Eagle Station

Unlike most of those on the forty-second floor, his office had no windows at all. Secure behind a keypad-controlled electronic lock, the room looked much smaller than it was — largely because almost all the available space was taken up by floor-to-ceiling racks of computer hardware. There was just enough room for a desk, chair, and a very large wastebasket usually full of crumpled paper coffee cups and takeout containers. Whenever Orlov was immersed in a complicated task, he rarely took any time off to sleep or eat… or even to change his clothes.

Right now, wearing a wrinkled polo shirt and dirty jeans, he sat hunched over a keyboard. While Sam Kerr and Marcus Cartwright were out in the field at Kansk-Dalniy, he’d been following a lead gained from hacking emails exchanged between a high-ranking Russian Space Forces officer and a production manager at Voronezh’s KB Khimavtomatika (KBKhA), the Chemical Automatics Design Bureau.

KBKhA was one of Russia’s leading high-tech companies. Its factories turned out everything from liquid-propellant rocket engines to nuclear space reactors to high-power lasers. That strongly suggested the company was somehow involved in Leonov’s spaceplane program — most probably in advanced engine development. And several of its senior engineers and executives had been specially invited to the Firebird demonstration, which only made the connection seem more certain.

But what had really caught Orlov’s attention was a cryptic reference in one of the emails to something called Nebesnyy Grom, Heaven’s Thunder. He was willing to bet that was a code name for the high-powered hybrid turbofan-scramjet-rocket engines any real single-stage-to-orbit spaceplane needed. Once their engines entered production, Russians usually slapped on dull-as-dishwater numbers, like the RD-0150… but nothing stopped them from indulging in a little romance while a project was still classified.

Since then, he’d been chasing down every possible reference to Heaven’s Thunder. Most of them had dead-ended, but a few had led him to a top secret Russian Defense Ministry database. He was pretty sure it contained critical files pertaining to the Firebird Project. And for hours and hours, he’d been digitally prowling around its outskirts, looking for a way inside.

Unfortunately, this was as close as Orlov dared get. Whoever had designed its security firewall had done one hell of a job. From what he could tell, this database was essentially guarded by the computer equivalent of motion sensors, IR detection gear, radar, land mines, barbed wire, machine guns, flamethrowers, and heavy artillery — with a side order of nuclear weapons thrown in for good measure.

“Fucking Q-boys,” he growled under his breath, taking his hands off the keyboard. He was pretty sure Q Directorate’s specialists were the ones who’d sheathed this database in so many layers of digital death. Their coding work wasn’t exactly discreet. It was more like they’d slapped on a bunch of garish neon signs blazing, “Abandon All Hope Ye Who Hack Here.” Then again, he admitted to himself, their computer security work didn’t have to be discreet, just effective.

Orlov shook his head in dismay. Short of Sam Kerr using her feminine wiles to charm the necessary passwords out of some lust-stricken Russian officer, there was no way in hell anyone from Scion was going to get a peek at those classified files. Not even an all-out, brute force hacking attack would break through those defenses.

Yawning, he sat back and rubbed at his tired eyes. They felt raw, like someone had been scraping them with sandpaper. No surprise, there, he thought blearily. The clock readout in the lower right corner of his monitor showed that he’d been working this angle for nearly twenty hours without a real break. Maybe it was time to punch out, grab some sleep, and come back at the problem fresh another day.

Still yawning, Orlov started to push back his chair… but then he froze in place, staring at his screen.

A red-outlined box had just flashed into existence: warning. intrusion attempts detected. intrusion attempts are ongoing.

He felt cold. Someone out there was trying to hack into Tekhwerk’s own computer network. And whoever it was had just tripped hidden warning subroutines he’d buried very deeply in what would otherwise look like an ordinary corporate security firewall. Shit. Shit. Shit. Had his own reconnaissance of that special Defense Ministry database set off alarms he’d missed?

Then Orlov shook his head. That wasn’t very likely. He’d been operating at arm’s length through a linked series of zombie computers — machines he’d infiltrated months ago and now secretly controlled. Even if he’d triggered an alarm, there should be no way anyone could have traced him back here through all those cutouts. Not this fast, anyway.