Defender Light Online Four

by Larcombe, Tom

  “I think we should wait. It's still a novelty right now. If there are more people wanting to rent in another month or two, then we should add a few more stalls in. It'd be a shame to build more only to have them sit empty most of the time,” Griff said.

  “Alright. I'll take your advice then. But if it stays crowded like this, let's get another four or six stalls in. I think that many will fit on the lot.”

  This time it did slip out.

  “Yes sir, I'll keep an eye on it.”

  Eddie winced, but didn't say anything.

  He's trying. It wasn't until I actually gave an order that he used 'sir'. I can handle that, I think.

  When Eddie went back out, he found Ivar sitting on a stone at the edge of the crossroads, one moved there for that purpose.

  “Something wrong, Ivar?”

  “Oh, no, Mayor Eddie, sir. It's just, I heard someone say something about a booth at the marketplace having rock candy, but I don't want to leave my post.”

  Eddie waved his hand towards the marketplace.

  “Go, I'll watch your post for you for now and memorize any messages that come in, or get the person looking for you to wait for a few minutes.”

  Ivar looked up at Eddie and grinned before turning and darting towards the marketplace. He was gone about ten minutes and when he returned he was sucking on a long section of rock candy attached to a stick.

  “Good?” Eddie asked.

  Ivar nodded.

  “Yeah, the beet lady's selling it. Her husband is the one that put in an entire field of sugar beets. She said that she can do it with what's left after the sweet beet juice is drained out. Tastes a little like beets, but sweet. Want a lick?”

  Ivar extended the rock candy towards him but Eddie shook his head and waved him off.

  “No, that's your treat. You used the money you made from your job for it?”

  Ivar nodded.

  “I give half what I make to momma to help out. The other half is mine to spend as I like. So I got a few rock candies, some for my sister too.”

  “Good lad, Ivar. I've got to get back to work. Enjoy your candy,” Eddie said.

  Ivar stuck the rock candy back in his mouth and nodded enthusiastically as Eddie headed back for the general store site.

  ~ ~ ~

  Eddie settled in for dinner. The walls of the general store were all finished and some of the struts for the ceiling as well. There would be an attic space in the general store and if it wasn't going to be used, Eddie already had some thoughts for it. If it got as hot up there as he thought it would, he was thinking it could be used to make dried fruits or vegetables. A food he was sure adventurers would want to take when they went out adventuring, especially if they were going to be gone for days at a time.

  He was sure he could figure out some sort of dehydrator to set up in the attic there, at least with the plans he'd seen online he could do it. So now he just had to wait and see if that space was in use for the store or not. Then he could start keeping an eye out for fruit, or just wait for the western settlement to get built and start producing it.

  Tiana had finished off her training, so now during the daylight hours there would always be an acolyte roaming the town to respond to any problems that required minor healing. The other two would stay in the temple, but the three of them would rotate the duty so they all got a chance to be out and about. Tiana had commented that her original two acolytes, who had originally been almost like automatons, had slowly developed personalities, almost like a terminally shy person coming out of their shell. Eddie thought it meant that the AI splinters running those two had learned and evolved enough to give them a personality, but that wasn't something he was going to comment on in the common room of the inn.

  He'd eaten and was leaning back, enjoying an ale, while he checked his email. A soft 'whoop!' came out of his mouth as he read.

  “Cool, Erich is going to give us a shot. That's the bard I was talking with. He can be in Brightport in a couple of days and he'll hook up with Bjorn to come down here. Now, where was Bjorn going to stay?”

  No-one at the table knew, so Eddie headed back to the kitchen. Liv glared at him disapprovingly as he entered it, but when he explained why he was there she was all smiles again.

  “Oh, aye, Bjorn doesn't stay at an inn in Brightport. He's got family there, of a sort. A cousin or something like that. Bjorn normally stays with him, helps him out with some things in a warehouse to pay for his stay.”

  “So, how do I get our bard to hook up with him?”

  Liv laughed out loud.

  “Just how many men do you think there are in Brightport that look like my Bjorn? Tell him to look for the biggest hauler he can find, one who looks furry enough to live up to his name. That ought to do, don't you think?”

  “Yeah, but in the whole town? Isn't it kind of big to go person to person looking?”

  “True, but if he looks in the merchant section he'll find him. That's where the haulers spend most of their time in that town, and it's where Bjorn's cousin lives too. Tell your bard to ask around the merchant section. He'll find Bjorn, I'm sure of it. There's not many men in that town that look like a bear on two legs, and even fewer of them in the merchant section.”

  ~ ~ ~

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Aaron looked at the new code they were going to try to run. It wasn't the code that was going to firewall off the unregistered connection, he wasn't ready to use that yet. Instead, this was another tracking program, one that would be limited by parameters given when he ran it. Instead of trying to track the connection, it was only going to try to pinpoint it. Wi-fi blanketed the building, even if some of the signals weren't strong enough for a solid connection, but Greenshaw's office technically could connect to some seven different signals.

  Because of that, Aaron's new tracing program might work. He'd needed Lydia's permission for it since she might get some backlash because of it. The program would be given the parameters, in this case the physical location of Greenshaw's office. Then it would determine the strongest wi-fi signal there, and disrupt the signal from the router. While that one stayed offline he expected the connection to switch to the next strongest signal, which would also be disrupted. The program would continue in that vein until it had turned off all the signals accessible, then all those routers would restart and the signals go back to normal.

  Greenshaw was the only person on that floor right now, according to Lydia's records, or at least if anyone else was there, they weren't connected to the network via the normal methods.

  Since he knew the signal strength of all the signals going through Greenshaw's office, he could compare the connection sequence to the signal strength. If they were right about Greenshaw having the unregistered connection, then the connection sequence would match up with the signal strengths in Greenshaw's office. The strongest signal first, the second strongest after that, and so on.

  I hope this works, and I hope Lydia doesn't get any backlash from it. There's going to be a lot of different people losing access for a few seconds at a time. Wait, what am I thinking? Most of them won't even notice unless they're in the middle of some sort of live stream, their buffers should get them through any normal streaming and anything not live will just appear a little laggy since the whole thing will only take a few seconds.

  He and Lydia had talked through this since he wanted her aware that his testing program might garner her a few irate calls. She was calm enough about it though.

  “I'll just tell them I had complaints from other people on the same signal and was rebooting the router. It happens all the time for the offices so they won't even think twice about it if the problem is gone within a minute or two,” she'd said.

  Aaron had mentally shook his head at that. It didn't fit with the picture of Lydia he'd built in his head, the one of a no-nonsense network administrator that didn't allow any sort of inefficiency on the network. Then he'd remembered that she also had to deal with people in the building doing thi
ngs that would screw up the network all the time, and had relaxed. Well, except for the tiny part of him in the back of his mind that screamed at him that he didn't want her to think of him as one of those people.

  The AI-L server was currently spiking and his normal tracing program had already failed during this spike.

  He texted Lydia on her personal phone, letting her know he was about to run the program but not leaving any records of that message on the company systems. That way she'd be covered if people called in with complaints, there should be no indication that it was intentional anywhere in the company system. Then he ran the program, using the co-ordinates for Greenshaw's office as the parameters.

  And honestly, building a 3D model of the building for the co-ordinate system was the hardest part of this program, but I think it was why Lydia was so easy to convince since she'll be able to use that model in the future.

  Aaron watched as first one, then another signal dropped. As he'd expected, the signal from the AI-L server re-routed each time one of the Wi-Fi signals dropped. As the last one dropped and the signal from AI-L went wild, pinging for a route to its destination more than a thousand times in a fraction of a second, the routers all came back online. AI-L's signal immediately latched on to the strongest one and steadied out.

  Aaron looked at the logs from the program, and sure enough the signal destination was Greenshaw's office.

  I'd really hoped that wasn't going to be the case, that it was just someone physically close to his office, Aaron thought. There's no doubt now though, it's definitely him. What, exactly, is Loki doing with a significant amount of connection time to the computer implanted in Greenshaw's head? I'm not sure I want to know, but I'll need to tell Freyja, and then we'll need to decide when we want to use the firewall program. Do we do it to keep Loki out of his head or should we do it when Loki is connected and in his head? I'll have to talk to both Freyja and Lydia about that.

  Aaron stopped dead for a second, going still as he considered something.

  Should I introduce Lydia to Freyja? How would Lydia react to knowing just how evolved an AI we have in the game? I think, maybe, that I'd better ask Freyja before doing that. I think that with Lydia aware of Freyja we could do this even more effectively, but still, I'm not sure how good an idea that would be.

  ~ ~ ~

  Eddie was downstairs getting a tray of breakfast for Tiana and himself when the door burst open.

  “Mayor Eddie, sir?” a guard asked, breathlessly.

  “Yeah, that's me. What is it?” Eddie said.

  “We've got a problem down at the patrol station. Erik needs you there as soon as you can, sir.”

  Why would our future bard need me at the patrol station? Eddie thought blearily.

  A moment later he knew he wasn't awake yet, she shook his head remembering that Erik with a 'k' was the leader of the guards he'd hired.

  “As in immediately? Or can I get a cup of coffee in me first so I'm awake?” Eddie asked.

  “He said as soon as you could, sir. He's got a prisoner that we caught last night. The man was trying to set a building on fire.”

  Eddie blinked.

  “Cancel the tray, just give me a cup of coffee, would you?” he asked the server he'd been talking to.

  The woman was back in a few seconds with a cup of coffee. Eddie didn't even bother with cream or sugar this time, just tilted it back and drained half the cup. He put the remainder on the bar and turned to the guard.

  “Alright, let's go,” he said.

  The guard led Eddie back to the Town Hall at a trot, going around back to the patrol station entrance. When Eddie followed the guard down the stairs, he found himself looking at a man he vaguely recognized, tied up in a chair with a guard keeping an eye on him.

  “Erik?” Eddie said.

  “Mayor Eddie, sir. Glad you could make it so fast. Didn't you say that you were going to rig up some jail cells down here? We could use one right now.”

  “I did say that, I just didn't think we'd need them so soon. What happened?”

  “This man here,” Erik said, gesturing towards the man tied to the chair. “He won't give us his name, but he was caught in the act of trying to burn down that new building you're making next to the crossroads. You might need to replace a board or two, but we got the flames out before it damaged much.”

  Eddie concentrated. His sleepiness was rapidly evaporating between the half cup of coffee and the run down to the Town Hall.

  “I know you,” Eddie said. “You're the guy that was lying to the construction crews, trying to get your house built sooner. You're also the one that was taking food from the temple grounds when they were offering it for free if you just came to the temple. Did Arvid put you up to this?”

  The man flinched at Arvid's name, but stayed quiet.

  “We could make him talk if you like, sir,” Erik said, fingering his sword hilt.

  “No, I don't want to responsible for torture.”

  “What shall we do with him?”

  “Can you keep him like this for a few more hours?” Eddie asked.

  “Well, we do have to keep a man watching him or he's sure to try to escape, but if you don't mind the town patrol being shy a man we could manage that,” Erik said.

  “Good, do that. I'm going to go get a few things and then we'll get the jail cells built. After they're done, we can toss him in there and decide what to do with him later on.”

  The man's face grew whiter and whiter as Eddie spoke.

  “What are we going to do with him long term, sir?” Erik asked.

  “That's my other problem. I need to find someone to administer justice for the town,” Eddie said. “I don't know if we can hold this guy long enough for that though.”

  Erik grinned, the sight not the least bit reassuring.

  “We can hold him as long as you like, sir.”

  The man tied to the chair cracked as he saw Erik's smile. The words spilled out of him in a rush.

  “It was Arvid, but it wasn't, you know? Arvid told me that Old Jeffries was complaining about losing business to the marketplace, then complaining that the general store was being built and he'd be out of business soon. He was making plans to move elsewhere, Old Jeffries was, but Arvid didn't like that. He thought that having the owner of the only shop around as a friend gave him some sort of standing, so he asked me if I'd take care of the general store for him. Get rid of it, you know?”

  The man paused to take a deep breath, then the words flooded out again.

  “Except he didn't say it that way, you know? He did a few favors for me when I got here with nothing, so I thought I had to do what he wanted, right? Hell, I don't even think getting rid of the general store would work, you'd just build it up again. Plus, Old Jeffries wants out of the area, said he's tired of it. I don't think it would've made him stay, but Arvid wouldn't listen to me, you know? So I had to do it, you know? I didn't want to, but I owed him. Please, don't put me in front of a Justiciar.”

  Eddie closed his eyes and exhaled slowly.

  Sounds exactly like I think Arvid would plan it, Eddie thought. Make sure that if it gets back to him he can deny asking for it to be destroyed and say he was misunderstood. Well, at least this one of Arvid's friends is probably going to desert him. I don't know how many more he has, I didn't even know he was friends with Old Jeffries, but when word of this gets out, and I'll make sure it does, he should lose most of the rest of the 'friends' he cultivated in order to use.

  He finished processing what the man had said.

  A Justiciar? What's that? It sounds like it might be just the ticket for someone to administer justice for the town. I'll have to find out exactly what that is and see if there's a way to get one.

  A warm, feminine voice in his head spoke to him.

  A Justiciar is a person who would be considered judge, jury, and executioner in your own world. Your guards would bring criminals to him, he would determine the veracity of any charges, then determine and execute an ap
propriate punishment. They are a sub-class of the priest of Tyr.

  Freyja? Eddie thought. Thank you. How would we go about getting one, do we need to build an altar to Tyr or something here in town?

  Unnecessary. Tyr has no formal temples. With his permission, which I'm sure he would give, I could consecrate a priest or priestess to him that could then become a Justiciar. You would need to either build a courthouse, or designate a portion of your Town Hall as a courthouse for them to be able to become a Justiciar though, Freyja thought.

  Done, and done. I'll rough out a portion of the Town Hall to use as a courthouse while Jern builds the jail cells later on today. But I'll need to find someone to take the position, won't I?

  There are three potential candidates for such a position among the refugees that you've welcomed to the area. If you can find them, send them to my temple and I'll bring Tyr's attention to them, Freyja said. More than that I'm unable to do. I could only tell you all of this because of your involvement with the creation of my temple. It makes me able to answer questions of minor importance for you when you have them.

  I don't know that this was all that minor, at least not to me, but thank you regardless, Eddie thought. I'll try to find those who might fit the qualifications and send them along to the temple.

  The presence faded from Eddie's mind and he snapped back to find Erik staring at him curiously.

  “I'll have someone here to work on the cells in a bit,” Eddie said. “I'm going to see about getting our town a Justiciar to deal with any future problems like this.”

  Erik smiled again, although this time it was much less threatening.

  “That would be good, it'd take a load off of you if you're not having to judge things yourself.”

  Something else I never considered when I decided to build a town, Eddie thought. Hopefully something I can now avoid.

  ~ ~ ~

  When Eddie got back to the inn, Jern was there having breakfast.

  “Hey Jern, got a new masonry project for you if you're interested,” Eddie said.