Price of Duty

ONE

Clouds covered the night sky, obscuring the stars and the new moon’s pale sliver. Deep in a patch of woodland east of an old Romanian military airfield, a twelve-foot-tall, humanlike machine stalked through the darkness — moving with catlike grace and quiet despite its size. Suddenly it stopped, crouching low beneath the spreading branches of a massive oak tree.

The machine’s six-sided head swiveled from side to side atop its broad shoulders, carefully probing the surrounding forest. At rest, it faded from view, becoming almost invisible both to the naked eye and to thermal imagers.

Inside the cockpit of the Cybernetic Infantry Device — a human-piloted combat robot — Brad McLanahan opened a secure channel. “Wolf One to Wolf Two. I’m in position and standing by.”

“Two copies,” a cheerful female voice replied. “I’m roughly three hundred meters to your right. So what is your evaluation of the tactical situation, young Jedi?”

Brad grinned. Five years ago, Charlie Turlock had taught him how to pilot these incredible fighting machines. Gutsy and combat-experienced, the former U.S. Amy National Guard captain and current Sky Masters CID specialist was still a teacher and robotics enthusiast at heart. She loved everything about the combat robots she had helped design, build, and steadily improve. That was why she was here now, serving as a covert adviser to the Iron Wolf and other Scion forces helping Poland and its allies.

It was easy to understand Charlie’s enthusiasm, he thought. Every time he strapped himself into a CID, he experienced a sudden rush of power, perception, and sheer freaking speed so unbelievably intense that it was almost sexual.

And why not? he thought. Covered in highly resistant composite armor, the robot’s microhydraulically-powered exoskeleton was stronger, quicker, and more agile than any ten men put together. Feedback from a special haptic interface translated its pilot’s gestures into exoskeleton motion, enabling the machine to move with uncanny nimbleness and precision. Sensors of all kinds, coupled with a highly advanced computer interface, gave a CID’s pilot astonishing situational awareness and the ability to aim and fire a remarkable array of weapons with speed and pinpoint accuracy. In basic terms, a single Cybernetic Infantry Device was more mobile, carried heavier firepower, and possessed significantly greater recon capability than an entire conventionally equipped infantry platoon.

Focus, Brad told himself sternly. Piloting one of these babies made it way too easy to get caught up in the thrill ride, losing track of the mission at hand. He concentrated more fully, allowing his CID’s neural interface to show him the composite imagery crafted from its wide range of passive sensors. Several slowly pulsing yellow dots blinked into existence on his display.

“I count at least ten fighting positions occupied by enemy infantry deployed across our line of approach, about two hundred meters out,” he told Charlie. “They’re dug in really well, completely covered by antithermal IR camouflage suits or netting. But I’m getting multiple heartbeats through my audio pickups and seeing several thermal traces of respiratory CO₂.” He smiled. “I could light ’em up with my radar to see what kind of heavy weapons they’re manning, but that would probably give us away.”

“Indeed it would, Wolf One,” Charlie replied. Her tone was amused. “But I suggest you refine your scans a bit. I think you’re seeing the worm, not the hook.”

Slightly nettled, Brad did as she suggested, mentally commanding the CID’s systems to tighten up its sensor readings, briefly concentrating on one sector. His image of the larger environment grew slightly fuzzier as the computer honed its focus. More data flowed through his conscious mind at the speed of thought.

“Skurwysyn. Son of a bitch,” he muttered in Polish, seeing what she was getting at. After living for more than a year in Poland, he was commenting and even beginning to think in Polish. Those heartbeats he was picking up were way too regular, as were the CO₂ traces. “They’re decoys.”

“Yep,” Charlie agreed. “Probably some kind of dummies wired up to simulate human cardiac and respiratory systems.” Now she sounded admiring, but just the tiniest bit smug at the same time. “Our friends out there are getting clever. Just not quite clever enough to beat the software and hardware tweaks my guys and I built into that Mod IV CID you’re riding.”

“It is a sweet machine,” Brad agreed absently, widening his sensor fields again. If the enemy had its decoys positioned out front, then logically its real strike force should be stationed on a flank, ready to hammer anyone pouncing on the bait.

“Gotcha,” he murmured. Several of the huge oak trees off to his left were very subtly wrong, just slightly too symmetrical to be natural. They were hollowed-out fakes large enough to conceal a heavy-machine-gun nest or an antitank missile team, he realized. Seen by a human eye, that camouflage was near perfect, but not when pitted against a CID battle computer with its lightning-fast ability to discern and analyze patterns. There were also several patches of ground near the trees that didn’t quite match the predicted natural rise and fall of the landscape. Those were probably foxholes covered with camouflage cloth, he decided.

Quickly, Brad highlighted the enemy positions he’d detected and sent the imagery to Charlie’s CID. Their computer systems simultaneously compressed and encrypted signals before transmitting them in short, millisecond-long bursts. Together, this combination of compression, frequency hopping, and encryption allowed CIDs operating together to communicate freely, without the risk of enemy interception.

“Wolf Two copies,” she replied. “What’s your plan, Wolf One? Flank the flankers? If you go about half a klick due west, you could—”

“Negative,” he said, edging backward, moving unhurriedly enough to stay hidden from view. Like the Mod III before it, his CID’s armored “skin” carried an overlay of hundreds of small, hexagonal thermal adaptive tiles. Made of a special material, these tiles could change temperature with amazing rapidity. Using data collected by its sensors, the CID’s computers adjusted the temperature of each tile to mimic its surroundings — displaying the heat signatures of trees, bushes, buildings, and even other vehicles. When moving slowly or at rest, the robot was practically impossible to detect using infrared or other thermal imagers. At high speeds, the camouflage system broke down as the CID moved through too many different heat textures too quickly and drained its power supplies.

“C’mon, Brad,” Charlie said persuasively. “Between the thermal system and the new chameleon camouflage plates we’ve added, you can sneak right in on top of those guys and shoot the crap out of them. It’ll be a great test of the system. All you’ve got to do is take it nice and easy. No fuss. No muss. No burned-out batteries. Right?”

She was right about that, Brad knew. This new CID also wore thousands of paper-thin electrochromatic plates layered over its thermal adaptive tiles. Derived from a highly advanced technology the Poles were experimenting with for a main battle tank they were designing, they represented the most significant upgrade Charlie and her Sky Masters team had crafted onto the new Mod IV CID. Put simply, they gave the robot a chameleon-like ability to blend with its environment. Its onboard computers continuously monitored the terrain through which it moved, using tiny voltage changes to change the mix of colors displayed by each electrochromatic plate.

But there was another way to deal with this planned ambush, one that might be a heck of a lot more fun. So he kept retreating, moving back about five hundred meters in silence, blending with the shadows. At last, satisfied with his position, he slid a 25mm autocannon out of one of his weapons packs and checked the ammunition load. “Okay, Wolf One is weapons live,” he radioed Charlie. “Stand by.”

“What the heck are you playing at, Brad?” she said, exasperated. “You can’t lay down effective fire from your current position — not unless you’re planning to waste enough ammo to chop down half this forest first!”

“You know what your trouble is, Charlie?” Brad asked.

She sighed. “I’m afraid to ask. But go ahead. Tell me.”

“Despite all those years you spent under my dad’s command, you still think like a ground pounder,” he said. “But I’m a McLanahan to the bone, so I know you should fight using all three dimensions whenever you can.”

“Oh no,” Brad heard Charlie groan.

“Oh yeah!” he said, grinning like a madman. Then he took a deep breath, getting set and making sure those hidden enemy fighting positions were locking in tight on his battle computer. Three. Two. One. Now! Autocannon at the ready, he sprinted forward — accelerating with every stride, racing through the woods at ever-increasing speed. Shattered branches, leaves, and clumps of torn brush whirled away in his wake.

Guided by his commands, his CID’s computer threw a series of markers across his display, continuously adjusting them as his speed picked up. Two hundred meters. One hundred and fifty meters. Seventy-five. Ten. The last marker flashed green.

And Brad jumped, bounding high into the air at nearly seventy miles an hour. The huge fighting machine came crashing down through the trees, hit the ground still running, and leaped again.

This time Brad landed right in the middle of the enemy position. He dug in his heels, braking to a stop in a huge cloud of dirt and dust, and then spun rapidly through a complete circle — firing precisely aimed bursts into every foxhole and hollowed-out tree concealing hostile troops and weapons. Flashes lit the woods in all directions, strobing eerily in the darkness.

At last, his autocannon whirred and fell silent. Blank ammunition expended, the CID’s battle computer reported.

Still smiling, Brad opened a channel, careful to set his electronically synthesized voice to normal human volume. “So, what about it, Captain Schofield? Have you and your merry gang of backwoods bandits had enough for tonight? Or shall we make it the best two out of three?”

Cautiously, a soldier, clad from head to foot in a leaf-and-branch-studded sniper’s ghillie suit, stood up in one of the foxholes. Before joining the Iron Wolf Squadron to fight the Russians last year, Ian Schofield had been an officer in Canada’s Special Operations Regiment. Now his own teeth flashed white in a rueful, answering grin. “I think you’ve made your point, Brad. As has Ms. Turlock.” He shook his head in wonder. “That new Mod IV CID of yours is a damned good piece of gear. I’m just glad my lads and I won’t be the ones facing it in real action.”

Surrounded by several other large, industrial-looking buildings, two domed concrete cylinders rose above a countryside otherwise dotted with fields, orchards, and a few small villages and midsize towns. Sited on a canal that fed into the Danube River, the Cernavodă Nuclear Station’s twin seven-hundred-megawatt heavy-water reactors supplied 20 percent of Romania’s electricity.

First ordered during the Ceauşescu regime, Unit Two only came on line eighteen years after the brutal communist dictator’s overthrow and execution. Three more planned reactors had been mothballed at the earliest stages of construction.

Like all Canadian CANDU-6 designs, both operational Cernavodă reactors relied heavily on automated computer control systems, first to maintain safe and efficient power production and then to shut the reactors down in an emergency. The plant’s operators stressed the advantages these advanced digital systems offered over the less sophisticated, manpower-intensive control measures used in competing reactor designs. From a purely technical standpoint, their claims had merit. Increased automation meant fewer human-induced errors, lower costs, and safer day-to-day operation.

Unfortunately, those same computer systems also created a path — a hidden breach in all the defenses and barriers intended to protect Unit Two from accident or attack. A breach that ran straight into the reactor’s hellishly radioactive, high-pressure, high-temperature core.

In a peaceful world, this overlooked vulnerability would never have mattered.

But the world was not at peace.

Control room supervisor Marku Proca yawned once and then again. “Isus. Jesus,” he muttered, fighting down a third jaw-cracking yawn. He blinked rapidly, distractedly running a hand through his thick mane of white hair. Night shifts were always a bitch.

One of the two younger men stationed in the control room glanced away from the computer displays on the operator’s desk. “Want another coffee, boss?”

Wryly, Proca shook his head. “No thanks. My kidneys are already floating.” He nodded toward the displays. “So? Any problems?”

The third man, a senior plant operator named Nicolae Diaconu, shrugged. “No. As usual, everything’s nominal.” He pulled a safety logbook closer and jotted down a few notes, checking the time as he signed it with a flourish. “There, you see! Twenty-two thirty hours and all’s well.”

At that moment, unnoticed by Proca or his two subordinates, preset logic bombs detonated inside the computers tasked with monitoring Unit Two’s independent automated emergency shutdown systems. Malicious code covertly embedded in their operating software suddenly went live, surreptitiously taking control while leaving routine operations seemingly undisturbed. Within milliseconds, the hijacked computers began sending precisely tailored viruses through fiber-optic links connecting them to other machines.

Down and down the linked hierarchy of computers these pieces of malware rippled — methodically seizing every system in their path as they moved closer to their primary targets. There, at the very heart of each of Cernovadă’s two emergency shutdown mechanisms, lay three very small, very simple digital machines.

These “trip” computers had one function: they constantly cycled through data sent from sensors embedded in the reactor core, coolant systems, and the containment building. When any two out of three of these tiny computers sensed temperatures or pressures or other anomalies beyond parameters set in their simple programming, they were expected to “trip” the reactor — safely shutting it down in seconds.

But now viruses latched on to their very basic code and went to work, swiftly cutting away those parts of each program that “read” incoming sensor data. Stitched in their place were endlessly repeating loops of false data — all showing a range of perfectly safe temperatures, pressures, coolant flow levels, and neutron power.

In a matter of seconds, both of the elaborate automated systems designed to shut down Cernavodă’s Unit Two were out of action, securely cocooned in an illusory digital world where nothing would ever go wrong.

Now a small subroutine in the rogue program controlling one of the commandeered computers activated.

Beep. Beep. Beep.

Nicolae Diaconu closed the logbook he’d just finished signing and glanced at his display. “I’ve got a minor flag from one of the test and display computers,” he told Proca. “Says it’s getting an error reading from a neutron flux detector in Zone 11.”

“Just one?” Proca asked. There were nearly two hundred separate vanadium and platinum-clad flux sensors set throughout the reactor core.

Diaconu took a closer look. “Only one detector,” he confirmed. “NFS-11A.”

Proca shrugged. “Follow normal procedure. Have the DCC test the same sensor. Let’s see if we’ve got a genuine equipment failure or just a programming glitch.”

“Already on it,” Diaconu said, keying in a command to the plant’s main “X” Digital Control Computer.

Neither man ever realized that this routine request for a diagnostic check on sensor NFS-11A was the detonation trigger for yet another logic bomb, this one buried deep inside the control computer’s core operating software. Line after line of malicious code spooled through the computer, rapidly taking command over specific programs used to manage the reactor and its associated systems. Another virus flashed through a link into the identical “Y” DCC running in standby mode, turning it into a slave clone of the hijacked master computer.

In a perfectly timed, sequenced, and calibrated digital assault taking less than thirty seconds from start to finish, Unit Two’s human operators lost control over their seven-hundred-megawatt heavy-water nuclear power reactor — and all without the slightest warning.

Now fully in command, the sabotage programs running in the reactor’s digital control system kicked into high gear. Over the course of the next few minutes, dozens of valves and actuators opened and closed in a carefully orchestrated sequence. Thousands of gallons of deuterium-laced “heavy” water and ordinary light water used to cool and control the reactor drained away. Steel-encased cadmium rods used to adjust the fission reaction slid out of the core and locked.

More valves opened. Pressurized helium gas reserves set aside to force emergency supplies of cooling water and gadolinium nitrate — a chemical that could poison and stop the fission reaction — into the core in a crisis vented uselessly into the cold night air outside the containment building.

As its control mechanisms were ruthlessly and systematically stripped away, power levels inside the reactor started spiking. Temperatures inside thousands of uranium fuel bundles rose fast, heating the heavy water still surrounding them to the boiling point. This, in turn, caused the fission reaction to climb even faster.

As minutes ticked by without human intervention or even awareness, temperatures and pressures inside Cernavodă Unit Two’s core climbed dangerously. Fuel bundles melted, sagging closer and closer together. Hydrogen gas began boiling off the superheated zirconium alloy cladding around each bundle.

Through all of this, the computer-driven displays inside the control room showed no signs of trouble. Separate analog-driven contact alarms should have gone off as the reactor went haywire, lighting up in a dazzling cascade across control panels. Instead, these backup alerts fell prey to yet another weakness in Cernavodă’s automated systems.

Concerned that human operators could be overwhelmed by the hundreds of alarms that might be triggered in any real crisis, the plant’s designers had installed alarm prioritization software. In an emergency, this program deliberately suppressed all minor alarms. In theory, this allowed control room operators to focus on the most serious threats they faced. What its creators failed to anticipate was the unauthorized insertion of a single line of malicious code, one that automatically defined all alarms as minor.

And so Cernavodă Unit Two’s highly trained and dedicated control room personnel were left essentially blind, deaf, and dumb — with no way of knowing that their reactor was racing out of control, accelerating toward a catastrophic meltdown.

Marku Proca checked his watch and sighed. Half an hour left until he could reasonably take another coffee break. He stretched back in his chair, concentrating on keeping his eyes open. Sure, Diaconu and Ion Morar, the other operator, were both capable guys, but it wouldn’t do them any good to see him slacking off on shift.

His direct line to the turbine room buzzed.

“Proca here,” he said.

“What the hell’s going on down there, Marku?” a voice demanded, barely audible over the earsplitting whine of huge machinery spooling down. “We’re not getting near enough steam. Every goddamned turbine I’ve got is shutting down!”

Proca sat up straighter, suddenly wide-awake. “What?”

“We’re going dark, Marku! Your fucking reactor must be off-line. So why don’t I see any trip alarms?”

Proca stared at the displays showing Unit Two’s status. Everything on his board showed the reactor operating well within normal parameters. Nothing was wrong. Nothing could be wrong. In its essentials, nuclear power generation was a simple process. A fission reaction produced heat. Water circulating through the core to cool and control the reaction turned into steam. And that steam drove turbines, producing electricity.

He started to sweat. If one or more of Unit Two’s steam generators had blown out, that was bad. Very bad. But the only other possible explanation was even worse. What if they were facing a massive rupture in the reactor’s cooling system? A major loss-of-coolant accident, or LOCA, was the primary nightmare for any nuclear plant.

“Marku?”

“We’re checking,” Proca snapped, dropping the phone. He spun toward Diaconu. “There must be something wrong with the primary DCC. Switch control to the ‘Y’ computer. Now!” The younger man immediately obeyed.

His action set off two more pieces of malware buried in their computer system.

Immediately an alarm shrieked, accompanied by a flashing red icon on Diaconu’s display. “I’ve got a major fire warning in the secondary control area!” he yelled. “The SCA’s automated sprinklers are activating!”

“Oh, shit,” Proca said. Unit Two’s secondary control area was designed to maintain safe operation of the plant if an accident wrecked the main control room or otherwise rendered it uninhabitable. But now, triggered by the false fire alarm, torrents of high-pressure water sluiced across the SCA’s computers, equipment panels, and other electronics — setting off a destructive chain of short circuits and overloads.

Bad as that was, the complicated sequence of valve openings and closures set in motion by the second piece of malicious code was far more deadly.

In seconds, the superheated steam still boiling away from the reactor found itself funneled into just one section of pipe — a section that ran right over the main control room. Under computer control, another valve at the far end spun shut. As more and more steam forced its way into the bottlenecked pipe, its internal pressure climbed higher and higher. Forced far beyond its structural limits, the steam pipe suddenly ballooned, cracked, and then blew apart.

Jagged steel splinters sleeted outward from the burst pipe — shredding everything and everyone in their path. Marku Proca had just time enough to see Diaconu and Morar hurled aside in a spray of blood and bone. And then he broiled to death a fraction of a second later when the temperature hit more than six hundred degrees Fahrenheit.

Safe in a shielded area behind the wrecked control room, Unit Two’s hijacked computers continued executing their carefully laid-out sabotage programs.