Cyberstrike, James Barrington [short story to read .TXT] 📗

a magnifying glass and it looked to him like a very, very thin grey film lying on the plasma, but using a hand lens he couldn’t see any details. He prepped a microscope slide with some of the film, but even under the highest magnification he had on the optical microscope it was still just a greyish smear, with no indication what it was made of. But whatever it was, it shouldn’t have been there, so the technicians decided to take the next obvious step.’

‘A SEM,’ Natasha Black suggested. ‘Or maybe even a STEM, if they had access to one.’

Dame Janet looked at her blankly, not sure whether to be impressed or irritated. ‘A SEM?’ she asked.

‘Scanning electron microscope. Digs down into the stuff that optical devices can’t see. The problem with trying to see anything really small is light itself. The wavelength of visible light is between 0.4 and 0.7 micrometres and you can’t see anything smaller than half that wavelength, so 0.2 micrometres. A micrometre used to be called a micron, and it’s one millionth of a metre. To give you an idea of the scale we’re talking about, a human hair is about fifty micrometres in diameter. There’s stuff you can do to get higher resolution, like sub-diffraction microscopy, but they’re just workarounds. To see atoms and molecules you have to forget the optical stuff and use electrons, because they have a smaller wavelength. That gives you a resolution of between one and twenty nanometres, and a nanometre is a billionth of a metre, so really sodding small.’

‘You mentioned a STEM?’ Morgan said.

‘Yup. A STEM – an STM – is a scanning tunnelling microscope, and that makes the SEM look kind of clunky. The STM works at the atomic level, so the resolution’s between about a tenth and a hundredth of a nanometre. And there are a few other high-tech gadgets in the same field like the AFM and the TEM, the atomic force microscope and the transmission electron microscope. They’ve both got about the same level of resolution as the STEM.’

North looked at her and nodded.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘You’re right. It was an anomaly and they decided to take it to the next level. The next level down, I mean. They took a sample to UCL, University College London, and used the scanning electron microscope they have there.’

‘Don’t keep us in suspense,’ Dame Janet instructed. ‘Presumably this SEM thing identified whatever it was.’

North nodded.

‘It did, yes,’ he replied, ‘but that’s really where our problems start, not where they finish.’ He paused again. ‘Do any of you know what a fullerene is?’ he asked. ‘Or a buckyball?’

Chapter 5

River Thames, London

What had taken most of the time had been working out the delivery mechanism. The target, in the context of the campaign, was both very ambitious and perfectly obvious, and it wasn’t even the first time that somebody had tried to destroy it, though that much earlier attempt had been a complete failure. The problem they had faced was that, precisely because the target was so obvious and so important, it was also extremely well protected. They knew from the very start that getting close enough to it to do any significant damage, at least using the easiest approach and one of their normal, tried and tested methods of attack, would never work.

There was one approach path to the target that was essentially unguarded but presented an extremely high degree of difficulty and would have required at least one of the volunteer shahids to learn to fly an aircraft, and they really hadn’t got time for that. And in any case, after 9/11 the rules and precautions involving powered flights near cities in the United Kingdom, and especially near London, had been tightened up so much that they knew a successful attack from the air could not be guaranteed. It might not even be possible because of the large number of military bases near London from which a fighter aircraft could be scrambled. So they looked again at the other unguarded avenue of approach and decided that was their best option, but using a slightly different and hopefully unexpected method.

They knew more or less what they needed to do, and after about a week spent wandering around in the boatyards and marinas that were dotted about the upper reaches of the Thames, they’d found three vessels that would suit their purposes. They covertly watched to see how often the owners of these boats appeared and then settled on the oldest one, which looked as if it had almost been abandoned.

In the late evening of the day after they had made their choice, Hassan and Tariq, whose combined skill sets included opening locked doors and a certain facility with key-operated systems of all kinds, had entered the small marina after watching it for over an hour to make sure they would be the only people there. That had required picking the padlock securing the pedestrian access gate, which they’d then carefully locked behind them – they would be leaving by a different route – before heading for the office building on which they knew two security cameras were mounted. The most expensive things in the marina were the boats berthed there, not the office buildings, and that was where the cameras had been pointed.

Tariq had found a sturdy wooden box that would give him the height he needed to reach the camera. He stood on it and, taking care to keep his face well away from the lens, he had sprayed a thick coating of black paint onto it. He’d repeated the treatment with the second camera, checked to make sure there were no other monitoring devices, and then they’d made their way through the marina to the berth where the cabin cruiser was located.

The lock on the stern door had given them no trouble at all, and nor had the ignition lock. About five minutes after stepping on board the boat, Tariq had released the mooring ropes