The Wheel of Darkness

He tapped a few keys and a new screen came up:

HMS BRITANNIA – CENTRAL SYSTEMS

AUTONOMOUS SERVICES (MAINTENANCE MODE)

PROPULSION

GUIDANCE

HVAC

ELECTRICAL

FINANCIAL

TRIM / STABILIZERS

EMERGENCY

Pe

Well, he’d expected that. Exiting the menu system, he brought up a command prompt and began typing quickly. A series of small windows appeared on the screen.

“What are you doing now?” Hufnagel asked.

“I’m going to use the diagnostic back door to access the autopilot.” Just how he was going to get access, he wouldn’t say: Hufnagel didn’t need to know everything.

A phone rang in a far corner of the server room and one of the technicians answered it. “Mr. Hufnagel, call for you, sir.” The technician had a strained, worried look on his face. Pe

“Coming.” And Hufnagel stepped away.

Thank God . Quickly, Pe

A few mouse clicks and a new screen appeared:

HMS BRITANNIA—CENTRAL SYSTEMS

AUTONOMOUS SYSTEMS (DIAGNOSTIC MODE)

SUBSYSTEM VII

CORE AUTOPILOT HANDLING SUBSTRUCTURE

He thought he’d ask a question before Hufnagel started in again. “When—I mean, if—I transfer control of the handling routines, what next?”

“Deactivate the autopilot. Kill it completely, and switch manual control of the helm to the aux bridge.”

Pe

“Yes, it is. Now get on with it.”

Pe

“What’s that?”

Pe

“And?”

“And I’m going to reverse engineer it, find the interrupt stack, then use the internal trigger events to disrupt the process.”

Hufnagel nodded sagely, as if he understood what the hell he’d just been told. A long moment passed as Pe

“Well?” Hufnagel said. “Go ahead. We have less than an hour.”

“It’s not quite that easy.”

“Why not?”

Pe

“Can you remove the encryption?”

Can a bear shit in the woods? Pe

He liked the sound of that—it even rhymed. He began to relax again; this was going to be a piece of cake. “It’s going to be tough, real tough,” he said, giving his tone just the right amount of melodrama. “There’s a serious encryption routine at work here. Anything you can tell me about it?”

Hufnagel shook his head. “The autopilot coding was outsourced to a German software firm. Corporate can’t find the documentation or specs. And it’s after office hours in Hamburg.”

“Then I’ll have to analyze its encoding signature before I can determine what decryption strategy to use on it.”

As Hufnagel watched, he piped the autopilot datastream through the cryptographic analyzer. “It’s using a native hardware-based encryption system,” he a

“Is that bad?”

“No, it’s good. Usually, hardware encryption is pretty weak, maybe 32-bit stuff. As long as it’s not AES or some large-bit algorithm, I should be able to crack—er, decrypt it—in a little while.”

“We don’t

have

a little while. Like I said, we have less than an hour.”

Pe

“Well?” Hufnagel urged.

“Just hold on, sir. The analyzer is determining just how strong the encryption is. Depending on the bit depth, I can run a side-cha

The analyzer finished, and a stack of numbers popped up. Despite the warmth of the server room, Pe

“Jesus,” he murmured.

“What is it?” Hufnagel asked instantly.

Pe

“Until the

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