“We done?” Case asked, and I looked at Delight.
No surprise that she shook her head.
“Sorry, Case. You mind sticking around a bit longer?”
“I’m guessing Delight’s on stand-by?”
“Yup. I’ll put you and Abs on speaker.”
“Good to know she’s okay, too,” Case said, sounding unimpressed. “After this, I want a sitrep.”
My first reaction was to wonder what the hell gave her the right, and then I remembered Mack putting her in charge. Delight’s expression said she hadn’t realized we were that deeply in the shit. I met it with a look that said I didn’t have time for her baloney, and she needed to get the hell over herself.
I’m not sure what would have happened if she hadn’t taken a glance around the negotiating table and reminded herself we were supposed to be doing business. Whatever. Pretty sure I could have done with the workout just as much as she could.
“So,” Abby said, using Wanderer’s speakers. “Delight, I take it you have an agenda you need to work through.”
Delight refocused, and nodded.
“Thank you, Abby. First order of business: the retrieval contract for me and Pritchard is off the table.”
I rolled my eyes.
Like we hadn’t worked that out already.
Abby gave me a mental poke, and I got my mind back to the task at hand.
“Understood,” Case said.
“The other half of the offer still stands,” Delight said. “Odyssey requires your assistance in finding the connection between the Star Shadow wolf clan and Sharovan, Mishamblin, or any of the other companies that fall under the direction or ownership of the entity known as Terrence Costoganzi.”
Entity?
“We have yet to verify his species,” Pritchard told me, sliding a cup of kaff across in front of me, and setting down a plate.
Right. Well, I guess the dude could be arach, I glanced down at the plate, just as Cascade tilted his head, and scooped what was on it into his mouth. Holy Hell! Hadn’t anybody fed the beast?
“Exactly.” Pritchard picked up the plate, and absent-mindedly patted Cascade. “I’ll get you another.”
I lifted the cup of coffee to my lips, turning my mind back to the negotiations, but the negotiations were moving along without us.
“… and I’ll be keeping the Shady Marie out of the line of fire,” Case was saying. “Details of which I’ll work out with the Koprakades.”
“Confirmed. In addition, Odyssey requires assistance in the retrieval of alliance assets.”
I sat up straighter, and Delight winked at me.
“Thought you’d like that, Cutter.”
She had, had she? I remembered Abby trumping Odyssey in its offer of assistance and had to wonder.
“Ouch,” said Pritchard, returning with another plate.
He set it on the table in front of me, at the same time as he waved a bowl in front of Cascade’s nose. The dog lifted his head off the table and followed the offering down to the floor, standing so he could eat. I listened to him chomping down the contents, and lifted a small pie off the plate in front of me. Delight kept talking, as I started chewing.
“We need your assistance in retrieving Mackenzie Star, Tenser Tennyson, and Rohan Garitch from the Star Shadow clan.”
Oh, they did, did they? And I’d thought Mack and the Shady weren’t that import—
I choked on my pie as Pritchard nudged me hard enough to rock me sideways. Delight smirked, but continued hammering out the finer points with Case and Abs. I took another gulp from my coffee as Cascade raised his head above the table.
“You need to mind your manners,” Pritchard’s growl rattled through my head, and I rolled my eyes.
“So Mack keeps telling me.”
Cascade made a lunge for my plate, and I swept it out of his reach before he could clear it.
“Pack?” he asked, and I snarled at him, before I’d realized what I was doing.
He ducked his head, and lay down by my feet, huffing out a huge sigh of resignation. Pure silence greeted me. I looked up, and found I was the centre of attention from everyone around the table.
“Sorry,” I said, indicating the dog. “I was just… It… He…”
From the looks on their faces, it didn’t matter what I said. They weren’t going to get it. I glanced down at the dog.
“Troublemaker,” I muttered, and then waved at Delight. “Carry on.”
After another embarrassing moment’s silence, she did.
“Case? Abby? Are you satisfied with the conditions?”
Two firm affirmatives followed, and then Delight turned to me.
“And how about you, Cutter?”
I waved my hand, and picked up another pie.
“Sure. Case is happy, I’m happy.”
Case made a sound of disgust.
“You didn’t get a word of that, did you, Cutter?”
“You’re the boss, Case—and you know this stuff better than I ever will. It’s your call, and I’ll back it.”
“I’ll hold you to that, Cutter. Now, go get my crew back.”
I swallowed the last hasty bite, and nodded.
“Sure thing, Case. I’ll get right on it.”
She said nothing else, signing off with a ‘pleasure doing business with you’ for Delight, and ending the connection. Abby gave me the computer equivalent of a clip upside the head, and then left me alone under Delight’s watchful eye.
Pritchard sat down beside me, and Cascade stirred restlessly at my feet.
“So,” he said, as Delight came and sat beside him. “How are we going to do this?”
18—Locating Costoganzi
I looked at Delight, and then at Pritchard. How were we going to do this? Well, it was like this…
“We’re going after Costoganzi,” I said, and Delight reared back in surprise.
“What, just like that?”
“It’s the only way to be sure.”
“But you have no proof,” Beckett protested, and I pivoted my chair so I could see him.
“It’s there,” I said. “I just have to join the dots.”
I hesitated, looking at him.
“Can you be here for this, or do you need to be out of it?”
He returned my stare, his eyes taking on a faraway look as he thought about it. I waited, and Delight and Pritchard followed my lead. When Beckett came out of his head, there was determination in his gaze.
“I’ll help you,” he said. “I… It’s my responsibility. My department’s. If the missing agents were acting on orders from higher up in the company, I, we, need to know about it. For the most part, I can’t prosecute them for acting on orders from an authorized officer—and Mr. Costoganzi would certainly count as that—and, at the very least, I would have to resign, because I don’t agree with it.” He shrugged. “Either way, I have to know the truth of it.”
“Understood. Good. I could do with another mind in my corner, so to speak.”
I turned back to Delight and Pritchard, and caught them eyeing Beckett like two predators might consider a piece of meat.
“Ouch!”
“Not nice, Cutter.”
“If the boot, fits…”
They’d obviously forgotten Beckett was as firmly embedded in my head as they were—thanks to me tapping the Depredides comms network to get his attention. The counter-measures had provided him with an in, and I wasn’t begrudging him that, now. He was smart enough not to comment on what he’d seen, though, just got right down to business.
“So, how are we going to go about this?”
“Well, first we’ve got to find him. Abs?”
“You’re the retrieval expert…”
“Thanks, Abs.” I turned to Delight.
“I believe that this case is also linked to another one, we’re working on,” I said. “I take it that Odyssey have an alliance with Dasojin?”
>
Delight sighed, rolled her eyes, and called Case back. The pilot was on the line almost straight away.
“Shady Marie. How can we help, Odyssey?”
“Apparently Odyssey require assistance in a third alliance retrieval…”
“Do tell,” and Case’s grin could be heard all the way through the comms link.
Beckett just stared at me in disbelief.
I caught his look and shrugged.
“Girl never knows if she don’t ask.”
“Girl’s a cheeky little shit!” Pritchard murmured, but he was smiling that quiet smile he had when he was genuinely amused.
Delight cast me a look that suggested she’d been sucking bitter lemons, and Cascade groaned and wrapped a paw over his nose. Case sounded happy, though. She hammered Delight for cumulative success fees, and then bonuses on early completion. I sipped what was left of my coffee, if only to hide my smirk, and Abby stayed conspicuously silent, although I could feel her presence inside my skull. If I wasn’t much mistaken, she was actually impressed.
I listened as Case finalized the contract, and signed off. Delight turned to me, but I held up a hand, before she could speak.
“I need a terminal that I can access the Dark Net with, preferably one isolated from the rest of the ship’s systems.”
“Make it one that can handle two,” Beckett added. “We’ll get nothing going through the company systems, but I can help get us some of the places we need to be.”
“Wuff,” came from under the table, and Cascade rested his chin on my thigh.
I looked down at him in surprise. Dog wanted to come, too?
“Wuff.”
Well, okay then.
Cascade washed my leg with his tongue, and leant on me some more. I dropped a hand to his shoulder and stroked, looking up at Delight. Her face held the same amount of puzzlement I felt, and exasperation…a lot of exasperation. Heavens knew why!
Pritchard snorted and laid a heavy hand on my shoulder.
“We have a unit you can use. To make it sporting, you, Beckett and the dog will be racing the Hack Team.”
I felt my heart speed up at the idea of a challenge, and forced myself to a nonchalant shrug.
“Sure. What’s the objective?”
At this, Delight decided to chip in.
“The primary objective is to locate Costoganzi’s current whereabouts. Bonus points go to the discovery of concrete evidence indicating his connections to the wolves, business or otherwise. Deductions occur for being discovered in the system.”
“Discovered and identified,” I clarified, and Delight considered the amendment.
“Fine. No penalty if you get away without being identified.”
“Noted,” Pritchard said, and Beckett echoed his agreement.
“Good,” I said, pushing back my chair. “Let’s get to it.”
“I’m coming, too,” Abby added. “Odyssey has the whole Hack Team; I’m with Cutter—it should just about even things up.”
Delight rolled her eyes, but she didn’t argue; she just led the way out of the conference room and into the Wanderer’s isolated data centre. It was interesting to see something that mirrored Mack’s set up on the Shady Marie. It made me wondered which had come first—and where Mack had been before he’d set out on the Marie.
“That’s something you’ll have to ask him, sweetie,” Delight said, “but I wouldn’t. Man needs his privacy.”
Man did, did he? I wondered why
“How would you feel about sharing what happened with the arach… or with Ghoul… or—”
“Fine. I get it. Just point me at the terminal, and let’s get to it. I need to go hunting.”
“Me too, kiddo.”
Delight led us over to a terminal, and authorized our entry. She was about to turn away, when alarm bells started ringing, and Cascade yelped.
“Well, for fuck’s sake!” she said, and the alarm stopped.
Cascade gave an odd grumbling whine, and settled himself between Beckett’s and my chairs. This time, when Delight turned away, no alarms rang. Not that I would have registered them. I was standing just inside the terminal, staring at Cascade’s construct, and wondering when the dog had worked out this particular trick.
Beckett looked from the dog to me and back, again.
“You sure he wouldn’t like to come home with me?” he asked, and he was only half in jest.
“You’d need to ask Rohan. Dog’s not mine to share.”
We looked around, and I pulled out the company schematic.
“What do you think?” I asked.
“I think you’re wasting time,” Abby chimed in, and dragged us into the Sharovan server, and through a link into the Dark Net that existed beneath it.
Beckett was shocked.
“That’s not supposed to be there,” he murmured.
“Sorry, sweetcakes, but it’s something one of your suspect agents built specifically.”
“He did?”
“She, and yes, but I’ve yet to find the communique that suggested it. I am hoping we’ll find something wherever this leads to…”
We turned a corner in the tunnel, and Cascade leapt suddenly ahead. Before Beckett or I could react, the dog had crunched his way through a half dozen small attack programs set to defend the storage space at the end.
“Jackpot,” I whispered, scanning the area for any more defenses, and not feeling safe enough to relax when I found none.
“I’ll take this corner,” Beckett said, shifting to a suite of files opposite where I was standing.
“Whoa! We should have really asked where we could exfiltrate these to,” I said.
“I’ll take them,” Abs said, and opened a conduit to an isolated storage section inside her ship shell.
“I didn’t know you had this on board,” I said.
“Well, it’s not like I tell you everything, hon. Need to know, okay?”
“And, right now, I need to know, I get it.”
“Here, Abby,” Beckett said, waving a file in the general direction of her presence.
She took it.
“Jackpot, indeed! Nice work, Agent Beckett. I’ll log this with Delight, straight away. The rest we’ll strip and store. It’s more evidence of the connection, but it won’t give us Costoganzi’s location.”
“Done,” I said, transferring files as fast as I could. “You want us to leave copies, in case they come back?”
“No, just drop a sticky and an alarm. I’ll leave a tag trace. If anyone comes here, we’ll know, and we’ll know exactly where to find them. No matter where they run.”
It sounded like a plan, and we stripped the files, and the hidden folders behind them, in nanoseconds.
“Now, we just have to find Costoganzi.”
“You got a picture of the man? Or a signature?” I asked. “We could try to find a match in the correspondence coming in at the top of Sharovan or Mishamblin… maybe…”
It was worth a shot. Abby surfaced into the legitimate web and pulled the most recent press picture she could find. I passed a copy to Beckett, and felt Cascade’s sudden attention.
“You want a copy, too, boy?” I asked, and passed his net presence the file.
“Wuff,” he said, snuffling through the bits and bytes, as he ate the entire image.
Well, at least I knew he could be fed in the digital….
“Wuff, wuff,” and he bolted into the ether.
“Abby!”
She didn’t reply, but I caught a glimmer of her presence charging after the dog’s net construct, Beckett following in her wake. I hurried after them, but this was the part of retrieval I hadn’t specialized in. I could do the research, but high-speed pursuit of net presences through the web? That was the sort of shit I left to the IT bunnies. You know, the ones with teeth.
I just uncovered the data I required to locate what I needed to fetch, and then I physically went in and fetched it. Th
is whole ether-net bouncing thing was something I just didn’t do.
“Quit your whinging, Cutter!”
Abby had returned, and she grabbed me and towed me through the web to where Cascade was dancing around the locked and bolted net entrance to a very private server. I sighed, and looked at Abby and Beckett.
“Let me guess, we earn a penalty or three for being identified?”
“Not yet, we don’t,” Abby snapped back, “but you need to convince him to head back home, or we’re rumbled, and then we won’t be able to get you to where this server sits in the real, before he leaves it.”
“Cas, time to go, boy,” I said.
He scratched at the door, whining as he tried to dig his way through it.
“Cas. Good work, boy. Treat?”
That got his attention, and I tried to work out how to get back to the Wanderer’s server.
“I’ve got this, Cutter,” Abby told me. “Grab the dog.”
She stretched out a digital hand.
“Beckett, grab hold. I don’t want to leave you behind.”
The Sharovan agent didn’t argue. He took Abby’s hand, and let her bring us all the way back to the Wanderer’s isolated machine. Delight was waiting for us when we surfaced.
She didn’t look too impressed—and neither did the six Hack Team members who’d surrounded our terminals and were staring at us in frustration.
“You had a bit of an unfair advantage there, Cutter, between the HMT and the dog.”
I felt my face flush with color.
“I didn’t know Cascade could do that.”
Delight’s eyebrows rose.
“You mean that’s new?”
“Not all of it, but he was more effective this time. Maybe it’s something he’s growing into?”
That seemed to mollify her. She looked over at her team.
“No harm. No foul,” she said, “but I’ll look into the files we got from Ghoul, and see what we can do about finding you folks a puppy, each.”
I caught the mixture of emotion that ran across the faces of her team. Everything from absolute delight to horror at the idea of having a pet.
“They don’t become useful for a couple of years,” I ventured.
Delight shrugged.
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