SINdicate

by J. T. Nicholas

  “You’ve got their schedule?” I asked, coming half out of my chair and almost spilling my coffee. I cursed as I hurriedly set it down, wiping at the hot liquid that had sloshed over my hand.

  “Yes. Their delivery schedule, their delivery fleet specifics, and, with just a little more work, we will know the names of their employees. Give me an hour, Jason. I will need that long to study the information and to see if we can worm our way into other systems. I will have La Sorte and the others concentrate their efforts here as well, so that we can wring every byte of useful data out of their servers. One hour.”

  “One hour,” I agreed. I gathered my coffee and made my way back to the kitchen, leaving the synthetic to his work.

  * * * *

  I couldn’t wait the full hour. I was back at Silas’s side after about forty minutes. He didn’t look surprised to see me. “You are just in time. I think we have gathered what we need to make some decisions.”

  “Good,” said Al’awwal, his silhouette darkening the doorway leading off to the kitchen. “I’ve been sitting on this cache for more years than I care to remember. It’s time to do something about it.”

  “What have you got?” I asked, dropping into one of the chairs. Al’awwal took the one across from me, so we could both see the screens as Silas worked.

  “We have a company, Quark Glassworks. They are based just outside the city, not too far from Thibodaux, actually. Small, on the grand scale of things, and it looks like Walton Biogenics is their primary customer. They have been doing business with each other for decades. We have their delivery schedule—and it looks like we have a choice between tomorrow and three days from now for the next delivery.” He paused, and his voice lost a little of its certainty. “And we have information on their fleet of trucks. The system is fully automated, as expected. But we have not been able to crack into it. We probably can, if we are willing to wait until the later shipment, but…”

  “But that doesn’t give a hell of a lot of time to parse the information, figure out what it is, and decide what the hell we’re going to do with it, at least if we want to use it as part of our alpha strike against the world?” I offered. “And if there’s something in there that we can use to minimize the backlash against synthetics, better it go out in the first wave.”

  “That,” Silas agreed. “And the fact that the longer we poke around their infrastructure, the more likely we are to be found out. We are confident that the good people at Quark have not noticed our intrusion as yet, but the longer we are in their systems, the greater the chance of discovery.”

  “And if we go after the delivery tomorrow?” Al’awwal asked. “Why do we need to be able to hack into the vehicle’s system? It’s already going where we want to go.”

  I couldn’t help the smile that curled the left side of my mouth. Al’awwal was a genetic superman, unhindered by the constraints Silas suffered under, and with more years of experience—probably—than me and Silas combined. He was smarter, stronger, faster, better trained, and sure as shit healthier than I would ever be. He’d been hiding from the cyclopean reach of Walton Biogenics—successfully—for longer than I’d been alive. But despite all that, without being able to plan the details better, he’d make a shitty criminal. Maybe it wasn’t something to be proud of, the thought that I—a former cop—made a better villain than the synthetic, but I was feeling just a smidge inferior to Al’awwal, so I’d take what I could get.

  “We have to get on board, Al,” I said. If he minded the nickname, he made no show of it. “And that’s going to be pretty fucking hard if we can’t tell the truck not only to stop, but to not tell its home base that it’s made a stop. I don’t doubt that Walton Biogenics is paranoid enough to question any irregularities in its scheduled deliveries.”

  “Ah.”

  “Ah, indeed,” Silas said. “So we will have to find a way to intercept the shipment, board the truck, and remain hidden through the delivery process.”

  “Sounds easy enough,” I said. Both synthetics threw me a strange look. Well, another thing humans were superior at. “Sarcasm,” I said, then shrugged. “If we’re doing this tomorrow, better break out the specs and maps and whatever else we can find, because we don’t have a lot of time to plan, prep, and execute. Time to go to work.”

  * * * *

  Some hours later, we were still huddled around the dining room table.

  “I just don’t see us waiting until the truck gets into the city,” I said, for the fourth or fifth time.

  “It’s highly improbable that the truck will need to make any stops before it gets into the city,” Silas countered.

  “I know, I know. But what are we going to do? Hang out at a busy intersection and hop on board if the truck has to stop? In case you’ve forgotten, there are a shit-ton of protests going on, with half the police force in the city present. The other half is directly looking for me. How long do you think it would take for me to be recognized? Four seconds? Five?”

  Silas sighed, frustration evident. “Well, we cannot jump onto a moving vehicle traveling at thirty or forty miles per hour, either. The chances of something going catastrophically wrong are far too great.”

  “We need to force the vehicle to a stop outside the city,” Al’awwal interjected, heading me off before I could offer an angry retort. I wasn’t mad at Silas—he was right. I didn’t want to jump onto a truck moving at near highway speeds, since the slightest slip or bump in the road would almost certainly spell death. But damned if I could think of a better way.

  “If we force the vehicle to stop,” Silas said, “Quark will know about it. And we have already agreed that it is highly likely that Walton will be monitoring the systems as well. We cannot risk that such a stop would alert them and increase the security at the lab. That is enough of an uphill battle already.”

  “Only if they know that the vehicle was forced to stop,” Al’awwal said. “Look.” His fingers swiped across the screens, reorienting the map, zooming in on an area less than one hundred yards from the gates to the Quark Glassworks plant. “Here,” he tapped at the map, indicating an intersection. “There’s a light here.”

  “Yeah, sure,” I said. “But no fucking traffic. It’s in the middle of nowhere.”

  “There doesn’t have to be traffic. You said you can’t hack into the truck, but surely you can hack into a simple traffic light?”

  “Of course I can,” Silas snapped. “But there are also cameras that may well be monitored. Do you think no one will find it odd to have a red light appear for no reason, with no cross traffic anywhere near?”

  “They might,” Al’awwal acknowledged. “If by they you mean the people at Quark. But I doubt any monitoring on the Walton front is going to be so complex as to check whether a traffic signal right outside the factory’s front door is behaving appropriately. Sure, they might be notified if their delivery wasn’t obeying the signals present, or if it was obeying signals not present. But do you really think Walton Biogenics will have an algorithm in place to detect whether a random traffic signal turned red when it should have stayed green?”

  That was hard to argue with. “What about Quark?” I countered. “Walton might not notice, but the people at Quark, some of whom might be able to observe this whole thing with a good old-fashioned mark one eyeball might find it strange.”

  “And if they do?” Al’awwal asked. “Do you think this glassware company is so paranoid as to stop their deliveries and launch an investigation because a stoplight turned red?” He shook his head. “No. They will do what any company not involved in illegal activity would do. They’ll scratch their heads, wonder why it happened, and at most send someone out to check on the light. But they won’t recall the delivery.”

  “Okay,” I agreed. “Maybe you have a point. And it’s probably better odds than trying to hit the truck in motion or stop it somewhere in the heart of the city. It adds its own wrinkl
e though—we’re going to have to get pretty damn close to the factory for this to work. Not to mention the fact that, if stopping the truck outside the gates like that is unusual, we’re going to draw a look or two from anybody outside. Which is going to make it a hell of a lot harder to get on board without being seen.”

  “Then we shall have to give them something else to look at,” Silas said.

  “Okay, but what?”

  “Leave that to me, Detective. Your job is figuring out how to get us on the truck.”

  Chapter 19

  “This is still a stupid fucking plan,” I muttered, mostly to myself as we hiked our way across a field of feed corn. The Quark delivery truck was scheduled to leave for the Walton lab at zero-seven-hundred, about ten minutes after sunrise, as it turned out. That was great for getting in position under the cover of darkness, at least in theory. In practice, it meant carrying a bunch of gear across rough terrain with zero visibility, all while leading a pair of synthetics who, at their core, were city rats. For all his genius with computers and his knowledge of the bowels of New Lyons, Silas hadn’t ever made it out of the city. And while Al’awwal seemed to have some kind of training—at least judging by the way he stowed and carried his gear—it was pretty obvious it was the kind of training you bought and paid for somewhere but without the actual experience of doing it for a living.

  “Beggars and choosers, Campbell,” Al’awwal grunted, shifting his assault pack on his shoulders. He and I were both under arms. He was carrying the Israeli-made bullpup with which he had first greeted us and I had opted for a ten millimeter sub-gun of German manufacture, pulled from the synthetic’s extensive collection. The five-five-six rifle round gave Al the firepower edge over my ten millimeter, but he’d also had a nice little suppressor for the sub-gun in his collection, so I’d screwed the can on the end of the barrel. It wouldn’t make the gun into a truly silent instrument of death, but it would at least keep people guessing as to where, exactly, the noise was coming from.

  Silas, of course, wasn’t armed, but he was hauling a pack of his own. It was filled with an odd array of electronics that I just filed under “commo” but almost certainly had more esoteric uses than that. Like me and Al, he was clad in simple dark slacks and a dark long-sleeved shirt. If we ditched our packs and weapons and if no one looked too closely at our shoes—we were all wearing some flavor of hiking boot, because damned if I was going to risk rolling an ankle on the walk to the objective—we could maybe pass for people who should be in an office building. A lot more than if we were wearing military surplus, anyway. And if we didn’t get too much corn stuck in our fucking gear.

  We’d had the car—an untraceable Silas special, not one of Al’awwal’s—drop us off about a mile from our objective. Silas then sent it back to whatever mysterious motor pool he kept hidden away, and we proceeded to hoof it cross-country the rest of the way. Walking a mile doesn’t sound super hard—should only take fifteen, twenty minutes right? Right. Now add in some soft, well-tilled soil that not only tugs at your boots but is anything but even. Add pack and weapons totaling maybe a quarter of your body weight. Think that would slow things down a bit? Maybe make it take twice as long? Great. Now do it in the pitch-fucking-black without any optics. Trust me. Shit gets real slow, real quick.

  It took us close to an hour and a half to cross that mile, a little slower than I’d estimated, but I’d built some snafu time into the plan, so we reached the edges of the cornfield with enough time to spare. We’d deviated a few points east—not bad, considering we were pretty much going off of dead reckoning in the middle of a cornfield—but that worked out to our advantage, anyway. Our target was an intersection of two roads a little too big to be called county, a little too small to be called state ones. They were those corporate-sponsored roads that you got sometimes near factories or business parks, the kind that didn’t really fit in with the local roads because they had to be of a size and quality to handle employee and freight traffic.

  We’d come out maybe a hundred yards from the intersection, which suited me fine. It gave us a better chance of crossing the street—which provided us no cover whatsoever—without being seen. We darted across the road and disappeared into the brush on the far side. We were close enough now to make out Quark Glassworks, rising in the distance beyond the brush and fields. It was a smaller building than I’d expected. I hadn’t ever really considered what type of facility would be needed to manufacture glass, and the only imagery I had to draw on was the massive power plants or automobile factories I remembered from my youth. This was neither. The building—what we could see of it—looked more like an elementary school than a factory, save for a pair of medium-sized chimneys that were far too reasonable to be called smokestacks. It was two stories, brick, and looked like it was built in a rough L shape. A fence ran around the property, and, following the line of the road, I could make out a guard house. It looked manned, though by synthetic or human, there was no way to tell. Not that it mattered. Being seen boarding the truck by either would be just as bad.

  I checked my watch. I didn’t normally bother with one, as a screen served all the same functions, but sometimes you couldn’t beat the convenience of wearable technology. Fifteen minutes until zero-seven. The sun was breaking, climbing over the eastern horizon. If I’d had my choice, I’d have tried to board the truck a couple of hours ago. Not because that was when it was darkest—the old saw about “darkest just before the dawn” is metaphorical, not literal—but because people, no matter the time they get up, always seem least alert at before-morning-nautical-twilight. It was true on guard duty in the big green machine, and I was sure it was true for those on guard duty here. But trying to penetrate the perimeter wasn’t part of the plan, so we were stuck waiting for the truck.

  Fortunately, the terrain outside the factory was either field or allowed to run wild. Closer in, the bush had been hacked back, the ground cover cultivated into something more resembling a lawn. But the traffic light, the simple device upon which all of our plans hinged, was a good twenty yards outside the landscaped perimeter. The corn stopped on the other side of the road, but there was enough rough scrub to let us move into position without too great a risk of being seen. We hunkered down near the light post, trusting the early morning shadows and brush to keep us out of sight of the guards.

  It occurred to me that if anyone came down the crossroad, we’d be three guys, all dressed in black, sitting out in the open. Not the least suspicious thing we could have done. But part of the reason we were out here was that traffic was so scarce to begin with.

  At one time, that wouldn’t have been the case. I strongly suspected that the only reason the light was here was to give employees of the factory a more orderly entrance and egress at shift-change times. Automation had taken care of a lot of those jobs, moving the formerly productive employees onto the Basic Living Stipend. The synthetic revolution had probably cleared out the rest, since any manual labor was cheaper to do with synthetics than robots or “real” people. Odds were, the only employees were a few “shift managers”—overseers by any other name—and maybe a handful of experts at managing the equipment and processes.

  Silas had dug out one of the many screens stuffed into his pack. It was already running—he’d done most of the heavy lifting last night, with a few final tweaks on the ride from Al’awwal’s estate.

  “We good to go?” I asked.

  “Very nearly,” he replied. “The light is already under my control, and we’re still inside Quark’s systems. I just need to verify a few processes, and the diversion will be ready. Five minutes, Jason.”

  I nodded, glancing at my watch again, more from habit than need. The truck was scheduled to depart at oh-seven-hundred, and given that it was a fully automated truck being loaded I assumed by synthetics that lived on property, it wasn’t going be leaving one minute early or one minute late. Twelve till. This was the part I hated most—the waiting. We’d
planned, plotted, executed…and now it all came down to grinding out a few minutes more and hoping nothing went wrong. I grit my teeth and tried to ignore the tension twisting my guts.

  “I am ready,” Silas said a few minutes later. “And I have the status of the truck. It is buttoned up and ready to move out. It should be rolling on schedule.”

  “Good,” I said. “Everyone know the plan?”

  “Such as it is,” Silas said.

  “And what there is of it,” Al’awwal added.

  I grunted. It wasn’t, I admitted, much of a plan. But it was what we had, so we were going to make it work. “Be ready.”

  The minutes clicked down, the sun rose higher, and the shadows receded. With each passing moment, the chances of being spotted by a bored security guard increased. Then the gates to the factory lumbered open and a vehicle pulled out onto the road.

  “Showtime,” I muttered.

  The truck moved smoothly, accelerating almost silently with its electric engine. “Switching the light now,” Silas said. I couldn’t see the actual signal from my vantage, and even if I could, I was keeping my eyes on the truck, but I noticed an almost instant flattening of its rate of acceleration followed by a noticeable slowing. It didn’t stop like a car under manual control would have—in fact, it kept up a relatively high rate of speed until almost the last moment, as if its programming anticipated the light going back to green. As the light would have, if Silas hadn’t hijacked its controls.

  “Triggering our diversion now,” the albino synthetic said, and I felt my muscles tense. It was almost go time.

  About a second after Silas hit his screen, and with the truck about ten yards from the stoplight, all hell broke loose at the factory. Sirens started blaring, a high, ululating cry designed to cut through the noise of a factory floor. Lights posted outside exits started flashing, alarmingly bright in the shadows of the dawning day, throwing a strobe-light effect over the yard. The guards, their confidence in another dull and routine day shattered, came pouring out of the guard shack, staring in the direction of the building.