Unix Wars!!!
Meanwhile, on a distant page in user space...
Two Admin troopers ushered Princess
LA36 into a conference room behind Lord Vadic.
"Moff Tarchive" she spat. "I should
have expected to find you hanging on Vadic's aux cable. I
recognized your unique pattern when I was first brought aboard."
She eyed the 0177545 tattoed on his header coldly.
"Charming to the last." Tarchive observed
smoothly. "Vadic, have you retrieved any information?"
"Her resistance to the logic probe
is considerable," Vadic rasped.
"Perhaps if we boosted the supply voltage..."
"You've had your chance. Now I would like the
Princess to witness the test that will certify this module
fully operational. Today we enable the -r beam
option, and we've chosen the
Princess's $HOME of /usr/alderaan as the primary
target.
"No! You can't! /usr/alderaan is an unprotected
public directory. We have no backup tapes! You can't..."
"Then name the rebel i-node!"
Tarchive snapped. A voice announced from a hidden speaker
that they'd arrived in /usr.
"2317" she whispered. "They're on /dev/rm5, i-node 2317.
/mnt/dantooine. She turned away.
Tarchive sighed with satisfaction. "There, you
see, Lord Vadic? She can be reasonable. Proceed with the operation."
It took several clock ticks for the words to penetrate. "What?" the
Princess gasped.
"/dev/rm5 is not a currently mounted file system."
explained Tarchive "We require a more visible target
to demonstrate the power of the rm- star. We will, of
course, mount an attack on /mnt/dantooine as soon as possible.
As she watched in horror Tarchive typed "ls -la"
on a nearby terminal.The screen showed
\fI.: no such directory\fR
Abruptly the Princess double-spaced and went offline.
Meanwhile, the \fIMilliamp Falcon\fR hurtled through
free space...
Con Sole0 finished checking the control and status
registers, finally satisfying himself that they'd
lost the Admin bus signals as they'd
passed the terminator. An irritable belch from Sixpacca
disturbed him not at all; he knew the Bookie got
grouchy when losing at chess, and RS232 had just caught
him in the Fischer set with a seven-ply search.
Across the room Luke was too busy practicing
bit-slice technique to notice the commotion.
"On a word boundary, Luke,"
said PDP-1 "Don't just hack at it.
Remember, the bytesaber is the ceremonial weapon of the Red-Eye
Knight. It is used to trim offensive lines of code. Handwaving
won't get you anywhere. Attune yourself with the Source."
Luke turned back towards the drone humming
in the air beside him. This time his attack complemented
its actions perfectly.
Con Sole0 was not impressed. "Forget this
bit-slicing stuff. Give me a good old PROM blaster any day!"
"Glork!" said PDP-1 indistinctly. He looked
momentarily vacant.
"What's wrong?" asked Luke.
"Strange. I thought I felt a disturbance in the
/src. It's gone now."
"We're coming up on user space!"
called Sole0 from the CSR. They slipped safely
through stack frames and emerged in the new context, only to find
themselves bombarded by floating freeblocks.
"What the..." gasped Sole0. The Bookie
belched unhappily. The screen showed \fI/usr/alderaan: not found\fR
"This is the right i-node, but it's been cleared! Brewie, where's
the
nearest file?"
The Bookie was beginning to belch a reply when
he was interrupted by a bright flash off to the left.
"Admin TTY fighters!" Con shouted "A
whole DZ of them. Where are they coming from?"
"The host system can't be far." said
PDP-1 "They've all got direct
EIA connections."
As Sole0 began evasive action the ship lurched suddenly.
Luke noticed that the link count was 3 and climbing rapidly.
"This is no ordinary file..."
murmered Kenobi "Look at that ODS
directory structure ahead! They seem to have us in a tractor feed."
"There's no way we can unlink in time."
said Sole0 "We're going in."
The \fIMilliamp Falcon\fR was swiftly pulled
down to the open collector of the Admin module. Lord Vadic
surveyed the battered ship as Admin Storm- Flunkies searched for
passengers.
"\fIls\fR scan shows no one on board, sir"
was the report. Vadic was unconvinced.
"Send a fully equipped \fIncheck\fR squad aboard. I
want every location in that thing searched." He stalked away.
More Unix Wars --->>