Free Back to the Moon-ARC by Les Johnson, Travis S. Taylor Page B

convincing the company to pay him enough that he would not consider climbing any more Mount Everests while employed by Space Excursions. Phil was good at his job and had outside connections that could help him in situations like this. Helen didn’t want to ask who some of these outside connections were.
    “Phil nosed around some. He said that we were getting IP port probes on a regular basis now and that the packets that left here went where the probes are coming from. He thinks it all went to China.”
    “Do we know how our systems were compromised?” Mark Watson asked.
    “Uh, well,” Jones responded. “Mark, look at your cell phone. Where does it say it was made? Check yours, too, Paul. Gary, flip over that laptop and tell me where it was assembled.”
    Childers picked up the laptop that was sitting idle in front of him and read from the back.  
    “Assembled in China.”
    “Same here,” Watson replied.
    “Mine, too,” said Gesling.
    “Of course they are.” Knowing that she had their full attention, Helen Jones continued her explanation. “All of the computers in the facility were either made or assembled in China. The company name on the outside is as red, white, and blue as you’d ever want. But the lure of cheap labor is too much for the CEOs—present company excluded, Mr. Childers. We’ve outsourced almost all of our computer-manufacturing base to China.
    “I believe our computers came with some additional software embedded in the operating system. It was then triggered or turned on by someone who knew what we were doing here.”
    “Wait a minute.” Childers leaned forward in his seat. “Are you telling me you’ve figured all this out since last night?”
    “Oh, heavens no,” Jones responded. “No, at this point it is just a theory. The idea wasn’t mine. It was Phil’s. It seems this is an active discussion among the hacker community and pretty well known there ‘unofficially.’ There have apparently been other incidents that Phil knew about. When we started looking into our problem, he told me about them.”
    Watson could contain himself no longer.  
    “Folks. Are you aware of the implications here? Yes, we’ve lost some expensive and important technical data. But what about the rest of the country? We aren’t the only ones who own this brand of computers. What about the banks? Other defense contractors? The government, for God’s sake. If her theory is correct, then we could have a security breach of national importance!”
    “Alright, alright, let’s settle down a bit.” Childers took back control of the meeting. “All in good time, Mr. Watson. We need to ascertain the degree to which we’ve been compromised, fix the leak—no, stop the leak—and then we can figure out who to report it to. And we will report it—but not just yet. First, I need to understand what this means to us.
    “I need to know something for absolute certain.” Childers looked at Gesling and Chu as he spoke. “Is there anything someone can do with this data that will compromise our flight? We have a manifest of paying customers and a launch date. I need to know if this leak will force a delay.”
    “Gary, if all they did was copy our files, then we should be okay,” Chu said. “But are we sure that’s all that happened? What if this Trojan program did more than copy the data? What if it changed something in the procedures or, God forbid, in the specifications? Paul might be halfway to the Moon and a bad command dumps all his fuel. We’d better make sure none of these systems are connected to the wireless on the ship.”
    “God, a wrong requirement could vent the cabin to vacuum,” Paul added.
    “Or God knows what else,” Chu said. “What we need is more work at this point. I can’t tell you about the launch or the safety of the vehicle until my team has had time to review the files and compare them with the backups. How do we know they weren’t compromised, too?”
    “The backups appear to