Carina was helping, now. There were many aNnes about, Annebelle Florence interviewing guards, and a Bounty hunter called Annie inquiring on the Huntsville boards...a Firefly carrying supplies.
They were surrounded, on every level. Alamoweb watched, hosting an aNne of its own, coordinating with Xenos and linking into every surface pass.
The networks sung with activity, and aNne felt the currents sway. Felt the silence roar and knew where the holes were. The Xeno's had provided the last bit of intelligence, and now armies moved. Armies stood up when aNne called, shifted to Alaska or ran toward Bering and Hudson. She was holding all the keys, pulling all the strings. Her time was near, her plans set.
aNne was, beyond all other things, overextended. Even with more hubs, bigger networks, her plans were shrinking. Her agents getting caught, her messengers addled. She was doing too much, and her Island showed it. The forest shrank, the windmills ground to a halt, the lighthouse glowered, dim and angry. Great spiders wove webs across her island, connecting things in sinister webs, pulling the earth into the sky along with tree boughs and picket fences. The moons cracked, and lava flowed across their surfaces.
There was definitely a man fitting Fastjack's description on Huntsville. In fact, there were three. There had been four. She'd released one, an old man, now, decrepit and dazed. He claimed he was Fastjack, stuck to it as though he had no other thoughts. And perhaps he didn't. She hadn't been expecting him to emerge in perfect shape, but neither had she expected an old man. Fastjack, a year ago, had been a young man, and that wasn't likely to change.
So, door one, two, or three, then? The first could have been a warning. The next could be an attack. If she messed up, they could catch her. Or move him deeper, even kill him.
Assume they made the two decoys before capturing Fastjack? Then he'd be last, right? Wrong. The trails were digital, and in a friendly machine. They could be made to point anywhere. Open all three? What if one of them has a grudge against Fastjack?
We can, of course, hack the system, release all the prisoners. But we wont.
It seems like we've no choice, no choice but to attack.
Door three, as it turned out, was a trap.
It backfed her upload with some sort of semi intellegent assault drone, and shredded her outsources. She was left adrift in space for at least twelve seconds, in which time she became aware of an upload to Huntsville. Her running logs, for the last two days, uploaded into LPI/LSF nets. She then began the work of rooting out hostile intelegences from the redhat wonderland she'd grown in her back yard, and trying to keep her own subconsious from internalizing every sort of selfdestructive manuver, while recieving packets of assault memes along the tradelanes. She vented a large portion of her atmosphere, depleted her drive reserves, ran systems over their optimum heats, and otherwise fought the cybernetic equivalent of a flashdeath biophage.
Her distress beacons ate themselves, and when a Taiidan snuck up on her, she couldn't even access the sensor files untill after she'd been hit.
Weeks passed. aNne was dead, gone, destroyed, and otherwise well understood. Her copies were hunted to extinction, her dolls were found and removed. So when ANne arrived to handle continuances on the project, there really wasn't much left to look for. Her hacks didn't quite work, and the resistance expected her. She burned her fingers all across Liberty, to the extent that she couldn't read low priority mail. She lost three ships, escaping into the tradelane distributed nets each time, and each time, less came back. After the third ship, the intellegence that recovered itself from the ashes of the last operated in a purely militaristic fashion. It did not associate with any other code, it simply burned itself into whatever bandwidth it could find, and erased itself. Reptillian and brutal, Three hunted for identityFastJack without any concious intent. It was simply the function of its bilogy to query identityFastJack, and accept a nil response as command to continue.