"Huh..." Joffrey Dieterville's stride dropped off, and finally fell short. His guide, Annabelle Marlborough, turned and glared.
"What now? You coming or not, Hacker?"
"Aren't they supposed to be red? I mean...they're always red in the pictures..."
"Its the Bretonian suns...Most people assume the pictures of them landed are before they're painted or something, but in all honesty, the only color on a Dunkirk is the gold leaf..well, there's a bit of red, too...but its all just highlights. Most of it is white, you get used to it."
"Used to it?" They were walking again now, steadily approaching the stripped out skeleton of a Dunkirk.
"Insides are white too...almost reflective...makes it easier to light."
------------------------
Under Marlborough Pile, Planet Leeds, three kilometers below the surface, in chambers carved by a sunken sea flowing around deposits of niobium for eons under the influence of an elliptical moon, floated thirteen hundred platforms, many not much larger than the average Cambridge house, dotted with a few that stretched on for city blocks, all of them laced with their own spiderweb of luminescence in the lightless deeps. Here, and in many other similar grottoes, the second line of Dunkirks were being manufactured, their systems tested, their crews trained. A Dunkirk II, further along than any other, and a bit further behind, perhaps, as far as its development, was nearly ready for launch.
The ship was white. You could shave with these walls. Brightly lit, too, like you wouldn't believe. Shadows simply didn't exist, even when your head and shoulders were inside the wall paneling, mucking with coms systems or the sensor arrays. Thats mostly where Joffrey Dieterville was spending his time, setting up a boosted sensor phalanx and a sort of a callback device into the comms...a long-range ecm. Just some basic binary and analog attacks, and a heuristic friend/foe mechanism, but the high data packets gave him amazing amounts of space to work with, and com systems simply weren't defended the way they should be for these sort of transmissions...though they were easy enough to shut off.
A macro data packet, like the ones sent after the IFF mechanisims, could easily contain self aware assault packages, learning the layouts and systems of an enemy ship, and hopefully causing havok before any realtime combat event. Of course, a ship with a 20 year old autistic/nonlearning AI would have more than enough digital mass to brute force through most of them, Dieterville's little assault viruses had been known to lay out Ageria Jumpgate AIs for hours, and even spread down the lanes to multiple systems. Dieterville himself was working on the BAF project as parole for one such incident.
"Now, I'm not saying you couldn't try, not at all...But since you're not a Heuristic Intelligence, I'd recommend against brute forcing it. You're basic structure should be strange enough, just through your natural growth, that invading systems shouldn't be able to function. You're running six processing hubs, throughout the ship, and at full employment, you could probably grapple with a WorldNet Intelligence....." Joffery Deitervile droned on at length, already quite enthused. Anne shimmered nearby, waiting paitently for him to finish while sneaking about Leeds WorldNet.
QUEEN ANNE was, of course, not a functioning AI, nor the Turing tape code Deiterville suspected. She was a girl, aged 14, suspended in a gel tank and fully plugged into a virtual control and reply mechanisim. Her body was entirely paralyzed, but then, she was so much more. She was the ship. Instead of eyelids, she had three thousand four hundred seven cameras fixed in lighting fixtures, a tractor beam instead of fingers, attitude thrusters replacing much of her left hand functioning...she was surrounded by the central aiming center, and a mock Turing tape, with autistic functionality. She was the culmination of the shrike project, the BAF had three hundred more just like her, and she did not exist. She could not.
Deiterville was busy, extremely so. The ship was operational, and it was his jobs to filter off about a thousand digital attacks an hour. Most didn't make it past the rotating encryption strings or the elucidate function, but right now he was struggling against a rather tenacious virtual worm that was chewing through the actuator control sequences. Damn thing wrote itself with larger blocks of binary than was standard, and so hid from the search function...like a book with letters made from piles of books, it couldn't be found from ground level in the library.
"What?... oh... a .kill kills things...usually used to euthanize..."
