“Uh … and the second thing?” prompted Nova.
“Oh yeah. Charon. You have an entity that is Prophet’s equal opposing. It’s like the immovable object getting hit by the unstoppable force. No one has a clue what the fuck would happen. Same with these two. I’d guess you have a high likelihood of finding these people, but you’re still going to have to work for it. Which is what I’m doing. Now. Except someone on the corporate lines is fighting me, trying to hack us.”
“Why would they do that?” asked Nova.
“Why else?” Billy stared at her quizzically. “Wealth and power. They want to control you, to control Charon, and if they can’t control Charon’s code, they’re sure as hell going to profit from it, any way they can. Charon probably doesn’t care what it costs to get them on his side, so long as they fit into his plan. Money doesn’t matter to pure intellect, but it sure is dandy helpful in getting people to dance on your strings.”
Nova shook her head. Gyro was suddenly left with the impression that her sister was used to Billy’s tangents and complete misunderstandings of intention in conversation. She wondered why he was like that. Maybe he was just super ADD?
Nova spoke softly. “Thank you, Billy. I was also wondering why they would be trying to hack you, since they shouldn’t know we are here?”
“Oh!” Billy shrugged. “That’s simple. Someone has crawlers on all five of you. Whoever that is, is coming after me, since I also put crawlers on your two missing friends.”
“Gotcha.” Nova backed up, crossing her arms and looking back at Chicken Fingers.
He caught her gaze and quietly shrugged.
“Hey. I have a question. How do we recompile Prophet’s code?” Gyro asked.
“One step at a time,” said Billy. “Won’t do you any good to crack your brain on that question until we actually have everyone accounted for. You try to compile code with pieces missing, and you wind up with a program that’s destined for deletion and probably won’t even boot. The good thing is, we know these slices of code have kept you safe. Shielded you from HR overload that everyone else is falling prey to. That’s helpful to know.”
“It is?”
“Sure. It means we’re likely looking for two others who aren’t caught up in the madness but are just trying to stay alive. That right there is a solid enough pattern that it is speeding up my search bots. Going to take me a bit to pin down where these other two have scurried off to, but don’t doubt that I will.” He peered over his lenses at them again. “Meantime, you all look like you could use a little unwinding. Nova, please go tend to that leg. I’d rather you didn’t bleed on my concrete.”
Gyro started to protest but found herself yawning instead. Nova also looked wearier than normal, with fine lines invading her fair face.
Chicken Fingers, on the other hand, checked the ammo in his bolters and headed for the hall they’d come in by. “You guys go ahead. I’ll take first watch.”
“No need to watch the watchers here,” Billy said. “I’ve got my eyes everywhere.”
“You see anyone following us on the way in?” the gunman asked.
Billy frowned. “Absolutely no. If you were followed, I wouldn’t have let you in.”
Chicken Fingers grunted. “Then I’m taking watch.” He vanished back toward the tunnels.
Billy lifted an eyebrow. “Persistent bastard. To each his own, I suppose. Go. I have work to do for you.”
He pointed them into one of the side compartments. With the chilled air and mind awhirl with thoughts of two AIs duking it out in cyberspace, Gyro didn’t figure she’d sleep a wink.
Less than a minute later, her eyelids slammed shut and stayed there.
Chapter Twenty-six
Chicken Fingers
Chicken Fingers slinked through the tunnels near Billy’s … house? Home? Tunnels? Secret lair?
He settled on lair. It sounded appropriately dramatic in his mind.
Once he landed on lair, he couldn’t help but think of it as a lair or a spiderweb, with Billy sitting at the center like a black widow, plucking strings of web data and trying to catch code flies in his snares. All of that jack-junkie talk and tech crap gave him a headache. Sure, he relied on his TAP, like every other person on the planet did, but certain people were just too plugged in for his tastes. He’d rather be packing a solid pistol with a flesh-and-blood enemy sighted down the scope any day.
Patrolling the tunnels offered a little focus, a way to burn off some of the nervous energy tingling on the nape of his neck. Besides, there was the hidden blade to sort through in his head too. Someone was following them; of that he was sure. He shifted from shadow to shadow, pausing to listen to the plips of condensation dripping from the pipes and the occasional electric hum of buried wiring. He didn’t worry about getting lost. A good sense of direction was something he had been born with, and he knew he could feel his way back to the lair even if the whole place plunged into darkness.
An hour into his watch, he began to notice the silence draping through the tunnels. Too much silence, in fact. Not that he expected chirping birds in an underground warren, but it was like certain tunnel sections absorbed any noise that was out of the ordinary. It reminded Chicken Fingers of a job he had done years ago. These mercs he had taken down in the forests in Pan Am had this trick where they just kind of blended in with the scenery. Every step they took sounded like just another animal, every movement looked like a swaying piece of foliage. After he killed them, he had been surprised to discover that their “cammo” was a fiery orange with blacks and grays across it.
These super-average zones shifted as he did too, always positioned just behind him or off to the sides. It was the same way he had tracked the mercs in Pan Am. Sometimes normal really isn’t.
At last, Chicken Fingers couldn’t take it anymore. He came to a junction where five tunnels converged. Metal grating composed the floor, and dim sunlight poked fingers down from a vent far above, illuminating a maze of rusting crossbeams overhead.
Chicken Fingers paused.
“Righto,” he said. “I know you’re there. You know I know you’re there. We playing this game flirty-like or we going to knock it?”
The softest whisper returned. “I like games.”
Chicken Fingers whirled, gun raised. Something spun out of the darkness and struck the back of his hand, knocking his aim askew. Swearing, he drew his second bolter.
A figure rushed in, speed and shadows blurring the details. A foot thrust into his stomach. Chicken Fingers stumbled back, the air escaping his lungs. When he recovered, he stood alone once more. He kept his bolters low, ready to sound off the second he glimpsed movement.
“Oh no,” he said. “You found my secret weakness, hand-to-hand combat. Quit hiding. Fight like a man.”
“What does that even mean?” came the whisper. “You want me to tear off my own testicles and beat you around the head with them?”
Chicken Fingers made a slow circle, trying to draw a bead on the person. “That’d just be a waste of a perfectly good set of junk.”
The shadows chuckled. “Quite the visceral image, isn’t it?”
Air moved behind Chicken Fingers. He spun, gun leading the way. The bolter swiped empty space. An open palm slapped the back of his head. He tried ramming an elbow back but threw himself off-center, once more hitting nothing.
Catching himself, he went into a crouch, balanced on his heels. He held his guns up on either side of his head, barrels pointed to the surface. What if he was going crazy like all the rest? Was he being fooled by HR blasts?
“Easy there. Wouldn’t want you to work up a sweat.”
The voice was clearer this time, drawing Chicken Fingers’ attention straight up. A dark figure squatted on one of the crossbeams at least ten feet above him. Chicken Fingers squinted, trying to bring him in focus.
“Who the hell are you?”
The person shifted in place, wearing the shadows like a mask, and the backlighting of the sunlight draped
him like a cloak. All Chicken Fingers could see was a silhouette. “I guess you should consider me your guardian demon.”
“Oh, really? Not a guardian angel, on a mission to save us, huh?”
Another chuckle. “I don’t think any of us could or would claim that. Though I was sent on a mission. Would you like to try and shoot me now, or are we going to have a civil discussion?”
Chicken Fingers considered this for a second and then tucked his bolters away. If this guy wanted him dead, he could’ve offed him plenty of times. “How you keeping Billy from seeing you?”
“Every eye has its blind spot. The more eyes you have, the more blind spots I can take advantage of. Funny how that works, isn’t it? He won’t be privy to this discussion, by the way.”
“Fair enough.” Chicken Fingers paced a circuit around the chamber, keeping an eye out to ensure the person didn’t move. “So what’s your mission?”
“Helping you. I would have thought that was obvious.”
“By stalking us?” Chicken Fingers looked up at the silhouette.
“By easing your path far more than you are aware of.”
Chicken Fingers wiggled a pinky in one ear and then flicked off the wax, though it took a couple tries of scraping his thumb against his pinky. “You did the extra Triads, right?”
“I couldn’t let you have all the fun, could I?” the voice floated down.
“Why not? We were doing pretty well.”
“Why not what? Steal some of your fun? Is that what you call getting choked half to death by a Triad boss?”
Chicken Fingers chuffed. “Naw, man. You know that’s not what I mean. Why are you keeping tabs on us?”
“Like I said, I was hired for this job.”
“That all we are then to you? A checklist?”
“A bit more than that, I’ll admit. You’re intriguing. I want to see how this all turns out.”
“Right, so why not join in from the start? You’ve got a funny way of helping.”
“In that hiring, it was stipulated I got to choose how to go about actually seeing it to completion. For now, I prefer to remain withdrawn. I don’t do too well in team dynamics.”
Chicken Fingers blinked, realizing the blotch of shade he’d been staring at no longer moved or looked particularly like a person sitting on a metal beam. He scanned everywhere but couldn’t tell where the darkness ended and where the unknown conversationalist might begin.
A finger of a breeze tickled his neck, accompanied by a drifting whisper.
“I’ll be around.”
He shrugged. This was obviously beyond his control.
Chapter Twenty-seven
Raider
“Sir, we’ve got another group incoming. Ten o’clock. They’re trying for the lobby again.”
Raider glowered as he pulled up the appropriate channel. A video window opened, showing at least twenty gangers hustling for the front of the cube hotel his team had stationed in.
After retrieving Anansi, the team had met up with the second transport and backup squads. Roaring through the city skies, they had dodged several surface-to-air missiles launched from multiple military and civilian outposts set up throughout the sectors.
Didn’t matter who tossed them up anymore, just that none of the rockets knocked them down. After several near misses, Raider had guided them to a strip of office buildings north of the Chicagoland Stadium and west of O’Hare Milsec. Some of the old buildings, from before the airport had become the Milsec, were visible on the outskirts of the compound. Civilians crowded the streets below, lost in an HR haze.
After clearing out the small hotel, they’d parked the transports on top and established a temporary base with units spread out across five floors. Raider had intended to spend the time interrogating Anansi, but the hotel had come under almost immediate attack. Seems a gang of Wolves had claimed the territory as their own and didn’t appreciate the trespassers. Plus, they must’ve seen the squad land and wanted a go at snatching the transports and whatever other advanced tech the corporate soldiers possessed.
At least a hundred of the gang members had thrown themselves into the fight; enough that, even with their superior firepower, Raider had to focus on coordinating the defenses. At this point, he was losing more time in fighting than he would have spent just taking the teams back to the CHIMERA arcology to regroup.
For now, Maven worked on Anansi in a side room, trying to crack his TAP and force pliability. She’d been at it a few hours now, and, when pressed for the reason behind her delays, could only say he showed “uncanny” resistance to her incursions. Her sideline, using the hardwired point-to-point corporate networks to phish for anyone else monitoring for the terrorists, was also coming up empty. Once they were done with this mission, he would be transferring Maven to a different unit.
Raider issued commands to the rooftop snipers and the two plasma cannons he’d ordered deployed on alternating floors. Bullets and particle beams reduced this wave of attackers by half before they reached the ground-level lobby. There, one of his units met them with close-range fire. The few who survived this went down under brutal hand and blade attacks, augmented by the soldiers’ power armor. They’d taken no losses on their side and had enough bodies to build a wall of corpses, yet the Wolves kept coming. Raider didn’t have the highest opinion of gangers in the first place, and this encounter certainly wasn’t helping.
As he monitored the radio chatter, making sure this last attack hadn’t been a distraction for a more concerted effort, a blinking light caught Raider’s attention. Sometime during the brief fight, his com had started requesting access from an external transmission. He double-checked, but it didn’t come from any of his squad. According to the transmission encoding, it came straight from Command.
He gritted his teeth in frustration. He’d been trying to reach Command ever since picking up Anansi and had met nothing but blocked networks and downed lines, and the point-to-points were apparently being ignored. Had they just now managed to reestablish wireless connections, or had they been connected all along and ignored his past requests?
When he tabbed the channel open, a modulated voice came over the line. “Commander, your situation is under review. Your progress is valued but slower than anticipated. We hope to remedy this momentarily.”
So they had been keeping track of the squad. How? Why hadn’t they updated him before?
“We have one target in custody—” he began.
“Yes, we know. You were wise to keep him as an asset. We believe he will prove instrumental in drawing the others into the open.” A pause. “To that end, we have established with 99 percent certainty that at least three of the fugitives are within this known perimeter.” A map overlay funneled down to a two-square-block neighborhood on the fringes of Koreatown. “Reports indicate they have taken sanctuary with the hacker known as Billy Black Eyes. His current location is shielded, but we have determined four viable positions based on past activity.”
Red dots sprang up on the map. Raider noted they didn’t coincide with any surface structures. This Black Eyes must be burrowed. Closed and subterranean quarters could work in favor of a small, agile squad, but it also meant dealing with the unmapped territory of Coffin City. They’d have to keep running blind.
“We are pinpointing local transmissions and will relay geo-loc data once confirmation is achieved. In the meantime, move your troops into position and prepare to breach the undergrounds.”
“Wait,” he said. “How do I make contact once we’re readied?”
“You won’t, Commander. We will be in touch when it is deemed necessary.”
The channel closed without warning. Raider’s knuckles popped as he made a fist and slammed it into the wall beside him. Plastic paneling cracked under his knuckles. “Fick dich.”
Maven came out of the side room, head clutched between both hands. She looked wan, drained. When Maven had first joined his unit two years ago, she was one of the best. There was nothing she could
n’t do. This assignment was showing him just how far she had fallen. Definitely time to replace her. “Problem?”
“I don’t get it, sir,” she said, still not meeting his eyes. “It’s not like he’s actively trying to resist me. I’ve got him strung along so he barely even knows where or who he is. He should be pouring code out his ears straight into my hands right now. But every time I try to dive in, his TAP data just … wriggles aside.”
“Wriggles.”
She huffed in exasperation. “That’s the best way I can describe it, sir. Like I’m trying to pin down a bunch of squirming worms with chopsticks.”
“I have never eaten worms with chopsticks.” Raider stared at her blankly.
“Didn’t mean to be taken literally, sir. I just meant trying to grab something very difficult to grab with something that isn’t meant for the job, even if it looks like it.”
“Ah.” Raider nodded as she voiced his earlier thoughts. “You feel you aren’t suited for the job. We will discuss that later, right now isn’t the time.”
“Not me, sir. The interface itself.” Maven grimaced wearily. “Maybe if I had more specifics about what I’m looking for in his mind .… The problem is that hacking a TAP doesn’t let you read someone’s mind; it just gives you access to the files they have there. Has Command provided any extra details?”
“Not that would be useful to you. You’ll just have to keep trying.” Raider shook his head. “What they have told us is that they have a fix on the others, so you’ll have to work while we move.”
“Because I wasn’t already doing the impossible? Yes, sir.” She turned away, then paused. “There’s something else, sir.”
Solar Singularity Page 18
