Rune Zero: A Cyberpunk Thriller (Rune Universe)

by Hugo Huesca

  “Good work, Terrance!” proclaimed John. The last red dot was moving through a secondary dirt road that would get it high up to the mountains. It was the shortest path out of the county, but also the most dangerous.

  David reclined over his seat, accepted the laptop the man was handing him, and focused again on the drone’s systems.

  His punch to the mouth had taken the other hacker out of the picture, for now. The mail was a simple cancellation request to the Zimbabwean ISP, sent from the most VIP-looking account the Intel guys could command with two minutes notice.

  The ISP software had read the email, a red-flag was triggered when it read the sender’s address, then it had forwarded it straight to the CEO. Account terminated with extreme prejudice, and Vicente’s lookalike was out of his proxy service.

  That’s what you get for trying to skimp on a few dollars, thought David.

  “I got a visual!” exclaimed the man by John’s side. “Red car, moving at least a hundred miles per hour.”

  On the dirt road, it was almost a suicidal speed. There were only jagged curves to one side and at the other, a straight fall off the mountain.

  David pushed his seatbelt and inclined almost to John’s lap. The car was navigating the road with the precision of a Nascar pro, making perfect turns in all the right places. A mile behind him, were the police, which were having more difficulty on the dirt road than the car.

  The quadcopter rose even higher and David caught sight of the road on the other side of the mountain. Several police cars and black vans were flying through the highway towards the county line, ready to set up a barricade. If the quadcopter kept sight of the car, they’d definitely catch Dugall Tull.

  Which he knew. Suddenly, the motor shook and the entire fuselage of the drone shot down and up several times like a crazed bull. Then it hung, frozen in the air, for a brief, hopeful instant before its engine shut itself off and the machine began to plummet to the ground.

  Turns out, people you punch in the mouth can punch you back. Who knew?

  The quadcopter didn’t go into free-fall instantly. For a precious few seconds, it glided around, propelled by the dying energy of the motor and the speed of its four blades.

  If it had been a more aerodynamic drone, it may have lasted longer. As it was… It seemed like a cartoon character who loses the ground underneath his feet, but doesn’t fall until he realizes he’s standing on thin air.

  A real pilot might have regained control over the aircraft right then, unplugged the automatic software pilot and taken the passengers to land gracefully.

  But there was no real life pilot, just three stunned CIA agents, and a terrified hacker.

  That’s what people get when they send a project to the cheapest contractor.

  David’s reaction saved his life. Another guy may have gone straight to the parachutes —like John Derry was trying to do—, but David Terrance was a hacker.

  His instincts when seeing a malfunctioning —a critically malfunctioning— piece of equipment, no matter if it was a smart-toaster or a Government drone, were the same, honed by thousands of different encounters with treacherous tech.

  He gripped his laptop almost hard enough to break plastic, reached on the touchpad for the Options Menu (a coil gyrating on itself) and rebooted the system. The ultimate weapon in any programmer’s arsenal against chaos.

  The lights in the cabin went out and the few remaining navigational systems turned off with them.

  Then the quadcopter went into freefall.

  David Terrance’s last words wouldn’t be inspiring or otherwise well thought. He was screaming something like: “SHIIIIIIIIITTTTTTTT!” only more high-pitched. The rocky terrain jumped at them like the Earth was just anxious to give them a hug.

  When the cabin’s lights suddenly came back on, the engine followed soon thereafter and the four blades roared back to life.

  The drone’s software studied the situation. Its altitude meter screamed in panic. Its navigational system scrambled in every direction. A solution was reached by panicked strings of ones and zeroes. Before the blades had regained their full speed, the quadcopter began an emergency-landing maneuver.

  Instead of aiming… well, down… it aimed to a diagonal fall, adding the little forward momentum its motor could yet manage. That gave it slightly more time to regain power.

  Then its systems diverted every single bit of power towards the engine, unlocking emergency protocols in its interior and burning half its fuel reserves in a single moment. The motor roared and the fuselage screamed as the metal was pulled in two different directions by two powerful forces.

  David’s jaw snapped shut and his neck shot backward. He hit his head against the seat (which saved his life, kudos to the seat’s engineers) hard enough to black his vision out. He stopped screaming then, but only because he was barely conscious.

  He felt every organ inside his torso try to reach his feet as the quadcopter fought for its electronic life and gravity tried to claim its victim.

  If David could’ve looked out of the cabin, he would’ve seen the ground come within a terrifying distance of the drone, before the quadcopter won the battle and coasted safely atop a bed of rocks and grass. The quadcopter would’ve roared with triumph if its systems were advanced enough for it to speak. Instead, it slowly gained altitude as it raised its nose towards the sky, a triumphant bird of metal, the proud symbol of human ingenuity. The sun shone against it, transforming it into a mythical being. It was majestic.

  Then it hit the top of a tree.

  Darkness. Peaceful darkness. And so warm. Actually, too warm. And the pain wasn’t that peaceful, now that David reflected on his body’s sensations. He opened his eyes with a brutal effort of will.

  The quadcopter was laying on the ground in several pieces. Metal blades and pieces of rotor were strewn everywhere. The cabin’s fuselage was bent in painful shapes. The seats in front of him were empty, and so was the one at his side. Also, he was on his head.

  And the cabin was on fire.

  The flames came from behind him, from the quadcopter’s tail, and from underneath him (which now was up). The metal had kept his vulnerable body away from the fire, but it was heating quickly. David felt the skin of his back sizzle. He screamed in agony and reached for the seatbelt. He fell straight down.

  He managed to take the blunt of the fall with his hands covering his head and kicked and crawled his way out of the cabin. Somehow, his jeans had caught fire on his left leg. He patted at the belt while screaming pitifully all the while. His free hand felt rocks and grass and then a man was pulling him out of the wreckage. As he did so, the fire on David’s pants died down and left him with a small patch of black covering his dirtied clothes.

  “So, you’re still alive,” said John Derry. He helped David stand up. “Can you run? This thing can blow up at any second.”

  One second before hearing that, David Terrance was sure he couldn’t run at all. With the threat of an explosion, turns out he could run pretty fast, given his condition.

  The quadcopter had fallen at least a thousand feet away from the road. John and David reached the road, with David pale and sweaty from the effort.

  David turned back to see the quadcopter enveloped completely in a curtain of flames and black smoke. His body tensed and he prepared to drop to the ground before the explosion.

  Which didn’t come. The agents and the hacker were left standing in the middle of the road as the quadcopter burned in the distance.

  “Well,” started David, “I guess they built it better than I thought—”

  The explosion sent a wave of heat and deafening noise towards them. David fell to the floor, stunned, as a rain of fiery debris fell all around him. A flaming piece of blade fixed itself on the ground less than two hundred feet away from him. David covered his head with his arms and closed his eyes.

  Once again, a pair of hands grabbed him by the shirt and propped him up. John’s face was red and his suit was torn where a sma
ll fragment of metal had stabbed his shoulder. He was screaming at David.

  “What?” David couldn’t hear himself speak, either. If his life was a movie, someone had pressed the “mute” button. “I can’t hear you at all!”

  John shook his head, thought it over, and then pushed him forwards, away from the wreckage.

  “Alright, alright, I get it!”

  This time, he could barely walk.

  One of the other agents had a limp and was bleeding all over the place. His partner had an arm around his shoulders and together they led the slowest escape in the history of Urban Pacification quadcopters.

  David winced when a final, tiny piece of metal struck his neck and scorched his hair. He swatted it like a fly and he burned his hand, too.

  “I’m going to strangle that asshole,” he said mutedly, thinking of the hacker.

  “…catch…first,” came the faint words from John, right at his side.

  “Yeah. Let’s do that.”

  Like they were responding to David’s wishes, half a dozen police cars roared around the corner and stopped right behind them. They were manned by real human beings.

  “Come on,” John told him, going after the first car, where an officer was waiting for them with a confused expression on his face. “Time to switch rides.”

  “We’re still going after them?”

  “After that shit they pulled? Yes, yes we are.”

  The other CIA agents left in a different car and left towards a hospital. Meanwhile, the officer in David and John’s car led the pursuit.

  “Close call back there, right mates?” he asked them, barely turning back. “I’ll be level with you two, I’ve no idea how you’re still alive.”

  “Vicente’s impersonator jammed our drone’s system,” muttered David, who still could barely hear anything other than the screeching in his ears. “I had to reboot the entire thing.”

  “You rebooted the drone mid-flight?” asked John, loud enough for David to hear his voice clearly. He was both parts pissed off and impressed. “That’s insane.”

  “Yeah, we didn’t have many options left, now, did we?” snapped David.

  “You can reboot a quadcopter in the middle of a flight?” asked the police officer. “Now, that’s insane.”

  To add to his point, the officer took a sharp turn in a part of the road with barely enough space for a car to fit through, giving David a good view of the great fall by his window. It was one sharp mountainside.

  “Insane or not,” said John, “it was good thinking. Well done.” He took David’s laptop out of his jacket’s pocket. “It fell right in front of my face. It may come useful now because Tull is losing us.”

  The screen on the laptop had cracked and the F3 key had fallen out of the keyboard, but somehow, nothing else appeared much damaged. The screen was just where David had left off, in the drone’s operating system, except it proclaimed “Signal Not Found” with red letters on top of the image.

  “You still have contact with your team?” David asked John.

  John nodded. “Yes. They’re tracing the attack as we speak. They say the hacker DDOS’ed our drone’s network connection and forced it to shut down. Whatever that means.”

  It was now David’s turn to appear exasperated. “Really, man? Don’t you know what a DDOS means? It’s the oldest trick in the book. Kids do it, God’s sake.”

  John’s face disclosed nothing.

  “Whatever. You get a lot of connections to a system (like the drone’s) and overwhelm it. It gets cut off from the Internet. Which shouldn’t take out a damned quadcopter out of the sky, are you kidding me—” he realized John was looking intently at his laptop, in a clear “stop wasting my time and get to work” manner.

  I save your life and you give me more work, thought David bitterly. He shut up and went back to work. After all, he absolutely wanted to return the favor to his hacker friend.

  Seriously, a DDOS?

  “Uhh, Derry, can you set your tablet as a modem? I don’t have WiFi in this car.”

  “—Who do you think we are, the FBI?” muttered the police officer under his breath before John could answer.

  The steep climb upwards was now so enunciated that their car could barely move forward. It had been built for urban use, not for rough terrain.

  John took out his shattered tablet and set it up as a modem for David.

  The other hacker had made a mistake, that much David knew. Since he had shut down his proxy service, any ongoing connection to the drone’s network had to be done from the hacker’s real IP address. Sort of. It was possible the hacker had another defense set up in case this one failed. He could be hiding behind a thousand different layers, like an onion. David could peel them with enough time (or a powerful enough computer, which the laptop wasn’t), but they didn’t have enough time.

  So, he took the gamble. He traced the ongoing DDOS attack to a well-known Bot Net and from there, to the hacker’s address.

  Then he followed it. It was coming from about a mile in front of them and was currently taking a sharp turn to the left.

  “The hacker is with Dugall Tull,” David announced. “He attacked us from his car’s connection.”

  Well, that isn’t very efficient.

  John relayed the information to his team, whispering a string of commands. “You’re on it.”

  “Tell them to drop a 42 bomb on their asses,” suggested David. Then, when John looked at him like he had gone mad, he added: “It’s a data-clog. A huge amount of bytes compressed into just 42 kilobytes, another old trick. Car’s connections aren’t very secure, at least that I can remember. It will definitely fall for it. Will be faster than trying to take over the hacker’s computer or whatever he’s using.” Especially if a CIA Intel guy used his access to get the car to open the file in the first place.

  Adding to that, a 42 file was so common that anyone could download it after two or three seconds in a search engine.

  John muttered a sentence and then waited. “The team says ‘thank you.’”

  “No problem.”

  He followed Tull’s signal with interest. The sports car was almost to the top of the mountain. The road he had chosen was not the most efficient, speedwise, but it was excellent if you were trying to outrun a bunch of police cars built for city pursuits.

  Of course, the barricades waiting for them after the car came down the mountain would render that plan moot.

  They have to know it, thought David. He frowned. They have to know there’s no chance they’re getting away.

  The car reached the top of the mountain. It started its way down, much faster than before.

  Too fast. It wasn’t even on the mountain already, it was moving slightly to the right, out of the mountain, like the car had suddenly spurted wings.

  David’s brain caught up with what his eyes were seeing just a second before he heard the crash. It came faint, from way down, but the scream of metal and glass smashing at fuck-you speeds against the rocks was too familiar with him to miss easily.

  The 42 file.

  When the police car made another turn, the column of black smoke became visible, coming from below and dispersing into the clouds.

  “Shit,” said the policeman, “you actually bombed those poor sods?”

  “No? What the fuck,” muttered David Terrance. That wasn’t supposed to happen. At all.

  Had he just murdered two human beings?

  This time, anyone could’ve read the suspicion in John’s face. “There goes our prime suspect,” he said, looking straight at David.

  Chapter 6

  David Terrance stood at the edge of the road by himself, watching the paramedics and the police establish a perimeter by the crashed car. Or its remains, if anyone could be phlegmatic enough to call them remains. They were more car flakes than remains. And they came pre-toasted.

  When the red sports car had lost control and skittered out of the road, it hadn’t just fallen straight down. It had carved a path a
cross the mountainside, smashing itself into rocks, trees, plants, a bear, anything that stood in its way. David could trace the exact path down it had followed, by watching the destruction in its wake.

  All because of a single, innocent, clichéd data-clog bomb.

  The paramedics would need entire days to piece together any bodies they found down there. The fire would make sure of that.

  Except for the bear, of course. They were already pulling the bear out. Perhaps they’d even be able to save it. Improve it. They had the technology.

  “Terrance,” John Derry’s voice called from behind him. The agent had been talking with a couple of high-ranking police officers, a couple of real FBI agents, and a couple of freelance journalists calling their contacts to their tablets, trying to bribe their way into an exclusive.

  Now, it was David’s turn to talk.

  “What the hell happened?” John managed to mark every word with menace.

  So, we already forgot I saved our lives, thought David. “I don’t know. The bomb was just supposed to shut them off from the Internet. Not make them lose control of the car.”

  “If I didn’t have an entire intel team telling me the exact same thing in my ear, right now, you’d be on your way to jail again. That was our prime suspect your idea just offed.”

  David could feel hot coils of rage start to burn and tense around his body.

  Remember why you worked alone in the first place? Because any idiot you’d get paired with will try to dump any fuck-up on you.

  “I’m starting to wonder what any human rights’ organization is going to think about your VR jails, Agent Derry. Perhaps you’ll stop growling like a bulldog anytime things stop going your way when the media gets a hold of your shit.”

  John Derry smiled, and his smile was more dangerous than his anger. “Did you just threaten me, Terrance? Because I don’t negotiate with criminals.” His right hand was dangerously close to his waist, where his sidearm was waiting.