Page 49 of Power's Fall

Vadisk’s eye was twitching. “A computer virus?—”

“Technically worm.”

“—made a physical piece of machinery destroy itself?”

“Yes.”

“Could something like that be used to tell a plane to fly into a mountain?” Vadisk demanded. “How the fuck do you defend against that?”

“Technically, yes, and you have to have system defenses.”

“Is that what you did? Stopped someone from refining uranium with one of your cyberattacks?” Dahlia asked.

“Yes, actually. The other Cyber Ops guy on the sub and I built a worm a lot like Stuxnet.” The fact that they’d done it themselves, while underwater, was seriously damned impressive. It had taken dozens of people from two different governments to build Stuxnet. He wasn’t going to tell Vadisk and Dahlia that, though, because he already felt like enough of an asshole.

“I found the news report about a ‘malfunction’ in a nuclear facility that set the country’s nuclear program back twenty years. And one about a banking system in Southeast Asia going offline while their currency was collapsing. The system stayed offline for two days, just long enough for the U.S. to secretly prop up the economy and stop a government collapse.”

“Let me guess, they’re a U.S. ally and we have bases there?” Dahlia asked with a sigh.

“Yep.”

“Could you make a computer explode? Could you assassinate someone by making their computer blow up while they’re sitting at their desk?” Vadisk was gripping his head with both hands.

“No. There’s nothing explosive in the hardware of a computer.”

Vadisk relaxed, muttering to himself in Ukrainian. The poor dude was just now realizing how very vulnerable everything and everyone really was. He could keep his mouth shut and not stress Vadisk out any more…

“I could probably make the computer catch on fire,” Montana said.

Vadisk’s head jerked up. “What?”

“Turn off the fan, max out the CPU so it runs hot. Depending on what kind of computer it is, and the casing, that would start a fire that could spread.”

Vadisk made a sound that was almost a whimper. Dahlia reached over and patted his knee, but she was watching Montana.

“You stopped nuclear development and a currency collapse, but neither of those is what upset you, is it?” she asked.

He shook his head and looked at the floor. “There was an attack on the capitol in Sierra Leone. My order was to take the government networks offline until the government took back control of the building. I think it’s because our government didn’t want the terrorists to access information about stores of this mineral rutile that were waiting to be exported to the U.S.”

Dahlia closed her eyes, exhaling slowly. “What happened when you took the government network offline?”

“Their airline computer systems were housed in that building. Air traffic control, radar, and the airport computer network all went offline. Planes went down. Basically what I did was build something to tell the VM—virtual machine—that controlled the server to turn itself off, and I overwrote the commands that would automatically turn it back on. Someone was supposedly standing by on site to input the code and turn the system back on the instant they had control of the building. But the loss of radar and guidance systems means planes crashed. Planes carrying civilians. Not enemy soldiers, not corrupt politicians, not bad guys. Just…innocent people.”

Dahlia squeezed his hand. “Montana?—”

“Did you know when you launched the virus that would happen?” Vadisk asked.

Montana knew where Vadisk was going with this but answered anyway. “No. When I was given system information, it looked like I was taking down the servers that controlled the government network, not infrastructure. Just administration.”

“The person who gave the order, do you think they knew and hid it from you?”

Montana shrugged. “Probably. It was pretty clear by that point I had ethical concerns.”

Vadisk raised his hand as if he’d made his point. “So they hid the information from you so you’d do it. You were just following orders.”

“That’s not an excuse.”

“It’s not,” Vadisk agreed with a sigh.

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