The Ascension Myth Box Set

by Ell Leigh Clark

  “You’re leaving the details up to us?” Soraya asked slowly, caught somewhere between disbelief and double-checking.

  “You know what you’re doing,” Bates replied, offering it as confirmation. “I expect to be kept informed of what’s going on, but I have no intentions of micromanaging you.”

  “Of course, ma’am,” Soraya replied, as if the words were simply habit whenever Bates spoke. “We’ll get started immediately.”

  “See that you do.” Bates waved them toward the door again.

  The three of them trekked back down the stairs in thoughtful silence. When they made it back to the bullpen, rather than returning to their individual cubicles, Soraya and Dhashana instead dragged their chairs into Elroy’s cubicle.

  They started out with the basics, simply dredging up as much unclassified information on Cyber Communications as they could, until all three of their holoconsoles were a mess of tabs and windows.

  The public information offered little to go off of. It was time to change tacks.

  “Any new employees?” Soraya asked, idly twisting her chair just slightly from one side to the other. “This is a recent issue, so either someone new has been introduced or something happened with an old-timer. I figure Occam’s Razor is at play here, so we’ll check for newbies first.”

  Elroy hummed, the universal sound for ‘give me a sec,’ and it was followed by the rapid sound of typing. A moment later, six pictures popped up on screen.

  “All of them have only been working in Cyber Communications for a few months at most,” he offered, hands still poised over his keyboard.

  Soraya wrinkled her nose slightly in distaste. “That’s still a lot of information to check, though. I was hoping this would be quick.”

  “Hang on.” Dhashana glanced over the information briefly, before highlighting two of them; a woman named Jennifer and a nondescript man named Ben. “These two are the only ones who would have the authority to tweak broadcasting to this extent,” she offered. “The other four are interns or lower level workers.”

  “And everyone else has been established there long enough that we probably would have gotten trouble from them before this,” Elroy added. “Should I try to see how much of their stuff I can get through without being onsite?”

  “Hold on.” Soraya held a hand up before she leaned closer to the screen. Slowly, she pointed to Jennifer’s picture and the job title beneath it. “Didn’t her predecessor die not that long ago?” she asked pointedly.

  “Murdered, yeah,” Dhashana confirmed. “She got shot. Sniped, if you want to be specific.”

  “A woman gets murdered, and now her successor is one of our most likely suspects,” Soraya mused, head cocked to one side as she contemplated the picture. “Seems a bit too convenient if you ask me. Start with her.”

  “Got it.” Elroy flashed her a thumbs-up before he started typing again.

  It was only a minute later when he made a disgusted noise and leaned back from his console as if it had offended him.

  “Problem?” Soraya asked blandly.

  “Firewall,” he grumbled before he cracked his knuckles and started typing again. “Give me a minute.”

  He pulled up a list of employees, glanced at it quickly, and kept typing. A few minutes later, he crowed, “Got it!”

  “Already?” Soraya wondered, peering over his shoulder. “How’d you bypass it?”

  “Didn’t,” he answered, tone distracted. “Interns’ accounts have less security. Got into one of those and used it as a proxy so Jennifer’s account thinks the intrusion is coming from within the local network.”

  The bullpen lapsed into silence after that, and after a minute Soraya settled back into her seat once it became apparent that watching Elroy work wasn’t all that exciting in real-time.

  Eventually, Elroy heaved an exasperated sigh. “She’s a complete amateur about coding,” he grumbled.

  “You’ve said that about professional programmers,” Dhashana accused. “Not everyone has standards as high as the moon.”

  “Well they should,” he insisted primly, leaning back into his seat. He pushed his holoconsole over for Soraya to look at. “She tried to cover her tracks, but there are bits and pieces of her code left all over the place. I can piece it back together enough to get some idea of what she was doing. Leaving breadcrumbs is an amateur move,” he insisted.

  “Can we definitively say that Jennifer is the cause of the scheduling discrepancies?” Soraya asked before he could go off on an overly-involved tangent.

  He nodded quickly. “I’d say so, yeah,” he confirmed. “Like I said, she tried to cover her tracks, so I can’t put all of the specifics together from here.” He flapped a hand at his console. “But her accounts accessed the scheduling system way more than it should have, and I can put together pieces of her override for the system. I mean, I can’t guess at her intent, clearly, but she’s at least had something to do with it.”

  Soraya nodded slowly. “Right,” she agreed, glancing over Elroy’s holoconsole. She didn’t understand his digital work to the same extent as he did, but she could grasp the gist of it. “I guess we know what the next step is.”

  “Time to bring her in?” Elroy wondered, already making copies of everything on his console before he started closing it down. They were going to need the evidence later, more than likely, which meant they couldn’t risk any of it being erased in the interim.

  “Time to bring her in,” Soraya confirmed, getting to her feet. “We’ll need to be careful, but I don’t think it will be a particularly dangerous gig.”

  “You mean waltzing into the Department of Cyber Communications won’t be like a battlefield?” Elroy wondered wryly, feigning a look of wide-eyed amazement. “I never would have guessed.” His antics got no response.

  “I’ll go let the boss know what we’re doing. You,” Soraya pointed a finger at Elroy, “go get a car ready. And you,” she turned to point at Dhashana, “go grab the mockup badges and uniforms for us. We need them to actually let us into the building beyond the lobby if we’re going to do anything.”

  “Cops, I’m assuming?” Dhashana asked, levering herself to her feet. Already, her thoughts were churning as she mentally put together a list of everything they would need for the disguises.

  Soraya simply nodded in agreement and waved her on her way, as she got to her feet and headed toward the lift. She turned to call over her shoulder, “And both of you be quick about it. I want this all out of the way by the end of the night.”

  “Got it!” Elroy called, already halfway to the garage.

  “Understood,” Dhashana offered distractedly, back in her own cubicle and compiling the information they would all need for suitably convincing IDs.

  The lift opened and Soraya stepped in.

  Chapter 19

  Department of Cyber Communications, Spire, Estaria

  Jennifer knocked on the door and waited, standing patiently in the hallway until her boss called, “Come in.” She keyed in her entry code and stepped through when the door slid open. It closed automatically behind her.

  With a cheerful smile on her face, she came to a halt in front of his desk. “Morning, sir,” she offered. “I have a few things I need to get your approval on.”

  He reached out an expectant hand, waiting for her to hand it over. “Well, let’s see it.”

  Jennifer knew her boss already. She had studied how he ticked, even in the short time she had known him. It was a skill she had developed. She knew how long his attention span actually lasted, so when she handed him a stack of half a dozen requests that needed his approval, she knew exactly what he was going to do.

  He read the first two, just as she expected him to. Once he got to the third one, he read the first paragraph before he skipped to the end and signed it. So long as the first paragraph seemed safe, he was basically guaranteed to sign anything after the first two requests.

  Her goal was the fourth re
quest in the stack, tucked into it after two requests to shuffle various interns around and a request to upgrade the screen in her office. From its first paragraph, it looked perfectly reasonable; a request to let her overhaul the Department’s outdated, much-neglected social media presence.

  She watched him scan over the first paragraph, and then he paused. Glancing up at her, he wondered, “Is this really necessary, Jenn?”

  Though her smile wanted to crumble, she kept it in place as she nodded. She had known he might have questions. She had walked into his office prepared to answer them.

  “Positive,” she assured him, and if her voice sounded just a touch too chipper in that moment, her boss didn’t comment on it. “The world is changing all the time, and so is the way that people interact with it. If we want people to trust that we’re telling them the truth, they need to feel like they know us. We need to be more present on the XtraNET, or—“

  She cut herself off, closing her mouth with an audible click as her boss held up a hand to silence her.

  “I don’t need the full sales pitch, Jenn,” he asserted, looking down at it again. “If you’re that set on it, I suppose it won’t hurt.”

  He glanced over the first paragraph again. And, just as expected, he skipped to the end and signed on the dotted line before he moved onto the next request.

  Within fifteen minutes, Jennifer was on her way back to her office with her authorized requests in hand. It couldn’t have gone more according to plan if she had scripted it herself.

  She leaned back against her door for a moment once she was in her office, holding the stack of requests close to her chest. Then she pushed herself away from the door and headed to her desk. She set the stack of papers down and cracked her knuckles.

  “Moment of truth,” she murmured to herself, opening her holoconsole as she did. Most of the work was already done, but she found herself scanning through her pet project’s coding despite that. She tweaked it here and there, just to make it a touch more efficient, and proofread it three times before she decided it was good to go. The last thing she needed was to be foiled by a missing bracket, after all.

  The entire time she looked over it, she listened with half an ear to everything going on in the hallway. Every footstep that passed her door made her jump, yanking her hands away from her keyboard each time just to make sure she didn’t make any accidental keystrokes.

  “Why is this so hard?” she groused to herself, practically whining the words. Immediately afterward, she was glad there was no one else in the room to hear her.

  It wasn’t as if she had never snuck around at work before. It should have been as easy as any habit by then. But she supposed her latest pet project was a bit more intense than simply altering the scheduling algorithms. It reached considerably farther than just her own office building.

  She had been staring at the finished product for almost a full minute, and finally she took a deep breath, exhaling slowly, and started the upload to the holo network.

  No turning back, she mused silently herself. Whatever happened…happened, from that point forward.

  She watched the progress bar creep along until there was a knock on her office door. She nearly leapt out of her skin, turning her chair around so quickly she practically toppled out of it.

  “Um—“

  She turned back around again to look at her console with panicked eyes as if it was going to suddenly jump up and do a dance for her. At least until her common sense caught up with the rest of her, and she simply opened a few other tabs to hide the upload’s progress bar. Within a few seconds, her console looked the same as it would on any other day.

  “Come in!” she called, her voice slightly strangled as the brief panic of just a moment before faded. It didn’t leave relief in its wake, but rather just a sense of vague unease.

  She couldn’t bring herself to feel even an ounce of surprise when the door opened and Andrew stepped into the office.

  “Andy!” she greeted, sitting too stiffly in her chair, her grin too broad and her grip on her chair’s armrests too tight. “How’s your day going?”

  He recoiled half a step at the greeting, brows furrowing in bewilderment. “Fiiiine…?” he answered slowly, with a level of wariness that was perhaps more appropriate for trying to decide if a snake was venomous or not.

  Consciously, Jennifer toned her smile down and tried to relax in her seat, leaning back and sliding down slightly. Mostly it looked as if she was trying to hold herself into the seat for dear life, as if a rocket ship was taking off.

  Andrew continued to watch her like he was waiting for her to explode for a few seconds before he cleared his throat. “…Anyway.” He didn’t step any farther into the office. She didn’t notice that he held a stack of files until he set them down on the side table by the door. At the deer-in-headlights look that Jennifer gave them, Andrew’s eyebrows rose slowly.

  “You filed for a couple of intern reassignments,” he reminded her carefully. “I’m bringing you the information on the interns that have shifted to your roster.” He gestured to the files somewhat needlessly. “Are you all right?” He sounded less like he was asking for her benefit and more so he could decide if he needed to flee from a contagion or not.

  “Great!” she assured him brightly. “Why wouldn’t I be?”

  His eyebrows rose again, nearly disappearing into his hairline that time. “You look a bit, uh…” He trailed off for a few seconds, before he settled on a careful, “A bit uncomfortable.”

  “Long bike ride the other day,” she answered, and she had to fight back the urge to wonder why that was the first excuse she went with. “Sitting down isn’t the most comfortable thing right now.”

  To say Andrew looked unconvinced was to put it charitably. He was quiet for a moment longer before he simply shook his head and started to turn away. He sighed as the door started to open again. “On second thought, I don’t think I want to know.”

  He stepped out, and Jennifer all but sagged in her chair. Her hands went limp on the armrests, her legs splayed out slightly, and she tipped her head back against the back of the seat. She felt a bit like a marionette whose strings had all been cut with a blunt knife.

  She wasn’t even sure what she was so nervous about. After all, her boss had said she could do it; she had made sure of it. So really, whose fault was it?

  She waited until the door closed and she could hear Andrew’s footsteps retreating before she sighed and dragged a hand down her face. She turned her chair around again and slumped onto her desk, holding her full weight up on her arms. It took her a moment to regain her composure before she turned her attention back to her console. She cleared out all of the decoy tabs until she was looking at the upload’s progress bar again, and she pulled her legs up onto her seat as she waited for it to finish.

  It seemed to take half the day before the upload finally finished, but when she glanced at the clock, it had only been a few minutes. She huffed out an irritated breath, but she didn’t think about it beyond that. She wasn’t quite done yet, after all.

  She grabbed her communicator and made a single call. It was answered with a slow, “Yes?”

  “The ball is out of my court now, Sloth,” Jennifer stated simply before she hung up the call.

  Outside the Department of Cyber Communications, Spire, Estaria

  “It looks so generic,” Dhashana mused, staring up at the building. “Hard to believe anyone here could be capable of committing any sort of crime.”

  “That sort of mindset means working here is probably a great idea for anyone who wants to commit any sort of crime,” Elroy pointed out, before he loped ahead to open the door. Just in time to miss the eye roll that Dhashana aimed at his back.

  Soraya took a moment to straighten her borrowed jacket before she stepped inside, making sure that not a button was out of place. Belatedly, Dhashana and Elroy followed her lead, until all three of them looked polished and pressed, as if they
had been putting those same uniforms on each and every day for years.

  The receptionist at the front desk glanced up only briefly when the door opened, and did a double take and straightened up behind her desk once she realized that the three people who had just filed into the building were all wearing uniforms.

  “Officers,” she greeted carefully, bemused and concerned in equal measure. “Can I help you with something?” She was fidgeting already, twirling her stylus between her fingers before she set it down and tried to look professional.

  Standing at the front of the trio, Soraya made it to the desk first. “Good afternoon,” she offered as she pulled the badge Dhashana had made for her off of her belt. She presented it to the receptionist just long enough for her to get a good look at it before putting it back on her belt. Behind her, Elroy and Dhashana both presented their own badges. As the receptionist’s concern increased until it could safely be called anxiety, Soraya got to the point. They weren’t playing dress-up just for a good time, after all, and there was no point in beating around the bush.

  “We’re looking for a Miss Jennifer Etang,” she stated. “Could you point us in the direction of her office?”

  “Is she in trouble?” the receptionist asked fretfully, even as she was already writing down the floor and the room number on a slip of paper.

  “I’m afraid we’re not at liberty to discuss that,” Soraya replied, feigning regret as she said it. It was no surprise when the receptionist’s worry increased.

  Sliding the paper across the desk with one hand, the receptionist pointed down the nearest hallway with the other hand. “The first lift on the right,” she explained. “Let me know if you need anything else.”

  “Thank you very much for your assistance—“ Soraya darted a glance at the nameplate on the desk. “Miss Dreyers. If we need anything, you’ll be the first to know.” She took the slip of paper between two fingers, and as she began to walk away from the desk, Elroy and Dhashana followed her in nearly perfect sync.