Code Breakers Complete Series: Books 1-4 (68 page)

Sasha blinked, stunned. “What the holy fuck was that?”

“Outside!” Malik was at the window overlooking the square. There was a centimetre-wide-hole in the glass. Sasha followed Malik’s gaze outside. A figure dressed as a window engineer descended the face of the building on an anti-grav platform. A rifle hung across the figure’s back.
 

“Fucking sniper!” Sasha said. “I’m going after them. You sweep this place for evidence.”

Before Malik had a chance to speak, Sasha opened the window and jumped out.

She soared through the air, a bird catching thermal updrafts. Between her ribs and her arms, NanoFibre webs stretched out, creating weblike wings. She flew to the side of the fountain, barrel-rolling in time to avoid colliding with it. The Silver Sisters looked up as she flew past their heads—admittedly a little closer than was polite.
 

She focussed on her target as the sniper leapt from the platform and dashed into the throng of people within the square. She tracked her target’s movements by the way the citizens broke apart like waves.
 

Her target looked round and noticed Sasha gliding ever closer. A mask obscured the sniper’s face. She lowered her head, brought her arms in closer to her body, and increased her speed. The sniper was no more than twenty metres away when he dived into an alley. Sasha had no alternative but to land and proceed on foot.

As she turned into the narrow passage, she realised it was a dead end.
 

The sniper did too. They faced each other.
 

Sasha continued to move forward. She reached to her back, pulled out her duelling daggers, and stalked closer. The sniper pulled the mask away. It was a young man, no older than eighteen or nineteen.
 

“Stop there!” Sasha said. “Don’t do anything stupid.”

He seemed not to hear her as he took from his pocket a small black device. He clicked a button on its surface. His eyes rolled back into his head, and his body became limp. He started to laugh, and white foam frothed from his lips. He broke off, fixed his blank stare on her, and said, “You’re too late...”

“For what?”
 

His laugh cut short. His chest exploded outwards. The blast ricocheted off the close walls, making her ears pop with the sound pressure. She fell back as his body slumped to the ground, his arms hanging loosely by his sides. Sasha saw that he was wearing a ronin-chip: one of Elliot’s drones.

“Holy crap!” Malik said, running to her. “Are you okay?”

Sasha turned to him, wiping her face. “You know what? I’ve been better.”

He reached out and held her by her arms. “I thought for a moment you...” He shook his head. “You’re crazy, you know that? You near enough gave me a heart attack.”

“Sorry, dude. Did you find anything back at Loas’ place?”

“A stash of chips and a manifest, but nothing else.”

Sasha approached the body and investigated the remains. She didn’t recognise the make of the rifle. It was matte black, light, and supremely balanced, featuring a semi-automatic mode. It wasn’t a mass-produced item, suggesting the ronin had an expert gunsmith within their ranks.

The sniper’s black tactical jacket had split apart during the suicide blast. Strips of wire and a smouldering white gel coated the inside.

“Must be a homemade explosive substance. It’s nothing I immediately recognise,” Malik said. “We’ll get the guys in the lab to check it out. If the ronin are developing bombs too, it shows that they might be looking to step up their attack on the city.”

“There’s something else here,” Sasha said. She reached into the breast pocket of the jacket, wincing at the heat. With her fingertips she pulled out the dented remains of a slate.

“Now this might be useful. I wonder if the guys at Cemprom can lift some data off it?”
 

Malik shrugged as he opened his arms to indicate the mess. “Fuentes is going to have a shit-fit when she hears about all this.”

Sasha shrugged her shoulders. “Not our fault. We’re just doing our job, right? Although I should call this in before people get freaked out.”

Given how wide Malik’s eyes were, she guessed he already was.
 

“Fun first day in the new job, huh?” she said.

Chapter 3

Petal helped Enna clear up the mess and remove Natalya’s body from her compound. Two Bachians took away the Russian’s body. It’d soon be staked outside the city as a warning.

“I’m worried about Gabe,” Petal said as she sat at Enna’s operating table.

Enna had changed her clothes from traditional Bachian robes into her scrubs. Her hair was pulled up into a tight bun.
 

“He’ll be okay,” Enna said. “He’s one of the most resilient people I’ve ever met.”

“But he’s gonna do something stupid like try to infiltrate the Red Widows. He’s going to want vengeance. I should go after him.” Petal made to leave the room.

Enna pulled her back, grabbing her wrist. “No. You have to let him go. He’s hurting; he’ll come to his senses in his own time, or if not, then what he does is up to him.”

“But he’s severed our VPN. I can’t even message him.”

“We need to think about you right now. You and Gerry. I don’t even know if this will work, and we need time to iron things out.”
 

“Besides,” Petal added, “we could really use his help with this. What if things don’t go right?”

“We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it. We could always enlist the help of Sasha and James Rober—”

“He’s a fucking traitor and liar. I wouldn’t trust him anywhere near me.”
 

Enna put her hands up. “Okay, okay. I’m sorry.”
 

The atmosphere in the room grew tense, and Petal knew it was her fault. It was bad enough that she lost Gerry and had him living inside her mind in some weird fucked-up way, but now she was on the verge of losing her oldest friend, mentor, and father figure.

Sure, their relationship over the years was a little odd, but the fact is that without Gabe, she wouldn’t be alive today. To see him so distraught killed her. It was the first glimpse into his previous life that she’d had, and seeing how that hope of him finding his family again was cruelly taken from him, she wished she could do something. Wished that she could go with him and help him exact his revenge.
 

But growing inside her mind, Gerry’s consciousness needed to be set free. She didn’t know how much longer she could hold him. Her memories were already mixing with his, and at times she heard his thoughts and words as if they were her own.

After a few moments of watching Enna prepare the operation room, Petal said, “So, do you have a body in mind to receive Gerry’s consciousness?”

“I do. It’s one I grew with the idea of increasing the cognitive connection bandwidth of the transcendents. After getting a close look at the AI that Gerry defeated at Cemprom, I saw a way that I thought I could design the nervous system and the neural cortex to accommodate a greater capacity AI personality.”

“Can I see it?” Petal asked.

“Sure.” Enna left the room and returned in a few minutes with a tall, tubular tank on a wheeled platform. Inside the tube a naked male floated like the clones James had kept. Even thinking about them and James brought bile to her throat. All those lies he told her... She took a deep breath, letting her anger go.
 

“He looks good,” she said, not thinking of what else to say. It didn’t look much like Gerry. It was more athletic, taller, and its face was younger. It had none of Gerry’s softness and kindness in its face. She wondered if it would have been possible to grow a clone body from Gerry’s, but then she remembered how damaged it was. After the battle, his body was buried with the others at a monument and memorial cemetery outside the Dome.

Petal thought it was a weird experience watching the burial of the person whose mind was now inside hers. That was when she first felt Gerry’s emotions. She already missed looking at him, being in his company. Or maybe that was just because he was there inside her, doing whatever a digitally uploaded and subsequently downloaded entity does.
 

“Would the body look different in any way, like the eyes and facial expressions, when the mind is downloaded?”

Enna thought for a moment. “I can’t say for sure, but there might be some change. The consciousness will have its own set of emotions, and that’ll affect how the nerves and muscles work, so there might be some similarity in their mannerisms.”

“How long will it take?” Petal asked.

“Surprisingly, not very long. For a regular transcendent AI personality download, it’s about a thirty-minute procedure. But we’re dealing with something far more complicated, and I’m still not entirely sure if this will work.”

Petal had put off thinking about the consequences of failure. It boiled down to either her losing her mind completely and turning into a vegetable or a homicidal lunatic, or destroying Gerry’s mind completely. There seemed no middle ground, like a headache or slight nausea for a few days. Petal saw it from Enna’s point of view, knew that it’d either be a wonderful success, and they’d get Gerry back, albeit in a different body, or it would be utter catastrophe.
 

“Story of my life,” Petal said aloud.

“Pardon?”

“Sorry, I was just thinking. Any chance there could be, like, some backup procedure? Or maybe some kind of... I don’t know... a contingency in case things get screwed up?”

“Not really,” Enna said, sitting on a stool next to Petal. She reached up and placed a hand on her shoulder. “The only thing I thought of was enlisting the help of Alpha & Omega to help with the integration, but given what happened the last time they were used, I’m not sure that’s wise.”

“When do you want to get started?” Petal asked.

Enna checked her watch. “It’s getting on for five, so if we start now, we should be finished by this evening and give you, and hopefully Gerry, the night to recover. We could wait, but from what you were saying, it seems you and Gerry are entwining in ever more complex ways, which will complicate any transfer. Even as it is, I’ll have to do quite a lot of manual work.”

“What do you mean manual work?” Petal had a terrible image of Enna poking about in her brain.

“Nothing too bad. It just means that I have to observe your neural network and make sure the right data is being downloaded. It’s okay; I’ve done it before in a related procedure. It’s not dangerous, as such. It just adds a little more time to it.”

“Oh God. We’re really going to have to do this, aren’t we?”

“It’s your call,” Enna said. “But we don’t know what will happen if you leave him in there long term.”

Petal closed her eyes and concentrated her mind. She tried to find Gerry in there amongst her thoughts, wanted to know what he was thinking. Was he aware of what she planned to do? Did he want her to go ahead with it? When nothing came to her, no instinct or warning, she opened her eyes. “Okay, let’s get it underway.”

Enna got Petal set up in the operating theatre. Various wires and sensors were attached to her body. A jack plug from her neck port was attached to a lead that came from the compound’s mainframe. After a shot of tranquilliser, Enna strapped Petal’s arms down for safety.
 

Whose exactly, she couldn’t be sure. To one side of the table, the tank with the destination body stood like a silent god waiting for its reanimation. The lights of the operating theatre dimmed. Along the walls, various status lights blinked, and a metre-tall, rectangular holoscreen stood at the end of the operating table. Like the smaller one that was next to her bed when she was at Criborg, a flowing stream of data filled the screen.
 

They became blurry until they were white stripes floating in front of her eyes.
 

The three overhead lights were sheer clouds, wide and diaphanous. In the background, Enna’s voice muffled, sounding as though it came from the end of a tunnel. And then another sound: Gerry’s mind screamed.

***

Something was terribly wrong. She’d never heard Gerry’s mind communicate before. There were a few vague emotions and memories; this was a real, audible scream of anguish. It woke her up, sending her body into a shock against the tranquillisers.
 

Warning notices flashed on the holoscreen. The data download spiked before flatlining.
 

Petal let out a throat-rending scream as her brain became a pyre, searing against her skull. Her heart pounded so hard she fully expected it to give out at any moment.
 

Gerry’s scream rattling around inside her head made it unbearable. She arched her body in response to the pain, every muscle fibre tensed with defiance.

“Stay calm,” Enna said, her voice ripe with panic as she busied herself at the control desk.
 

It was too late, though, the procedure had botched. Petal was in meltdown. She thrashed against her restraints, eventually breaking them. Sitting up, she yanked the lead from her neck port.
 

A smash of glass and the destination body broke its way out of the tube, sending the amnioticlike fluid gushing across the floor. It lurched out, snapping the cable attached to the rear of its head. As soon as it looked up, Petal recognised the look in its wide, crazy eyes.