Code Breakers: Beta (16 page)

At first she didn’t move, clinging to him like a limpet. But then as he stepped back, she released her grip, stepped back, and tried to read the intention on his face.

“It’s okay, really. We’re all here to help you. I’ve found a solution.”

She remained impassive.

He found it disconcerting. Did she look upon that poor boy in the same way before ripping him apart?

As soon as he thought it, her face softened. She nodded her head and held out her hand, letting him guide her into the Plexiglas cell. He placed her gently onto the bed and sat beside her.

It was then he felt his VPN buzz with an incoming message. He took his personal slate from his pocket. It was Sasha! He read the message, then looked up at Fuentes. She stared back, a smile on her face.

Chapter 21

14:00. The storm roared on, gaining on Gabe and Petal’s location every second. The wind whipped at them so strongly, Gabe had to crouch in front of a boulder to avoid being blown to the hard, dusty ground.

“Link hands,” he yelled, holding out his hand to Petal, who clutched the iron handle of the bunker hatch. She reached to him, gripping his palm. She pulled and he pushed until they both held onto the hatch. Gabe kneeled, took the handle, and heaved the hatch over, leaning his body against it, propping his feet on the edge so the wind couldn’t blow it shut.

“Go!” he shouted to Petal.

She ducked under his body and clambered down the ladder, carrying the water, rations, and the box containing Alpha’s damaged parts. When she had disappeared inside, Gabe followed, first placing his feet on the lowest rung he could reach and then ducking down.

The hatch crashed shut, sending the vertical tunnel into silence and darkness.

His hands slipped, and his weight shifted, sending his feet skidding off the metal ladder. He fell a few feet before hooking his forearm over and catching his fall. His face swung forward with the momentum, striking against the tunnel’s surface.

Lights flashed in his eyes and then blinded him. He thought he’d suffered a severe concussion, but when he looked down, he saw Petal waving at him.

“The place has power.”

“Ya could’ve warned me!”

“Sorry, Gabe, didn’t realise.”

He squinted and waited for his eyes to adjust to the sudden lights. Strip panels of white OLEDS ran down the length of the tunnel and presumably through the roof of the bunker, if it were anything like the ones he grew up in.

Once at the bottom he stretched out, easing his old muscles. “I’m getting too old for this sh—”

“Sugar!” Petal said with a kind of happy yelp.

“What?”

“There’s freakin’ sugar here. Proper stuff, too. None of that shitty artificial crap that melts your brain.” She held up a jar with a spoon’s worth of grains in the bottom. She pawed at them like a bear scooping honey from a hive. She thrust it to him. “Want some?”

“Sure, in a bit. Let’s see what we got down here first, eh? Like crazy people waiting to slaughter us and eat our innards.”

There were no crazy people. The bunker extended approximately ten metres long and five wide and was decorated in the finest concrete blue-grey. He was right: OLED strips gridded the low ceiling, casting the entire room in an even light.

He scanned round. It looked like the place had been used recently. He found cartons of powdered food and proteins, cooking utensils, and paper plates with what looked like fresh stains on them. There was also a blanket crumpled in the corner.

Gabe kneeled and picked it up, and something thudded to the floor.

“Shit me, Gabe, it’s a proper book.”

Curious. He picked it up, turned it over in his hands, and read the cover.

“What is it?” Petal asked. “A computer manual, tech specs? Some old history book?”

“A novel.”

“A what?”

Gabe turned to her, clutching the book in his hands. “Ya tellin’ me ya don’t know what a novel is?”

She shook her head. “Is it like a bible or something?”

“They’re both fiction, girl, but one tells the truth.”

“Which one?”

“The novel, of course. Here, take a look.”

He handed it to her, and she gripped it as though it were the most precious thing in the world. On the cover was a picture of a woman in a red coat. She wore silvered filters over her eyes. Petal read out the word on the front, “Neuromancer.” She flicked through the pages. “I don’t get it, Gabe.”

“Did James not program ya to have any appreciation of the arts?”

“Sure he did. The art to hack computers and fuck people’s shit up.” She flashed him a smile.

“Well, let’s hope now Gerry’s poking about in ya brain, he can give ya some extra knowledge. It’s a story. Ya read it for entertainment, but good ones also teach ya something, and sometimes, like in the case of that one, predict the future.”

She gave him a wonky expression. “Predict the future? You serious?” She looked at the book as if it were some kind of magical device.

“Not in a literal sense. Ya don’t open it up and see the future as such, but at the time it was written, like many books back in the day, they speculated on stuff. Scientists would then end up developing tech that mirrored what had been written about in the story.”

“So like incidental prediction algorithms?”

“Yeah, just like those, only more entertaining. Take it; ya should read it some time.”

“You found it. And you know more about it than me, perhaps you should keep it?”

“I’ve read it. Trust me, ya’ll love it.”

“When did you read a book?”

“When I ran with the gangs, we broke into some dead, rich guy’s place. He had a library. A proper honest-to-God library full of books. Some of the fools burned ’em for fuel. But those crack heads couldn’t read. My ol’ man taught me from a young age, so I took them books, kept ’em for myself. Used to read ’em at night when the others were fightin’ or fuckin’. That one taught me a lot about hacking in an abstract way.”

“You’re a freakin’ enigma. Who’d have known it? Why didn’t ya tell me this stuff before?”

He shrugged. “Didn’t come up.”

“What else don’t I know about you?”

“It’s rumoured I play a mean jazz flute solo.”

“A what?”

“Never mind. What are ya pickin’ up traffic-wise? Clearly the place is empty, but where’s the data coming from you detected?”

Petal had opened the book and was reading the page, not listening to Gabe. She murmured as she read. “... The colour of television—”

“Hey,” Gabe tapped her shoulder. “I’m talkin’ to ya. Where’s the data coming from?”

“Eh? Oh, through there. Some old terminal.”

“And ya didn’t think that’d be important to tell me first?”

“You’re the one giving me a history lesson.”

Gabe moved to the back of the bunker. A false wall came out halfway, hiding the view of a narrow passage that had two doors at the end. As he moved into the passage, the smell of server coolant increased. Following his nose, he chose the door directly in front and opened it.

The glowing grey and blue welcome screen of an old Legacy I console glared back at him from inside a small room barely large enough to hold two adults. More detritus littered the floor, making him think that someone had been here very recently. And perhaps left in a hurry, given the items left behind and the computer console still on.

The log file on the console caught his attention. It had been used just an hour previously—if the time was correct.

He navigated through the system until he found a terminal application. He launched it and scanned back through the files to find any that were recently new or had been updated. A single result came up: a transcript from an unencrypted email program.

The message was sent to an address that Gabe knew was in Libertas, although he still thought of it as City Earth and still viewed it with suspicion. He guessed it’d take him a while to disassociate it from the Family. The message read:

To: xxx-xxx-xx

Subject: Recovery and Elimination

Message:

We lost contact with #48 and #39. We think they’re dead. Target’s location as yet to be identified. Storm has pinned us down into one of the old bunkers and the static has interrupted our connection. Are the chips faulty in these conditions? We’re currently off the grid, but hoping it’s just a temporary issue. We had a little trouble with some survivors (lost #52 in the struggle), but secured the location. When the storm has passed, we’ll locate and eliminate the targets. We know they’re carrying the server. Recovery shouldn’t be a problem. May need to look at adding more EM shielding to the next model of chips.

Will update soon.

Gabe’s muscles tightened. From that message it seemed that more ronin were here. He turned to the other door in the passage. Was that the only other room? Were ‘they’ in there? And who were the survivors? He thought about his family and their small tribe: could it have been them?

He rushed back to Petal, who was sitting cross-legged, reading the book. She held a piece of white card in her right hand. She looked up at him and handed him the card.

“I found this between the pages. Looks old.”

Gabe’s heart sank as soon as he looked at it. It was a photograph of a woman smiling, a child of about five sitting on her knee. The woman had long, flowing dreadlocks, and the child wore a tatty, red sweater. Gabe recognised the sweater, the child, and the woman.

His legs became weak. He leant against the wall of the bunker.

“What is it?” Petal asked, clearly not understanding the connection, too wrapped up in the story.

The sound of voices and shuffling came from beyond the door in the passage.

“Get up, girl,” Gabe said, turning to face the passage.

“For what?”

Before he could draw his weapon, a group of five ronin, in brown and yellow desert robes, swarmed into the bunker, catching Gabe and Petal off guard. Three launched at Gabe and overwhelmed him. He managed to jab one man in the nose, cracking the cartilage, but they just kept coming, punching and kicking until he fell to the ground.

They paralysed him with a stun weapon before dragging him around the wall and into the room from which they came.

Through the melee, Gabe saw Petal drive her forearm spike into the leg of a woman. It jammed in the bone. Before Petal could withdraw and attack again, a burly man shoved her in the shoulder. It sent her spinning to the floor, taking the woman on the end of her spike with her. They fell in a tangled heap.

Petal managed to kick out, catching the man in the ribs. He grunted once before falling down onto her and delivering a wicked right hook that caught her clean on the jaw.

Like Gabe, they cuffed her and dragged her through the passage and into a small room that looked as if it might have once been the storage area given the metal racking that lined the walls. It was dark inside, just a small OLED strip glowed in the low ceiling; the rest was offline, presumably to save energy. In one of the corners were a number of shapes Gabe knew would be bodies.

“Dump them here, and check that storage box,” the one with the broken nose said.

Two ronin gagged both Gabe and Petal with strips of cloth and duct tape and pulled them close to the metal racks, where their arms were tied in place.

Broken-nose stood over them, grinning. Gabe saw the chip on his wrist.

“We’ve got the server,” one of his compatriots shouted from outside of the bunker.

The two ronin in the room left, slamming the door behind them and shutting Gabe and Petal in darkness as the overhead light switched off.

Petal rattled her arms against the racking and tried to talk, but the gag obscured her words.

Gabe didn’t even bother trying to say anything. The anger was too much, choking the words before he could speak them. It wasn’t so much losing Alpha at this point or being thrown in the room, but the book, the picture...

He moved his head to the side, imagining what those dark shapes were piled up in the corner. That’s when he struggled against the restraints and let his fury out in one explosive show of rage.

Chapter 22

James gripped the slate so tight he thought he might break the screen. And yet it was the only way he could control his emotions. In stark contrast to his rage at the message Sasha had sent, clone one sat next to him and barely moved or showed anything on her impassive face as she gazed out of her translucent cell.

He read the message again to make sure he hadn’t misunderstood.

Jimmy! Hope you’re getting this. We’re in the shit big time. Malik and I were taken by the ronin. We’re in the warehouse district. They’ve got a full-on factory here producing the chips. Malik’s lost a leg (long story), and I’m trying to plan our way out.

It’s worse than we could imagine. They’
r
e producing enough chips to take over most of the city, replacing the AIA network with one that extends from Elliot. I saw him for a brief moment in his network. His reach is fucking massive. We must stop him.

Please send help to the coordinates attached. As many men and women as you can get. It has to stop here. Also, don’t trust Fuentes! She and a man called Katsuo (the ‘engineer’) are in league. She’s one of them! The bitch had a number of the Libertas Security Service take Malik and me. She’s staging some kind of coup right under our noses.

You must believe me, Jimmy; this shit’s out of control.

— Sasha.

Her unique address imprinted the message, so he knew it was legit. Reading through the second time had helped him formulate a course of action. If there was one person he could trust, it was Sasha. Despite how much it hurt to think that all this time Fuentes had been playing him, luring him in with a false sense of intimacy, he had to act rationally.

He felt foolish for being so easily taken in, taken advantage of.

Considering his time in Criborg, he should have foreseen that he would naturally be attracted to someone quickly, given the right signals—the signals Fuentes knew and manipulated. He could see now why the Family held her in such high regard; her ability to organise and arrange people’s attention and feelings towards her were impressive—and difficult to notice.

Even now as he watched her, he wondered if she knew that he knew. She was speaking with Saladin, saying something softly in his ear. They both flicked their eyes to the door of the lab. Their movements compelled the muscles in his neck so that he too glanced over. A tingle of expectation crawled down his spine.

When they brought their eyes back to him, he felt like a target.

He turned to clone one. “Are you okay alone for a moment?”

She didn’t respond, just stared ahead, her eyes seeing something on another plane.

He left the cell, securing the door behind him. Clone one didn’t move an inch. Just sat there in her thick fabric robe. Occasionally her lips would twitch and move by the influence of a cadre of phantom words. He then knew why.

“You already injected the nanobots, didn’t you?” He pointed at Saladin, who just shrugged as if it were no big deal. He realised the deception and betrayal had started some time before, perhaps from the day they liberated the city.

“What’s going on?” he asked Rosario, wanting her to confirm it, to see if she had the strength of character to be straight with him for once.

Her fake smile dropped, and a tight cruelty etched into the folds of her skin; her mouth tightened, and her eyes squinted. Looking at her now, he could see her for what she truly was.

“Your time’s up, I’m afraid, James,” Fuentes said, stepping close to him and placing a hand on his upper arm, gently, as if she were giving bad news to a terminally ill patient. “I never meant any of this to get personal. I hope you realise that—in time.”

He was about to ask why, but in truth he didn’t care. He just needed to play this right.

Saladin stalked to the side, blocking off his exit, trapping him.

“Was any of it real, Rosa?”

He scrutinised her to try and tell if she was lying, but like clone one, she was unreadable.

“I certainly don’t have any bad feelings towards you, James. It’s just business. We won’t hurt you—if you comply. You can make this as easy as possible on yourself. Just hand over the slate and go with security. I’ve arranged a secure room for you in the Greenway House complex. It’s a nice room.”

“You’re placing me under house arrest?” While he talked, he connected to the slate via his VPN connection and forwarded Sasha’s message to Enna. He added the line:

Fuentes has me cornered. I don’t have much time. Help. Come quick.

With luck, Enna would bring some reinforcements with her, though he didn’t know how far Rosario’s deception had gone. Maybe she had the entire workforce of Cemprom and the Security Service under her influence.

“The slate, James. Don’t make this difficult, now.”

She held out her hand like a teacher confiscating a baseball card from a child.

The message was sent. He deleted the evidence before handing it over. She checked through it while he thought about his options: Saladin didn’t look particularly physical, and James was a large and heavy man. If he made a run for it, he could probably get to the door, but it would mean leaving clone one behind. But then, it was too late to worry about her now. If the nanobot system worked as well as Saladin had intimated, then it was likely she’d be completely under Rosario’s control.

That was when he got scared; someone of clone one’s abilities, and insanities, on the loose... he couldn’t run, not with her chasing him down. The image of the boy’s shredded body came to him.

“What are you going to do with her?” James asked.

“What you said she’s good for,” Saladin said, “Hunting—and eliminating certain targets. She’s very impressive, Doctor. She reacted extremely well to the nanobot network.”

That was it; he had to act.

James launched forward, aiming his shoulder and elbow at Saladin. He knocked the younger scientist aside and reached out for the door handle, but as he was about to grip it, the door flew open, sending him tripping forward into the arms of two armed security women wielding the obligatory stun-batons.

They dragged him back into the lab, pulling his arms behind his back and cuffing him.

“I did say not to make this difficult,” Fuentes said as she discarded the slate.

The security women kicked at the back of his knees so he fell at Fuentes’ feet.

“I’ll give you one chance, James, out of courtesy. What did Sasha’s message say? Don’t deny it; I know her address. I had you and all of your allies logged the moment I took office. And even if you don’t choose to tell me, it won’t take long to recover the data from you one way or another.”

James said nothing.

“Fine, very well then. Ladies, take him to a spare cell for interrogation. I’ll prepare a press conference to announce we’ve detained the man responsible for the recent murders and the slaughter of the landscapers this morning.

“Saladin, I want you and a team from Cemprom to recover the data and find out what that message was.”

“Of course.” Saladin took the slate and pocketed it.

“One last chance, James,” Rosario said.

“Go to hell.”

“Take him away.”

The security officers escorted him out of the room. There was no point in protesting. He’d be better off conserving his energy, thinking of a way out of this while hoping Enna had received his message and had made appropriate plans. As for clone one, she still barely moved by the time he left the lab. She continued to lock her attentions on Saladin—who, with his technology, was her new master.

Above everything, that was what scared James the most.