Kara and Maritza launched and sped out from beneath the derrick, then got in line behind the other two boards. Kara hooked her harness to the boom and leaned against the pull of the sail. She crouched low to give herself as much leverage as possible. The waves bobbed the boards up and down, up and down, but in a way Kara was intimately familiar with. I can do this. Too bad these boards are so big. They’re like surfing a coffee table.
She looked down and felt sorry for Maritza. In calmer waters the second person on the windsurfer could sit up on the nose, but in conditions like this the passenger needed to be as low as possible. This meant, Kara noted, that every wave Kara sailed over smacked Maritza right in the chin, often breaking over her head. That was only if she took it correctly; a few times Kara almost buried her passenger in the brine.
“Sorry about the ride!” yelled Kara.
“I’ve been in worse!” yelled Maritza between dunkings.
“What could be worse than this?”
“A real storm!”
“This isn’t a storm?”
“This is just wind!”
“Going to be easier than I thought,” Ganesa had said last night. “You all know about Personal Networking, right? And how tricky it can be if you don’t password protect your computer? Well, only one computer in the range of Kara’s mobile has any sort of rudimentary protection. These militia IT people either are dumb, careless or never expected a cyber attack from inside their own derrick.” Kara checked her Com. They were five minutes out: time for Cyber Attack, stage 1. Using a proxy server from India to cover his tracks, Ganesa was going to bombard the Haley Militia web server with calls for information. When the server choked, he would activate a mole program he’d installed on the server to fire out hundreds of e-mails a second to every e-mail address it could find. Then he would deface their website with logos from one of the prank organizations that was famous in cyberspace for this sort of thing.
The wind picked up a notch and Kara had to lean back even more against the sail. Then came a strong gust and Kara lost her grip on one of the footstraps and catapulted forwards. She face-planted onto of the sail.
“You alright?” shouted Maritza.
“Yeah! Those gusts are murder!”
“Glad it’s you up there,” said Maritza.
Another strong gust hit them, and Kara heard a crack. She saw Veatta’s mast snap in half and both girls tumble. Veatta’s grasp slipped and she fell into her boom hard. “Kafele!”
Kafele turned his board around with an elegant jibe and brought himself alongside the crippled windsurfer. Saniya was wriggling back onto the board but Veatta hung on with one arm and held her ribs with the other. “You alright, girls?” asked Kafele.
“I’m fine, but check on Veatta,” said Saniya.
“Maritza, get in there and check on Veatta,” said Kara.
Maritza plopped into the water and slid alongside Veatta. “Veatta, does it hurt?”
“Yeah,” she said, like she was short of breath.
“Is it your ribs?”
“Yeah,” she said. It looked like every breath was painful.
She’s got a broken rib. Time to take action, thought Kara. She kept a position just behind everyone. “Saniya, detach your mast!” Saniya nodded and popped the sail off. It was quickly swept away. “Kafele!” yelled Kara. “Lash your board to theirs! You’re going to tow it!”
Kafele pulled a line from a bag and tossed it a few feet to Saniya. Saniya lashed the line to a ring near the nose of the board. Kafele tied the other end to the base of his mast. “Ready!” he yelled.
Kara jumped into the water. She held onto her board with one hand and leaned over towards the other girls. “Okay, moment of truth. Who’s the best windsurfer out of all of us?”
“You are,” said Saniya.
“Great,” said Kara. “I was afraid of that. Okay, let’s get Veatta onto my board. Saniya and Maritza, you two stay on the crippled board.”
The three girls eased Veatta onto to the other board. Veatta tried a prone position but that clearly hurt a lot. She could only lay on her side comfortably, which was difficult to maintain in the swells. “Veatta, just grab onto the mast, okay? I’ll try not to move it too much.”
“Okay,” she answered. Kara was amazed at Veatta’s poise. She would have been screaming and cursing bloody murder if that had happened to her. She attached a surfer-type leash to Veatta’s ankle, then secured the other end to the board.
“Let’s get moving!” yelled Kara. She still the rear position and furled her sail in more to keep the speed down. “Damn, this sucks,” she muttered under her breath. Since nobody could steer the middle board any more, Maritza and Saniya were getting buried every few seconds.
Kafele led the way with only a GPS coordinate as a destination. Kara wondered if they really would get to the same exact spot they’d been at two days ago. It seemed like a needle-in-a-haystack kind of problem: finding a few fish in a huge ocean when there weren’t any significant landmarks. Even the Haley Militia derrick was over the horizon, and Kara, very heartily, wanted it to stay that way.
Sooner than Kara expected, Kafele shouted that they were there. Kara dropped her sail, then pushed a button on her Com. It sent a compressed and encrypted message to Ganesa telling him they had arrived. This was the signal for Cyber Attack: stage 2.
One of the failed ideas of computing was the series of operating system features known as Appliance Control. This was the ability to control household appliances and other equipped devices wirelessly from one location. It was never accepted on a mass basis, but it was used in certain specialized applications. Ganesa noticed in his sweep of the Haley Militia network that the feeding procedure for the farmed fish was one of several systems run on Appliance Control. Stage 2 was taking control of the feeding system and dumping all the food into the pen.
Kara and Kafele dropped their sails. “Deploy the sea anchors,“ Kara said. These were little parachutes two feet wide designed to keep their noses pointed into the wind and prevent drifting. Each board popped one out automatically. “Good,” said Kara. “Now let’s get those fish.”
Saniya expertly pulled her rebreather, even in the rough water, then swam over to Maritza, who was struggling with some of the straps. They rearranged Maritza in the harness. “Is it working?” Saniya asked.
“I’m fine,” said Maritza.
“Can you breathe! I don’t want any accidents.”
“I can breathe fine.” Kafele handed Saniya a plastic apparatus, a “slurp gun” that looked like a large transparent water gun with a couple of extra tanks for water, then gave a similar one to Maritza.
“Kara, we’re ready to go!” said Saniya
“Then go! Let us know on the short-range if you need help.”
Kara watched the two girls descend into the grey water. They disappeared quickly. Last time they’d been here Kara could see to the bottom, almost fifty feet down; now the visibility was maybe fifteen. This is going to take a freaking miracle to pull off, thought Kara.
