by C. G. Hatton
“Against Neuchâtel.”
I needed to say no. I almost did say no. I was still aching after the hockey and the beating I’d just taken. But even then, I couldn’t. “When?”
“Next week. Annual grudge match. Apparently Zurich has never won it. Want to help me make history.”
I stared at my lemonade, the ice melting, slices of fresh lemon floating in amongst the cloudy bubbles. I’d never even seen real lemons before I came here. I glanced at Hil and sent through the Senson, as private as I could make it, “What’s Blackstone hiding in there?”
“LC, you know how impenetrable a FailSafe is. How are you going to get past it?”
I chewed at my lip. There’d be a way.
“And if you did? What if you got caught in his office? In Blackstone’s office hacking his system? You’d blow our cover, you’d blow the whole guild wide open. Don’t risk it.” Hil sat there, calmly drinking his lemonade, then he said out loud, “I want you on the team. You in?”
I looked up at him, eyes hooded, and answered out loud, “Left wing?”
Hil grinned. “I’ll make sure you don’t get flattened by Tenaka and his crew.”
I could do that. I nodded and sent privately, “I’ll play your rugby match if you help me figure out a way to get into Blackstone’s office. I can get past the FailSafe, I know I can.”
“Then you need a reason to be in there.” He held out his glass for a clink, eyes glinting, and sent back, “No one messes with the Thieves’ Guild.”
Damn right.
Chapter 5
I spent every minute of the next week trying to figure out how I could get into that office. Imogen avoided me. I had a feeling she felt bad about her boyfriend beating the crap out of me. We won the game. Of course we won the game. How could we not with Hil playing scrum half and me on the wing? Custom was that the teams had to drink tea together afterwards to celebrate. Very civilised. They had a long table set out on the school lawn, crisp white table cloth, fat little ceramic tea pots, ceramic jugs of milk, neat little sandwiches and cakes. The entire teaching staff turned out. Apparently it was a big deal.
I sat there, awkward in my buttoned up blazer, ribs sore, a fresh dressing above my eye, struggling to concentrate, holding a cold pack against my left knee. I’d been kicked, badly kicked, right in the knee, ten minutes into the second half.
Hil was keeping an eye on me from further down the table. He had strapping immobilising two broken fingers on one hand, bruising around his knuckles and stud marks stamped into his wrist. We’d taken a pounding but we’d given as good as we got. And the trophy had our colours tied to its handles. First time ever in the entire history of the school. No wonder Mr Z was beaming.
I wasn’t listening as Blackstone stood up at the head of the table to give a speech. I stared at him, zoning out, still trying to figure out how to get into his office. It was only when there was banging on the table and cheers erupting all round that I blinked and heard him say, “…and it looks like we’ve found ourselves a new captain for the Westings’ senior rugby fifteen.” More cheers. Hil’s buddies were slapping him on the back. Hil was playing it cool. Tenaka was glaring daggers at me. That figured.
Blackstone finished off with a rousing, “Let’s bring that trophy home,” to more applause.
I muttered, “What trophy?”
The kid next to me said under his breath, “Interschool stuff. We play Sacred Hearts in the final next month. They took the trophy off us twenty years ago and we’ve never won it since. Maybe the big man is right. I reckon we might have a chance if Kristian is captain. More than that Aries bastard Tenaka. Not that we’d get to see the trophy. Blackstone would put it in his office, next to his damned medal. Show it off to his private visitors only.”
“His medal?”
The kid rolled his eyes. “You must have heard of Blackstone’s medal? He gets it out and polishes it every night.”
I raked back over every scrap of intel I had on Blackstone. Derren Bay. He’d been awarded a Gold Star for active service at Derren Bay. I’d baulked the first time I’d read about it.
Charlie had been there. I’d seen it in his personnel record, the one he didn’t know I’d accessed in the garrison. He’d never talked about it, even when I asked outright one night. He’d gone quiet, told me I didn’t want to know and left it at that. But I knew from what I’d heard the other soldiers say about that engagement that the only people who came away from it with medals were the senior officers, the same officers who’d issued the commands that had got so many of their own people killed, that had killed so many civilians caught in the crossfire. I’d learned a lot about the rules of engagement and war crimes since I’d landed at the guild, reading everything I could get my hands on in the Alsatia’s libraries and databases, until a guild psych had found out and said it wasn’t good for me.
Hil nudged me through the Senson. “Hey, you okay?”
I blinked, realised I was sitting there with a dinky little tea cup in my hand, raised frozen half way to my mouth. My hand was shaking. I set the cup back down too quickly, hitting the saucer with a clatter.
“LC?” Hil sent. “Come on, you should have gone to the infirmary. You took a bad knock to the head in that second half.” He pushed back his chair as if he was going to stand.
“No, I’m fine,” I sent back. I wasn’t. It wasn’t just my knee. Neuchâtel’s back line had all jumped on me after one try as I’d touched down the ball. Coach had picked me up, bopped me on the cheek and sent me back into it. If I was honest, I was still feeling light-headed.
“So what’s wrong?” Hil sent, more insistently. “You look like you’re about to keel over. You need to go inside?”
“No.” I did. I was too hot, could feel that my cheeks were flushed, but I sent again, “No, I’m good.” I looked up at him. “I just figured out how we get into Blackstone’s office.”
“Just follow my lead,” I sent to him later, as we were left to our own devices, players from both houses mingling and heading to the senior common room. Technically, as a junior still, I shouldn’t have been in there but seeing how I’d scored more than half our points they were hardly going to stop me.
Someone bumped past me at the doorway, shoving hard, one of Tenaka’s cronies. My knee twisted badly and I stumbled, Hil grabbing me and pretty much holding me upright while he yelled after the kid. I cursed under my breath, eyes watering and having to stand still for a moment, all my weight on my right leg, breathing through it.
“Whatever your plan is,” Hil sent quietly, “does it involve screwing over those idiots?”
It took me a second or two more before I could answer.
“I don’t care,” I sent back when I could think straight, limping forwards. “I just want to get in that office.”
Imogen was in the common room already, with bruises on her arm, fingermarks, that she was trying to hide. I sidled up to her as she was filling two glasses with punch and said quietly, “You don’t have to put up with that.”
She kept her head down, spilt red juice onto the table cloth and muttered, “Fe, you don’t know what he’s like. You need to stay away from me.”
“I don’t want to stay away from you.”
She glanced up and behind me, whispering harshly, “You’re making it worse,” and taking the two cups.
I watched her move away, caught the glare Tenaka gave me, and couldn’t help smiling. He had stud marks scraped down his cheek. Like I said, we’d given as good as we got. He scowled and turned away.
The atmosphere in the room was primed for exactly what I wanted, sky high tensions, devastatingly damaged egos on one side and blistering adrenaline still racing on the other.
It didn’t take much bantering and baiting to make it escalate. Finally one kid stood up, one of Hil’s classmates, a big lad who’d been front line in our scrum. “Seems to me,” he announced to the room, spreading his arms as wide as the grin on his face, “that this is a whole new era, my friends.”
I glanced at Hil.
He shook his head, laughing.
I couldn’t resist and raised my voice. “What do we beat them at next?”
That caused an uproar. A couple of our guys had to move in front of me to stop them from grabbing me right there and then.
Imogen stood and stepped forward, her voice ringing out clearly. “What else do you think you could possibly beat us at, Felix?”
I couldn’t help the grin. “You name it.” An expectant hush descended in the room, everyone listening. “I bet we could take the Meadows off you.”
Someone laughed. Derisive. Until someone on our side of the room laughed louder and yelled out, “Hell yes.”
The Meadows Cup was a five day yacht race, open ocean, vicious. As much as I’d loved the sailing around the bay, I had no intention of going out on rough seas for five days.
The mood caught on though.
Imogen’s eyes were still fixed on mine. “And what else?”
It was as if we were the only two people in the room. I leaned forward slightly. “Yaeger’s.”
There was a moment of disbelief all round then the big lad shouted, “Yes, Yaeger’s.” He grinned and pointed at Tenaka. “Yaeger’s is coming home to Zurich, people.”
The waterfall. I knew I could do it. Easy. Me or Hil. I’d race him for it.
Tenaka was smouldering, expression dark. “No way.”
I slid off the bench and limped forward. “What is it? Nineteen thirty four? I bet I could smash that. I bet I could steal that pennant right out of your trophy cabinet.”
There was another outcry, voices getting louder.
The kid who’d been sitting next to me out on the lawn yelled, “I bet we could steal your freaking colours before you even noticed.”
That escalated the outrage.
Hil stepped up next to me, and said even louder, “I bet there’s nothing we couldn’t do.”
Cheering erupted from our side of the room, Zurich House, dominated by Earth Empire kids. Whoops and hollers.
“Blackstone’s medal.” Tenaka’s voice cut through the throng. He strode into the centre of the common room from the other side to face us, his cronies stepping back to give him room. “I bet you couldn’t break into Blackstone’s office and steal his precious medal.”
And there it was…
I made it to the door and pulled the makeshift lockpick out of my pocket, slotting the wire into the keyhole and working the mechanism by feel, keeping watch over my shoulder and hardly daring to breathe. It felt like it was taking forever. If I could have used a guild lockpick, I could have done it in a fraction of the time, but I didn’t even have Charlie’s wristband and its hidden gadgets with me.
“LC?” Hil sent. “You okay?”
“Yep.”
I was. I was buzzing.
You know how I said the security around the school was high? The systems around Blackstone’s office were insane. It had taken me most of two hours, two painstakingly, excruciatingly long hours, to make my way there but I was almost in.
There was a pause, then Hil sent, “Just don’t deviate, LC.”
That was all I ever heard at the guild. Don’t deviate. Do not deviate from the plan. The field-ops spent hours, days, preparing for a tab. I struggled to have the patience for that.
“I’m fine,” I sent back.
The lock clicked.
Now or never…
Walking into that office was like stepping into another world. My footsteps were silent on the soft plush carpet, a scent of fresh pine and rich wood polish hanging in the perfectly clean, warm air. I took a moment to breathe. The soft yellow beam from a single desk lamp was casting shadows that danced in the flickering glow from dying embers in a huge slate fireplace. Book shelves lined the walls. Real books, a couple of thick tomes lying open on the desk, paper pages curling.
The AI had no idea I was in there. It hadn’t taken much to fool it, nothing that would give us away as guild. And the other thing about that office that was making my curiosity itch? There was no surveillance in there. Nothing. No biosensors, no recording devices, no cameras, no monitors. Once inside that perimeter, it was the most secure, private space on the planet. We’d been gathering the most intimate, excruciatingly damaging dirt on all the big families of Earth and Winter, insider trading deals, private information… addresses, ship IDs, intricate carefully hidden tracer links to patent holding corporations… But there was something else in that office that warranted an isolated system protected by a FailSafe.
I stepped towards the desk and the private terminal sitting right there.
Even now there are some streams of data you just have to crawl and fight your way to, physically, real time, getting close enough to reach out and touch. And, believe me, those are always the ones that are the most valuable.
I cracked my knuckles and stared at it. There’s something exhilaratingly creepy as hell standing alone inside someone’s private inner sanctum. I didn’t have long. I knew I didn’t have long. Blackstone could show up at any minute. So I was on the clock.
The terminal was a Masters. Osiron Grade. Aries. Easy to see the pattern here. And not one that had been obvious overtly from outside.
I’d bust plenty of Osirons wide open. I had a knack for it. I’d been breaking into high end military security systems since I was seven. And since Redemption, NG and Mendhel hadn’t just been training me in how to manipulate AI strings.
From habit, I took the terminal and crawled under the desk with it, breaking into it steadily, leaving no trace that I was there, and starting to rake out every scrap of intel. It was fascinating, engrossing. Until I hit the FailSafe. Even though I was expecting it, it still sent a shiver spark down my spine.
It was the first time I’d encountered one for real. The FailSafe was monitored in real-time by the smart as hell school AI that ran constant diagnostics, controlling shifting cyphers and energy patterns that danced in a veil around the central core.
I inched back and sat there, left leg stretched out, the other tucked up tight. FailSafes are higher than high end. Foolproof. No doubt about it.
I let every muscle relax, slowing my breathing. And steady as I could make it, I switched focus from the office I was sitting in into the AI realm, using the Senson implant to initiate a remote connection, gentle, non-intrusive, watching only. In the two years since Redemption, NG had shown me some ridiculous tricks. Risky stuff, scary stuff that had landed me in Medical too many times to count when I’d pushed what he was showing me too far, too recklessly. I’d never tried it in the field. Cracking a FailSafe was one helluva time to start.
My heart was pounding a steady rhythm down in my stomach.
I was hardly breathing.
I knew exactly what to do. Whether I could pull it off without triggering a lockdown that would suck all the air out of every inch of space within ten feet of that office was something else.
I closed my eyes and went for it.
There was a whole underlayer of data that was hidden. Even in here. Even in this isolated, protected Osiron Grade system that was impenetrable. I almost triggered a lockdown just seeing it.
A pulse of adrenaline hit my chest.
I breathed through it and started to work steadily to unravel the barrier, carefully, nudging, backtracking and covering my ass, taking an age to just get into it and see what it was. A horrible feeling crept up behind me and lurked over my shoulder as I worked at the encryption, dark, dense, a looming, dire dread of anticipation. I couldn’t put my finger on what but there was something about it that was making my stomach turn cold.
I gave it a nudge.
It was a ledger…
Chapter 6
I didn’t hear Hil. I swear, I didn’t hear him until he threw an urgent, demanding, do not ignore query at me through the Senson. I almost yelled out loud, jerking away and breaking the link as I got the last of it, almost throwing the terminal away from me.
“LC, what the hell are you doing?�
� Hil sent, hissing it sharply.
I tried to respond but I was struggling just to breathe.
“LC, get out of there. Blackstone is on his way in. He’s walking across the quad now. He’s heading right for you. ETA two minutes.”
I thought I’d replied but he sent again, “LC? Do you copy? Get the hell out of there.”
“Hil…” My hands were trembling but I worked steadily to reinstate the FailSafe, leaving no evidence it had been breached, then scrambled out from under the desk, swiping across the screen and replacing the terminal where it had been, exactly, to a fraction of a millimetre. I stared at it.
“LC, come on. Do it and get out. Now.”
I turned, glancing around, a lump in my throat so bad I could hardly swallow. “Hil…”
The gold pointed star glinted at me from its place on the mantelpiece.
“LC, get out. What the hell is wrong?”
“Blackstone…” I sent, stomach turning backflips. I reached for the medal, as a framed photograph on the wall beside the fireplace caught my eye.
Everything I’d just seen in the data was confirmed.
Derren Bay. Blackstone, in uniform, next to three other Imperial Marine Corps officers, medals flashing as bright as the shit-eating grins they were all pulling. And one of those officers…
We’d been there for six weeks and we’d had no idea.
I couldn’t draw my eyes away.
The pressure of a gun barrel pushed against the back of my neck. Dust, heat. A harsh voice, saying, “Kill him.”
Hil hissed another warning, loud inside my head. “LC…”
I jerked, dragged myself back to that disgustingly opulent office and grabbed the medal.
“Blackstone…” I sent again, as I ran for the door. “Blackstone is working with McIntyre.”
Hil cursed. “Get out of there,” he sent. “Go. You’re clear. Go now.”
I slipped through, trying to fumble the lockpick out of my pocket as I eased the door closed. I could hear footsteps approaching from around the corner.
