Conventions of War Read Free Page B

that Spence provided, she discovered that all the Records Office mail—minus the interoffice communications, which remained within the department—went through the same broadcast node, a heavy duty model fully capable of handling the thousands of requests for information delivered to the office every day. The node tagged every mail with its own code before sending the original to its destination, and automatically copied every mail to the Office of the Censor, where it would be subjected to a series of highly secret algorithms to determine any subversive content.
    But how easy was it to program the broadcast node? She followed Spence’s advice and checked the help files.
    Very easy indeed. She was surprised. For someone with the proper user status, the programming features of the node could be turned on or off nearly as easily as flipping a switch.
    Her eyes burned from hours of staring at the display. Sula went to the bathroom and removed the brown contact lenses she wore to disguise her green eyes. She looked at herself in the darkened old mirror above the rust-stained sink, checked her hair roots, then touched her skin. Her efforts at disguise extended to dying her blond hair black and giving herself carotene supplements to darken her pale complexion. She was going to have to use the hair dye again soon, she saw.
    Her nerves gave a leap as the outer door opened and she realized she was far from the nearest weapon. She tried to calm herself with the thought that it was probably Macnamara returning, and so it proved to be.
    Got to keep a gun in the bathroom, she thought as she returned to the front room.
    â€œShall I sleep here tonight?” Macnamara asked. “Or shall I use my own place?”
    Originally, the Riverside apartment had been acquired only for meetings of the team, with the members actually sleeping in their own individual apartments, but the necessity of caring for a wounded team member had changed that.
    â€œYou can go home,” Sula said. “I’ll look after Spence tonight.”
    Macnamara glanced at the symbols glowing in the depths of the desk. “Working on something?” he asked.
    â€œYes. A way to communicate with the population.”
    Macnamara considered this. “I hope it’s less work than the last one.”
    After checking her work several times, Sula produced a program that would do a number of jobs in sequence.
    Turn off the broadcast node’s logging, so there would be no record of what followed.
    Turn off the function that appended an identification tag to the message.
    Turn off the function that copied the message to the censor.
    Broadcast a message.
    Turn on the function that copied messages to the censor.
    Turn on the identification function.
    And turn on the logging again.
    After which the program would remove itself from the node.
    She tested her program by sending herself a message—“The information you requested is not available at this department”—and found that it worked. No record of her message, or any of the other tasks she had triggered, appeared in any of the Department logs.
    She could send a message now, if she could only work out who to send it to and what the message was.
    Before Sula cut the connection and turned off the computer, she checked Rashtag’s message for the next day and found that his word was “Expedite!”
    Exactly, she thought.
    Spence had long ago gone to bed, but Sula had drunk too much coffee to sleep. She leaned out the window and took a deep breath of warm midsummer air.
    The traffic was gone, the stalls and pushcarts carried away. Energy restrictions had turned off all signs and illuminated only every third streetlight. Under the nearest, a street away, she could see a few figures engaged in intense conversation, their arms gesturing broadly.
    She grinned. It was so late that the hustlers could hustle only each other.
    Sula left the apartment through the rear door off the