Star Wars Black Fleet Crisis 01 Before the Storm Michael P Kube McDowell

[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

treats the approaching ship as a threat, and bolts."
' "Call and response," said Lobot.
"Sign and countersign," said Lando. "It wants to hear the password.
But why didn't it try again to get away? All it would have had to do
is turn to a new heading. The interdiction pickets could never have
re-positioned themselves in time."
"There is a high probability that this vessel was built before
interdiction fields were invented," said Lobot. "If we are dealing
with an automated response system, what just happened may have been
outside the parameters of the identification and security routines."
"Okay," said Lando. "Maybe their black box doesn't look outside to
make sure that the jump actually took place if the motivator and the
drive report
normally, it assumes that the ship jumped. And by the time all that
was over, D-89 was long gone--no threat within the threat horizon."
"That seems plausible."
"I'm going to play a hunch here and say it's more than plausible,"
Lando said. "The ship wants an answer from anyone who comes
knocking.
No answer, no entry. And it won't wait around for you to keep
guessing. It wants the answer right away."
See-Threepio cocked his head. "But Master Lando--what is the
question?"
"That's what we have to figure out, Threepio."
Hours of frustrating and fruitless verbal wandering passed before the
group finally found a path that seemed as if it might lead somewhere.
"Think, everyone--think. Let's back up and look at this again," Lando
said impatiently. "You want to lock up a spaceship you're sending out
to the great nowhere.
You want to make sure no outsider can get in uninvited, but you and
yours always have accessre" "Excuse me," said Lobot. "We don't know
that the builders of the vagabond intended to reenter it after it was
launched."
"That's true," admitted Lando. "But if they locked the door and threw
away the code, we might as well go home before we get somebody
killed.
We have to assume there's a way in."
"Very well. But I will consider this an axiom rather than a fact."
"Here's a fact If I'd built it, there'd be at least two ways in--a
front door, and a back door for when something goes wrong with the
front door," Lando said. "But, I was saying--you don't want to use a
physical key, because you don't want to let anyone that close without
checking them out. So we're talking about a password, basically. A
really long binary password."
"Forgive me, Master Lando, but in my experience
no sentient being could remember a password of this length and
comp lexity," said Threepio.
"The answer might not be as long as the question--" Lando began.
"It could be longer," said Lobot.
"That's not the point. Maybe the question only looks long and complex
because we don't understand it. Human beings can remember incredibly
long sequences if they have meaning," said Lando. "I knew a smuggler
who'd memorized the Hundred Prescriptions of Alsidas when he was a kid
taking religious training, and he could still rattle them off thirty
years later. My mother knew hundreds of songs and poems by heart.
And there are species with much better memories than human beings."
"I don't dispute that. There are many feats of memory recorded in the
libraries," said Lobot. "Even so, passwords and access codes, whether
mathematical or linguistic, are not error-tolerant. No matter how long
the expected response may be, it must contain no errors."
"Well, that's always the problem, isn't it?" said Lando. "How do
people remember all the things they have to remember? What do they do
when there's something they can't allow themselves to forget? Some
people have incredible memories, and others have trouble remembering
their kids' birthdays, much less their ID numbers and the access codes
for digital locks they haven't opened in years. So people cheat."
"Mnemonics."
"Yes, but they cheat in other ways, too," said Lando. "They carry the
passcodes with them--" "But that compromises security. Anything that's
carried can be stolen."
"Right. So some try to disguise the passcode as something else--"
"That's little better. Anything that's hidden can be found."
"Right again," said Lando. "A pickpocket on Pyjridj once told me that
four of every five belt
pouches he saw had passcodes in them, and it rarely took him even a
minute to find them. Sometimes the passcode was the only handwritten
item in the pouch."
"You could ask a droid to remember the passcode for you," said
Threepio. "A droid can be instructed to tell no one but you, does not
make mistakes, and will not forget."
"But droids can be stolen, just like pouches," Lobot said. "Droids can
have their memories read, or wiped. Droids will dump their memory data
under sensor-torture. Droids also know what it is that they know,
which can lead to erratic behavior. Droids have revealed criminal acts [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

Tematy