Chapter 65: ... We Have A Problem

“Paul, it’s Allen. We have a problem.”

My blood chilled. The fact it was Allen calling and not a watch officer told me it was serious.

“Talk to me,” I said as I turned away from Jer and headed toward a quiet corner of the gallery.

“Mars-One performed it’s mid-flight turn over and cannot re-start engines. No immediate danger, but we’ve got a problem.”

I tried to think through the failure modes of the engines on an Orion.

“Connectivity checks are good?” I asked. It was the first troubleshooting action for something affecting all of the engines.

“All of our troubleshooting checks look good, but commands from the central control cores to the engines don’t seem to go down the wires. We’ve been working the checklists for nearly an hour,” he said.

“Okay. Is Terry in ops?” I asked.

“He’s on his way. He was enroute home from Learmonth when the incident occurred.”

“Call me back once he is there. I’m at a thing with Jer but will head out ASAP. Where are the other Orions?”

“Mars-Two is in Kenya, prepping for the building mission on Mars. Orion-three is at Aristarchus on a supply run. Orion-four is docked at Astra. Five and Six are at Kenya for loading the L-5 build-out crew.”

“Ground them all until we know what’s going on. Get Lila’s team tracing the supply chain for the networking gear we used on the Orions. Have we checked local control on the engines?” I asked.

“Negative local control, but all the engine check diagnostics pass. The crew is a little stymied. Wait one while I get no-fly orders to the other Orions.”

I gave him a minute as he talked to someone near him or on another line.

“Okay, the Orions are grounded,” he said as he came back on the line.

“What else is flying?” I asked.

“Only GOTs from Qantas and Delta, plus yours in New York,” he said.

“Issue a notice to report any engine concerns. We have totally different engines in the GOTs, so we should be safe. Get our engineering team in and ready for some long shifts to try and isolate and remediate. Is there an OTV at Astra?” I asked.

“Affirmative. Selene is docked at Astra, why?”

“It’s got an older control configuration. If Mars-One’s engines are working and it’s a control problem, we might have to deliver new gear to them, and I don’t want to use an Orion if we aren’t one hundred percent certain we’ve resolved the issue. Freeze Selene at Astra until we know what we’re dealing with and have the flight control group start developing a thrust profile for rendezvous with Mars-One.”

“I’m on it,” Allen replied.

“Okay. Let me take care of Jer, here, and then I’ll get on my way. Where will the engineering team be staffing up?”

“Dublin. Most of the design for the Orion control systems was done over there.”

“Okay. You stay on top of things in Park City, get Terry in there as well, and I’ll take charge in Dublin. Anyone else we need to alert right now?”

“No, but we probably need to be ready to talk to NASA in the morning, if we don’t have things resolved.”

“Agreed. I’ll call as soon as I’m on the GOT for any updates.”

I ended the call and turned to spot Jer again. Agatha was standing nearby, listening to him discuss his work with a buyer and the gallery owner. I wanted to give him time to revel in his success but had to get moving. I walked over.

“Jer,” I said at a slight pause in the conversation. “I’ve had something come up that Allen needs me for.” I did not need to say there was a problem in orbit, Jer knew Allen’s role. His face fell a little, but he nodded stoically. It was sad to realize he assumed I was prioritizing my work over his.

“Can you ride back with security when you’re done?” I asked, wanting to give him all the time he needed.

His face brightened a little. “Sure, Dad.”

“Okay. It was a pleasure meeting you all,” I said to the small cluster of people nearby. “I wish I could have joined the conversations for a bit longer.”

I extracted myself quickly after that, pulling on my coat and stepping outside to the cool autumn night. I hopped in our car, and told the chase car to stay and wait for Jer.

“We’ll call for another backup vehicle,” tonight’s security said.

“Send it to the gallery,” I instructed. “We’re heading to Teterboro. Call ahead and have the GOT prepared for a hop to Dublin.”

We beat the co-pilot to the airport, so I decided to sit in the right-hand seat and not delay further. Forty minutes after leaving the gallery, we were taxing for takeoff. Forty minutes after that, we were landed in Ireland.

“Un-fucking believable,” Hunter muttered over the video conference link.

He was still in Park City operations with Allen and Terry and the ops team while I was in Dublin with the systems control engineering team. Both sites, as well as the crew in Learmonth, had been reviewing systems and software for nearly twelve hours straight. Even the Mars-Two crew in Kenya had been involved performing software dumps on the systems there. After over twenty man-days of effort crammed into twelve hours, we thought we had found root cause.

I rubbed my eyes, having no words better than Hunter’s disbelief.

“How is this possible?” Lila asked from beside him.

“It doesn’t matter for the short-term,” I replied. “The control software has been tampered with, as well as the engine ignition parameters. We need to focus on how to rectify this and get Mars-One back on the ground, safely.”

“We practice software dumps and reloads as one of the emergency scenarios,” Terry said. “Can’t we transmit the code up to them and let the crew have at it?”

I shook my head. “I wish it were that simple. We could if the problem was isolated to the main computer core, but it is more like half a virus there, with the other half in the engine controllers. Those were designed as sealed systems,” I added.

Hunter was nodding. “We would need to shut down all the software in the core, break the comms linkages, shut-down the controllers on the engines, update both systems, reboot them independently, and then re-enable control handshakes. It’s going to be more than the crew can handle alone, especially the engine reloads and reboots.”

“The engine reload will actually have to be a ROM swap out,” I added. “That’s EVA work.”

Allen was nodding on camera. “The crew could handle the EVA portion, but not everything else as well. We’ve only got three souls onboard coming back from Mars.”

Mars-One had departed with a full complement, but only Todd Walton and Joel Lamb, the pilot and engineer on the outbound leg, were returning. Bryce Tilden, one of our documentarians was also coming back as a supercargo on this leg.

“We need to go help them,” Terry said. “We can perform all the changes on Orion-Six in Kenya as practice and then take off to rendezvous and fix Mars-One.”

“We’re not time critical,” I said. “We’ll perform the fixes on the Orions in Kenya, using them to practice, and then go help Mars-One. How long to get clear ROMs for the engines?” I asked the team around me in Dublin.

“The code is straight forward,” one engineer said. “We just need to make sure it is only the designed instruction set burned onto the ROM. We can burn them, dump them, and perform a full audit in a couple of days.”

“Okay,” I said. “How about the control system software? How long to take this crap out and clean it up?” I asked as I waved my hand at the offensive subroutines, we had isolated in the systems.

“Three days, but then we have to test the shit out of it,” a different engineer said. “I also want to audit the code for anything else that might try to connect to the internal comms busses. That looks like how they propagated across the three command nodes.”

We had designed the system for redundancy and correctness, taking a note from the shuttle flight systems. The three command nodes all had redundant code bases, each performing the same function, but coded by different teams. For all critical activities, two of the three nodes had to agree that the commands being issued were correct. That control code had been subverted from one node with the offensive code then propagated to the other two nodes, so they were in synch on issuing engine commands. The only command that currently synced was a null-start command, which invoked some of the security features on the engine controllers. As a result, the engines might get a signal to initiate a start, but when they checked with the control systems to verify, all three nodes told them to not start.

“Let’s get started on both tasks. Terry and Hunter, can you start writing out the procedures and checklists we’re going to need for the shutdown, changeout, reboots, and system verification?”

“We’re on it,” Hunter replied.

“Lila,” I said. “We’re going to need your team tracking how this was done. We’ve now had three instances of hardware attacks that show a pretty high level of sophistication. I want our case laid out for the government. If they won’t do something this time, I want some options of our own.”

“I’ve got a response team in Dublin, down on the first floor. I’ll get them on it and then hop a flight over. Some of this, we need to talk about face to face.”

I nodded.

“Allen, have the teams in Kenya and Learmonth go off-duty to get some rest. We’ll run the training for the crew through those two sites while your team provides oversight. What am I missing, folks?”

“News and PR?” Tamara asked.

I nodded. “Get Billy and Thomas on it. We need to take a little more aggressive stance on this. Two attacks within a year. I want everyone wondering who is doing it. Lila, send them the reports on the Astra incident so we can start shaping the narrative. Anything else?”

Lila started at me out of the screen. “Paul, you need to get some rest as well. You’re going to get a call as soon as this leaks outside our staffs. You need to be thinking clearly when it does.”

As much as I wanted to argue with her, I knew she was right. I nodded. “I’m reachable for emergencies but will be sacked out in an office here until I’ve gotten some sleep. Everyone needs to step up and let people know when you need a break. We are in control of the situation now that we know the cause. Don’t make anything worse by pushing yourselves too hard.”

“Absolutely not,” I said reflexively.

Chrissy’s eyebrows went up as her lips tightened into a firm line and her chin dropped. It was not what I would consider an attractive look.

“You had best pick your next words carefully, Paul,” she said, barely opening her mouth and keeping her tone low. It was not the voice of someone arguing with their boss, it was the sound of a woman correcting her man. We were in a small conference room in Kenya with Terry and Tamara as we made crew selection and assignments for helping Mars-One.

“I have as much zero-gee EVA experience as anyone on the team, and more total EVA time than anyone else we have here to select from. It goes without saying that I have more experience than you and Terry combined when it comes to working in a suit.”

I saw Tamara nodding slightly.

“You bent-over backwards to make sure you didn’t show a bias in the original crew selection. You need to do the same now, when I am heads-and-shoulders the most qualified person for the job,” she concluded.

Terry broke the tension we all suddenly felt with a loud, dramatic sigh.

“Chrissy is right, Paul. She has more EVA hours logged than anyone else available. We’d be adding risk to the mission to not use her.”

I wanted to scowl, but decided discretion was definitely the better part of valor.

“Okay, I’m sorry for how I came across. Who’s her buddy out there? And who will their back-ups be?”

“Katie Hicks will lead the back-up team. Katiana will be Chrissy’s partner. She’s fully trained for zero-g EVA from prepping for the nugget mission,” Terry said.

I nodded. “Then let’s get both teams going over the checklists and prepped for training. We’ll walk-through the process here, on Orion-Six and then hop over to Learmonth for the tank to practice it in suits.”

Tamara nodded and glanced at her tablet. “Hunter is getting the engine mock-up set up over there and we’ve got old control modules that we can use underwater for training. We obviously won’t be able to perform a post swap reboot in the tank.”

We had a large, freshwater training pool, similar to the ones NASA used, at Learmonth for zero-g familiarization.

“Okay, how about a final run-through in orbit?” I asked.

“We don’t have any space large enough on Astra to do a full trial,” Tamara said, “but we could put an engine housing in the manufacturing bay and test the process. Other than being more comfortable, I’m not sure it’s worth it.”

Chrissy shook her head. “Our experience on the builder rovers was that the pressure suit is more difficult to maneuver in than worrying about zero-g. If the orbital test runs are not in vacuum, they just add to our timeline without really giving us additional benefit.”

Terry was nodding. “That sounds right. How long to have all the parts ready to go?”

“That depends,” Tamara said. “We need eight modules for the engines, which will be ready tomorrow, but how many back-ups do we want to take? QA for another set of eight is going to be two more days.”

I shook my head. “We need to take the week. The first eight units will go on Orion-Six. Then I want Terry and I to run a full shakedown on it and the revised control software. We need to know the fix is solid before we head out to Mars-One.”

Chrissy’s scowl returned. “Are you sure two should be doing that test flight? If there’s a problem, you both need to be looking at changes to the fix, not being potentially stuck in orbit.”

“Crap. We’re getting too thin on experienced staff again,” I said.

Terry and Tamara both nodded. We had been through growing pains on the staffing of flight crews and mission specialists before. The fact that we had let the bench get too lean again was our fault.

“Charles and Madison should be able to handle that test,” Terry said. Charles Madigan was slotted to pilot Mars-Two on the next build mission. He had been Katiana’s pilot to the nugget. Madison Wakeman was one of our more experienced Orion flight engineers.

I nodded. “Where do you want them to do the test-flight work-up, Terry?”

“Let’s do those at Learmonth as well. We’ll also train them up on the software purge and reload for the main mission. They’ll be our back-ups for the real thing,” he concluded.

“Okay. Tamara, do we have all of the assignments taken care of?”

Tamara checked her list of slots again before nodding.

“Anything else before we go face the troops?” I asked.

After a moment, with no words spoken, I stood up. “Okay, let’s head to Orion-Five and talk everybody through the process before we head off to Learmonth for the real training.”

I had decided, in consultation with Hunter and Terry, that we needed the primary and back-up crews to see the process first-hand on an Orion. That had gotten us all to Kenya. Once everyone knew the broad outlines of the process and had seen what was involved first hand, we would break down into the more detailed simulations and hands-on training at different locations, but mostly in Learmonth. Once the training was passed, we would let the orbital crew actually perform the fix on the Orion-Six before its test flight. Once we knew it was solid, we would then take Orion-Six out to rendezvous with Mars-One, dock, and perform the repairs. We had decided that the Mars-One crew would fill a supporting role, since we wanted the whole evolution to be tight before we had to do it for real on a ship in solar orbit.

By the end of the day, Chrissy was at least smiling at me as we headed toward the GOT that would take most of us over to Learmonth.

“I’m sorry I snapped at you earlier,” she said after we were buckled in and taxiing toward the runway.

“I’m sorry I spoke without thinking,” I said. “Maybe I’m a little too protective of you,” I admitted.

She smiled. “I like that, but I am the most qualified person for the job, you know?”

I nodded. “I do, when you and Tamara and Terry all remind me of it. I’m sorry.”

She leaned in and gave me a kiss on the lips. “Apology accepted,” she said before kissing me again.

As we surged skyward, she rested her head on my shoulder. As I thought back on the past ninety-six hours and what my instinctive response to putting her in danger was, I realized it was time to make some changes in my life ... soon.

“I’m surprised to see you in person,” I said as Lila guided me into a conference room on Astra. Two men already seated at the table rose unsteadily as we entered. One had the uncomfortable bearing of a military man who wasn’t sure what rank they should consider me. The other seemed more of a politician or bureaucrat. Sam Johnson, of the Taylor task force at the FBI was there as well but remained seated.

“We didn’t want to risk a compromise,” Lila said as she closed the door. “Paul, this is Joshua Waters,” she said, indicating the bureaucrat, “from the State Department Special Services Division.”

I shook his hand.

“And this is Colonel Franklin from the NSA.”

“Welcome to Astra,” I said as I shook his hand and motioned them to sit. I waved and smiled at Sam.

“I assume this has to do with China,” I said as I took a seat.

Lila nodded. “We’ve finally got some hard proof. Colonel?”

Colonel Franklin cleared his throat and began. “In the Astra Incident we saw a capability demonstrated to infiltrate semiconductor fabrication plants and modify chip design sets, as well as quality control procedures. Our initial assumption was that the infiltration was performed covertly, without plant management or corporate oversight being aware of the issue. With this latest incident, we looked for a broader attack vector. What we have uncovered is classified Top Secret - Ethical Owl.”

I nodded, understanding I would be signing a document acknowledging I had received the information.

“We have used national assets to trace communications to and from the compromised FABs. While we can’t break the actual encryption on the calls, we have applied methods of traffic analysis to the data and come up with a very high correlation that paints a pretty damning picture.”

“What sort of correlation?” I asked.

“Let’s start with the FAB in Taiwan that manufactured your network chipsets for Astra originally,” He said as he pulled out a folded stack of papers. He unfolded them until a timeline was revealed running nearly the length of the table. He pointed to the far end.

“This was an initial inbound call from the Chairman’s office in Beijing to the General Manager of the plant. It lasted roughly six minutes. The day after that call, the GM’s cousins who still resided in the mainland were all arrested with the exception of his great-aunt. She called his personal phone here.” His finger pointed to another annotation on the timeline.

“Two days later, the Chairman’s office contacted the GM once more. This was three weeks before the start of your fabrication runs.”

Waters took over at this point. “We know that the three individuals that actually perpetrated the act were hired at the plant here, three days after that call. Our initial investigation showed their backgrounds were unremarkable, but that they all left the company six months after the manufacturing run and quality checks were run. They seemed to disappear without a trace after last being seen boarding three different flights back to the mainland.”

“An outbound call from the GM to the original number was placed a week after those three left the country,” Franklin continued. “And a week later, the GM’s cousins were released from wherever they were being held.”

“So, you think this was orchestrated by the Chairman?” I asked.

Franklin shook his head. “We only know the calls originated from that switchboard. However, our associates in Langley were able to confirm your Minister Sun has offices that use that switchboard.”

Waters spoke again. “We then started looking at communications data from China to your European FAB that handles sub-components for your engine systems. We found a different pattern of calls there, but this time they were from China to various Chinese embassies. We then had to go through thousands of contact reports and field operations reports to find the pattern. It looks like they were not able to compromise the actual chip fabrication on the engines, thank God, but did managed to do something with the interface chip-set used for the Orions. They then spent nearly a year infiltrating the QA team of your software group where they were able to plant the virus routines that are causing your current issue.”

“Do we know who did it?” I asked, looking at Lila.

“We do,” she answered. “We’ve detained them with the help of MI-5 and are holding them pending further investigation. It looks like they were subverted after hiring. We’re still trying to figure out what leverage was used on them. So far, it does not look like money was the driver.”

I nodded. “But we know they had contact with a Chinese agent?”

Franklin, Waters, and Sam all nodded.

“So how many other systems do we think are compromised? They’ve obviously developed a flair for fucking things up in our fabrication processes,” I said.

“We’re running a wider search,” Franklin said, “but honestly, it will be pure luck if we find something. It took us a lot of digging to put these two together.”

“Sam, you’re awful quiet today,” I said.

He nodded. “Your security and personnel screening process is tight. We don’t have any reason to believe anyone else is compromised, but we’re going to need to run a lot more re-checks to regain confidence in everyone. Lila and her teams are already moving forward on that, with limited assistance from the FBI. If they find anything leading to criminal behavior or espionage, we’ll obviously become more involved.”

“But other than embarrassment and re-work, what are they trying to achieve?” I asked as I looked at the timeline.

“We still don’t know,” Lila said.

“But we have a few ideas,” Waters added. “I liaison with a team in State that has been looking at the Chinese economy and the impact your generators and your other high-tech materials are having. A few of the folks there believe you are making the Chinese political power structure unstable. Minister Chen is a rising star, and the inability of the Premier’s shadow minister, Sun, to match your technological accomplishments is creating a sense of conflict within the party. There is also a belief that the old guard take issue with your stance on encryption and other technologies that prevent them from exercising the type of control over information they desire. Add in the vast resources they are investing in your generators and their own fusion R&D efforts, and we expect some slowing of their manufacturing economy over the next five years. That will hit their trade balance as well. We know China wants the status of joining the IMF and having greater economic clout for diplomatic reasons. You appear to be threatening that without even trying to.”

I sighed and looked at the time. “Okay, so for the short-term, what can I do besides fix my spaceships?”

“State will be briefing the President tomorrow,” Waters said. “It will likely impact our trade policy with China,” he added.

“DoD is increasing the peacetime alert status for Pacific units,” Franklin said. “We don’t think there is much more we can do until they make a bigger move.”

“Well, then I guess I had better get back to my team and go fix Mars-One.”

I felt my phone buzz and looked at the display. Only a few people were set up to notify me when they sent something. I was surprised to feel it vibrate while several light minutes from Earth.

The message was from Tamara. “Urgent contact needed. Situation escalating.”

I typed a terse reply. “Middle of repair process. Will contact once Mars-One is up.”

No sooner had I hit send than another buzz hit my phone.

“Generator compromise. Protocols in action.” It was from Lila.

“Shit, shit, shit,” I muttered.

We had defined security protocols in place for responding to various threats to the generators or their operating teams. I knew Lila and Hunter would manage those procedures until I was closer to Earth. I was confused that Tamara would send a separate message.

Unless there were multiple issues happening while I was out of touch.

“Crap,” I said loud enough for Todd Walton and Joel Lamb to look at me.

“Problems, Paul?” We were waiting for the EVA team of Chrissy and Katiana to finish the ROM swap outs on the four engine clusters.

“Not here,” I replied. “But once we get the repairs completed, I need to get on the horn to Earth. It looks like we have multiple situations there to deal with.”

“Orbital Ops has been updating the return course parameters every hour.”

I nodded, but added, “Message them to have a two-gee option calculated for Orion-Six to get me back ASAP.”

“Ouch,” Todd said after punching in some numbers to his flight calculator. “Forty-six hours at two-gee is not going to be fun.”

“No, that’s why everyone but Terry and I will be dead-heading with you back to Earth. If I thought it was worth it, I’d try a higher-gee profile. Maybe I’ll have to after I talk to them back there.”

“Command,” Chrissy’s voice called out over the loudspeaker on the flight deck. “We’ve completed swap on engine cluster three. Moving on to cluster four.”

“Roger, swap complete on cluster three,” Joel said after keying his microphone.

“I’ll run down to local control and check it out,” I said. “Let Terry know we need to plan for a high-gee return, please,” I added as I headed out. The flight deck was near the top of the Orion, just below the upper EVA deck. Terry and our back-up EVA crew were in Orion-Six, docked nose to nose with Mars-One.

I was the only ‘rescue’ crew member on Mars-One right now. Terry, as pilot in command, had to stay on the Orion and the back-up EVA team was suited up and standing by for any emergency that Chrissy and Katiana might run into. It was my job to verify signals were transmitting through the new module to the actual control circuits, without firing the engine, after each swap was made. The devious attack had actually been simple in concept but incredibly tricky for the Chinese to execute.

Normally, the software told the engines to ignite and throttle to a specific setting. The reality of those commands was much more complex. The virus software in the main control computers had modified one of those commands. The modified firmware in the engine control systems had then been locked to a no-start command that we used in testing. By replacing that bit of firmware, we were able to issue the correct commands to the pair of engines in the cluster.

My job during this part of the procedure was to verify that a no-start command could be initiated from local control of the engine cluster and that both engines sent acknowledgment of the command back out. If that step worked, I could then initiate diagnostics on the engine circuitry. With the faulty firmware in place on the clusters, even the diagnostic commands had been locked out, since essentially every command was replaced with the no-start signal.

I got down to the local control panel, unlocked it, and was pleased to see the no-start and diagnostics ran as expected once again. I double-checked the diagnostic results, ran a copy from the panel to my laptop, and then buttoned everything back up again. I made my way back up to the flight deck.

“How are they doing?” I asked. I had been gone about twenty minutes.

“They just got the housing opened,” Todd said. “Probably another twenty minutes to swap it out and button things back up.”

“Okay. I need to use a stateroom to make a call to earth. Call me if they finish before then.”

“Will do,” Todd replied.

I commandeered an unused stateroom and connected my laptop to the shipboard network. It took a couple of minutes to get connected to Tamara. With the six-minute time-lag, video was not worth the trouble.

“Tamara, this is Paul,” I began, wanting to get my full message across as succinctly as possible. “I got Lila’s alert. She can manage the protocols on whatever is happening. What is your urgent escalation? Over.”

I then sat back and looked at my backlog of email. There was a note from Tamara.

I read quickly, to see what was going on. It appeared that one of the power plants we had built for the Trans-Siberian Railway upgrades had been attacked with two generators taken. I immediately wished for more information. While the structures we had demanded be built to house the generators were hardly bunkers, they weren’t simple sheds, either. Getting the generators out of them would not have been a simple task without some pretty heavy equipment. They had also been built with the Russian winter in mind.

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