Code Breakers: Beta (11 page)

Chapter 16

T
he interrogators had introduced themselves as Alizia and Margaret, and very ‘pleasant’ they were too. They’d even given Gerry a drink of water. Of course he knew this was the good cop part of the procedure. He’d give them three questions and no answers before they took those bloodstained sickles and started the cutting.

“Mr Gerry,” Alizia, she of the foul breath and stubby black teeth, said all cheery and calm, standing casually with her back against the wall, arms folded in front of her chest. “Where is Omega?”

As he thought on that question, he wondered about Bilanko in the next room. Since Gabe had left, he’d heard nothing else from her cell. It was a worrying silence given the screams and commotion just prior. He lifted his chin, regarded Alizia. “What happened to the one in the next cell?”

“Dead, unable to help with enquiries. You unable too, Mr Gerry?”

Gerry shook his head. “Can you please be more specific about your first question,” Gerry replied. “I don’t know what exactly Omega is. If you could expand a little more, I could probably help you. I don’t want to be difficult.” He kept talking, hoped to buy time while he probed the compound’s network, trying to make a connection to something. Anything. The fuzziness still permeated his brain, and although connected, the network appeared blurred and indistinct to him.

“I have a family.” Gerry continued to talk to Alizia. “I’d rather get out of here in one piece, so please help me help you.”

While he continued to talk, and apparently entertain the two interrogators, he managed to locate Old Grey through the compound’s network. The idiots hadn’t even firewalled her. Gerry supposed that if this group were out in the cold as it were in their underground bunkers they probably weren’t familiar with how to secure a network, relying on their personal EMP-like devices to secure individuals instead.

He sent his mind out to Old Grey, programmed his AIA to connect to the ancient server. She let him in straight away. The old-style 2D operation system flashed into his mind, waiting for his command. He used the server to map the compound’s network, creating a picture of the data: which nodes were responsible for which function. He’d use his own mind to do the task, but having the server and his AIA interacting allowed him to fully focus on staying alive during the interrogation.

“We know what you are, who you are. You tell us now of Omega’s location.”

“I don’t know what you mean. What is this Omega? By the way, I know we’ve got off on the wrong foot, and I’m sorry for killing a few of your comrades, but you know, it was a war zone.”

“Enough!” Margaret grabbed Gerry by the throat, squeezed his windpipe. “This simple. Give me Omega location or I kill you now.”

Mags delivered the network report.

—
Five operational nodes discovered: two control the security doors and lights, one operates the cameras, and the other two distribute power. The latter are not fully operational since the last time we were here and overloaded them.

— Good job, Mags,
Gerry returned.
Start the cracking procedure on the door and light systems. I really need to get out of here.

Gerry’s AIA took a program that he had devised while on the station in The Family’s care: a highly efficient, chip-level piece of software that simultaneously tied up the target’s CPU while hijacking its memory and boot process, which allowed the insertion of a cracking tool that would alter the security credentials and thus allowing him, and his AIA, access.

The tip of the curved dagger pierced the thin skin on Gerry’s throat; a warm trickle of blood dripped down to his chest. Margaret held it there, adding weight to the hilt, threatening to push it further in. “You think I won’t do it?” she said.

“Okay, okay! Let’s take all this down a notch. I’m sure we can sort something out. Now, please, explain to me what Omega is, and I’ll tell you if I can help you find it.”

Alizia leaned away from the wall, her smirk dropping, becoming serious. She took her sickle and tapped it against Gerry’s dermal implant, ‘
clunk, clunk
.’ “We start here.” Then she tapped the edge of the blade against Gerry’s temple, “End here.”

“So,” Alizia said. “We ask last time. Where is Omega?”

“I take it you don’t know what happened to the last person who cut me open.” Gerry raised his wrists, still within the EM cuffs, and tapped his bionic eye. “I lived, he didn’t.”

“Wrong answer, Mr Gerry,” Alizia said.

She stepped to face Gerry head-on, took the knife, pressed its sharp tip to his wrist implant and—

—
We’re in
,
Gerry
, Mags said.

Before Alizia could gouge the weapon deeper, Gerry accessed the compound’s breached systems, turning off the lights, plunging the cell into darkness. He switched on his night-vision and drove his forehead into Alizia’s nose.

Margaret stood to his right, her arms out in the darkness, trying to find something to hold on to. He kicked out at her legs, sending her crashing to the floor with a sharp scream. She dropped her sickle with the fall. Alizia fell back against the door. She, too, dropped her sickle in order to stem the blood from her crushed nose. Blood mingled in her throat making her yells of frustration take on a wet, thick quality.

Gerry spun, kicked out at Margaret on the floor, catching her in the throat with his boot. He bent and picked up the sickle, moved to the door, and using its stun capability, brought it down onto Alizia’s shoulders. The Red Widow stiffened as if struck by lightning, all her muscles tensing as one and sending her face-first to the hard floor.

Gerry grinned with satisfaction, thinking of both times when he had been stunned. Taking a thin, squared rod about ten centimetres long from a keychain under Alizia’s robes, he unlocked the EM cuffs. He dragged Alizia’s unconscious body over to Margaret, who clutched her throat and writhed in pain. Using the sickle, he stunned her into unconsciousness too, and used the cuffs to bind the two women together.

Now that he had access to the compound’s security system, he took a minute to browse through the node’s cell-locking procedures. Each cell had its own electronic lock setting: a global set of routines that allowed a user of the system to control the entire setup. Gerry unlocked his cell, the one next door, and the one opposite into which he’d seen Enna taken.

He kept the main door to the cell locked, not wanting a flood of Red Widow guards to rush in. He only switched off the lights to the cells, so he hoped the others wouldn’t have realised what had happened. At the very least, he’d bought some time.

He stepped out into the dark corridor, his night-vision making it seem more oppressive than it was. He locked the door behind him, and moved to Bilanko’s cell. Inside, the half-woman, half-computer controlled transcendent, sat on the bench, her head resting on her chest. A pool of dark liquid surrounded her. She didn’t move, or breathe. No data came from her at all.

The queen of GeoCity-1 had died.

“I’m sorry,” Gerry said, before turning his back and quietly closing the cell door behind him. He’d only ever had one interaction with her before now, and that wasn’t entirely pleasant, but he felt a deep depression come over him. She was truly something, and to be so casually snuffed out by those butchers, it made him think that perhaps The Family had the right idea after all, if only for a minute.

The thought of The Family reminded him of Enna. He snapped out of his current train of thought and dashed across the corridor to her cell.

Gerry opened Enna’s door to find her with Gabe, and Old Grey on a trolley, all sitting casually in the dark.

“Close the door, Gerry,” Enna said as she sat calmly on her bench. “And maybe switch on the lights?”

“Sure,” he accessed the node and did as Enna asked. The cell was much like his own: grey, barren, and clinical. Enna and Gabe stared at him, waited. Gerry closed the door behind him.

“What now?” he asked. He wanted to tell them about Bilanko, but given their faces, tired and stern, he guessed they already knew.

“My cover’s blown,” Gabe said. “They saw me bring Old Grey out of the server room. We’ve got to get outta the compound, the place’s crawlin’ with ‘em.”

Sitting on the bench beside them, Gerry took a deep breath, waited for his heart rate to come down. “How the hell did you get mixed up with this lot?” Gerry said to Gabe.

Enna spoke first. “For the last few weeks I’ve been tracking them. It started out with unusual data patterns coming from an unknown node. Given how few networked computers survived, that’s always a concern. I traced the origins, discovered there were more survivors over the Russian borders. That’s when I got Gabe involved.”

“As a spy?”

Gabe nodded, said. “It’s partly why I disappeared after ya thought I double-crossed ya, man. That was all part of the plan: for you to get to Seca, and for Petal to stay safe, but well, that didn’t quite happen. Ya see, these Red Widows have got a hard-on for people with tech in ‘em.”

“What do you mean exactly?” Gerry said.

“They blame The Family,” Enna said. “And the advancement of technology in general for the war, and for the loss of their fathers and husbands. They were the last surviving adults post-Cataclysm on account of them being in a bunker system at the time. That part of Russia still segregated male and female roles within the military, and a quirk of circumstance meant that they were the sole survivors from that region.”

“So you sent Gabe, a male, to infiltrate them? How did that work out?”

“I had something to trade with, man,” Gabe said.

“What?”

“Information. Ya see, as I said earlier, they’d been in contact with some kind of old AI-like entity. Nothing like I’ve ever seen before. It’d promised ‘em all kinds of secrets and ways to take down The Family, take the Dome for themselves. I got on the inside, managed the comms for ‘em. Despite the Jags and ATVs at their disposal, when it comes to tech, they’re like cave people. So I extended my skills to ‘em, helped ‘em decipher the code from this AI. All the while feeding info back here to Enna.”

“So what did they want with Petal? Why take Darkhan and GeoCity-1 for that matter?”

“This AI, whatever it is, tipped them off about Petal, about what she could do. They tracked her when Jasper’s men took her away from the Dome. Gabe here ensured that she was taken alive.”

“Told ‘em a little of what she could do, how she could benefit ‘em. Had to do something to keep her alive. And besides, it gave me the chance of springing her once we found out about where her chip came from.”

“I still don’t understand why you let her travel alone. If she was sick,” he pointed to Enna. “You should have taken her, tried to help her.”

Enna stood, her body tense. “I tried my best when she was with me the last time. I don’t know everything, Gerry. There’s a limit to what I could do. She is not like a normal person, or a transcendent for that matter. I’m sorry. I simply don’t have the skills or knowledge to help her. It was the only way!”

“Okay, okay. I’m sorry.”

Enna took a deep breath, sat back down. “We couldn’t leave her here with the Widows. You’ve seen what they would have done with her.” Enna pointed to Bilanko’s cell. “All that time alone with their grief and pain has turned them into brutal killers. They want blood and death. They’re delusional. She couldn’t have stayed, and you saw what happened at GeoCity-1. She had to find her home, for her sake. For all of our sake.”

The loss of Petal to the unknown gnawed away at Gerry’s patience. He wanted to leave everyone behind, trace her route, and find her, make sure she was safe. But here he stood, stuck in the damned compound again.

“What can we do here then?” Gerry asked. “What’s next? Do we have any idea where Omega is?”

“They believe Omega is in Darkhan somewhere,” Enna said. “And I think they’re right. When Len went with you to City Earth, the Upsiders scattered, took Omega with them. It makes sense to come here to keep it safe. There are lots of defensible buildings, of old places to hide, none of Seca’s drones or hired thugs to monitor the place anymore.”

“You mentioned the two servers could create and destroy AIs. How does that actually work? Is it something we can use against this AI entity?” Gerry asked, trying to piece everything together.

Enna stood, rubbed her wrists. Red marks scored her skin from her cuffs, which now lay on the floor. “The two servers are a pair of the same entity,” Enna said. “Created by Sakura and Hajime Murakami, the co-owners and pioneering AI engineers of Old Grey Network Systems back before the war and the Cataclysm. They are Alpha and Omega because the two complete each other.”

Gabe added, “When coupled, they can be used to permanently destroy an AI, or as this thing hinted at: upload a consciousness. Don’t know if that’s true or not. Whether or not it’s possible, this thing seemed insane. Many of its comms were batshit crazy.”

“So what’s the plan?” Gerry said.

“So far,” Gabe said. “The plan is get the servers. Then pray.”

“For what?”

“That Petal gets to Criborg in time, and that they have something useful to help us fight the Red Widows, otherwise we’re looking at war with The Family, and we all know how that ended up last time.”

“What about this thing you call an AI entity. What do you know about it? Did it have a name?”

“Not a great deal really,” Gabe said. “All its comms were pseudo-religious bullshit, like some kind of crazed cult leader. It’s related to some pre-Cataclysm program of The Family. As for its name, it just referred to itself as the Patriarch. Also, its message coincided with access to the Meshwork being suppressed. I’m sure it’s related somehow, man. But I didn’t get a chance to dig any further. When Natalya, the leader of the Widows, figured out how to decrypt its messages I was relegated to an odd-job man. My stock ain’t worth a damn with ‘em now.”

“What if Petal doesn’t make it?” Gerry said.

Neither Enna nor Gabe spoke, clearly not wanting to entertain the possibility.

A knock came from the door. Gerry gripped the sickle’s handle and stood to the side.