Free The Lost Fleet: Beyond the Frontier: Leviathan by Jack Campbell

her comm system, paused, spoke again, paused, then muttered a few words under her breath. “I tried telling my colonel, and my own comms cut off.”
    “You’ll have to do a face-to-face,” Geary said. “Like we are doing here.”
    “This is the Syndics, right, Admiral? Playing their damned games again.”
    Geary took a deep breath before replying. “We don’t know for certain who is responsible. We only know that the malware involved is coming in through official updates and has all of the latest code approvals and accesses.” He offered some data coins. “These contain the software patches you’ll need.”
    The major took them, eyeing the coins dubiously. “These are going to impact official updates? Who authorized the patches, sir? I know my colonel will want to know.”
    “I’ve authorized them,” Geary said.
    “You’re not in our chain of command, sir, but I’ll leave that up to my colonel to decide.” She frowned, listening as a message came in over her armor’s comm circuit. “Sir, we just received orders directly from Admiral Timbale. Not just the colonel. All of us.”
    “Those orders didn’t come from Admiral Timbale,” Geary said. “I haven’t been able to contact him myself for some time. Until I talk to him face-to-face, I won’t believe any messages I receive, even if they have all of the proper authentication codes.”
    “I need to pass that on as well. With your permission, Admiral, I will rejoin my forces and personally brief my colonel on what you have told me.”
    “The sooner, the better,” Geary said, returning the major’s salute.
    He briefed General Carabali and Desjani on what he had learned ashe watched the major walk briskly back to her lines. “Make sure the Marines know the ground forces don’t intend moving in, and they should not target or fire on the ground forces under any circumstances. I don’t want anyone accidentally letting off a round at Major Problem.”
    “If I were Major Problem,” Carabali commented, “I’d get myself busted to captain as fast as I could. It looks like the ground forces are handling this professionally, but I think I see something else in their reactions.”
    “What’s that?” Geary asked.
    “It feels as if the ground forces didn’t entirely trust their sensors or comms before now. They’re double-checking orders, and they’re doing visual confirmations of what their sensors tell them. Things must have been happening that have caused the ground forces to adopt such measures.”
    “Problems with the official software that created problems for even routine operations by the ground forces?”
    “That’s entirely possible, Admiral. The software we use is so complex and interrelated that if you pull one string of code, it creates knots in all kinds of places. Those secret subroutines might have been causing problems all across the board, problems that were having a growing impact on the effectiveness of our combat systems.”
    “It’s a good thing we beat the Syndics when we did,” Desjani commented. “From the look of things, we were well on our way to defeating ourselves.”
    That might still happen,
Geary thought, hoping that he hadn’t accidentally said it out loud. “Once we get this situation stabilized and find Admiral Timbale, I’ll meet with all of the senior military and civilian officials on Ambaru. Then we’ll have to brief the senior ground forces and aerospace forces commanders as well.”
    “A lot of other people could have gone to Ambaru to set up that meeting,” she said. “You shouldn’t be risking yourself.”
    “Everyone needs to know that I am giving the orders they are seeing,”he said. “My being here in person is the only way to make sure that happens. Would those station officials have risked walking to the ground forces if anyone but I had asked?”
    Desjani changed the subject quickly enough to make it clear she knew she would not win the argument. “We’re not spotting any unusual