The Pendragon Codex

by D. C. Fergerson

  “Geez, Gideon would have a field day in here,” she said.

  “Our own hacker designed it,” Julian said, stepping to a desk on the left end of the room. “He’s in the field at the moment.”

  A swipe of his hand at the computer rig summoned a holographic keyboard projected to the table. With a few key presses, one of the monitors on the wall came to life.

  “We first ran into him in Les Invalides in Paris,” Julian grumbled. “We don’t have any footage for that. In that encounter, we were on an after-hours trip to the museum. He appeared, laid out six of my men, and took the artifact we were there for.”

  The holovid monitor displayed a picture like an old-style television, flat and without detail. In the image was a hallway with an intricate marble floor. Julian pointed at the screen.

  “We were able to get some footage for the second one, but it’s 2D only,” he said. “Watch this.”

  The still image came to life, shadows swirling about on the floor of a cathedral. Checkered white and black tiles formed a mosaic of ornate circles on the ground, like stained glass windows. A soldier flew into view, slamming on the ground and sliding on his back until he was out of frame. The ninja came into the picture for a split second, sporting a white tactical suit and helmet, but a burst of light blinded the camera. In that second, once the light was gone, so was the ninja.

  Cora shook her head. “Wait, what just happened? That’s it?”

  “Yes,” Julian said with a sigh. “Two and a half seconds. We tried to get more video on the third and fourth heists, but we had to cut the power to the museums in order to infiltrate. All our footage from body and rifle cams is too dark to make anything out.”

  “Fourth? How many artifacts has he beaten you to?” Cora asked, astonished.

  “Those four, in total,” he replied. He crossed his arms. “Whoever he is, he’s good. But he must also be working for Lucius, trying to ensure we don’t get our hands on these.”

  The whole scenario bewildered Cora. She tried wrapping her head around it. From her experience, it seemed too indirect for Lucius. If he knew how to get at Julian, and believed him a threat, why not take him instead of the artifact? Something wasn’t adding up.

  “Let me see if I understand this,” she said, raising a finger. “You guys pick a target, do your research on the security that’s present, choose the right time and bust in. Then, right as you’re about to steal whatever artifact you came for, this ninja shows up, takes it from you, and vanishes into thin air? Four times?”

  Julian hung his head. “I’d appreciate if you’d not make light of it. I know this makes my men look like bumbling fools, but this magic is like nothing I’ve ever seen before.”

  Cora turned her head back to the screen. “Play it back for me again. Slow it down.”

  After Julian tinkered with some settings on the screen, the video played again, frame by frame. Cora motioned with her hand to go a little faster, eyes fixed to every detail going on. After the soldier slid across the floor, the ninja flipped into frame, landing on their feet. She held up a finger to freeze it there. She walked to the front of the room, getting as close to the screen as she could without distorting her view. The white tactical suit was a one-piece from neck to ankle, and skintight. A black stripe connected the boots and gloves to the rest of the suit, perhaps hiding a cable of some kind. The body of the ninja was lithe, though the height was difficult to ascertain without reference. The helmet was the strangest design. Equally as confined as the rest of the suit, the flat, black, reflective face of it shared more in common with a welding mask than with one of Cora’s motorcycle helmets.

  “Any idea about the tech?” she asked.

  “It’s all custom,” Julian replied. “It didn’t match against anything the private military corps have, and nothing Apex manufactures.”

  Cora twirled her finger in a circle through the air. “Go back a little bit. Replay from the flip.”

  As she examined each frame of the landing, she smirked. “I hate to break it to you, but your ninja is a woman.”

  “Come again, Miss Blake?”

  Cora pointed at the screen. “She’s landing on the ground with her torso straight. Watch it again, you can see it. The straight up and down of her spine is to root herself. Men land using their waist and legs to distribute weight in a triangle pattern.”

  Julian furrowed his brow and shook his head. “How would you even know that?”

  Cora looked over her shoulder at him. “Master Hidori, the man who made my sword and a real taskmaster of a fighting instructor. He was really into biomechanics and kinetics.”

  “I see,” Julian said, pursing his lips.

  What he didn’t say spoke volumes. He had more than a hundred men loyal to him on this base, but they were all under his command in the Royal Army. They weren’t much different from UNS Marines, in that regard. Sure, he may have a few specialists, a hacker, an engineer, but his resource pool may have been limited. He needed her more than he realized. Now, she knew it, too.

  “I need to pull these two seconds apart,” she said, walking back to him. “Every detail, every frame. I also need the information on all four missions. Any detail is important. Most importantly, I need my team in here.”

  Julian nodded back, a little easier this time. “What about the magic? The vanishing act? Any idea what that could be?”

  “No,” Cora said, shaking her head. “I’ve never seen anything like it. It doesn’t matter, though. No matter what, we’re going to figure it out and stop her.”

  Crossed Wires

  “Pretty sweet setup,” Gideon remarked, impressed with the computer room. His hands stroked every piece of equipment as he walked by, as though he were making plans for all of it.

  Johnny unbuttoned his suit jacket and took a seat at one of the desks. “So, he gave us free reign and disappeared?”

  Cora rested her bottom on the desk beside him. “I believe his exact words were that he ‘was convinced I didn’t need a babysitter.’ He still needs to play tough guy.”

  “You’re covered in sweat, patatina,” Giovanna said, looking her over. “Either you made a man out of him or you beat his ass.”

  Cora laughed and shook her head. “Definitely the second one.”

  “Oh, man,” Gideon said, quick-stepping to the strange chair in the corner of the room. “How did I not notice this beauty sooner? C’mere, girl.”

  “Don’t fall in love over there,” Cora laughed. “I have no idea how long our warm welcome is going to last.”

  Gideon awed and examined every panel and interface on the chair. “You don’t understand. Luxury NeuralNet rigs like these go for hundreds of thousands of credits. Whoever their hacker is, he must have really suckered Julian into thinking he needed this.”

  Cora waved him off and pointed at the ninja onscreen. “Well, go play. We have our run of the room. Julian said he made all files available to us that relate to this ninja or whatever.”

  Giovanna tinkered with the video controls on the nearby desktop computer, running the footage again in slow motion. She took a breath and shook her head. “I’ve been doing the spy game for a very long time. I’ve never seen anything quite like this.”

  Cora scooted her rear to rest on the desk beside her, her voice low. “Julian was interested in me to begin with because of that flash of light in her exit. He thinks it’s magic, but I’ve never seen it, either.” She turned to her other shoulder. “Johnny, what about you? Did you see any Native people with the power to vanish in a blast of light?”

  “Not once,” he replied. He rolled his shoulders, as if trying to relieve tension. “I’m sorry, but are we not going to talk about that little pow-wow? I mean, we’re all a team, but that prick really needled some uncomfortable secrets out.”

  Giovanna turned toward him and put her hands on her hips. “The only one keeping secrets was me. Is that what you’re talking about?”

  “No, Gia,” Johnny huffed. “Where you come from is pa
rt of who you are. I would have rathered hear that story from you when you felt comfortable enough to tell us.”

  “I wouldn’t have, to be honest,” she replied, her thick Italian accent full of pride. “I’m not about to have anyone looking at me with any kind of pity. That’s what those kinds of stories do, and I won’t have it. That’s why Pia Seretti is dead. Poor little burned girl died in a test chamber. I came out. The end.”

  “Sounds like you’re projecting, old man,” Gideon said, getting comfortable in the mechanical chair. With a few button presses on the arm console, the chair came to life, adjusting height and turning him to the rest of the team.

  “What the hell is that supposed to mean?” Johnny said, taking off his sunglasses.

  Gideon threw his hands up in mock surrender. “I’m just saying it seems like you don’t feel comfortable with what Julian made you say in front of Cora.”

  “Yeah, well, I don’t,” he replied, gnawing at the corner of his lip.

  Cora threw her head back and stared at the matte black pipes running a maze across the ceiling. “I’m not stupid, Johnny. I was a high school kid when the war ended. I know what side you were on, and I know who you worked for. You think that gives me some secret resentment against you?”

  Johnny shook his head and turned up his hands. “I don’t know what it does. I just know that I did some things I’m not proud of during that war and I wouldn’t want the ghosts of my past coming around messing with your head.”

  Cora slid on her butt back over to him. With a finger, she pulled him by the chin to look at her. “I don’t care. When my back was against the wall in Berlin and I thought I was going to die, you came for me. When the UNS moved on Heaven’s Crest, you brought Gideon. When Lucius kidnapped me, you busted me out. That’s all I need to know.”

  She turned and addressed the room. “Does anyone feel any different about each other after what was said in there?” Her head swiveled back and forth to everyone. Gideon shrugged. Johnny and Giovanna stayed their ground. “Awesome. Let’s get to work, then. Gideon?”

  “Jacking in as we speak,” Gideon replied, connecting a wire from the side of the chair to a port embedded behind his ear. She turned away. There was no need to see all that and conjure up visions of doctors sawing into his skull to install it.

  Turning to Giovanna, she said, “Let’s start with the suit. They checked it against weapons manufacturers like Apex and PMC tech. What if we widened the search past that?”

  “Alright,” Giovanna replied. “But why?”

  “Well, if that suit is really custom,” Cora said, fixing her eyes on the screen, “she would have needed combat training for the soldiers, engineering for the helmet, been a seamstress for the suit, and have magic? I’m betting she has a team, a benefactor, something.”

  “What can I do, kid? I’m not much good on a computer,” Johnny said.

  “Maps,” Cora replied, thinking fast. Johnny’s sniper talents might mold to the situation. “If she beats Julian’s team to the punch four times, she’s staking them out. Find spots near the four hits where she would have had a good view, then give that info to Gideon. We might be able to find some drone or traffic cams that picked her up on those nights. Maybe we can get more footage of her.”

  “On it,” Johnny said. He smiled in spite of himself as he stared at the holographic screen in front of him. “You’re really something, kid.”

  Cora stood up and patted him on the shoulder as she walked past. “I had some pretty good teachers.”

  She strode to the front of the room, watching the video replay over and over, looking for something she hadn’t noticed before.

  “Alright, Cora,” Gideon’s voice came from speakers mounted all around the room. “I’m in.”

  Cora startled and looked about. Gideon’s limp body laid in the chair as though sleeping, and now his presence was all around her like the voice of God. She shook off the unnerving feeling and refocused.

  “What have we got in the files? What did she steal from the museums?”

  A mechanical approximation of Gideon’s voice came over the speakers. “Let’s see...we’ve got a dagger from 1679, a street magician’s box from the 18th century, a pistol from 1932, and a carafe made from amethyst, dated 1851.”

  Cora raised an eyebrow. “That’s a really mixed bag. Any relation between them?”

  “None that I can see,” he replied. “They came from four different museums, four different time periods, no relationships I can see in any of the owners prior to now. Of course, I don’t know what Project Phoenix info they had that led them to these artifacts. It’s not included in what he gave us access to.”

  She grumbled. There wasn’t much to go on. When Lucius’ men abducted Gideon in Berlin, they destroyed his rig, along with all of their compiled information about the museum pieces.

  “This sucks,” she said. “We could probably do more if we had all those AI you wrote for Project Ashes back in Berlin.”

  There was a pause. “Well...”

  Cora put a hand on her hip. “Gideon?”

  “I may have stored copies of the bots I wrote in a cloud,” he replied.

  “Why in the hell am I only hearing about this now?” she barked.

  “Plausible deniability,” Gideon explained. “If you don’t know I have them, you can’t give them up under interrogation.”

  She crossed her arms. Her first instinct was to debate the point, but Lucius did have her drugged and suggestible for two weeks. With a sigh, she asked, “Well, can we do anything with them?”

  “All of my bots were programmed to work with the Project Ashes data,” he said. “They’re useless without it.”

  Her mouth twisted while she mulled it over. “Does Julian have a biochip?”

  “Sec...yeah,” Gideon replied. “His biometrics are reading connected to the local network here.”

  “Patch him to my Arcadia,” Cora replied, swiping out her holographic screen to the back of her palm. Within seconds, Julian’s name appeared on her contact list. After selecting him, she tapped the comm button on her ear piece. “Cora to Julian.”

  A long pause ensued, though she made out faint grumbles of restrained rage. “How did you...who the bloody hell...Parker.”

  “He’s really good, I know,” Cora said with a smirk. “Quick question for you?”

  He sighed. “Go ahead.”

  “Can you release whatever data you have from Project Phoenix to us?”

  “I said you didn’t need a babysitter, Miss Blake,” Julian replied. “Trust is earned.”

  “Oh, c’mon, Julian,” she cooed. “I’ll be your best friend. Or I can just have Gideon feed some really shitty Synth music direct to your ear implant. We’re working on something down here.”

  “The answer is no, Miss Blake,” Julian replied with a stern tone.

  “Look, Gideon had already written several AI meant to sift the data we got from Project Ashes, a sorting facility for the Project Phoenix database,” Cora explained, rolling her eyes at the team and motioning to her earpiece.

  “Yes, I’m aware of the facility,” Julian said with a huff. “Empty offices now. If Lucius still has the facility, he’s moved it elsewhere.”

  “We still have the AI Gideon wrote for them,” she said. “I’m guessing that if your hacker is in the field right now, and you’ve had him working on piecing together the data from damaged drives, you don’t have anything like this to sort the information.”

  There was a pause. Cora took that as a good sign. Finally, Julian said, “I would want full results of anything you found.”

  Cora smiled, glancing at Gideon’s limp body in the chair. “I’ll do you one better. The AI is yours for whatever good it does you. Just give us a crack at it.”

  Julian sighed and spoke into the background. “Michael, get down there and unlock the Phoenix files...yes, really! Just go!”

  “Thanks a bunch,” Cora said, full of fake chipper and perkiness. She hit the comm button and
ended the call. “Michael is on his way here to unlock the files, Gideon.”

  She walked back toward Giovanna, stopping beside Johnny. He pored over holographic maps on his screen, turning them and analyzing the area.

  “Any luck?” she asked.

  “Two down, two to go,” Johnny replied. “The first two were easy, because of the number of obstructions to the view of the museums. These other two, though...I’ll figure it out.”

  Cora smiled and bowed her head, heading over to Giovanna. The more experienced with computers of the two, she had three different screens opened, gesturing and swiping through each one. Before Cora could speak, Giovanna swiped a screen in the direction of the monitors at the front of the room.

  “Found it,” she said with effortless confidence.

  Cora raised an eyebrow and focused her attention on the front of the room. It was a retail location on NeuralNet, but all of the text was in Russian. Beside the block of text an image rotated featuring a white bodysuit. Glossy, but otherwise featureless, there was nothing about it that made it obvious it was the same one used by the ninja.

  “Alright, what are we looking at?” Cora asked.

  Giovanna stood up and walked to the front of the room, momentarily distracting Cora with the sultry sway of her hips when she walked. She doubted the Italian was doing it on purpose, but it grabbed attention all the same. She shook her head and got back to business.

  “Magic or no, that flash of light put out a lot of energy in the video,” Giovanna explained. “So, I started thinking about energy farms, like where they make power cells for cars. I’ve seen them before, the workers have to use specially insulated suits. Since most power cells are made in China, I started looking at where the major corporations are getting the suits. Turns out, the majority of the suits are manufactured from this single company in Russia.”