once in, he moved with incredible speed. A simulacrum of Light Touch's laptop screen honed into Tom's view. He let his fingers fly over his own keyboard, shooting through the hacker's systems with the ease of a world-class gamer playing an Xbox. Rifling through the files, 3 seconds after entering the man's system, Tom had located what he was after: a file entitled ‘Deposits'. He opened it immediately and there it was: the money Light Touch had received from the Four Horsemen. Payment for hacking into ITAM's systems. Tom wasted a fraction of a second boggled by the immensity of the sum.

‘Shit! I'm working for the wrong people!' he muttered to himself and zipped on, into the control system monitoring the files. He found a path between the files and Light Touch's screen.

‘Two seconds,' Sybil announced as Tom's fingers darted over his keyboard. ‘One second . . .'

He was there. He was about to transfer all the money from the account but in the final moments decided to finesse things. He was out with 0.2 seconds to spare.

‘There, oh ye of little faith, Sybil!' Tom declared.

85

Geneva, Switzerland

If it were possible to stand in the processing complex of the ITAM building in Geneva unobserved by Light Touch (who had sensors covering every inch of the room), for several minutes after the nanofly arrived, it would seem that nothing much had changed in this space. But this would be an illusion, because something very definitely was happening in the room. It was, though, happening in an invisible nanoworld, far, far beyond the ability of a human to see.

Each of the 40 million nanobots excreted by the nanofly were approximately 500 nanometres in diameter. To put that into perspective, a nanobot is about the size of an Ebola virus, so the 40 million examples on the floor of the processing complex would fit very comfortably onto a pinhead.

These nanobots were programmed to reproduce themselves and they did this by using the raw material of the nanofly. By the time the robotic flying machine had made its way to the processing complex, its primary purpose had been fulfilled. It then moved on to its secondary function – to provide fuel for the multiplication of the nanobots.

The nanobots reproduced extremely quickly. Within a minute, there were 80 million of them. A further minute passed and there were over 300 million nanobots. By this time, the nanofly was no more.

On Tintara, Tom was following the progress of this reproductive procedure. He had returned to Cyber Control, the main computer centre at Base One. Here he sat in his motorised wheelchair close to the huge screen that took up an entire wall of the room. At their control panels around Cyber Control, technicians worked with Sybil, manipulating and guiding the reproduction of the nanobots according to a prefigured program built into each of the original 40 million machines. And, as though they were passing on their DNA, each of the original bots communicated their program to the ones they made and these carried the same set of instructions to pass on to their progeny. One big difference between this process and the reproduction of living things was that the original nanobots didn't age and eventually die. Instead, dozens of generations of machines worked in unison. The other difference was that the nanobots and their programmes remained pure and unadulterated by reproduction because they were not replicating by a blending of genes from a male and a female.

And that is why these nanobots were all but unbeatable. By the time Light Touch's sensors noticed something wrong in the processing complex of ITAM, it was too late. A billion nanobots were in the room and they had spread out and found their way into tiny cracks in the metal cuboid shielding of the processor core, just as an army of viruses or bacteria infiltrate a host and start to attack the cells of a living thing.

A few seconds after penetrating the cuboid, the nanobots had made their way to all major components of the core, invading the memory systems, the electronic circuitry and the power controls. Guided by Sybil, they were utterly invincible.

86

New York City

Light Touch was sitting in the living room of his penthouse apartment in Midtown New York. It was 4 am, the lights of Fifth Avenue, 76 storeys below, broke the grey night. Rain beat against a wall of windows overlooking Central Park.

The hacker was naked and so slender it was possible to count his individual ribs. His grey beard, plaited at the end, reached almost to his navel. Seated in a white leather armchair, his computer on his lap, he stared at the screen. He was playing
Assassin's Creed III
with seven cyberfriends in unknown locations around the globe.

He turned to pick up a tumbler of water at his side and when his eyes returned to look at the screen it had changed. The backdrop for the assassin in the game – Renaissance Venice – had dissolved. In its place, an Excel spread sheet filled the screen. He recognised it immediately. It showed one of his secure bank accounts: the one he used to deposit his fee from the Four Horsemen. It comprised a list of payments and expenses relating to the ITAM operation. He had assumed everything about that project was under complete control. Indeed, he had been so relaxed about it, he had put it on ‘auto-guidance' – a mode that only alerted him if something untoward happened in Geneva. So far nothing had interfered with his mission, allowing him to indulge in the quick game of
Assassin's Creed III
.

His eyes scanned down the screen and he felt his skin become instantly cold. There had been a seven-figure number there. Now there was something very different. His fingers trembled as he played with his beard and stared at the amount: $0.50.

Then he was calm again. ‘Oh dear,' he muttered. ‘Now that is a shame.'

Under the calm, his mind was racing. There was only one way this could have happened, he mused. Somehow, his employers had planted a cyberintruder, the digital equivalent of a virus. This clever little device caused no damage to the computer, nor to any of the machine's operating systems. Instead, it simply stole, accessing bank accounts and personal information no matter how well they had been protected. The Four Horsemen must have taken back the money they had paid him. They had achieved their aim of destabilising ITAM and had then concluded they no longer needed him. That could be the only explanation for this.

He tapped the keyboard and the bank account information vanished, replaced by his management screen for the ITAM project. It was at that moment the ‘auto-guidance' alarm sounded. Light Touch understood what had happened in Geneva immediately. His fingers flew over the keyboard and he concentrated so hard on the information streaming across the screen his head began to throb.

In little over 1.5 seconds, the nanobots controlled by Sybil had sucked the data from the gigantic ITAM mainframe in Geneva and, like a fleet of viral agents attacking an organ and then shooting through the blood system to invade another, they began accessing the hard drive of Light Touch's laptop through the internet.

Light Touch hated to be beaten but he knew when he was and he appreciated superior forces when he encountered them. He could not help but stare in wonder as file after file on his laptop was sucked dry. Quelling his rising panic as best he could, he scrambled through his systems, trying desperately to salvage what he could, partitioning parts of his hard drive before they were spirited away.

And then he saw what he needed: a file only marginally less important than his financial ones. It sped across the screen to a folder entitled ‘The Four Horsemen'. It contained everything he had ever found out about his employers.

But even as he pulled the file towards him and dumped it into a specially encrypted ‘safety pod', Sybil's tendrils had gripped it too. Light Touch felt a surge of desperation shoot through him.

‘Have it!' he screamed across the vast expanse of the apartment, the sound bouncing back at him. ‘But I'm having it as well.'

And he just managed to copy the information to a safe folder as the data slipped away through cyberspace and into Sybil's vast memory.

87

Somewhere above Dubai

‘Mark?' Dimitri called into the internal comms aboard the Big Mac. ‘
Mick
and
Keith
have arrived.'

‘I'll be right there.'

Mark Harrison strode onto the flight deck, half a sandwich in his hand, his mouth full. Pacing over to the main control console, he saw on the big screen the two Silverbacks from Polar Base. They took up position level with the Big Mac a few hundred metres to port.

‘Mark? Dimitri?' It was Ralph Newman, the pilot of
Mick
. ‘Sorry to have kept you waiting,' he quipped, knowing that they had made record flight-time from their home station on the Russian Island of Semja Alexandry inside the Arctic Circle, some 5000 kilometres northeast of Dubai.

Mark smiled back at the image of Ralph on the screen. ‘I hear you broke all the speed limits.'

‘Very possibly,'
Keith
's pilot, Gina Zvilion, interjected. ‘So what's the situation?'

‘Not good, to put it bluntly. Tom's computer model gives us between 21 and 22 minutes before the Tower goes.'

‘Christ!'

‘We have something like . . .' He checked the control panel. ‘Eighty-seven per cent evacuation of survivors below the impact site, some 27,300 people, and the rescue services on the ground have been augmented by sailors from HMS
Suffolk
and HMS
Valiant
, and from the aircraft carrier, HMS
Queen Elizabeth
. Three-hundred men have helicoptered in. The Chief of the Dubai Fire Service has assured me they will have everyone out of the tower and in a safety zone in time.'

‘But . . .?' It was Ralph.

‘But we have a group trapped on Floor 199. Steph and Chloe are with them. Steph's given me a full report. They've found 13 survivors. They're all walking wounded, broken bones and severe lacerations. But ironically, Chloe is the most seriously injured. She's sustained multiple wounds and lost a lot of blood.'

‘But the nanobots are –'

‘Yeah, of course. But they'll take time.'

‘So you're thinking about a nanonet?' Gina said matter-of-factly. ‘Like the operation in California a few days ago?'

‘Yes,' Dimitri Godska interrupted. ‘But this is different in certain fundamentals.' He tapped at his keyboard and immediately the two pilots in the newly arrived Silverbacks received schematics of the Tower. ‘This is the plan.'

88

Dimitri was kitted out in his cybersuit and watching the top of the tower rear up as he gripped the cable on which he was descending to the roof. Below him he could see the two Silverbacks,
George
and
Ringo
, where Chloe and Steph had landed them over 90 minutes earlier. He had chosen to ride
George
, its deep blue hull just a few metres to starboard of the cable.

He leapt the final couple of metres, ran to the plane and shot up the recessed steps to the cockpit, the canopy opening automatically. Once seated, he belted up and ran a speedy pre-flight check.

‘All systems ready.'

‘Copy that, Dimitri,' Mark replied from the flight deck of the Big Mac.

The engines of the Silverback burst into life, sending out a stream of flame and gas from the undercarriage as the majestic aircraft ascended slowly, accelerating as it cleared the helipad of the Cloud Tower.

Dimitri could see the other two Silverbacks,
Mick
and
Keith
. They were just specs on his sensor screen. He brought the plane around and there they were in his holographic helmet display, suspended in the air 200 metres above the tower.
Mick
was glowing pearlescent white,
Keith
a dark green.

‘Welcome to the party, Dimitri,' Gina Zvilion called through the comms.

The three jets turned away in different directions. Gina banked around her Silverback and took up position 300 metres from the tower, the nose of the plane pointing towards the northeast-facing wall. Dimitri pulled
George
around and lowered the jet down to the building on the northwest-facing side. Ralph headed directly south before swinging around 40 metres beneath the roof and pointing the nose of his Silverback towards that side of the Cloud Tower.

‘Steph?' Mark said into his comms. ‘Progress report, please.'

On Floor 199 of the Cloud Tower, Steph stared around at the devastation. Chloe lay on the ground beside her on a hastily constructed stretcher made from a couple of pieces of metal from a crumpled clothes rack and a rectangle of wood taken from a flatpack in an office equipment store. Steph and Frank had managed to lash the wood to the poles with several dozen metres of electrical cable from
Cloud Electrics
. They had also found some clothes in a nearby shop and fashioned Chloe a makeshift pillow. She was covered in a silver emergency blanket from her utility backup belt. Her eyes were closed but she was still conscious.

‘The bots are working overtime on Chloe's injuries,' Steph told Mark. ‘And the suit is almost fixed. She lost thermal control, so we have a blanket over her.'

‘Is she conscious?'

‘Yes.'

‘And the others? How are they?'

‘They're bearing up but obviously terrified and exhausted.'

‘All right, Steph. I want you to get everyone into the centre of the floor. No one near the walls. Get under cover if you can.'

‘The planes are moving in?'

‘They'll start on your signal.'