by Mel Odom
“How bad?”
She turned and showed him the deep scars that tracked the armor, but thankfully hadn’t penetrated. “I’m wiz.”
“Get Dolphin into the mainframe.” Hawke shot the trideo projector twice and the resulting electrical charges blew the device offline. He slapped a couple more button cams on the walls.
Twitch ran for the computer room, held back only an instant by a sec door she took out with another slap charge.
Gunfire from the hallway let Hawke know reinforcements had figured out where the problem was. They were running out of time.
“Dolphin.”
“I’m working. I just lost control of the elevators. Fraggers locked me out.”
Hawke peered out into the hallway and spotted Rolla exchanging shots with a tactical group emerging from the elevators there. Dolphin had hacked the elevators initially, but someone had booted an override protocol. Removing the silencer from his pistol because he wanted the noise to add to the confusion, Hawke leaned out around the door and emptied the magazine. The thunderous booms echoed down the hallway. “I need you on the sec computer hack.”
“I’ve got it,” Dolphin told him.
“Then hurry up.” Hawke pulled back, slapped a new magazine into the Beretta, and released the action to load the first round into the chamber. Reaching into his armor’s thigh pocket, he took out a high-explosive grenade. He set the grenade, counted down, and flipped it out into the hallway toward the new sec men, reaching immediately for another.
CHAPTER SIXTY-TWO
In her sanctum sanctorum, knowing she was vulnerable to detection and possible attack now that she was moving in the Matrix, Dolphin watched the feeds streaming from Hawke and his group with a growing sense of urgency. The team was taking heavy fire, and their defensive efforts were restricted by Hawke’s insistence on using non-lethal rounds against the sec men.
Seeing the carnage that had opened up so unexpectedly at the Ngola Building reminded her that there were no controls over what happened next.
We’re all vulnerable now, she told herself. She considered bailing—she always did when a run went bad, and wasn’t ashamed to admit it. Her world consisted of secrecy, hiding, never being physically there when people were getting hurt.
If she hadn’t discovered the worlds that lay at her fingertips on the Matrix, she probably would have been content to be a wageslave somewhere. Just putting in her time at a corp. Maybe getting married, having a child. The usual things.
That didn’t happen, though. She’d always been a gamer, and that was how other deckers had sucked her into the dark side. They’d hacked into game sites, shown her games in development, and got her started prying into the secrets that were out there. And there were a lot of secrets out there.
Right now, her attention was split between Hawke and Rolla trading bullets with the sec men in the hallway, and Twitch bursting through the door to the mainframe room.
Computer hardware covered the walls, filled with servers, motherboards, coolant systems, and layered redundancies. Two people in anti-static clothing were working on shutting down the mainframe. Two armored guards, their helmets off, were leveling their assault rifles at the entrance.
Panic flared through Dolphin. If the techs shut down the mainframe to protect the files, she couldn’t make her run at NeoNET. She opened a channel to Twitch.
“Take out the lab techs first.”
Twitch threw herself forward and dropped to her knees, sliding across the floor toward the techs as she shot them in the legs. As the techs fell, Twitch turned her attention to the sec men, and Dolphin’s attention turned with it because the gunslinger’s point of view was the only one she had access to in the room.
One of the guards unleashed a burst that glanced off Twitch’s armor and knocked her off balance. Rolling with the impacts, the gunslinger lay on her side and fired from a prone position. The stick-and-shock rounds adhered to the faces and throats of both men, lit up, and dropped them in quivering piles of unconscious flesh.
“Twitch—” Dolphin said, not knowing how badly the woman was hit.
“Null sheen, I’m wiz.” Twitch’s point of view shifted as she got to her feet.
Some of the knots in Dolphin’s gut relaxed, but her team was still inside, still in dangerous territory. In a sense, working as a decker for a run was a lot like playing a game. But she only had part of the play within her control. If she could have warped them out of the building with a spell or futuristic tech, she would have done it.
Except for Twitch. Dolphin needed her to set up the jackpoint she’d designed to get her into Ngola’s cyberware.
Twitch looked down as she holstered one of her pistols and reached into her thigh pouch for the small piece of hardware needed to make the connection. It wasn’t anything fancy, wasn’t made of anything that would allow people to trace it back later. It looked like a spike, wider at one end than at the other, and was only ten centimeters long.
The program on it was streamlined, some of the best coding Dolphin had ever done. If anything could be tracked back to her, it would be those ones and zeroes.
That’s not going to happen, she told herself. Your hack-fu is strong. That which you write can never be deciphered.
“Where?” Twitch asked.
Dolphin had told her she’d have to see the hardware first to know where to place the jackpoint. “To your left. On the console. Green light. Do it.”
Twitch slotted the jackpoint and released it, waiting as if she was going to see something happen.
This isn’t for your eyes any more, gunslinger. We’re in my world now. Dolphin watched the code open up around her as she launched her sleaze programs and started cutting through Ngola’s defenses like Neil the Ork Barbarian’s sword through zombies.
“Go,” Dolphin told Twitch. “Get out of there.” She was calmer now, her breath coming more evenly, and her heart rate was slowing as she entered her zone.
Twitch drew her other weapon and headed back to the ongoing firefight in the hallway.
Knowing she didn’t have a choice, knowing that she had to trust Hawke to take care of the team, Dolphin pushed the screens out of her head and focused on the hack. She looked into the Matrix, then placed her hand on the screen and pulled herself into the Ngola node.
The building wrapped itself around her as her cyber senses assimilated the new environment and translated it into code. Physical objects still looked like physical objects—sometimes. The security programs on the building’s mainframe were riled up. Razor-edged simulacrums that resembled spinning Mobius strips leaned threateningly toward her.
The guardian code didn’t actually look like that, she knew. That was just her interpretation of the programs. She reached out and hit them with Tinkerbell’s fairy dust. At least, that was what the golden powder looked like. In reality it was a compilation of masking utilities she’d written to spoof firewalls.
The dust settled over the simulacrums and glowed for a moment. Then they sat down and ignored her. If they’d been guard dogs, they would have been wagging their tails for her.
Total calm filled Dolphin as she opened her toolbox and layered on the programs she’d readied. She changed her avatar, becoming a sleek black porpoise, a bullet she’d designed to fire through the Matrix.
As all of her programs came online, she became a weapon. An invisible blade that could plunge fearlessly through the Matrix. She set a timer, knowing time worked differently in here. In here, she perceived nanoseconds, not minutes. Everything happened fast.
She floated in the room, watching code pulse through the mainframe and through the peripherals. She could go through all of it, could go through the building—except for the places protected by firewalls. And those she could go through if she hacked them.
Dolphin grinned. The game was on.
CHAPTER SIXTY-THREE
Evading enemy fire chewing at the doorway he was taking cover in, Hawke accessed the secondary array of button cams he’d p
laced along the walls during their entry.
The HE grenade bounced off the opposite wall and exploded in mid-air, knocking the sec men backward. Since there was no shrapnel, the grenade wouldn’t do any real damage, but it would scare the guards into holding back for a moment to assess things.
Hawke threw the second grenade and it detonated in a bright flash, filling the corridor with thick gray smoke. As the cloud eddied, already being sucked away by the air vents, he held his pistol in both hands and waited.
Before the smoke had completely disappeared, Twitch was back, tapping him on the shoulder to let him know she was there. “Dolphin’s hardware is in place, mon. Time to go.”
Hawke emptied his second magazine, but the sec men shrugged off the gunfire and kept coming forward.
Twitch stepped past him and stopped in the middle of the hallway with her pistols extended. When she fired this time, the basso reports told him she wasn’t using stick-and-shock ammo anymore. Brass flew into the air in a steady stream.
The front rank of sec men fell back as the armor-penetrating rounds tore through their protective layers. Cries of wounded men sounded distant outside Hawke’s helmet.
Twitch held up her pistols and released the magazines. She tucked one weapon under her arm as she freed an extra mag and looked at Hawke. “Arms and legs only, mon. Nothing vital. They’ve got DocWagon, I’m sure. Let ’em use it.”
Hawke nodded and sprinted toward the corridor where Rolla held his position. The street samurai wasn’t visible, though. Hawke rounded the corner and spotted the troll with his back to him, holding his telescoped axe in both hands, blocking most of the hallway. Like an earthmover, he routed a half-dozen sec men before him, driving them back and down as he cleared the way.
“Well,” Paredes said, “it looks like not dropping him was a good thing.”
Trotting after Rolla, Hawke leveled his Beretta and shot at the sec men trailing them. Twitch was providing most of the cover fire, and wounded guards went down after her.
“What have you been doing?” Hawke asked.
“Your shaman friend and I are dealing with magical threats,” the combat mage replied. “There are some African twists and turns here I haven’t before seen. It seems Ngola is preyed upon more by magic-based attackers than physical opponents.”
“Lucky us.”
“Trust me, Dani and I are saving you from a lot.” Paredes’s voice sounded strained. “It would help if your team hit your extraction point sooner rather than later, however.”
Hawke stepped on the chest of a guy Rolla had left sprawled across the floor with a cracked helmet. Instinctively, the guy grabbed him by the ankle, but the shadowrunner shot him in the throat for his trouble and felt a small tingle from the electrical charge before his foot lifted from the man’s spasming hands.
A few seconds later, Rolla stood at the window where they’d entered. Around the street sam, sec men lay unconscious.
“Man, this is gonna suck,” the troll said.
“You gotta go first to anchor us.” Hawke peered through the window and aimed at the higher end of the zip-line on the parking building across the street. He steadied, targeting the line a few centimeters out from the building. When he fired, two stick-and-shock rounds hit and crackled blue fire for an instant.
Realizing he’d forgotten the nonlethal rounds wouldn’t cut through the tungsten, Hawke drew back and reached for a magazine filled with APDS. Before he could switch out, Twitch was there, leaning out to snap off a quick shot. Across the street, the wire parted and whipped toward the Ngola Building.
Multiple bootsteps alerted Hawke that they were about to have more company. He turned and fired at the group of sec men taking a position at the end of the hallway. Their opponents had more cover than they did.
One also had a small rocket launcher that he pulled into place over his shoulder.
CHAPTER SIXTY-FOUR
Reaching into her bag of tricks, Dolphin enabled a trio of sniffer programs that manifested as squid-like creatures equipped with fiber optic cables ending in hooks for tentacles. She called them her Erinyes, after the Greek goddesses of vengeance.
According to legend, no guilty party could escape the Erinyes. She’d crafted hers to seek out any mention of Rachel Gordon, Professor Madison Fredericks, and—on a wider search—anything having to do with Guatemalan archeology.
“Okay, troops, let’s go.” Dolphin linked up with the Ngola grid, a subsidiary of the NeoNET grid, and flew through cyberspace with her three Erinyes at her side.
The jump from Minneapolis to Boston was a blur of impressions as she followed the gridlink. If she’d slowed down, she could have wandered through the Matrix version of all the sprawls she passed through. She could have hung out in chat-rooms, joined in games, or done any of a myriad social or solitary things she wanted to do.
There were so many places to explore out here. Some days she feared her insatiable curiosity, thought maybe her inquisitiveness would lead her into a rabbit hole or a honey trap she wouldn’t get out of, or that GOD would pump her full of black ice, and her meat body would die, leaving her mind . . . where? She didn’t know. She’d heard horror stories of minds being lost forever on the Matrix.
Maybe that would happen to her one day.
But not today. Hawke and the team were counting on her to come through with something to help them solve the mystery of Rachel Gordon.
Ahead, NeoNET blossomed into being in the center of the grid. The central node resembled a prismatic, stellated dodecahedron that slowly spun on an ever-changing axis. The facets changed colors as well, making it hard for a person to pinpoint an area and keep it marked. A crawler spun around the node as well, advertising TOMORROW RUNS ON NeoNET.
Pausing, Dolphin hung outside of NeoNET’s node. Security software tingled as it examined her, like spiders crawling on her bare flesh. Then it passed, reading her as non-threatening.
I am so not the program you’re looking for, Dolphin couldn’t help thinking. She smiled, then whispered to the Erinyes, “Okay, crew, seek. Make Momma happy.”
Immediately, the three squid simulacrums darted forward. The wrapper programs she’d put on them got them through NeoNET’s preliminary firewalls. To the corp security, the sniffers were just random inquiries from Ngola, programs looking for updates. The spoof would hold as long as she didn’t try to crash any systems or stay too long.
A moment later, the sniffer looking for Guatemalan archeology pulsed, let her know it had a hit. The other two notified her that they’d found something almost immediately as well.
Opening a small ping program, Dolphin located where the Erinyes had stopped within NeoNET. She went to them, passing through the perimeter firewalls and appearing outside the Matrix representation of the NeoNET building in Boston. The Erinyes floated outside an office on the eighty-sixth floor, where another firewall whirled around the building.
Dolphin translated herself back to human form and pulled a snooper program from her toolbox that looked like a soft, pink bubble. She flicked the bubble toward the office and it floated across the distance.
Tension filled her. This was one of the main hurdles she had to clear. If the firewall didn’t like the snooper program, even though it was masked to look like Ngola software, the building would go on alert. One thing she had working for her was the fact that the office was protected by deep encryption, but it wasn’t as protected as the financial records and research and development.
And she was trying to get into one isolated area of the corp, not take down the whole system.
The bubble bounced against the shimmering silver firewall. A face pressed through the metallic surface and regarded the bubble for a moment, then didn’t seem able to see it. The face recessed and the bubble burst against the firewall and spread into a circle.
Feeling more certain, and vibrating with excitement, Dolphin streaked for the pink circle, grabbed its edges, and pulled herself through the firewall into the corp office.
&
nbsp; A colorful, intricate Persian rug covered Macassar ebony flooring with a lot of grain. The wood was the real thing, not pulp squeezed through an extruder. A crystal globe of the world as large as a baby elephant, with white continents floating on pale blue seas, hovered in a corner of the room. Beautiful paintings of seashores and exotic landscapes hung on the wall.
A marble-topped desk large enough to hold a miniatures war game of a large seafleet sat in front of a wall of windows offering an amazing view of the city. The chair had a wrought-iron frame, and the back was created by a couple dozen swords that had been welded together. Padding made it comfortable, and even that was covered with real Napa leather.
“Well, well,” Dolphin mused. “Somebody has expensive tastes.”
She approached the desk and sat in the big chair. Since she wasn’t really there, she wasn’t actually sitting in the chair, but it satisfied her to emulate doing so. She liked touching people’s things, even if just from the Matrix, when she broke into their places.
She waved a hand over the top of the desk and brought the built-in deck online. “Let’s see who you are.”
The top of the desk was suddenly wreathed in fog, and a large cat’s head popped up from the surface. Before Dolphin could pull her hand back, the beast closed its jaws on her wrist with crushing force.
Resisting the instinctive urge to jack out, Dolphin activated programs to shut down the biofeedback the guardian program unleashed on her. But the sec program was powerful—instead of just her hand, her whole body ached with pain. The guardianware was there to protect the deck, but it wasn’t true black ice, and couldn’t trap her.
She reached into her toolbox and spun out a decryption program that took the form of green powder lying in her hand. She blew on the powder and the small cloud wreathed the big cat’s face. It was a jaguar, she noted as she took in the distinctive black pattern spread over its tawny fur. It was also near-sentient.
