Images of commanding officers vanished in a flurry, Lieutenant Iger gratefully hastening out of the room, with Co-President Rione following haughtily. Captain Desjani, her eyes on Rione’s back, went out as well.

One unexpected figure remained. Geary checked the identification. Lieutenant Commander Moltri, commanding officer of the destroyer Taru. “Yes, Commander?” Geary asked.

Moltri swallowed, then averted his eyes as he spoke. “Sir, I think I know how the worms were propagated through the fleet and were able to bypass security.”

“Were you involved in that?” Geary kept his voice calm with some effort. Moltri seemed not only frightened but also extremely embarrassed, which didn’t make sense.

Lieutenant Commander Moltri shook his head very quickly. “No, sir. Not… not knowingly.” He closed his eyes, visibly nerved himself, then focused on Geary and spoke steadily. “There are… certain programs that get passed around to those… interested in them. Because of their nature, they have to be passed through means that avoid fleet security checks. There’s a whole subnet within the fleet that handles those programs covertly.”

Pulling out his data pad, Moltri tapped a few commands, his face grim and his hand shaking. “I’ve sent a sample to you, sir. Your security personnel will be able to use it to identify the means by which it was being passed. I swear, sir, that I had no idea that someone might use the same means to propagate a dangerous worm, but I think that’s what must have happened.”

“Thank you, Commander Moltri,” Geary stated. “I’ll take a look at it. You may have done this fleet a great service.”

Moltri gritted his teeth in what seemed to be pain. “Please don’t reveal my connection to the content of what I sent you, sir. I’m not proud of it. Not at all. I’ve never really hurt anyone. I swear.”

“I understand.”

“I know there’ll be some disciplinary action, sir. Please, don’t let the full reason be part of the record.”

Geary, increasingly disturbed by Moltri’s distress and statements, spoke evenly. “If it’s not germane, it won’t be. Thank you, Commander.”

Moltri’s image vanished as if the man were fleeing. Geary checked his message queue and found what Moltri had just sent him. He called up the program in it, then stared, his stomach roiling, at the images displayed. No wonder Moltri and the others interested in this kind of thing had distributed it by undercover means. Hastily shutting off the program, Geary called Captain Desjani and her systems-security officer.

Desjani hadn’t gotten far and was back quickly, but it took the security officer a few minutes to get there. Geary offered his data unit. “Take a look.”

The security officer seemed first outraged, then both sickened and resigned. “They keep finding new ways to spread this stuff, sir. May I forward it to my address?” Geary nodded. “I’ll be able to use this message to locate and monitor the subnet it was originally sent on,” the security officer advised.

“Will you be able to tell if that’s how the worms were spread?”

“We’re unlikely to be able to prove it, sir, if this subnet is typical of what I’ve seen before, but I’d lay bets that this is what was used. This subnet would have been set up to access every ship in the fleet.”

Geary’s reaction surely showed. “There’s someone on every ship in the fleet who likes this kind of thing?”

“No, sir,” the security officer corrected hastily. “Subnets that handle this sort of material are designed not to leave fingerprints when stuff is uploaded or downloaded. It automatically spreads to every communication node on the net, meaning every ship. Anyone on any ship who knew about it could get to it, but it’d be almost impossible to identify anyone who actually had done it or even what ship they were on.”

The implications of that were clear enough. “So the odds that we’ll be able to figure out who put the worm into this subnet are pretty dismal.”

The security officer made a helpless gesture. “ ‘Dismal’ is probably an optimistic term in a case like this, sir. We can monitor this subnet now that we have its characteristics identified, and that means it can’t be used for that again.”

“Monitor it? Shut it down. Are we sure there aren’t other covert subnets active?” Desjani demanded.

This time the security officer appeared surprised by the question. “We know there are, Captain. The net linking the fleet is riddled with unofficial subnets, handling anything that’s not authorized officially, like gambling.”

“Why haven’t they been shut down?” Desjani pressed.

“Because my people are responsible for security, not law enforcement, Captain. As long as we know where the subnets are, we can monitor them and know what people are doing on them. If we shut one down, it’ll eventually reappear and have to be found again, and until we find it, we can’t know what’s going on in it. Like this one. If we’d known about it, we’d have picked up the worm when it was introduced into the subnet, so whoever used this particular subnet probably did it for that reason.” The lieutenant commander held up Geary’s data unit. “But you told me to shut this one down, so I will. The people who like this will have to set up a replacement, and that takes time.”

Geary pondered the moral difference between allowing material like that to be spread through the fleet so worse misuse could be tracked and shutting it down at the risk that the replacement would be used for sabotage as well. “How much time?”

“For a replacement subnet, sir? Under current conditions?” The security officer’s eyes went distant. “Half a day.”

“Half a day?” Geary exchanged an aggravated look with Desjani. The choice didn’t really exist, given the nature of the threat to the fleet posed by another worm like that. “Keep it up and make sure it’s monitored.”

Captain Desjani gestured to her security officer. “Get on it. But give me that first.” The security officer hesitated, looking to Geary, who also hesitated, then waved a quick, reluctant assent.

“This one?” Desjani opened the file on Geary’s data unit, staring dispassionately for a few seconds, then clicked it off. “Is what it shows real?”

The security officer shook his head. “Usually not. Producing this stuff is bad enough, but if they used real people, the producers would find themselves facing eternity in prison. They use very realistic computer-generated images.”

“But it looks real,” Geary stated, feeling unclean for having viewed it.

“Yes, sir. That’s, uh, the point.”

“Thanks. Take care of it.” He shivered when the security officer had left.

Desjani looked as if she’d swallowed something vile. “I know why you agreed to leave the subnet up, but I also know how you must feel about that. Where’d you get that download? ”

“From someone I never would have guessed would like that kind of thing, judging by appearances.”

“Whoever it is needs a full psych workup.”

“Yeah.” Geary drummed his fingers on the table surface. “Can I order a psych workup confidentially?”

She nodded. “Yes, though I don’t know why you’d want to protect whoever this is. Just possessing that is a serious violation of regulations.”

“Because that person was willing to let me know this about himself so I could protect the fleet,” Geary explained.

Desjani made a face. “That can’t have been easy. I won’t ask who it was.”

“Had you ever seen something like that before?”

She shook her head this time. “I’d heard about it, but never seen it.”

“Me, neither.” Geary rubbed his face with both hands. “Excuse me, Tanya. I need to call the fleet psychs and a fleet officer, then I need to take a shower. Let me know what your security officer finds out.”

“Yes, sir.” Desjani paused at the door and turned back to face him. “I wish to apologize for not trusting your assessment of Co-President Rione, sir.”