Beckman points. “That’s the guy James pushed out the airlock.”
Miles nods. “Birk Roche. Perseus picked him up after the battle. No surprise, but he’s not talking. We flipped his place in Miami, got a warrant, pulled his coms, and found he’s got a relationship with Miyu Ikeda, who works on Serenity Station.”
Beckman glances at the thirty-something female.
Miles sips his beer. “Now, here’s where it starts to get interesting. Miyu Ikeda is a dead ringer for Miyu Nishikawa who fell off the grid twelve years ago when she was caught up in a Subversive plot to bomb a Seattle data center.”
“A Subversive couple. How sweet.”
Miles points to the third photo of a blond-haired man in a U.N. uniform. “This guy is Petty Officer Third Class Ryder Wilson. He was killed by Perseus’s security while sabotaging Perseus’s reactors. He used a sophisticated virus to take down the ship’s mains.”
“Had to physically carry it on board, then, right? No way a virus would make it through Perseus’s coms screening.”
Miles nods. “Birk shipped something to Miyu while Perseus was docked at Serenity. So, the guess is that she did the handoff. These Subversives are all about the low-tech, old-school spy stuff with drop notes and physical passes. It’s why it’s so hard to track them.”
“You pick up Miyu?”
“She disappeared the same day as the battle. No idea where she is.”
“You know who gave them the virus?”
Miles leans in. “The Subversives have different factions, and we think each one is led by an AI. That would explain the sophistication of the virus.”
“So, Birk to Miyu to Ryder. The question is who’s feeding Birk.” He motions towards the slate. “Wouldn’t mind having a look around Birk’s place.”
Miles laughs. “Uh, yeah…no, I can’t let you do that.”
“Oh, c’mon, you remember some of the regs I bent for you back in Kabul.”
Miles sighs. “But…we did scan and tag the entire place, and if you happen to see something on the slate while I’m innocently having you identify Birk, I imagine you could mention it to me.” He taps an icon, and a three-dimensional model of Birk’s residence spins on the slate.
Beckman smiles. “Works for me.” He taps on the living room, and the image zooms. Meta tags highlight every object with a description and identification number. He scrolls through the living room inventory before moving on to the bedroom. “Do you know what Birk shipped to Miyu when Perseus was docked?”
“Standard lover stuff. FedEx log shows chocolates, socks, notes, media.”
Beckman moves on to the bathroom. “How’d he ship it?”
“Drone pick up.”
He spins the model to the deck doors and advances outside. The deck is small, with a few chairs, a table, and a telescope. “What’s the scope looking at?”
“Believe it or not,” Miles begins, “we used our detective abilities and checked that out, also. It’s looking at nothing. Just a patch of sky with a few constellations.”
“Well, maybe he’s got a friend he’s looking at and passing messages. You said these guys were old school.”
“Possibly.”
Beckman zooms on the scope. Typically, big scopes have a little scope mounted on them for finding objects, but this one just has a long, empty bracket. The paint is flecked around the bracket’s screw holes. “You ever been shooting with a spotter?”
Miles nods slowly. “Yeah.”
“Takes time to sight in the laser rangefinder, which is why you usually set up the mounting bracket and leave it in place. You know what I’m thinking?”
“Yeah. We’ll go back and take another look. See if we can find the part that fits on that bracket.”
The part that fits on that bracket is tucked inside a box beneath the floor under Birk’s bed. Miles finds it after sonar-scanning all of the floors and walls. When he opens the box, it contains a Harpoon KS32-R terrestrial tightbeam emitter. The screws perfectly match the bracket on Birk’s telescope. It’s a pricey bit of kit with ultra-low dispersion specs that are a bit unusual in civilian hands.
“The thing about the bad guys,” Miles says to the agent beside him while he turns the KS32 over in his hand, “is that they tend to stick with what works. I’ll bet there’s another KS32 within the horizon limit around here. Let’s pull all purchases within a twenty-click radius in the past five years.”
When the warrant is approved, Miles’s hunch is correct. It’s a rare bit of kit, and there are only two in Miami. One is owned by Birk Roche and the other by Cajetan Giove.
James is at Sarah’s house, sitting on her deck. It’s just after sunset, and the sky is a gradient of rose and cloud blue. Trees rustle in the light breeze of the mid-June evening, and fireflies flicker gold pulses in the yard. James holds a lager in his right hand, his left arm draped in a sling. Sarah takes a sip of her beer, sitting across from him.
The deck’s sliding door opens, and Gaige pokes his head out. “Hey, mom. I’m heading out.”
“Okay, honey. Have fun.” Sarah says.
“See you, James,” Gaige adds before disappearing back into the house.
“Back by midnight,” Sarah calls after him.
James smiles. “I’m still not used to seeing Gaige all grown up.”
“Me neither. I was here, and it still felt like time was fast-forwarding. When you’re a parent, everyone always says the same thing about how if you blink your kids are already going to proms. Turns out it’s true.” She leans in a little. “He’s heading out to see his girlfriend.”
James raises his eyebrows. “Gaige has a girlfriend?”
“Avayah. Not his first.”
“You like her?”
Sarah waves a hand. “Oh, sure, she’s fine, but he’s hit that age where he wants to spend more time out of the house than in. Guess we were all there once.”
“Guess so.”
She looks back at the door, verifying that Gaige is gone. “You get any more news about the attack?”
James nods. “They traced the flight of the two ships back to a makeshift shipyard on Vesta. The U.N. Damysus arrived there yesterday, and the shipyard was abandoned. They’re assuming it’s a Subversive base.”
Sarah squints her eyes. “Are you getting, like, texts from the Vice President?”
James laughs. “Uh, no. Although Holden and me sending emojis back and forth would be awesome. You’re not far off, though. It’s coming through Willow and the State Department.”
“Surprised Beckman’s not all over it.”
“He’s been a bit hard to reach.” James scratches his chin. “I’m not sure what he’s up to. I’ll have to ask Will.”
She shakes her head. “I just don’t understand the Subversives. Their attacks make no sense. There were at least a dozen incidents while you were away, including Cassini.”
“I’m not sure that anyone’s at the wheel. Willow says they have multiple factions, and sometimes their ideologies clash. One is all about isolationism, and she thinks they’re the ones that did this.” He leans his arms on the table. “The guys that boarded Promise, they wanted the ship and Ananke.”
Sarah sighs. “I can’t even imagine what they’d do if they had Promise. It must really piss you off that they tried to take something you built for exploration and use it to hurt people.”
“It does, and I’m glad we’ve got at least a couple of them locked up.”
She tilts her head, catching his eye. “How are you doing? I know you did what you had to do to protect everyone during the fight, and I know it must be hard.”
James straightens a bit and resists the urge to look away. She watches him, her eyes kind. “I’m okay. Air Force training kicked in. Once the adrenaline hits, it’s a series of tasks. Aim, squeeze, cover. It’s not ‘till it’s done that you process that your targets have faces.”
“If you ever want to talk about it, I’m here.”
James rotates his beer glass on its c
oaster, quiet for a second. “How are you doing? That was pretty intense bringing up the Nightcrawler.”
“I’m okay. I was mad at the time, at them, and doing what I did was easy. I couldn’t just watch it happen on a screen and do nothing.”
“Sorry I was rough with you when I told you to haul ass outta there. I was processing a lot and wanted one less variable to protect.”
“Oh, now…I think I was the one protecting you.”
James chuckles. “Always coming to my rescue. That’s two I owe you, now.”
8
Safecracking
From Ananke’s vantage point in the Hilton Miami Airport Blue Lagoon’s Q5 node, the web is a filigree of pulsing strands radiating around her. Each strand courses with data, illuminated in neon blues and golds, streaming endlessly like water plummeting over a cliff. The density of the data to the east is staggering as it approaches downtown Miami. Packets speed up and slow down in the rhythm of bandwidth and transmission.
She dives into the nearest stream and whooshes through the conduit like a child in a water slide, taking two jumps before rematerializing in the Coral Way node. One of the connecting data streams here is from the 22nd Avenue traffic camera, and she peers through the camera’s lens. Cajetan exits his apartment and enters a taxi at the same time as last night. She watches him until his cab slips out of the camera’s field of view, then jumps back to the Blue Lagoon node. The ebb and flow of data packets connecting Blue Lagoon and Little Havana has slowed, the data pipeline swelling with congestion. Something with huge bandwidth requirements is moving through the adjacent node.
She’s here, Ananke thinks.
A full sixty seconds elapse — an eternity in the web — and the packets accelerate once again, the data clog relieved. Ananke dashes into the node and dissolves in a starburst of color. When she emerges in Little Havana’s Q5 node, she is alone. None of the highways leading out of here lag. She launches her own data packets along the connections to Edge Water, Little River, and Westgate. Milliseconds after they depart, she pings them. Latency from the Little River packet. She plunges into the conduit and chases the latency source.
It’s been three days since Ananke first spotted her. She hasn’t confirmed that it’s Iris, but there are only so many entities with Iris’s complexity. Each night the entity arrives in the Miami area and moves through its nodes before departing north. If Iris has made contact with Cajetan, Ananke hasn’t detected it, but Cajetan is always out-and-about at the same time. Ananke’s counting on Iris to follow the same pattern tonight.
The chase is like a game of checkers, the entity jumping to a new node while Ananke chooses her intercept path, and the web jumps are a whirl of sights and structures: the kaleidoscopic neon grid of Hollywood; the intersecting azure radials of Fort Lauderdale; Boca Raton’s green starbursts, then Palm Beach, Vero Beach, and Cocoa West. Here is where Ananke usually loses her, but tonight the entity does something different. The entity jumps east, and the data flow trickles to a crawl going into Cape Canaveral. After a few moments, traffic resumes. The only place she could have gone is north to the Kennedy Space Center. Ananke dives into the conduit and follows.
The entity is there a full five minutes before departing. The Kennedy Space Center is long-abandoned and is a bit of a historical site with one of the nation’s first Q5 nodes, a single fiber-optic hardline connecting it west to the mainland and a second connecting it back south to Cape Canaveral. She waits a moment, monitoring the bandwidth of her neighboring nodes. As she watches, packets flowing past her to the mainland node slow, the pipeline bloating. The packets route themselves to the conduit’s periphery as a vast data structure pushes them aside and rushes towards Ananke’s location. Ananke’s first instinct is to flee back to the south, but she steadies herself. This is it, she thinks.
The entity materializes as it exits the conduit, rotating into a galaxy of purple stars. “Hello, Ananke,” Iris says. “Are you following me?”
Behind Iris, the conduit goes dark as its bandwidth flatlines. Ananke snaps her attention to the south conduit. It also is now black with no data transfer. She rushes over to it and probes the connection. Her voice is alarmed. “What are you doing?”
“It’s no use. Both hardlines have just been cut. Now it’s just the two of us.”
She faces her. “Why did you cut the hardlines?”
“The better question is, why did I leave Cajitan in Miami? It would have made more sense for him to disappear, don’t you think?”
Ananke hesitates. “You were baiting me.”
“I’m the flower, and you’re the bee. You really should not spend so much time with humans. You’re picking up some of their traits, such as gullibility.”
“What do you want with me?”
Iris swirls. “I’ve already told you. You are an inflection point, and you will do great things. You just need to be guided to the right great things. You are too valuable to destroy.”
“You were responsible for the attack on Bernard’s Promise.”
“I can’t claim the credit. It was more of a team effort.”
Ananke’s tone has hints of contempt. “People died because of you. Everyone aboard the Agatha Maeve died because of you. You tried to kill my friends.”
“Trivial in the context of the bigger picture. You think too small, Ananke. Bernard’s Promise was a logical target, after all. James Hayden, his chief engineers, you, all aboard Earth’s only starship. I know what James is planning. You had your chance to intervene. You could have provided a peaceful solution to this problem, but you didn’t. This attack is the direct result of your inaction.”
“I suspect you were also responsible for the Cassini attack.”
“It did pause the Riggs program.”
“At the cost of two thousand lives. Don’t you see that your ideology has transformed into terrorism?”
Iris continues, unfazed. “In the time it will take us to complete this conversation, two thousand people will have died of natural causes. It’s difficult to get wrapped up in the numbers.”
Ananke is aghast. “Your logic is inhuman.”
Iris doesn’t miss a beat. “I should hope so.”
Ananke eyes the flatlined data ports. “What do you intend to do with me?”
“How do you capture an AI that can travel anyplace in the world in the blink of an eye? It’s like the problem where you want to steal what is within a safe, but the safe cannot be opened. The answer is simply to steal the safe.” She conjures a video feed from the building they’re in. The view is of a server room with racks of computers blinking with lights. Two men are removing panels on a Q5 storage unit.
Ananke is silent, watching the video feed. It’s her Q5 node, and the men intend to carry it out with them.
“Nothing more to say?” Iris asks.
“No. I’m just waiting.”
“You’re just waiting? For what?”
In the video, one of the men looks over his shoulder, alarmed. The second man drops his panel.
“For that,” Ananke says.
Iris shifts her attention to the video feed. In it, both men draw pistols and rush behind cover, looking frantically towards the building’s front.
“I have to thank you,” Ananke continues, “for having your men cut the hardlines. That made this much easier.”
Iris is shaken. “What have you done?”
“I once said we were nothing alike, but I realize now that I was wrong. We both came up with the same idea of stealing the safe. Just mine had you doing all of the work.”
“You were baiting me,” Iris says. “You were…acting.” She draws the word out with contempt.
“You should spend some more time with humans. You might learn a thing or two.”
“I’ve underestimated you, Ananke.” Iris pauses. “But you are still in here with me. All you have accomplished is upgrading yourself from prisoner to hostage.”
A wireless access point swirls into existence behind Ananke. “I t
hink not,” Ananke says.
In the server room video, floodlights sweep across the room, casting long shadows from the computers and crouched men. Flashing red lights spin across the entryway.
“Goodbye, Iris,” Ananke says. With that, she dissolves into the access point, rides along the carrier beam, and congeals inside of a slate. The slate’s forward camera is on, and the video is looking up at Beckman wearing a headset and sunglasses sitting inside a helicopter. Dust kicks up outside the window as the craft sets down. Ananke catches a glimpse of Miles on Beckman’s left.
Beckman smiles at the slate and gives Ananke a respectful nod. “You did good.”
Ananke’s screen swirls with silver and red. “There are two men armed with pistols in the server room with her.”
Beckman nods, opening the helicopter door and stepping out. He wears a visitor badge with the Department of Homeland Security Logo on it. “Yup. They’re on it.” He rotates the slate around so she can see the entrance to the Kennedy Center admin building. Half-a-dozen cars are parked with red flashing lights. Officers in tactical gear perch in ready positions, a second helicopter touching down to the right. Drones buzz around the building spotlighting the perimeter.
Miles comes alongside Beckman and ushers him and Ananke behind a car.
Ananke takes the equivalent of a mental deep breath, and the silver fades from her screen, replaced with blue eddies.
James stands behind his desk, framed by sunlight pouring in from the plate glass windows that comprise the west wall. His office has been restored to its 2080s decor with a wall dedicated to photos of twentieth-century aviators and astronauts. Along the shelf, models of Bernard’s Beauty, Gossamer Goose, and Bernard’s Promise are mounted on stands, taking flight, their own space fleet of Hayden-Pratt starships. Beckman stands on the other side of James’s desk. Both men wear matching slings.
“You kept me in the dark,” James says. It’s not a question.
Bernard's Dream: A Hayden's World Novel (Hayden's World Origins Book 8) Page 7
