Braun — > Mitsuri, Vaz: Mr. Rabbit has penetrated our mil-net.

It was a fantastic claim — and manifestly true. For the last ten minutes there had been minor comm glitches, error retry packets happening a little too often. The statistics were well below the level of reasonable suspicion. But then in a grand gesture — typical Rabbit madness — the creature had sent a two-megabyte jumbogram straight through the milnet and off the end of the fiber.

Braun — > Mitsuri, Vaz: Just before we lost the fiber, it seemed the local stooges intended on escape. How much time does that leave us?

Numerical estimates floated up for "Time till stooges can reach 911" and "Time till DHS responds." But Keiko's people had an idea:

Mitsuri — > Braun, Vaz: For the moment, DHS is distracted. I can be very crude. I can fool the stooges into believing I'm the local police. Such a masquerade would mean hijacking a significant part of the local net. Within the highly regulated networks of the modern world, that was about as subtle as an infantry assault. DHS was truly in disarray.

For several minutes, there was no manager-level traffic. Alfred was aware of Keiko masquerading as the California Highway Patrol. His own attention was on a number of tasks he hadn't dared try while Alice Gong was still around. Günberk's analysts were assessing how deeply Rabbit's intrusion had gone. Their conclusions were tagged a soothing green.

Braun — > Mitsuri, Vaz: I wonder what Rabbit was doing? There were much easier ways of betraying the operation than this. As far as the network analysts could tell, Rabbit had managed little more than to rattle the metaphorical doorknobs of their milnet. The psych people had their explanation: Rabbit was known for its childish ego. It simply couldn't pass up a chance to show off — hence the jumbogram. Such antics could not be taken as a sign of overall betrayal. After all, Rabbit was still doing a magnificent job with the library riot.

Some analysts had more paranoid theories. The current favorite was that Rabbit was China; that would make tonight a perfect Keystone Kops comedy, all the Great Powers chasing after each other. But there were also nightmare speculations: Maybe Rabbit had fooled the network analysts and all the lesser paranoids. After all, the jumbogram had been sent just before the fiberlink was broken. Maybe Rabbit was a Grand Terrorist, who had used the Alliance as its stooge, installing its own interests within the labs, a quick conversion of the entire establishment into a death factory. And there was that UP/Ex launcher in the GenGen area, what amounted to a delivery system.

Alfred sighed to himself. In the long run, he feared Rabbit as much as the extreme paranoids did, but tonight — well, if they looked too closely, they might see Alfred's own operation lurking in the shadows. It was best to calm things down.

Vaz — > Braun, Mitsuri: I'm with the greens on this. Yes, Rabbit has exceeded our worst estimates. He has broken into our operation's mil-net. But we have hard limits on his bandwidth and my people still control the changes being made. Just look at the consistency checks. Short of having physical troops on the ground there, we own the MCog area.

Mitsuri — > Braun, Vaz: We also have good control of the topside operation, no sign of Rabbit funny business. The important

Red doubt was hemorrhaging across the analyst pool, spreading from a statistical analysis team at Moscow-Capetown. These were the same chaps who had been consistently right about the Soybean Futures Plot. They had credibility… and they claimed that the views from the north side of the GenGen area were corrupt. Those were not views Alfred had subverted. For better or worse, his colleagues had discovered some other deception.

Now the signals and stat people in all the analyst pools had precedence. A thousand specialists, who a second ago might have been looking at a dozen other problems, were suddenly watching the same data. Computing resources shifted from a myriad drudge tasks, began correlating data from the accessible sensors in the labs. It was as if Indo-European intelligence were an immense cat suddenly come alert, listening and watching for sign of its prey.

Only one of the area cams was offline, but others were subtly misregistered. The inconsistencies were scattered all across the area that the Alliance controlled… but analysis made the Moscow-Capetown guess more and more a certainty. A blotch of deception was moving into the GenGen area at the speed of a fast walk.

There ! A fleeting glimpse of the Gu child. The analysts pounced on the location, dredged two sets of footsteps out of the lying silence. So Rabbit did have troops on the ground.

Mitsuri — > Braun, Vaz: That damned bunny. We can't stop him. He just keeps coming and coming and coming.

For a moment there was no conversation. Then:

Braun — > Mitsuri, Vaz: I can stop him. I can pull the plug on Credit Suisse.

There was another long pause. Yes. Günberk's discovery that Rabbit depended on a single apex certificate authority. All power in the modern world, from flying the largest aircraft to moving bytes between components in a single processor, it all came down to the exchange of appropriate markers of trust, as enforced by the Secure Hardware Environment. And far at the top of Rabbit's operations, via billions of unknown paths, there was a single source, Credit Suisse CA. Revoking that authority would disarm Rabbit. It would likely destroy the fellow's access to his own most personal files, leaving nothing but what the creature held in his natural mind (unless Rabbit really was an AI, in which case nothing would be left). But the collateral damage would be enormous. Shutting down a top-level certificate authority was a metaphorical weapon of mass destruction. And now it was all that was left to them.

Braun — > Mitsuri, Vaz: Mr. Rabbit must be stopped… I have begun the proceedings. Credit Suisse will begin issuing global revocations in fifteen seconds.

Mitsuri — > Braun, Vaz: I'm sorry, Günberk. Ten percent of the trust apparatus of Europe would slide into chaos in the next half hour. The aftershocks would rattle the world. Whatever else came out of their mission here, for Günberk Braun it was a career-ending failure.

Another kind of failure threatened Alfred Vaz. Shooting down Rabbit had been one of his fondest hopes, but not just now ! Alfred dipped back into the GenGen viewpoints. Downing Rabbit had eliminated all the slack from the schedule. And I need that time for my own cover-up . He was reduced to emergency measures: Alfred brought two more secret teams online. One would use the fruit-fly scam to divert what was left of Rabbit. The other would destroy his lab-within-a-lab, destroy Alfred's work of years. But they would also outship his secret lab's greatest prize through GenGen's UP/Ex launcher.

For Alfred Vaz, some form of success was still possible.

Gu the Eldest and Gu the Youngest hiked southward out of the Huertas cavern. Behind them the shredda containers and the north entrance were swallowed by darkness. The light that traveled above them shone just a few yards in all directions.

"How far till we're in enemy territory?" said Robert.

Miri held a finger up to her lips. She gestured, and silent messaging paraded across his vision.

Miri — > Robert: Your pdf says they only control a small part of GenGen. But I bet they can hear a long ways. Stick with silent messaging.

Robert fumbled with the box at his belt. The keypad display helped, but typing was tedious. All the tricks that Juan had taught him were nearly useless without Epiphany.