Deep Storm

40

"Ready?" Crane said, disposing of the medical instruments. "Then take what you need and let's go."

Hui hesitated a moment. Then she walked to her desk, pulled open a drawer, and removed a bulky tool kit. Next, she disconnected her laptop from the network, unplugged it, and tucked it beneath her arm.

"What's that for?" Crane asked, nodding at her laptop.

"Spare parts." She straightened. "Ready."

"Lead the way, then. Avoid marines and security cameras."

They left the radiology lab and made their way down the narrow corridors of deck 3. At the first intersection, Hui stopped, then chose the right-hand path to avoid a security camera. They followed the corridor to the end, where it doglegged left.

Crane turned the corner, then stopped. Ahead of them, to one side of the hallway, two marines stood on guard outside a closed, redpainted door.

He thought quickly. The marines had radios clipped to their belts. But chances were very good there hadn't been any general announcement made about a search for Hui. If they were to back up it would look far more suspicious.

He reached for Hui's hand, gave it a brief, inconspicuous tug. Then he started forward, swinging Asher's laptop case with what he hoped was the right degree of indifference. After a moment, he saw-from the corner of his eye-Hui begin to follow him.

Crane passed the marines, who eyed him but said nothing.

They passed a half dozen closed doors, then arrived at another intersection. To the left, more marines were stationed.

"I can't do this," Hui whispered to Crane.

"You've got to."

She paused for a moment, clearly trying to think. "There's a maintenance stairway behind Bottom we can take to deck six. This way." She turned and started down the right-hand corridor.

The cafeteria was relatively quiet, a dozen people sitting in small clusters at the white-topped tables. Hui led the way along one wall to the swinging doors that opened onto the cramped kitchen. It was as crowded as the cafeteria was empty. In one corner, Crane saw Renault, the executive chef, but the man was busily plating a meal and did not look up.

Hui walked across the tiny kitchen, past the cold storage unit, and pulled open a metal hatch in the rear wall. A narrow metal stairway lay beyond. Ducking through and closing the hatch behind them, they made their way quickly up three flights of stairs to deck 6. The stairway ended here-no doubt, Crane realized, because directly above lay the Barrier, the no-man's-land between the classified and non-classified areas.

On the landing, Hui paused to collect herself. She reached for the handle, took a deep breath. Then she opened the hatch.

An empty corridor lay beyond.

She gave a sigh of relief. "The lab's just down this hallway."

She led Crane past a maintenance room and an unoccupied office, then stopped outside a door labeled MARITIME APPLIED PHYSICS and opened it briskly. Crane made a final scan of the hall, making doubly sure there were no witnesses or security cameras. Then he followed her into the darkened lab, closing the door quietly behind him.

Hui snapped on the lights, revealing a large, well-appointed space. There was a central table on which sat a stereozoom microscope and an autoclave. A couple of lab stools were snugged up to one side. An open door in the rear wall led to an equipment locker; to either side stood racks of oscilloscopes, galvanometers, and other gear Crane couldn't identify. A large drop cloth of some unusual material hung from a hook beside one of the equipment racks. It gave off a silvery sheen under the fluorescent light.

Crane walked over to the drop cloth, rubbed it between his fingers. "What's this?" he asked.

"Fire suppressant cloth. Just in case an experiment goes awry."

He nodded. "And why isn't this lab being used?"

"Dr. Asher had planned to take this opportunity-being on the Facility, I mean-to run some deep-water tests. Capillary-gravity wave analysis, current sedimentology, that sort of thing. After all, having a resource like this is the chance of a lifetime."

"What happened?"

"He was overruled by Spartan. Needed extra manpower for the excavation, it seemed. Lost bunk space for half a dozen of the scientists he'd been counting on." She walked over to the lab table, placed her laptop and tool kit on it. "You can set Asher's laptop here," she said. "As gently as possible, please. This kind of work should really be done in a class one hundred clean room: if we raise any dust, or if dirt gets on the exposed media, our chances of retrieving any data will become that much slimmer."

Crane set the laptop case carefully on the table. Hui rubbed her hands together for a moment, orienting herself. Then she began rummaging through various drawers, assembling a small arsenal of equipment: latex gloves, surgical masks, scalpels; a high-intensity work lamp; a magnifying lens in a tabletop stand; cans of compressed air. She opened her tool kit and spread the contents out on the table. Then she slipped a grounding strap over her wrist and glanced at him.

"What are we looking for, exactly?" she asked.

"I don't know for sure. Somehow, we have to reconstruct Asher's final journey of discovery."

Hui nodded. As Crane watched, she slowly unzipped the case and pulled out the damaged laptop. One end was badly burned, the plastic housing partially melted. Scorch marks and smoke covered its surface. Crane's heart sank.

Hui pulled on the pair of gloves, fixed the surgical mask over her face. She handed another mask to Crane, gesturing for him to follow suit. Using the can of compressed air, she gave the already-spotless table a cleansing blast. Then she used a screwdriver from her tool kit to remove the laptop's back plate. This was followed by the motherboard and the power supply. Now the hard drive itself was exposed.

"We might be lucky," she said. "The hard drive was away from the worst of the damage."

Moving to her own laptop, she disassembled it in turn. The work, the challenge, seemed to calm her. Watching, Crane was impressed by how quickly and skillfully she was able to break the computer down into its component parts.

Now, taking Asher's hard drive carefully in hand, she carried it over to her own laptop and substituted it for her drive. She quickly reassembled her laptop, plugged it in, turned it on. There was a loud clicking sound, followed by several beeps. An error message appeared on the screen and the computer refused to boot.

"What's that noise?" Crane asked.

"At the data recovery facility I interned at, they called that the Click of Death. It usually means a servo failure or something similar."

"That's bad, right?"

"I don't know yet. We've got to open up the drive."

She powered down her laptop, disassembled it again, and removed Asher's hard drive. Setting it carefully on the table, she motioned Crane to step back. Using a series of tiny screwdrivers, scalpels, and some tools that to Crane looked more suitable for a dentist's office, she coaxed off the top half of the housing. Bringing the work lamp close, she aimed it at the hard drive. The inner workings stood revealed in the glare: a series of thin, gold cylinders stacked one atop another, each sporting a tiny read/write arm, the whole surrounded by a tiny green forest of integrated circuits.

Hui leaned in with the magnifying lens, giving the drive a close inspection. "There doesn't appear to have been a head crash," she said. "The platters look like they're in good condition." A pause. "I think I see the problem. There are burned chips on the PCB."

"PCB?"

"Primary controller board."

"Can you repair it?"

"Probably. I'll swap out the board with the one from my laptop."

Crane frowned. "You can do that?"

"Every laptop on the Facility is precisely the same model. You know the government-always buy in bulk."

Working through the magnifying lens, Hui used jeweler's tools to remove a tiny portion of the drive mechanism. "It's really fused," she said, holding it up to the magnifying lens and turning it this way and that with a pair of tweezers. "We're lucky the platters themselves weren't melted."

She put it aside. Opening the hard drive from her own laptop, she carefully removed the same piece, attached it to Asher's drive, and replaced the top of the housing.

"Moment of truth," she said, returning the damaged drive to her laptop. She quickly reassembled the computer, plugged it in, gave the interior a gentle blast of canned air, and switched it on again.

Crane drew close, staring eagerly at the screen. The same error message reappeared.

"Damn," he said.

"But the Click of Death is gone," Hui replied. "And did you notice there were no warning beeps during the POST?"

"What's that mean?"

"The laptop sees the hard drive now, no problem. It just can't find any data."

Crane swore under his breath.

"We're not done yet." She slipped a jewel case from her tool kit, opened it, and took out a CD. "This is a bootable disc with an assortment of diagnostic tools. Let's take a closer look at Asher's hard drive."

She slipped the disc into the laptop and restarted it. This time the screen came to life. The disc drive trundled for a moment, then several windows opened. Hui took a seat at the lab table and began typing. Crane peered over her shoulder.

For several minutes, Hui moused her way through a variety of windows. Long series of binary and hexadecimal numbers appeared, scrolled up the screen, then disappeared again. At last, she sat back.

"The hard drive is operable," she said. "I can't detect any further physical damage."

"Then why can't we read it?" Crane asked.

Hui looked at him. "Because it appears somebody has erased all the data on it."

"Erased?"

She removed her face mask, shook out her hair, and nodded. "Based on the electromagnetic pattern, it seems somebody used a degausser on it."

"And this was done after the fire?"

"Must have been. Asher wouldn't have done it himself."

"But why?" Crane felt stunned. "That makes no sense. For all anybody knew, the laptop was ruined."

"I guess somebody wanted to make sure of that."

Slowly, Crane pulled out the other lab stool and sat down. He took off his own mask and dropped it on the table. All of a sudden, he felt very old.

"That's it, then," he said. "Now we'll never know what Asher found."

He sighed. Then he glanced at Hui. What he saw surprised him. She was looking back, a small smile on her face that-at any other time-he might have termed mischievous.

"What is it?" he asked.

"I still have one or two tricks up my sleeve."

"What are you talking about? The hard drive's been erased."

"Yes. But that doesn't mean the data's gone."

He shook his head. "I don't understand."

"It's like this. When you erase data on a hard drive, you're really just overwriting that data with random zeros and ones. But you see, when the read/write head writes that new data, it uses only enough signal necessary to set the bit. That's the way hard drives work: just enough signal, and no more."

"Why is that?"

"To make sure that adjoining bits aren't affected. Anyway, because the signal isn't powerful enough to fully saturate the platter, whatever data was previously there is-like a ghost-going to affect the overall strength of the signal in that location."

Crane looked at her, uncomprehending.

"Let's say you have two positions on a hard drive, side by side. The first contains a zero, the second contains a one. Then somebody comes along and overwrites those two positions with two ones. So now we have a one in both positions. But guess what? Because the read/write head uses the bare minimum of signal to write those ones, the position that had a zero in it before has a weaker signal strength than the position that had a one in it."

"So the data that was there before affects the new data that overwrites it," Crane said.

"Exactly."

"And you've got a tool that can resurrect that old, overwritten data?"

Hui nodded. "It takes an absolute value of the signal and subtracts it from what's actually on the hard disk. That leaves us with a shadow image of what had been there before."

"I had no idea that was possible." Crane paused. "But wait a minute. The data wasn't overwritten. You said it was degaussed. Demagnetized. How can you restore that?"

"Whatever kind of degausser was used, it doesn't seem to have been very powerful: probably a hand-held model. Or maybe the person who did this didn't take into account that the platters of the hard disk have a small amount of shielding. Anyway, a light degaussing is the equivalent of overwriting the hard disk two, maybe three times. And my equipment has the capability of restoring data that's been overwritten twice as many times as that."

Crane could only shake his head.

"But the process is destructive. We'll only have one pass at it-and that means we'll need another hard drive to dump the reconstructed data onto. I trashed mine when I removed the PCB." She glanced at him. "Can I borrow yours?"

Crane smiled. "Seems we're going through laptops pretty fast. Sure, I'll get it now."

"I'll get the data recovery started." Hui pushed the magnifying glass aside and reached for her tool kit.

"You be safe." And Crane turned and quietly left the lab.