with his forearm, panting. “Yeah, fine, guilty as charged. Save it for later, okay? How are we doing?”
Tau let out an annoyed breath. “All right for the moment. There were four big fronts where they tried to break through. We stopped the first two right away, but the other two were much worse, and one of them, right here where our people were shoved back into the river, was the worst of all. Maybe a hundred thousand zombie logins hit us in that spot—”
“But they didn’t punch through.”
“No thanks to those of us who went in without adequate safeguards and diverted resources that were needed for the defense!”
Dev made a face. “Okay, I guess this is later . . .”
Tau rolled his eyes. “Sorry. But this was not the walkover we thought it was going to be, Dev. Our defenses were hard pressed: Mike wasn’t kidding you when he said this was a much worse attack than anything we’ve had before. There were some minor breakthroughs into the accounting routines, and though we cut them off fast, now the question is what those people on the outside learned. The attacker programs were adapting as fast to what we were doing as we were to them.”
“You think the attacks weren’t entirely machine driven?” Dev said. “They had people riding their routines the way we did?”
“Why not?” Tau said. “We thought of doing it. Why shouldn’t they?”
Dev let out a breath. “Okay,” he said. He looked out over the battlefield, which was clearing rapidly: all the forces of zombie-bot darkness had now been pushed well back from the river and were being forced right out toward the battlefield’s horizons. Behind them the pursuing Omnitopians were also flooding over into the real- world side of the battle, pursuing their enemies down the world’s networks to isolate the access gateways the enemy had used and lock them down. Others would doubtless open later, but these would not be used again.
Tau was watching the retreat of the dark forces with a grim look on his face. Most of the Omnitopians who had been behind them had now headed forward to help their comrades with the mopping up. Dev let out a breath. Then, startled by something seen out of the corner of his eye, he turned.
Something among the roots of the tree. Flitting, passing—gone—
And now, nothing. Dev became aware that Tau was looking at him strangely. “What?”
“Did you see that?” Dev said.
“See what?”
Dev shook his head. Now that Tau asked, it was hard to say. “It was like—” He shrugged. “A shadow.”
Tau turned an uneasy look on him. “A virus, maybe?” They had seen such things before when viewing the Omnitopia subterverse this way: introduced code, insufficiently or incorrectly described or camouflaged by the ones responsible, would display itself against the more fully realized background as something splotchy or inchoate.
Dev shook his head. “Down here? You were the one telling me how well this area’s protected.”
Tau scowled. “Usually, sure. But after what we’ve been through it’s not beyond possibility that something sneaked in. Or that this attack was used as cover to allow something to sneak in . . .”
“Have a security crew give the place a good scouring,” Dev said. He chucked the Sword of Truth into the air, and the system caught it and vanished it: when his hands were empty, Dev rubbed his eyes. “They can report off after we do our debrief.”
“Right,” Tau said. “See you in the Tower.”
He vanished.
Dev stood there looking at the trees and the shadows under them for some little while longer: then vanished as well.
Two hours later, Dev, Tau, Mike, and four of Tau’s senior security and infrastructure people finished their debriefing in the Tower room around the big dark table, while outside the last embers of sunset were burning down into darkness. Dev pushed his laptop away, sighing, and closed its lid on a long report that would need closer examination later in the evening. “So,” he said. “Bottom line: all the prep we did, all the ready-rolled attack strategies, turned out not to be more than enough—they were barely enough. And we’re going to get hit again, and we have no good answer to the question of whether we’ll be ready.”
“That about sums it up,” said Tau. He dropped the pen he’d been fiddling with and leaned his elbows on the table, running his hands through his hair. “At the end of the day, the strategies and responses improvised and executed on the fly