by Sean Platt
“Are you doing that now?” Dominic looked over, as if he might see the steam of churning effort spilling from her ears.
“Just…shh.”
Leah took a breath. She closed her eyes. For a second, she saw a dark, faceless shape behind her eyelids. But that wasn’t a real thing; it was only her paranoia.
Just because Integer7 told you that Leo was in custody doesn’t mean he’s involved.
But of course, Integer7 was involved. He’d basically said so.
Then: just because he wants the Organas released doesn’t mean they shouldn’t be released.
Which, really, bristled against Leah’s sense of independence. She’d been a pointed rebel her entire life. The surest way to get Leah to do something had always been to suggest the opposite. This time, she had to fight her natural impulses. Of course Leo needed to get out of his current bind, held by NPS as an enemy of the state. He needed to cure the Organas’ collective shakes, and had a plan to do it. If she hadn’t known that already, the snooping she’d done on Leo after Dominic had committed to this idea had confirmed it.
It made Leah uncomfortable to be on Integer7’s side, and even more nervous to feel as if she were doing his bidding. But regardless, Leo had a plan. Leah knew half of the answer already. And Dominic, without any nanobots to help, had already intuited the truth: Leo had the Organas arrested on purpose.
Because they couldn’t get what they needed in the village…but down here in the city, that same rare thing was like sand on a beach.
It made Leah nervous. Not just Integer7’s resurgence (twice, through Shadow and now Leo’s release — logically related, though Leah couldn’t see how), but Leo’s plan itself.
But, hey — that’s why Dominic had the slumbergun.
She blinked again, willing away the apparition.
When Leah closed her eyes a second time, ignoring Dominic’s nervous sidelong glance, she saw the dashboard. Superimposed over the darkness behind her lids, white on black. In one corner, she could see the video feed she’d established from Leo’s cell.
Then she looked into Agent Smith’s office and made his canvas trill.
In the darkness of Leah’s dashboard, she watched as Smith told his canvas to answer the call. According to Dominic, NPS canvases were better than those at DZPD. From the positioning of her current nanospot, Leah couldn’t see the connection window Smith opened to take the incoming call, but it wasn’t coming from a box on his desk as would happen in Dominic’s office. It was probably on the opposite wall, big as life.
Leah didn’t need to see the screen because in just a minute, she’d be busy filling it.
She opened her eyes then reached into her satchel and pulled out a tiny Beam camera. She handed it to Dominic, who seemed reluctant to take a hand from his weapon.
“Point this at me,” she said. “And for West’s sake, hold it steady.”
Dominic’s hands were already shaking. He was perfectly seasoned, but smart veteran cops didn’t usually try Leah’s brand of stupid shit.
“Why?”
“I’m going to talk to your Agent Smith.”
Dominic’s face changed. “I don’t think he’s going to listen.”
“I’m not going to talk to him as myself. I’m going to talk to him as Agent Regina Macabee.”
“Who’s that?”
“A Quark cleric.”
“I’ve never heard of her. She sounds like an heiress.”
“That’s because I made her up.”
Dominic’s eyes narrowed.
“Smith isn’t going to pull any of his men unless someone higher up the chain orders him to, and Quark’s the only agency around here that can order NPS to do anything,” Leah explained.
“Quark doesn’t have authority over NPS.”
Leah gave Dominic a patronizing smile that said, Aw, sweetie. But maybe that wasn’t fair. Leah had spent a lot of time behind the Quark firewall, and Dominic hadn’t. Based on the degrees of freedom in command flag chains, it looked like Quark had the unofficial ability to boss most of the city around. If Leah had to guess, nobody had likely given Quark permission to establish that authority, but they’d made The Beam, and he who made The Beam had a way of making the rules.
“Hold up the cam, Dominic. Hurry, or he’ll start to wonder what’s taking Regina so long.”
Thinking this, Leah turned off one eye so she could check Smith’s office without looking to Dom as if she was falling asleep. She toggled her visual cortex mediator to give preference to her blacked-out right eye and saw the agent still waiting, watching the verified Quark seal on his screen. Leah wouldn’t be able to hear Smith without turning on her cochlear mediator and distracting herself, but she could see the raw code logging in from Smith’s point on the network, duly hijacked by the AI gate she’d established inside. It was trying to handshake, waiting for a connection. Over and over.
“He’s going to know you’re not an NPS agent, I think,” Dominic said.
“The video will be filtered through a Macabee avatar I created. Modulators will also take the echo from this room out of the audio. So hold up the camera. Come on, hurry.”
“This will never work. You’re going to get us Respero’d.”
The cam lowered. Dominic was looking around again, waiting for an ambush.
Leah leaned in, putting her small hand over the meaty paw holding the cam. She spoke quickly, feeling Agent Smith’s patience — and her avatar’s credibility — thinning by the second.
“Remember when I got busted for digital trespassing at QuarkTechnic? They dragged me in here, faced me off against those two digitheads, and you had to come in here and spring me?”
“Just one of many times you put my job and life on the line.”
“I dropped spoofed nanobots onto the table, remember? You yelled at me for it.” She raised a hand then used the other to tip back one of her fingernails, revealing the small nano-fabricator beneath.
“You’re saying — ”
“Yes, stupid. Just like I told you. I can call Smith as Quark because my nanos were cloned from the clerics we spoke with and have since got their little feet dirty. I’ve had AI behind their firewall for weeks. It’s designed to model and adapt, and evades their internal AI sweeps because it’s one step ahead, literally. I designed a protocol that iterates a new authentication sequence on the hour then prompts native AI to authenticate mine. It’s basically given the answer I already have and instructed to ask for that specific reply. The Quark AI thinks the authentications are its own idea. Got it?”
“You’re kidding me.”
Inside Leah’s blacked-out right eye, Smith was cueing the system for a soft restart, issuing a ping to Leah’s nonexistent Quark agent. Soon, he’d call someone else to let them know his connection was acting flaky. Leah couldn’t have that. She’d already spoofed and rerouted Smith’s office’s sensors when she’d installed the new circulation routines for the bots and shunted duty agents to convenient parts of the station to clear them a path. But if Smith called in for support, there would be nothing she could do. Leah had too many hands in too many places already and didn’t think she could convincingly hack another connection, right now, in real time.
“Dominic! Just trust me, okay?”
Slowly, he raised the cam. Disbelief refused to leave his face.
Once the cam was up, Leah could see the feed from its queued position in Quark’s system. She double checked the way the Macabee avatar was overlaying her own face, moved around a bit to test its reality, and decided it was good enough. She made the connection and soon found herself looking at Smith through her own eyes while Smith faced her alter ego, Agent Macabee.
“Agent Smith?” Leah said.
“What can I do for you, Lieutenant Macabee?”
“We’ve been requesting NPS assistance via your canvas. Have you missed the pings?” Leah made her voice annoyed. A bit imperious.
“I haven’t got any pings.”
“You should have re
ceived redundant reminders in your HUDs.”
“Most of my agents don’t have heads-up enabled.”
Leah rolled her eyes, knowing Macabee would do the same. “It’s still in your collective. Nobody has seen it? It’s double-flagged.”
“We don’t all neural-share, either.”
“Then how about a fog horn, Agent? Would you like us to blow a fog horn to get your attention? Maybe a telegraph. Or Pony Express.”
“Now wait just a — ”
Smith stopped himself when Leah began pushing fake incident reports onto Smith’s wall where he couldn’t miss them. There would be a history on his desktop now, too, and when Smith looked later, he’d probably feel guilty for having missed them even though they’d never arrived.
“Do you see them now?”
Smith was scanning, dragging windows around, his manner annoyed and hesitant, as if he wasn’t sure if he was in trouble. “This is Quark. We aren’t responsible for Quark incidents.” Then Smith’s eyebrows bunched together as if he’d seen something on-screen that he didn’t like, which he absolutely had.
“Your roster has been reprioritized,” Leah announced to Dominic’s camera. With half of her attention, Leah was shuffling bogus but authentic-looking documents she’d pulled from both the Quark and NPS systems. It was a shell game with no substance, but if she kept things moving fast enough, Smith might not have time to see through the bullshit. “I need the following agents to report to Oh-Six.” Leah pushed another list forward, this one populated with the entire NPS duty roster.
“This is everyone!”
“I’m just passing down what’s been given to me.”
“You can’t just come in here and take all my agents for your bullshit Quark issues with — ”
Leah sighed heavily. “Look, Agent Smith. I could throw my weight around here. I could prove that I have the authority to pull your entire duty roster, including the deadheads who lie at home and collect a dole while bots and AI do their jobs. If you’ll take a moment to look at the NPS organizational tree, you’ll find that yours ultimately branches to Beam service, which is Quark controlled. I can flip switches here and flat-out make you do it, but that’s not how we’ve ever run things, and I don’t want to start now. We’ve never had to pull this ace, so believe me, we wouldn’t be doing it now if it wasn’t important. For NPS as well as Quark PD. For the city, in fact.”
In one of Leah’s eyes, Smith looked hesitant but willing to listen.
“You know the riot at Wellings?”
“DZPD is on it. Not our problem.”
“I know DZPD is on it!” Leah snapped. “I’m not talking about the fucking riot itself. Wellings is right near a major Quark connection hub, and we now believe the riot’s a cover. But we also believe the riot has got a bit out of hand, and — ”
“I’ve been watching that. DZPD sent pacifier drones.”
“Drones won’t apprehend guerrilla hackers!” Leah snapped. “If they can access the Quark hub, they’ll be able to disable drones! Right now we have the upper hand. We know what they’re doing, but they don’t know we know. So we’re giving them access to foo files — bogus information that the AI is generating specifically to let them burrow into with the illusion of progress. But it won’t keep them busy forever.”
“Send Quark agents,” Smith suggested.
Leah had anticipated that. She made her face reluctant, watching as the avatar’s expression made it seem close to admitting something it didn’t want to.
“We’re concerned that the jammers they’re using might be able to incapacitate our agents.”
“Why?” Something dawned on Smith’s face, and Leah could see him trying not to smile. “It’s because they’re clerics, isn’t it?”
“They’re limited if we pull the AI back and let them enter as organics. Much of our agents’ training relies on nanotech assistance. We have reason to believe they may have anticipated much of this. Unfortunately, we only get one shot. If they catch on and get away, that might be it. This group of insurgents is good at being ghosts.”
“Then put PD on it.”
“They’re occupied with the riot. And a few others, maybe related and maybe not.”
Smith looked like he might be seeking an angle — a favor Quark could owe him for accepting the job.
“We have prisoners here,” he told Macabee. “They need tending.”
“You don’t have to send all your staff, just the agents. And I’ve already sent in bots to assist. They’re Quark. State of the art. They’ll fill your agents’ and guards’ shoes.” And do a much better job than those humans would, Leah almost wanted to add, because that’s how Quark thought.
Smith nodded. “Fine. But seeing as you’re in a corner and we both know I could fight you long enough to lose your hackers, Quark will need to owe this agency a favor. A big one.”
“Fine.”
“Then until later…Lieutenant,” Smith said, bristling.
Leah nodded, closed the connection, and set about sending bullshit to Smith that contained his next bogus steps.
Across from Leah, Dominic raised his eyebrows. She nodded again, and he handed the small cam back to her.
“Now what?”
“That will take most of the human members of DZ NPS out of our way,” she said. “The bots, I can handle.”
“And the cells holding the Organas?”
Leah tapped her head. “As soon as I see the agents leave, I can open the cells. I’ve already sent in additional bots from Quark storage to make it look convincing. Smith and his men will go out through the station garage, on the other side of the building, probably in district hovers and screetbikes. Beam feeds, including the redundancies, are blacked out, and my AI is covering the gap.”
Dominic nodded, breathing deeply.
Leah went on. “Once the cells are open, Leo and the others will come to us.”
“How can you be sure?”
“I know it’s a bit predictable, but one of the bots has a little bag filled with ash. To starving junkies, it’ll look exactly like moondust. It’ll bring them here. Right down this passageway.” She pointed straight ahead.
“Then what?”
Leah nodded to Dominic’s slumbergun then reached behind her and grabbed her own. Both weapons had been brought to the two civilians in the garage by a helpful but confused Quark patrol bot whose orders hadn’t, it turned out, made a whole lot of sense.
“Then we try our best to slumber Leo and the others before they can kill us,” Leah said, “and we pray.”
Chapter Five
Kai’s senses went on high alert the moment the old woman said that Kai had come to kill her. Defensive add-ons, keyed to adrenaline and Kai’s own honed reflexes, lit up like a Christmas tree. She hadn’t brought a weapon and was sure Alpha Place’s security would be plenty good enough to disable any Kai carried within her, but she was still strong and fast. Even without nanos, she should be able to snap this woman like a twig.
But then Rachel Ryan stepped back, opening the door wider, and beckoned for Kai to enter as if offering tea.
Unsure what else to do, Kai followed the old woman’s arm into the lush apartment. All her preparations were immediately moot. She’d planned to surveil — to meet the woman, get a bead on her, and suss out a bit more than what Nicolai had been able to shake loose. She hadn’t planned to do any killing today, regardless of what Micah said about the woman’s evil or about Kai’s rightful place in the Beau Monde. She hadn’t planned to talk of killing, give indication of killing, or generally do anything other than be nice and see what she could learn.
After what Micah had ordered Kai to do to Doc, she’d lost her taste for assassin duties and for being told what to do — especially by Micah Ryan. Because even if Rachel was the snake that Micah said she was, it’s not like he was much better. So she’d come to Alpha Place with a singular thought: She might kill Rachel Ryan — but if she did, it would be because she wanted to, because she decided the wo
man deserved to die. If that lined up with Micah’s desires, so be it — but Kai was through being his slave.
But now those plans were flushed. She wasn’t here on reconnaissance anymore. Rachel knew why she’d come…and here Kai was, walking right into the lion’s den like an idiot.
Kai stopped moving five meters or so into the room, unsure of what to do with herself. Rachel, on the other hand, crossed to a large, elegant chair and sat. She looked much younger than Kai had expected. The way Nicolai had described her, she should move like a person balancing an egg on the end of a spoon. But to Kai’s eye, Rachel moved just fine — the best enhancements money could buy for someone nearly 150 years old.
“So you know my son.”
Kai nodded. It was a strange second thing for Rachel to say, considering that her first had involved matricide.
“He’s a good boy. He’s just ambitious. Enough that it makes him an idiot from time to time.” She readjusted an elaborate doily draped over the chair’s arm. “I raised him better than that.”
Rachel lifted her head and looked expectantly at Kai. Kai wasn’t sure what to do, so instead of moving, she took in the apartment. It was at least twice as large as her own, and ten or more times as lavish. But the room’s appointments weren’t what she would have expected; they were expensive and lush in an old-fashioned sort of way, with no obvious Beam peripherals anywhere. Like the building’s lobby, the room was old world: fine fabrics like Kai might use for a seductive bedroom, glistening gold and silver, carvings in the woodwork. And below it all, ancient music spilled from hidden speakers, the volume low.
“Can I sit?” Kai asked.
“I wish you would.” The words weren’t quite cordial. They sounded more impatient.
Kai sat. She needed to. She’d felt like her world was spinning for some time now, and Rachel’s presence wasn’t helping.
“Micah is impetuous and impatient; that’s his problem,” the old woman said. “He’s in his eighties now, and he still can’t help wanting more and more, faster and faster. I won’t take your visit personally. This is just Micah wanting to move up. Like it or not, I’m in his way.”
