Code Breakers: Beta (7 page)

Gerry breathed hard, closed his eyes, and tried to wait out the pain that gripped him. After a few seconds, Mags had controlled the flow of endorphins and adrenaline and got both his pain and heart rate under control. A hissing noise came from the rear of the shuttle. The holoscreen warned him of a breech in the hydrogen fuel tank. Not good. Not good at all. Hydrogen gas was incredibly explosive.

Trying to be calm about it, Gerry pressed the door release on the holoscreen: no response. He tried the manual latch, all the while ignoring his hand shaking with the increasing levels of panic that itched at his skin as if it were exposed to searing heat.

The door wouldn’t open. The mechanism had busted. No other way out.

A
ping-ping-clang
noise of shell casings hitting the cabin had him jumping as if he were trapped inside a pot of heated popcorn. He kicked out, screaming at the damned door, trying to escape, but it refused to budge.

An explosion erupted a few meters away. The debris rained down on the shuttle, and a shell crashed into the rear of the fuselage, piercing the structure and striking against the motor. The metal-on-metal friction caused sparks to jump and a fire to start in the cabin.

He kicked out furiously again as more shells continued to rain down on his position.

Chapter 9

Criborg - Wake Island – 19:00

S
asha brushed the hair from her eyes and wished her boss and creator, Little Jimmy, hadn’t given her re-growing follicles. A regular non-maintenance style would have been much better. She pulled her brunette hair into a ponytail and thought about the chances of Jimmy Robertson giving her an upgrade.

Jimmy Robertson was Criborg’s chief science officer. He hated being called Little Jimmy. Not much a fan of irony, despite his great bulk. He much preferred James, or simply Doctor Robertson.

She pictured him now, with his hair greying at the temples and even greyer augmented eyes giving her the disapproving look, and the way his multiple chins wobbled with incredulity. So she never called him Little Jimmy to his face.

The problem with the evening shift was nothing really happened. She’d sit there at the monitoring desks, watching what the UAVs saw, the Red Widow’s movements, and the shuttles coming and going from the Dome to the Station, but that concluded any observable activity. Any enemy engagement or real action remained few and far between.

There was a time when General Vickers’s men would go out onto the surface of the island whenever they wanted to perform various maintenance tasks to their radio and control gear. The island itself had a rich history of military use going all the back to the WWII. Nowadays, with The Family’s satellites monitoring the area they only had certain times of day to go outside. The rest of the time they stayed underground, as they had for the last few decades ever since The Family brought about the Cataclysm.

Sasha wondered what that had been like. She’d only been around for five years and was already sick of the place. She’d never know how the others coped, staying here for over forty years. Three years, two months, five days since she last breathed the open air.

‘You’re too precious to us to go outside,’ Vickers would say with his thick Texan accent.

“I haven’t finished your software yet,” Robertson would add, this time with the clipped tones of the upper class British. Such an odd pair they made, but then Criborg was an allied company of British, Canadian, and American forces. Vickers often boasted that he and his men were the last Americans. But then the way Sasha saw it, apart from a few poor people trying to survive in the abandoned lands, and the Dome, those at Criborg were probably the last of everyone.

Despite their caution she felt ready, strong, capable, and none of Vickers’s goons could touch her during combat training. She had every single one of them beat, including the General himself, and he was augmented up the wazoo. How they could say she wasn’t ready was beyond her. Was sitting at a desk, monitoring drones all evening, really an appropriate use of her talents? Like hell it was.

In her opinion, Sasha represented the most complete assassin-class cyborg in existence. Designed, built, and improved by James ‘Jimmy’ Robertson who came to Criborg even before the Cataclysm, hell, even before WWIII. Her lineage and technology had a long, rich history.

Back in Britain, Jimmy was arrested and jailed for his views on transhumanism and subsequent ‘experiments’. But she had him right. The subjects were sane and willing. That they died during his experiments didn’t mean failure. Their deaths served to further his techniques and theories, so that now they had such models as she and her sisters, whenever they would be ready.
If
they would ever be ready.

Just five more hours
, she thought.
And then my shift is done and I can finally go test out Little Jimmy’s new blade katas
. Apparently he had one of his AIs develop the moves. Perfected to give both artistic and practical use, grow her synthetic, nano-augmented muscles efficiently, and, above all, look like a badass doing it.

She wondered whether Jimmy’s design had given her this much vanity, or whether she had developed it naturally. Her complexity made it difficult to know how much could be assigned to programming or natural evolution.

She flicked a stray hair back, caught her reflection in the shiny surfaces of her glass desk and realised she didn’t care. She looked good, moved well, and performed her tasks well. If only they would trust—

A series of alert tones beeped and caught her attention.

“Whoa, what’s this?”

On one of her holographic display terminals she saw an incoming data packet from one of their UAVs, which in itself wouldn’t normally be a problem considering she had tracked it, witnessed it get shot down by Red Widow scum, and had been tracking the recordings. Oddly, the information didn’t look like anything normally generated by the drone’s systems. Which reminded her: she would have to sift through all the footage at some point, like she had time for all that!
Yay! More sand, more snow, more fanatics doing stupid things with lasers.

She patched the curious data packet stream through to her analysis software that decrypted the security protocol. She gasped as a spoken message came through the noise of engines—Red Widow’s Jaguar engines. That well-known sound had wormed its way inside her head after watching and listening to hundreds of hours of recordings.

The message came from a female, a voice so familiar, it said:

Hi there, people at Criborg. Well, I’m assuming there are some people there. Listen, I had one of your chips inside me. Members of the Red Widows imprisoned me. I escaped, and ended up borrowing their vehicle, and well they had one of your drone’s thingies. I traced the signal back. Don’t be alarmed, but I’m coming your way. I’ve included the craft’s ID signature with the signal so you can see I’m telling the truth. Oh, and I don’t have enough fuel to get to you, so if you do happen to get this, please send a boat. You can call me Petal, by the way, whoever, or whatever you are.

“Huh. That don’t happen every day,” Sasha said, rubbing her face.
A girl with a Criborg chip inside her?
That couldn’t be right. Jimmy hadn’t lost any ‘borgs to her knowledge. She’d have to talk with him and see if he could shed any light on it. The most worrying thing though was that she, whoever she really was, was bringing a Jaguar to Wake Island. She couldn’t let that happen. The General’s men were out on the surface, vulnerable to attack. Sasha uploaded the message and its associated data to her slate, headed to Jimmy, almost skipping along the corridors with excitement.

***

Grey walls. Grey floor. Grey everywhere
. Sasha often wondered why Criborg couldn’t have painted their underground town in something a little more cheery. Hell, even beige would be an improvement. But every corridor, room, weapons store, and vehicle hangar blended into one another.

Only the numbers and titles painted in thick black paint on the walls gave any indication of her whereabouts. That, and the feeling of having walked a trough through the old concrete with the amount of times she had travelled about the place.

Regardless of the dullness of the place, she now had something new, shiny, possibly dangerous in her hands. Maybe Jimmy would let her do something more interesting than scanning through A/V footage.

She arrived at the blast doors to Jimmy’s room. She knocked twice, and the door swung open. As ever, he’d expected her. She wondered if he had the entire place under surveillance.

He sat inside his workstation: a glass cube with holoscreens on every surface. He hunched over a particularly complicated equation when he glanced up, regarded her with a kind, but impatient expression, his bushy eyebrows doing their little dance. He often said more through those furry slugs than he did orally, which of course led to a great deal of humour during one of the General’s more boring briefings, and by more boring, she meant always boring.

“Yo, Jimbo. What’s going down?” she said as she hopped onto a desk and swung her legs underneath, innocent as if nothing would melt in her mouth. She wore her dark leggings and black, barefoot shoes, which always made her feel sneaky and fast.

“Jimbo?” Robertson said, shaking his head with a degree of resignation. “Please. How much further would you butcher my name? Will it soon just been a grunt, or an ‘Oi!’ Let’s maintain at least some standards.”

“Fair play, Doc. Look, I have something super interesting.”

“What is it?” He stood from his stool, exited his control cube, and approached Sasha. She held out the slate, pressed play on the audio file.

The audio stopped. Jimmy Robertson stroked his chin. “Awfully familiar, wouldn’t you say, my dear?”

She shrugged, “I guess. What do you think of it? Could it be a trap? Those idiot Widows aren’t always blessed with the greatest of strategic minds. They might be dumb enough to try something like this in order to get closer. And recently their ship prowled closer than ever before. I think they’re trying it on.”

He cringed at her language, replied, “Could be. Have you analysed the data yet? The video from the drone’s camera?”

She shook her head. “Not yet. Going by the coordinates in the UAV’s transmitter, I’d say they’re only about twenty minutes from the island. I thought it best to speak to you right away.”

“Yes, you did the right thing,” he said, scratching his head, showering his shoulders with dandruff.

“Shall I send a message back? Or just blast ‘em out of the sky and recover the wreckage?”

Robertson looked at the time on the slate: 19:10. The General and his men would be out there until 22:00 before heading back. That’s when The Family’s satellites would be overhead.

“It’s too risky to establish contact. The signatures are definitely coming from a Red Widow Jaguar,” Jimmy said. “With Vickers and his men out there, they’d have little time to find cover. They’re at least twenty-five minutes away from the main doors.”

Sasha jumped up and down. “Want me to take it down? It’s totally a trap. They’ve even sampled my voice.”

“How would they have got your voice?” Jimmy asked, moving his hands into the pockets of his grey trousers. Everything was grey.

“Um, well, I might have left some messages inside the UAV.”

“Messages? His voice scaled an octave when he became agitated, making Sasha laugh inside. “What kind of messages?”

“Nothing bad. I just read the UAV’s instructions and added a little something to the Red Widows, a few insults, about their robes. Oh, and I maybe said something about their personal hygiene too, and their heritage. Ha-ha, you’re gonna laugh at this one, I—”

“You stupid bloody girl!” Jimmy slammed his palm down on the desk, puffed out his cheeks. “You could have compromised us all. Don’t you know how reckless—”

“I’m sorry, I didn’t think.” Sasha slunk off the desk, dropped her chin.

Robertson shook his head. “Look. What’s done is done.”

“What do you want me to do?” Sasha asked, wanting the whole damned episode over and done with. She hated failing Jimmy. It reminded her why they didn’t trust her: because she let her eagerness get the better of her.

Jimmy walked to her, placed a hand on her shoulder. “We can’t take the risk. Record and send everything to my servers. Send out two UAV drones to get a closer look: this one’s feed looks like it’s dead. There’s nothing but static.”

“And then what?” she said. “What next?”

“And then, if it looks like the Red Widows, take them out.”

“Yes!” Sasha fist-pumped the air, turned on her heels and ran all the way back to the control room singing “I’mma gonna blast ya from the skies, from the skies, I’mma gonna blast ya.”

Chapter 10

Over the Sea of Japan

P
etal noticed the increase of traffic to the UAV, having set up an application to monitor its input/output channels. It was clear to her that whoever was at Criborg had got her message and was now making a decision, whatever that might be.

Land had disappeared behind her an hour ago. All that existed now were the two blues: the dark, rich evening sky and its partner, the sea. Small rippling waves shimmered against the cool white light of the moon.

The wind blew slow and calm, and she found herself staring out of the cabin window, with the Jaguar set to autopilot, watching various disturbances on the surfaces. She was sure one of the ripples was caused by a family of whales cruising for plankton and other sources of food.

Wake Island lay a further fifteen minutes away. A deep quiet descended with nothing stirring, chasing, or fighting. The blissful nature of the ‘Stem still kept her relaxed like everything was okay again. No hassles, no stresses, just fly for as long as the hydrogen lasted, and then pop the ejection seat and float on the sea until something happened.

Of all the dangerous situations she had been in, and of all the times where death presented it self as a possibility this was the most chilled she’d ever been. It was as if death wasn’t such a bad outcome really. For as long as she could remember, she’d been in one scrape or another. Filled to her core with malicious code and bad AIs, all rotting away her humanity, changing her into something else.

Gabe had often used her as nothing but a tool to further his agenda, and Enna nothing more than a research project and a weapon. She didn’t blame them really, or harbour any hard feelings. They were just doing what they thought right, and in their own way they had cared for her, looked out for her.

Only Gerry noticed something different within her, and yet even that spark of… no, she couldn’t say it was love, not yet. How would she even know what love was anyway? She was a killer, a hacker, and a weapon. She didn’t love. She maimed, and stole, and destroyed.

That a chip had been ripped from her with the name Criborg stamped into it didn’t mean she was going home. For all she knew this place was just a chip and weapons producer and someone else had stuck that in her to make her better at killing and hacking.

It’d be like sending a robot back to the manufacturer of its sensor array.

And then a nagging thought surfaced as she flew over the blue sea,
am I just a robot too
? It made sense when she looked at the evidence: no memories before Gabe discovered her wandering the desert; chips and implanted weaponry; the ability to contain and manipulate code and AIs; reflexes and abilities faster than most people she knew.

Then there was her extraordinary tolerance to NanoStems. The amount they had pumped into her over the last few years would have killed a regular person, but she took it in her stride. Thrived on it.

She wondered how much of her body was real and how much of it was actually billions of nano-machines all swimming about doing various jobs, keeping her going.

And yet, despite all that evidence, she still
felt
.

Even now, as she noticed two UAVs, similar in design to the one she found in the Jaguar, drop out from behind a thin wisp of cloud and head towards her. Dread, fear, excitement, and anticipation rose up inside her. Her hands began to sweat and she fidgeted in her seat, fingers poised over the weapon’s controls. She held off, waited. They drew closer, and then split off to flank her.

Her fingers edged closer to the triggers of the machine guns. The pair of UAVs appeared on her holographic display with a red ring around them. The targeting system had them locked.

A second passed, then two, three. She eased her hand away, took her eye off the radar, checked the data flow. Traffic spiked. Same signal structure as before. They were definitely from Criborg.

Two crashes smashed into the Jaguar simultaneously, alerting a rainbow of warning signs and a cacophony of beeps and sirens.
Dammit! Guess they’re not friendly, after all.

Petal wrestled with the controls, but the damned thing locked down and headed for the big drink. Two more blasts sealed the deal. Petal punched the ejector seat.

The air pressure popped her ears, her guts tried to remove themselves via her feet, and her head swam, even more so than normal with the ‘Stems floating about in there still. She watched almost as if it were happening in slow motion, as the Jaguar broke apart: its stub wings split from the fuselage and all three large pieces headed down into the calm waters below.

Strangely, she thought of the whales, hoped they would be safe. For years these waters had nothing in them, but as the damage to the climate eased, life had returned. The sea’s biodiversity could come and go as they pleased, but here she was creating yet more mayhem. Everywhere she went, destruction and death followed.

The ejector seat had small thrust-engines on either side, and she propelled herself forwards, more for the fun of it than anything. She was still going to hit the water and die either from hypothermia or drowning at some point, or perhaps some sea creature would eat her. Maybe the whales were hungry for more than just plankton?

Eventually she approached the surface of the water. She cut away the parachute and free-fell the last few meters, frantically trying to unclip from the seat, but the mechanism jammed, sending her smashing into the water, and going down and down, the weight of the seat strapped to her dragging her down into the deep like an anchor.

Bubbles poured from her mouth. She twisted, screamed, yanked at the strappings holding her tight. She looked up; flecks of moonlight dappled the surface only to be taken away by shadow as the dark-green parachute furled across the water.

Her struggling made the seat tip forward, and she fell down head first into the murky depths. Out from nowhere, seeing it too late, she crashed into a coral reef, striking her head against the rock. The seat wedged itself stuck in a crevice. Her blood used what little oxygen she had within her body as she frantically tried to escape to no avail.

Energy drained from her limbs to be replaced by pins and needles. The heavy cold made her lungs feel tight in her chest. Against her will she opened her mouth. Salt water flooded her lungs.

Her arms went limp. She blinked, tried to see past the red and black spots.

All she could feel was the cold.

And then, she felt nothing.