Code Breakers: Beta

by Colin F. Barnes

  “Control, this is Gerry Cardle. Open the exit. I’m on urgent Family business. Over.”

  “Hold your position, Mr Cardle, seeking authorisation.”

  “I don’t have time. I’m going out one way or another.” He gunned the engines, circled round to gain some room, and buzzed the control tower. “Now. I’m not waiting.”

  He aimed the shuttle at the access panel. Even if they refused to open it, he calculated that it was one of the weakest parts of the Dome’s superstructure. The size and velocity of his craft should smash through it. He hoped. He approached the panel with increasing speed when Control replied.

  “I’m patching you through to the station. Please hold, Mr Cardle.”

  “Told you already, I’m not holding.”

  A second later, and as Gerry swung the shuttle round to approach the access panel from an oblique angle, a voice came over his communicator. It was Jachz. Gerry would recognise that programmed voice anywhere. Its cool tones hummed as if nothing in the world was wrong.

  “Mr Cardle, please report in. The Family need an update of your status.”

  “Can’t do that, Jachz. You’ve got about ten seconds before I smash a big hole in the Dome.”

  “Please, Mr Cardle, this isn’t the right approach. I’m sure—”

  “Five seconds.” He braced himself tightly into the seat of the shuttle, tensing his legs against the footrest, wedging himself in tight.

  “Ger—”

  “Bye, Jachz.”

  Travelling at over 600 kph at the point of impact, the shuttle smashed the Plexiglas panel right out of its fitments, making the Dome reverberate with the noise. The shuttle blasted through the debris into the open air.

  “Now that’s what I’m talking about,” Gerry said, knowing that Jachz was still on the line and not caring one little bit. If the damned Family were going to spy on him they would learn exactly what he was capable of, and he would be damned to hell if he were going to let a bunch of cowards on a space station, hiding from the realities of the world, dictate to him what the hell he was going to do.

  “You getting all this, huh, Jachz? What’s that? No, you can’t see the video feed anymore? And yeah, that audio is all messed up with static. I don’t appreciate being spied upon. I’ve got a job to do, I suggest you tell ‘my’ family up there to leave me the hell alone.”

  “I’ll pass on the message, Mr Cardle. But, please, indulge me. What are you hoping to achieve with this behaviour? We can help if you cooperate.”

  “Jachz, tell me something. Are you capable of free thought, or have The Family made you a limited and neutered robot in a fleshy body?”

  “Indeed, Mr Cardle, The Family have created a vast array of free-form protocols and I—”

  Gerry laughed, steered the Shuttle up and over the Dome, and headed west to GeoCity-1. While he talked with Jachz, he focused his mind on the shuttle’s various computer systems, disabling the GPS link and adjusting the various transmitters to send back junk data. He didn’t want them to track his movements.

  “That’s it though, Jachz. You can only think within tightly controlled parameters, just like the citizens in the Dome. They’re given the impression of freedom and free-thought, but with those AIAs in their heads controlled by the Family, well nothing is really free, is it?”

  “I see.”

  “You don’t see anything up there in your lofty position. I bet you haven’t even left the lab in which you were created. I bet you’re sitting there right now in a cubicle, much like your clones next to you, doing everything The Family tell you, never questioning, never thinking. You’re trapped, Jachz, doomed to live a life of slavery. You know what that is, right?”

  “I have access to vast quantities of data, Mr Cardle. I’m familiar with the concept.”

  The shuttle had cleared the Dome. The vast dusty abandoned lands ahead stretched out to the horizon. The low sun caused long shadows to stretch across the ground where a number of rocky formations jutted from the dust. Gerry noticed the tall towers and the fence that secured the Dome from the outside, and he remembered back to his first kill. The NearlyMan: the low-level cyborg that secured the perimeter and at the time was hell-bent on destroying Petal.

  He shook his head. In such a short amount of time, he’d had so many memorable events with her, and Gabe.

  “I’ll leave you with those thoughts, Jachz. I’ve got a job to do. Tell the Family to get off my back and then maybe they’ll see more cooperation from me. If they don’t, well, they don’t want to make an enemy of me.”

  “I will pass on your message, Mr Cardle. Good luck in your mission, whatever it might be.”

  Gerry shut down the communication channel and, like the shuttle, altered the code within his internal system to only transmit junk data.

  GeoCity-1 was a few minutes away, but on the shuttle’s radar Gerry noticed he had company. He scanned with the shuttle’s near-field radio: another craft had followed him. It must have been one of the security members coming after him. Damned fool.

  Gerry opened a communication link between the two.

  “Who’s that following me? Bran, Elaine, Malik?”

  “Malik, sir. The Family said I should chaperone, and that’s what I’m doing.”

  “Stupidity like that will get you killed. You’ve never been outside the Dome, have you?”

  “No, sir, but I’m sure I’ll handle myself.”

  “Turn back now, Malik, don’t be so stupid.”

  Malik closed the communications channel and followed Gerry’s trajectory.

  Gerry thought about hacking the shuttle’s systems and sending him back home, but changed his mind. If he wanted to see what was in the abandoned lands, he might start to question The Family, and the more freethinkers about the better.

  Gerry reopened the link. “Malik, if you’re going to follow me, don’t do anything stupid. I’m setting up a secure VPN between us, and disabling your transmitting ability so you can’t send anything back to either the Dome or the Station. If you don’t like that, you better turn back.”

  “No problem with that, sir. I’ll still carry out my duties.”

  “That unquestioning loyalty will get you killed one day.”

  “If it’s in the line of duty, so be it.”

  “Yeah, we’ll see if you stick to that.”

  Gerry spun a security wrapper in his mind and sent it across to Malik’s AIA creating a secure channel between them. Without the Meshwork to piggyback, it’d only work within a few hundred metres of the shuttles. They each had a router and access point creating a kind of mobile Internet. Beyond that, radio was the only other option, and within the Helix wrapper, Gerry had created a virus to glom onto Malik’s radio systems, rendering them useless on certain frequencies. They’d be able to communicate with each other, and in Gerry’s case via his internal radio transceiver, but not beyond.

  If Malik wanted to follow him around like a lamb, then at least he wouldn’t give their position away to The Family. Gerry slowed his shuttle, allowing Malik to catch up so they could fly in formation. At least then he could keep an eye on the rash fool.

  As they approached GeoCity-1, Gerry started to understand what had freaked out Enna so much.

  The mounted machine guns on the various building roofs were rat-tatting down into the middle of the collection of buildings. Surrounding it on three sides were a number of Jaguar craft, and what looked like hover cars. Gerry hadn’t seen anything like those before, but given the way they moved and handled the rough terrain, he assumed they were of a similar design to the Jaguar’s technology.

  The cars were all heavily armed with laser and large-calibre canons attached to their hoods. A dust cloud plumed up into the middle of the melee of the settlement. The Bachians in their buggies and trikes were attacking the armed cars on mass, and taking heavy losses.

  “You chose the wrong day to be on duty, Malik. You should leave.”

  “Not likely, sir.”

  “Don’t be
so goddamned stubborn. Look at it down there. That is a real war zone!”

  Before he could remonstrate again, one of the Jaguars hovering above the Spider’s Byte—the dive bar of the town—turned on its axis and fired its machine guns. Gerry tried to manoeuvre out of the way, but the shuttle wasn’t built for dog fighting, and didn’t have the agility to avoid the raking arc of heavy calibre shells. The craft shuddered violently, knocking Gerry around in the cockpit. Malik’s shuttle took most of the shells as he was too slow to react and headed for the ground, flames and black smoke belched from its engines.

  “Brace yourself, Malik!”

  There was no reply as Malik crashed into the ground. They were no more than twenty metres up and the shallow angle of the descent meant that it didn’t break up on impact, but slid across the ground before flipping over and crashing into the iron gates at the front of the compound surrounding the city.

  Two further blasts struck Gerry’s shuttle, and he put it into a barrel roll, or as close to one as he could, and avoided the rest of the stream of shells from the Jaguar, which had now ascended and gone over the top of his position. It would soon have his rear, making him a sitting duck.

  Gerry didn’t have time to try and hack into the Jaguar. His initial probes found a fierce firewall and heavy levels of encryption. He’d get through it eventually, but not while trying to dogfight in a glorified tub.

  He passed over the top of the gate, hoping to use the machine gun turrets as cover, but was soon dodging away from them too. The Bachians and GeoCity-1 citizens should’ve realised Gerry wasn’t posing a threat, but then he was in a City Earth shuttle and at this stage, it wasn’t clear whose side he was on to the outsiders.

  Critical failure, hull breach, fuel lines cut. Every error code imaginable flashed across the holoscreen. The engines cut, sending him belly-down onto the ground of the compound. He cracked his head against the roof during the collision. A white-hot piercing pain spread from the crown of his skull to the back of his neck.

  The speed of descent skidded him across the rough, boulder-strewn ground, bumping over bodies, and finally coming to rest outside of Enna’s industrial unit at the far rear western edge of the settlement.

  Gerry breathed hard, closed his eyes, and tried to wait out the pain that gripped him. After a few seconds, Mags had controlled the flow of endorphins and adrenaline and got both his pain and heart rate under control. A hissing noise came from the rear of the shuttle. The holoscreen warned him of a breech in the hydrogen fuel tank. Not good. Not good at all. Hydrogen gas was incredibly explosive.

  Trying to be calm about it, Gerry pressed the door release on the holoscreen: no response. He tried the manual latch, all the while ignoring his hand shaking with the increasing levels of panic that itched at his skin as if it were exposed to searing heat.

  The door wouldn’t open. The mechanism had busted. No other way out.

  A ping-ping-clang noise of shell casings hitting the cabin had him jumping as if he were trapped inside a pot of heated popcorn. He kicked out, screaming at the damned door, trying to escape, but it refused to budge.

  An explosion erupted a few meters away. The debris rained down on the shuttle, and a shell crashed into the rear of the fuselage, piercing the structure and striking against the motor. The metal-on-metal friction caused sparks to jump and a fire to start in the cabin.

  He kicked out furiously again as more shells continued to rain down on his position.

  Chapter 9

  Criborg - Wake Island – 19:00

  Sasha brushed the hair from her eyes and wished her boss and creator, Little Jimmy, hadn’t given her re-growing follicles. A regular non-maintenance style would have been much better. She pulled her brunette hair into a ponytail and thought about the chances of Jimmy Robertson giving her an upgrade.

  Jimmy Robertson was Criborg’s chief science officer. He hated being called Little Jimmy. Not much a fan of irony, despite his great bulk. He much preferred James, or simply Doctor Robertson.

  She pictured him now, with his hair greying at the temples and even greyer augmented eyes giving her the disapproving look, and the way his multiple chins wobbled with incredulity. So she never called him Little Jimmy to his face.

  The problem with the evening shift was nothing really happened. She’d sit there at the monitoring desks, watching what the UAVs saw, the Red Widow’s movements, and the shuttles coming and going from the Dome to the Station, but that concluded any observable activity. Any enemy engagement or real action remained few and far between.

  There was a time when General Vickers’s men would go out onto the surface of the island whenever they wanted to perform various maintenance tasks to their radio and control gear. The island itself had a rich history of military use going all the back to the WWII. Nowadays, with The Family’s satellites monitoring the area they only had certain times of day to go outside. The rest of the time they stayed underground, as they had for the last few decades ever since The Family brought about the Cataclysm.

  Sasha wondered what that had been like. She’d only been around for five years and was already sick of the place. She’d never know how the others coped, staying here for over forty years. Three years, two months, five days since she last breathed the open air.

  ‘You’re too precious to us to go outside,’ Vickers would say with his thick Texan accent.

  “I haven’t finished your software yet,” Robertson would add, this time with the clipped tones of the upper class British. Such an odd pair they made, but then Criborg was an allied company of British, Canadian, and American forces. Vickers often boasted that he and his men were the last Americans. But then the way Sasha saw it, apart from a few poor people trying to survive in the abandoned lands, and the Dome, those at Criborg were probably the last of everyone.

  Despite their caution she felt ready, strong, capable, and none of Vickers’s goons could touch her during combat training. She had every single one of them beat, including the General himself, and he was augmented up the wazoo. How they could say she wasn’t ready was beyond her. Was sitting at a desk, monitoring drones all evening, really an appropriate use of her talents? Like hell it was.

  In her opinion, Sasha represented the most complete assassin-class cyborg in existence. Designed, built, and improved by James ‘Jimmy’ Robertson who came to Criborg even before the Cataclysm, hell, even before WWIII. Her lineage and technology had a long, rich history.

  Back in Britain, Jimmy was arrested and jailed for his views on transhumanism and subsequent ‘experiments’. But she had him right. The subjects were sane and willing. That they died during his experiments didn’t mean failure. Their deaths served to further his techniques and theories, so that now they had such models as she and her sisters, whenever they would be ready. If they would ever be ready.

  Just five more hours, she thought. And then my shift is done and I can finally go test out Little Jimmy’s new blade katas. Apparently he had one of his AIs develop the moves. Perfected to give both artistic and practical use, grow her synthetic, nano-augmented muscles efficiently, and, above all, look like a badass doing it.

  She wondered whether Jimmy’s design had given her this much vanity, or whether she had developed it naturally. Her complexity made it difficult to know how much could be assigned to programming or natural evolution.

  She flicked a stray hair back, caught her reflection in the shiny surfaces of her glass desk and realised she didn’t care. She looked good, moved well, and performed her tasks well. If only they would trust—

  A series of alert tones beeped and caught her attention.

  “Whoa, what’s this?”

  On one of her holographic display terminals she saw an incoming data packet from one of their UAVs, which in itself wouldn’t normally be a problem considering she had tracked it, witnessed it get shot down by Red Widow scum, and had been tracking the recordings. Oddly, the information didn’t look like anything normally generated by the drone’s systems. Which remi
nded her: she would have to sift through all the footage at some point, like she had time for all that! Yay! More sand, more snow, more fanatics doing stupid things with lasers.

  She patched the curious data packet stream through to her analysis software that decrypted the security protocol. She gasped as a spoken message came through the noise of engines—Red Widow’s Jaguar engines. That well-known sound had wormed its way inside her head after watching and listening to hundreds of hours of recordings.

  The message came from a female, a voice so familiar, it said:

  Hi there, people at Criborg. Well, I’m assuming there are some people there. Listen, I had one of your chips inside me. Members of the Red Widows imprisoned me. I escaped, and ended up borrowing their vehicle, and well they had one of your drone’s thingies. I traced the signal back. Don’t be alarmed, but I’m coming your way. I’ve included the craft’s ID signature with the signal so you can see I’m telling the truth. Oh, and I don’t have enough fuel to get to you, so if you do happen to get this, please send a boat. You can call me Petal, by the way, whoever, or whatever you are.

  “Huh. That don’t happen every day,” Sasha said, rubbing her face. A girl with a Criborg chip inside her? That couldn’t be right. Jimmy hadn’t lost any ‘borgs to her knowledge. She’d have to talk with him and see if he could shed any light on it. The most worrying thing though was that she, whoever she really was, was bringing a Jaguar to Wake Island. She couldn’t let that happen. The General’s men were out on the surface, vulnerable to attack. Sasha uploaded the message and its associated data to her slate, headed to Jimmy, almost skipping along the corridors with excitement.

  ***

  Grey walls. Grey floor. Grey everywhere. Sasha often wondered why Criborg couldn’t have painted their underground town in something a little more cheery. Hell, even beige would be an improvement. But every corridor, room, weapons store, and vehicle hangar blended into one another.