Chapter 19

The anxiety running through Qi's mind was barely controllable. His fingers were flying over the keys as he kept an eye on five small boxes in the upper right corner of his screen. His spider programs were spinning through material at a furious rate but nothing of interest was popping up. Back doors were deliberately hidden but if the material had not been deleted, it was accessible by definition.

The problem was they were thieves without context. When a TSC employee came to query the database, that employee probably had a set of markers for which to search. Backdoor keys were never a direct line from search parameters to location. The best hiding places were three or four markers to location, where the first marker leads to the second and onward to the third. In theory, markers could be entirely random. However, human beings tend to shy away from randomness and settle comfortably for complicated. TSC had given Qi no indication that it took the harder paths for data storage and so he sent his spiders with the first 20,000 most common combinations for markers.

He was sweating.

Spider #4 found something interesting and kicked it to the main screen. Qi had another tool. Most hardy security codes needed to be only twelve characters to send computers into a tizzy. The best were twenty-four characters but they were tied to comp generated keys. Human keys were tied to human memory, which at its best only maintained seven characters in a row. The best human security keys were four groups of three characters or three groups of four. The groups had to have relationship like everyone's birthdate in a nuclear family. Birthdates limited what numbers could appear in any given column, which made them a weak choice. Because back doors were used rarely, the characters could not be too complicated for the human operator though. Knowledge of the human brain was his tool.

Spider #2 kicked out an interesting set of twelve.

The room was little better than a closet but it had a real desk and a chair. The ever present airbladder plants were creeping up the wall in front of him with is tiny waxy adhesions reflecting the overhead light just so. Qi had to stop himself from tracing the twisting vines with his eyes as he waited for the spiders to find targets. He had never been the most patient man when the only course of action was to stare at a comp screen.

Qi did not understand the urgency. As far as he knew, which he understood was woefully incomplete, there was no emergency requiring Volentin to approach Capitol Prime immediately. Even if TSC discovered its pilfered data storage facility, finding what had been pillaged would take weeks and weeks without access to the inventory lists. Maybe something else was happening that he did not know. If Benni deliberately misdirected his staff in planning a major raid, how much more so would he do the same to an outsider? He was anxious and he did not quite know the reason why.

Spider #1 beeped, signaling its completion. Qi glanced at the thirteen combinations on his screen and cracked his knuckles. Scanning the list, he tagged seven definite possibilities. If the search parameters were correct, he now had to find which marker informed the location of the next.

Four hours later, Qi had two markers identified. The key had been a musical one, the Imperium Anthem. When he finally decoded the first one, his first reflex had been to clownishly choke and gag. Unfortunately, an attentive Riata came storming through the door wanting to know what was wrong and did he need medical attention. He waved her off.

Another four hours later, Riata stepped into his closet again and set down a tray. Qi hardly looked up, grabbing food with his right hand and shoving it in his mouth. An hour later he took a break to use the head.

An hour after that, his countdown clock sounded an alarm. Qi stopped moving his fingers across the comp and bent his head in exhaustion. He was now stepping across the boundary from Benni's time to his own personal time. Standing up to stretch, Qi tried to work out the kinks in his spine without touching the plants with his fingers. The fine whiskers on the plants were coarse and felt barbed when touched. He would rub his fingers or flick the pads with his thumbnail for minutes trying to rid himself of the sensations.

For some reason, the strains of Apache Junction were ringing through his head. He could picture the wide vistas of sere desert and thrusting mountains as the music swelled before the title blazed across the screen to the added sound of thundering horse hooves. An idea struck him.

He jumped back down and opened a new screen. Tagway-Shinar was an overbearing, controlling company and pressed down upon their own employees more than their clients. He switched to the general database and found a diamond hiding in plain sight: the Tagway-Shinar company song, mandatory at the opening of each day's sessions at its branches across the galaxy.

He translated the first twelve notes into computer language. The answer was a failure. He scanned the song further and realized that TSC was so important that they had three stanzas and a chorus. He translated the chorus and marker #13 popped up.

Qi returned to the target datafield. He brought up a simple graph with X, Y and Z axis. Plotting the three markers he found, he saw a likely pattern, probably a square with the top line floating within the positive axis and the bottom line floating in the negative. He plugged in the last missing plot point and held his breath.