“But all they’re getting is pyrite,” Bekah said out loud.
“Say again?”
Eugene Fischer sat at an empty workstation, hands behind his head, feet on the console. Simon Franklin would have admonished him to put his feet down, to show a little respect as a guest. But she wasn’t her opa. And Fischer wasn’t someone she was comfortable being around, much less giving an etiquette lesson to. For hours she’d sat here with her shift mates and Fischer, observing the attacks on the Labyrinth and marveling at the tag-team defenders of Erkennen and Zafar and the other defenders at Prometheus Colony. Sometimes they were able to fend off the attacks; sometimes they weren’t. But every seeming victory for Cassandra was an actual victory for SynCorp. Every prize the attacks took was no prize at all. Just a collection of empty code, false test results, and flawed schematics.
“Nothing,” she said.
“No, you said something,” Fischer said, curious. His feet came down as he sat forward. In her mind, Bekah nodded to her grandfather’s spirit, as if invoking his memory had somehow influenced the old man to demonstrate some couth. “Something about pirates?”
Bekah’s grin came spiced with indulgence. “Pyrite. As in iron pyrite. Fool’s gold. It’s what—”
“I know what it is,” Fischer said. “I was making a joke.”
“Okay.”
“Seriously, Bekah, I don’t know how Rahim is doing it,” Carrin said. “The SSR worms have zombied the whole system, or damn near all of it. I don’t see how he’s walling off his own response code.”
“Zombied?” Fischer asked.
Bekah’s tight expression returned. “It’s when—”
“Never mind,” he said, waving a hand. “I don’t need to understand.”
“He’s not in the system.”
Everyone turned to look at Daniel Tripp.
“Rahim’s not in the system,” Daniel continued. “He can’t be. Cassandra’s AI reaction response is too fast for any human to keep up with.”
“Go team,” Fischer said flatly.
“What I mean is,” Daniel said, throwing a nervous glance the enforcer’s way, “Rahim and I discussed the defense strategy before he left. The algorithms he and the regent programmed set up millions of fake techs, right? The castles with the Holy Grails in them. Only, instead of spikes in the moat to impale attackers who fall in, there are code bombs hidden to blow up infiltrator worms.”
Fischer yawned.
Bekah gave him a look. “Go on, Daniel.”
“Any time a data exfiltration request hits one of the bombs, it puts up the most vigorous defense it can against the breach attempt. Never good enough, of course, in the long run. Cassandra can outthink it. But that takes time, and there are millions of those defenses that have to be overcome.”
“But eventually those will run out, right?” Fischer said.
“No,” Carrin said. Daniel had been about to answer, but she put up a hand. “This is how I’d do it. I’d use a botnet that only connects to the Labyrinth at random times and downloads no data, not a single packet—it only uploads random algorithms to generate new castles around new fake tech grails. And I’d use—”
“—adaptive heuristics to keep Cassandra on her toes,” Daniel finished. He turned to Bekah with an I-told-you-so look on his face. “That’s exactly what he’s doing.”
“Wow,” Fischer said. “How do you people ever get laid?”
Bekah turned to him. “Mr. Fischer, what Rahim is doing on Titan is protecting the entire Company by protecting Masada’s mainframe from attack. You realize that, right?”
Fischer’s eyebrows went up. “More or less,” he said, holding her gaze.
The data readout on Carrin’s screen chittered, monitoring the SSR cyberattacks. When no one else spoke, she cleared her throat. “Well, it seems to be working.” The Erkennen Faction’s expert had transferred her admiration from the enemy to Rahim for his stalwart cyberdefense.
Bekah’s face flattened and she rubbed her eyes. “You guys got this? I’m tired. I need some sleep.”
“Sure,” Maya Breides said. “You and Daniel were here all night. Carrin and I have this.”
Carrin offered a thumbs-up of confirmation, then turned back to her screen.
Daniel got to his feet. “I think I’ll hit the gym.”
Fischer stood when Bekah stood. “I’ll escort you to your quarters,” he said. “I’m due a little shut-eye myself.”
“That isn’t necessary.”
“Sure, except that it is,” Fischer said. “I’m your shadow. Regent’s orders.”
Bekah’s face flashed an expression that was too tired to argue. “Sure. Okay.” She led the way from the War Room.
“I’ll send Richter to stand watch with you guys,” Fischer said over his shoulder.
Carrin gave another distracted thumbs up. Had Maya winced at the sound of Richter’s name? Bekah couldn’t blame her. Even more than Fischer, Richter tickled her creepy bone.
• • •
“I get the sense you don’t care much for me,” Fischer said.
How perceptive, Bekah thought. What she said was: “Whatever gave you that idea?”
Their footsteps bounced off the walls of the empty corridor. The lights were set to fifty percent brilliance. Anyone looking in from the outside would think the station empty, part of a narrative Gregor Erkennen had leaked through semi-secure channels he knew were being tapped. The Erkennen Faction and all its secrets were turtled up in Prometheus Colony, the story went. Not easily defended, to all appearances, Masada Station had been abandoned. Move along, Cassandra. Nothing to see here.
“I study people for a living,” Fischer answered. “Especially people I’m contracted to protect.”
Bekah nodded. He’d reminded her of something it was easy to forget under the abrasion of Fischer’s personality. He was here at her regent’s request. She didn’t have to like him. She just had to tolerate him.
“Coffee?” she said. The cafeteria was just ahead. She could use the diversion. A twelve-hour shift in the War Room made you long for walls that looked like anywhere else.
Fischer cocked an eyebrow. “I thought you were looking for shut-eye.”
“I was looking to get out of there. Watching the attacks on the Labyrinth, even knowing that’s exactly what we want to be happening … every time I see code turn red, my anxiety spikes. I need to rest. My brain more than my body.”
Fischer nodded. “Coffee’s good.”
The cafeteria was dark. All lights defaulted to off except in occupied areas, and those were set to the fifty percent luminescent threshold. Windows facing outward to space were set to maximum opacity, effectively blacking them out. All external comms traffic was forbidden, including calls to Titan—to prevent accidentally opening a back door to the station for Cassandra, Bekah told Fischer when he asked for an explanation. Internal comms were allowed only on a local network with a range that stopped at the station’s walls.
Bekah stepped the cafeteria. The motion sensors switched on the lights to half brightness. Vacant but for the two of them, the hall designed to accommodate fifty or more personnel felt cavernous and cold. Its white walls and chrome fixtures and tables and chairs shone with their own emptiness.
After programming the coffeemaker, Bekah joined Fischer at his table. The sound of heating water shushed behind her.
“It’s not that I don’t like you.” Bekah felt inexplicably guilty that Fischer had pegged her feelings so accurately. It made her feel like an open book exposed to his flat, probing eyes. “You seem like a dark man to me,” she said with a sudden need to be authentic. “It makes me uncomfortable.”
“Never heard it put quite that way before, but that’s pretty spot-on.” Fischer took off his hat and set it on the table. “I’m in a dark business. It’s not for sunny people.”
That truth was so on-the-nose, it made her smile. Like everything else, Bekah had heard stories of SynCorp’s seedier side. Seen the vids on The Real
Story, had wondered about them. She’d known the factions employed fixers, enforcers, assassins—whatever you wanted to call them—to see that the business necessary for making the Company was done. Meeting Bruno Richter upon her arrival at Prometheus Colony had been a singular moment of revelation for her. It wasn’t pretty, but it was necessary—that’s what her Opa Simon had once explained. A strange rationalization coming from such a deep-thinking man, she now thought.
“It’s just that…” Bekah began, not quite sure how to put it. “I lost my grandfather recently.”
Fischer cleared his throat. “I heard. My condolences.”
“Thanks,” she said, meaning it. There was something about this man, an odor of personality. It came on strong at first, smelled offensive because it was refreshingly honest, if dark—not hidden by social niceties or a cordial veneer cloaking some personal political agenda. Fischer seemed a simple man of obvious intent. Sarcastic and bold and enviable in his transparency. But, Bekah was coming to realize, Fischer was really a multilayered, complex man wearing a mask that hid the hard heart of a brutal killer. Yet, even that seemed too simple an answer for the Fischer equation. In a way, he reminded her of her opa, and that thought almost made Bekah laugh.
The coffeemaker beeped once.
“Hypnos’s bane,” Fischer said.
“What?” Bekah asked, rising. She grabbed two insulated cups and drew the coffee.
“The Greek god of sleep, Hypnos. I’m guessing he hated coffee.”
Bekah handed him a cup and sat. With Fischer’s explanation, the reference came back to her. Part of her classical training, Opa Simon’s influence. An assassin familiar with obscure Greek deities? Like her grandfather, indeed. Simon Franklin, master of philosophy and archaic trivia. Apologist for the Syndicate Corporation.
“I think you and my grandfather would’ve gotten along,” she said. “You’re both fans of long and winding conversations.”
“Those can be the best kind.”
“That’s what he’d say!” Bekah allowed with light laughter. “He’d say we don’t learn if we don’t explore.”
Fischer offered a supportive nod. “True enough, I guess. Sometimes you find the good by exploring.” He took a swig of coffee and grimaced. “Sometimes you don’t.” The way he said it got her attention.
“Why did you go into … the line of work you do?” she asked. Voicing the question embarrassed her. She hardly knew Fischer. She couldn’t even tell him to take his feet off a computer console. She wasn’t sure how much better she wanted to know him.
He took another sip of coffee, then appeared to make a decision.
“The Weather War was tough on everyone,” Fischer said. “And before that, when whole populations were migrating inward from the coasts, away from submerging cities… I’m talking about Earth now—long time before you were born, kid. People wanted to live where the food was and the floods weren’t. Insurance companies went under because claims outdistanced premiums. Governments tried to take up the slack, but their coffers ran dry too. When the world’s power grid and transportation system started to fail, the global economy went to shit. Tens of thousands moved to government poorhouses.”
Fischer looked at Bekah, and there was a weariness behind his eyes. “We’d lived in luxury for so long, we forgot what it was built on. But we found out, boy-o. Mother Universe reminded us.” He took a long swig from his cup.
Bekah listened, drinking her coffee while Fischer spoke. She knew the history, and what Opa Simon had told her fit what Fischer said. No wonder mankind had stepped into space. Desperate people take desperate chances. Sometimes, you decided to hell with the devil you knew.
“You didn’t answer my question,” she said. “About why you got into the … business you’re in.”
“Yeah,” Fischer said. “I didn’t.” He brushed a finger toward her cup. “Take that to go? I’ll see you safely to your quarters. And I need to roust Richter out for his shift guarding the geek squad.”
Bekah knew the end of a conversation when she heard one. She refreshed her coffee, and they left the cafeteria. The motion sensors cut the lights behind them as they stepped into the corridor. The lift took them up to the vacant eeriness of the habitat level. The dim half-light snapped on as they stepped onto Level Three of the station. Unlike earlier, Bekah found herself glad to have Fischer walking beside her. She keyed in the lock code to her quarters while he waited like an awkward date.
Swish.
“Lock the door behind you,” he said.
“Okay,” she said. “Hey, Fischer—Stacks—we’re safe here, right? Gregor camouflaged us well. You’re here. Bruno’s here.”
He held her gaze a moment.
“Sure,” Fischer said. “Like I said, lock the door.”
Chapter 17
Stacks Fischer • Masada Station, Orbiting Titan
I left Erkennen’s protégé, but not until I’d heard that lock cycle. Bekah Franklin was a living, breathing dead man’s switch. If she died, so went the Company.
That weighed on my mind a bit, so I took a walk. I do some of my best thinking when my feet are moving and my mouth isn’t. I didn’t really have anyone ’cept my contract to talk to, and she’d be counting sheep soon. My only other options were a handful of geeks who spoke English but in a different language, and Bruno Richter, who preferred one-word grunts from Hunland to real conversation.
Well, that was just fine with me. Maybe it was professional competition or maybe it was his killing style—indirect, with poison—but every time Bruno Richter breathed, he rubbed me the wrong way.
I walked and thought and found myself comparing Richter to Daisy Brace. He came up short in every way. I chalked that up to my reaction to his reaction to my being on his turf. Defensive, offended, jealous. Something. But if Gregor Erkennen thought Richter could handle the job of keeping Franklin safe, he’d never have brought me here, right? I was playing nursemaid to his Number One Man. That had to curdle the milk in Bruno’s cornflakes. The looks he gave me were one trigger finger short of homicide.
I took my time, my steps clicking and clacking along Level 3’s lifeless corridor. They were the only sound around. I cocked an ear at the tiny apartments the crew would have occupied were they still in residence. Every single one was silent as the grave. Hell, the doors, labeled for their occupants who’d moved moonside, even reminded me of tombstones.
My joints had begun to ache, the left knee particularly. The air felt heavy in my lungs, like the cold of space was seeping through the walls. So the heat, like the lights, had been set to minimal function, part of Gregor’s distraction strategy. Plenty warm to ward off a need for a winter coat, but not warm enough for my old bones. If we’d been back on Earth, I could pretty much guarantee a thunderstorm was coming.
I favored the knee a bit as I slow-walked the habitat level. The light in the section I’d just left blinked out. The one in front flickered alive. Masada Station was big. Not as big as Adriana Rabh’s ornamented headquarters belt-buckling Callisto’s ring, mind you, but it felt bigger—the absence of the living will do that to a place. I’d counted thirty or so doors since I’d left Rebekah Franklin. Thirty or so vacant quarters, half the station’s complement.
Masada Station was more rigid in its design than Rabh’s HQ too, more clinical, which made sense given the tech-types that built it. I literally doffed my hat to Erkennen as I walked. He’d achieved something by dressing up Prometheus Colony as the actual prize. He’d managed to fool Cassie Kisaan sitting in her iron throne on Earth. Imagine how much data he’d had to fake to do that. Apartment assignments. Food shipment deliveries going back years. The absence records for staff kiddos, sick from school on a given day. And all just to make it seem like the brain trust’s heavy lifting happened on the moon below instead of this li’l ole asteroid outpost.
Ah, here we were: my destination. I pushed the door chime. The beepity-beep of an unlock code answered a second later, and the door slid open. Richter’s bony fra
me looked bonier in a wife-beater T-shirt and gray trousers, suspenders hanging around his legs. His face was impassive and ice cold. Looking at it made my knee flare up.
“Ja?”
“Your shift to watch over the Geek Patrol, Bruno,” I said. I tried to sound friendly, though not too hard. We all have our pride.
“Where is Bekah?” he asked, each syllable like a jackboot on a street.
“In her quarters. Locked up tight.”
“Gut,” he said in glottal-stop German, beckoning with his hand. “I’m getting dressed. Come in, Fischer.”
Richter backed away. I stepped into the doorway so it wouldn’t close, but I didn’t go in. Always get the lay of the land before you offer your back to it. There was a light on in the small bathroom. He headed for it.
His quarters were dimly lit like the rest of the station, but I got the impression they were that way all the time. A window looked out to the stars, or would have if it hadn’t been blacked out by Erkennen’s camouflage protocol. Otherwise, Richter’s quarters were about what you’d expect. Clueless bachelor styling—and if you don’t know any clueless bachelors, that means no style at all. A well-stocked liquor cabinet. The handful of mid-sized glass cases across the small apartment caught my eye. Bruno had a hobby.
I stepped in. The door closed behind me.
A faint, musty, musky odor crawled up my nose. It seemed to leave a slick backtrail in my olfactory factory the more I breathed it. It was an earthy scent. More like Earthy—I hadn’t smelled anything like it since I’d been on Ye Olde Home World. It smelled like wild fur that hadn’t been dunked in a river in a while.
“Want a drink?” Bruno called from the bathroom.
“I’m good,” I said.
I could see his face in the mirror, his eyes cocked at me on the angle. His face was wet, but he was shaving without cream. It’s what men who have something to prove to themselves do instead of the smart thing—namely, using cream. There was a dragging scrape as the old straight razor decapitated the hairs from his jawline. I began cataloging potential weapons in the apartment as I stepped closer to the glass cases, my curiosity getting the better of me. Close up I saw they were actually aquariums. Empty of water, but the bottoms lined with rocks. Fake flora under solar lamplights. In one corner of each there was a box up top with a fat, hollow tube hanging into the tank.
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