"Lisa Smedman - Psychotrope" - читать интересную книгу автора (Smedman Lisa)

octagonal box that represented the sub-processing unit he'd decked into. The false datastream created by the masking
program would glitch up the actual data that was flowing into Red Wraith's "foxhole"тАФin the real world, the hardcopy
printer that was connected to the port would hiccup and spew out a page or two of jumbled graphics. But with luck,
the admin clerks at UCAS Seattle Com-mand would lay the blame on a hardware glitch.
Red Wraith crouched lower in his foxhole as the tank rumbled closer. Crashing the IC wasn't an option. A stunt like
that would trigger too many system alerts, and then he'd have hostile UCAS deckers to tangle with. Instead he had to
find some way to subtly defeat the program.
As the tank loomed over his foxhole, Red Wraith could feel the walls and floor of the I/O port rumbling. Then the
tank's tread sealed off the hole, plunging him into dark-ness, and Red Wraith was engulfed in the stench of hot
exhaust and oil. Part of his mind acknowledged and appre-ciated the detail of the programming, noted the
effective-ness of psyching out the target by overwhelming his senses with such oppressive detail. Another part of
him responded with the fear the tank's designers had intended to induce. But the logical, methodical part of Red
Wraith's mindтАФ the part that had given him the steady hands and cool head to perform assassinationsтАФwas in
control. Almost instinc-tively, he tucked away his fear and activated an analyze utility.
The utility appeared next to him in the customized iconography he'd given it: a trode-patch electrocardio-graph
monitor like those used in hospitals. Programming on the fly, Red Wraith modified its outer casing, shaping it
into a gleaming chrome spike like those on the treads of the tank. Then he reached up and jammed it home. The trode
patch on the wide end of the spike sampled the graphic imaging of the IC, then adhered firmly as it was incorporated
into the tank's programming.
A series of pulsing red lines appeared in the darkness in front of Red Wraith as the utility began its analysis. He
scanned them quickly as the tank rumbled clear of the I/O port, noting the oscillation of the sine wave and the
fre-quency of the peaks on the baseline below it. The readouts told him not only what type of IC he was up againstтАФ
blaster, an attack program that could send his cyberdeck's MPCP chips into meltdown on a successful hitтАФbut also
how tough the program would be to crack.
Diagnosis: tough. But not mega. And that puzzled Red Wraith. He'd decked into a military computer system
con-taining confidential personnel datafiles; the IC here should have had ratings that were off the scale. Sure, the
datafiles were merely the records of personnel who had "retired" from active service. They hardly contained anything
that would be considered damaging to UCAS national security. Just addresses, medical records, next-of-kin forms. No
ac-tive service records. But they should have been guarded more closely, just the same.
Hmm. . .
A sudden shift in perspective took Red Wraith by sur-prise. Suddenly he was lying on the "floor" of the system
construct, looking across an expanse of corrugated metal at the glowing rectangular block of the datastore he'd been
trying to access before the tank materialized. The I/O port he'd been hunkering down in was nowhere in sight.
He processed the shift in the visual landscape and in-stantly realized what had happened. The I/O port had gone
off-line, ejecting him back into the octagonal box that rep-resented the sub-processing unit as its icon disappeared.
The UCAS SEACOM's sysops must have noted the glitch in the printer and taken the port off-line. Now he was fully
exposed. . .
Light flared explosively around Red Wraith as an IC at-tack hit home. The resolution of the images that sur-rounded
him shimmered and blurred. When they came
back into focus a moment later, the colors were muted, the resolution grainy. And it was getting worse. The walls and
floor of the sub-processing unit were losing their solidity, just the peaks of the corrugations showing in a barlike
pat-tern that revealed gaping, empty, non-space beyond . . .
Drek! The system was also protected by jammer IC! It was messing with his deck's sensor program, messing up his
ability to distinguish the iconography of the Matrix. It had already partially wiped his ability to process the visual
component of the tank. But he could hear the bone-jarring clatter of its spiked treads and could feel the subsonic
rum-ble of its engines, even though he couldn't locate the di-rection from which these sensory signals were coming.
He was equally blind to the jammer IC that had put him in this fix. But his tactile sensations hadn't been glitched yet.
He felt around him, patting his hands gently over the corrugated floor. There! A round device with a button on top: a
land mine. The IC was a nasty little piece of pro-gramming. Its first, undetectable attack had been when Red Wraith
first logged onto this system, rendering the jammer IC invisible to him. Now he knew what he was "looking" for. But