Free Strike Zone by Dale Brown Page A

Quicksilver . “Breanna—your wife—held us up and got us away from danger before telling us to bail. There was some other stuff, self-destruct routines.”
    â€œWe skip that. We’re not really interested in the accident, just the ghost clone.”
    â€œWhere is it?”
    Zen slapped at the keyboard. The sitrep showed it at seventy-five miles, to the northeast of the Chinese fleet.
    â€œIt’s got to be spying on the Chinese,” said Stoner. “But it doesn’t really make sense that the Indians would send it that far around, does it?”
    â€œNo,” said Zen.
    â€œIt could be another Chinese unit,” Stoner said. “The admiral in charge of this fleet, Xiam, is not well-liked. But I still don’t think they have the technology.”
    â€œThey spy on themselves?”
    â€œSometimes.”
    â€œI know how we can settle it,” said Zen. “We go back, buzz their coast, see if it comes out.”
    Stoner shrugged. “Maybe.”
    Zen had thought of the idea earlier and been readyto reject it because it didn’t seem as if the clone could be Chinese. But if what Stoner was saying was true—that one unit might spy on another—then the clone’s location made perfect sense.
    â€œWe fly over their coast, try to get them to come out. If it’s Chinese, eventually they’ll come and take a look. In the meantime, we can adjust our Elint gear to look for their transmissions,” added Zen. “Now that we know what we’re looking for, our range will be wider. They won’t know it.”
    â€œI guess.”
    â€œYou have a better idea?” Zen asked.
    â€œActually, I came down to suggest it myself.”
    Dreamland Perimeter
0525
    J ENNIFER G LEASON TOOK the last turn and broke into a sprint as she headed up the hill back toward the low-slung building that housed her small apartment. As she ran, she glanced in the direction of Dog’s small bungalow, hoping he might appear. The fact that he didn’t probably meant he was already over at his office. She channeled her disappointment into her legs, pushing out long strides as she finished her daily run.
    One brief warm-down and shower later, she grabbed breakfast from her tiny refrigerator—strawberry-banana yogurt—then headed over to the computer labs located below the main Megafortress hangars. Jennifer liked the feel of the empty lab around her early in the morning; she generally had the large underground complex to herself for at least a few hours and couldwalk around talking to herself as she figured out problems. That would be especially important today; she had an idea on how they might be able to break into the ghost clone’s coding and take it over, assuming they could get close to it again.
    Jennifer got off the elevator and punched her card into the reader next to the door, fingers slipping to the side to hit the number combination to clear the lock while she stared down the retina scan. Inside, she got a pot of coffee going, then went back to kick her computers on so they’d be ready when the coffee was.
    Except nothing came up.
    Jennifer stared at the blank screens, then reached down to the keyboards and gave her access codes again, directing the terminals to boot into the main system housed in a shielded bunker two floors below. The coffee hissed at her from the bench at the side of the room. She hit Enter and went back for a cup, expecting the screens to be blinking their hellos when she returned. But they were still blank.
    Kneeling at her station, she keyed her passwords one letter and number at a time. The system allowed only three tries, so she had to get it right.
    She did.
    But there was still nothing.
    The computers were operating—there was a cursor on the fifteen-inch network screen, and the two larger CRTs had their indicator lights on.
    The bungled attempts at signing on locked her out as a user, but not as system