Code Breakers Complete Series: Books 1-4 (79 page)

Before she could say anything, something cold struck her on the back of the neck, tensing her body, making her rigid.

Chapter 11

Petal and Gabe shared a bowl of steaming broth made from one of the food parcels they brought with them: a synthetic protein-based meal. Not the worst thing in the world, but not exactly the best either.
 

They were sat either side of the workbench within Shelley’s workshop compartment in the gutted passenger plane. Tools and electronic parts hung from the ceiling—all in arm’s reach of her position at the bench—while the racking along the rear wall behind her overflowed with boxes of scrap metal, wires, and salvaged components from the various vehicles and planes within her graveyard of a complex.
 

Shelley wore a magnifying visor over her head. She had swept her wire-entwined hair back, held together with a length of power cord. She sat hunched over the innards of Alpha, its motherboard blackened with damage. From the main data port, a cable connected the motherboard to Shelley’s rack of analysis devices: five holoscreens arranged in a grid, each one displaying a different stream of data.
 

The analysis setup wasn’t common. In all of Gabe’s travels, he’d only ever seen one person with a similar setup: the mad hacker Seca. Shelley had found it when she first came to this place. Many others followed her after finding out what tech was available, but through a desire to survive, Shelley had made it her own. As for the others that had tried to do the same... they didn’t quite make it, and Shelley had discovered a new food source.
 

During the war, the place was used as a central flight hub for the China-Russian alliance. Everything from top-of-the-line stealth fighters, bombers, passenger planes, and ground vehicles were placed here ready for deployment across eastern Asia.
 

Most never got the chance to get off the ground. Not once the Family ended the war with their EMPs and nukes. Although this area managed to avoid most of the nukes, it was a primary target for the EMPs, grounding most of the planes.
 

A great proportion of the aircraft within this compound were brand new, hot off the Russian assembly lines. They hadn’t seen a minute of conflict. Trillions of dollars’ worth of technology, and they just sat there, useless.
 

Well, not that useless, it turned out. Shelley had begun to work on stripping them of resources and parts. Gabe had no idea what she was building. Although in their previous meeting, she had mentioned she was trying to get one of the planes back to full operation. It was the information to do just that that had prompted her to hire Gabe and Petal for the job.
 

Gabe swallowed the broth, trying to forget the sights he’d seen when he and Petal had returned with the information: the bodies, the skins. They’d left before concluding the deal. He’d discovered Shelley had no plans of allowing them to leave alive, or in one piece, once they handed over the information.
 

“Well?” Petal said, wiping her chin on her sleeve. “How’s she looking?”

“Burnt to a fucking crisp.” Shelley sat back, tapping the needles of the electronic multimeter against the edge of the metal workbench like a drumstick. “But, it’s not the end of the world, not yet, anyway.”

“So ya can fix it?” Gabe said, leaning forward to peer at the streams of data. It appeared the motherboard, although severely damaged, was still functioning on some level. Its input/output channels were still operational. As were the memory chips.
 

“I can’t promise it’ll be as it was before,” Shelley added, “but if you can get me the parts, I’m confident this sucker can be patched up enough to be useable. Which reminds me, you never did say what you needed this for or what was so special about it.”

“Ya right,” Gabe said. “We didn’t. Ya don’t need to know. It doesn’t affect ya either way. We just need it back up and running.”

“Well, if you can find me a new quantum bridge and the right transistors, I can probably get it running again. There’s a few repairs, mostly to the GPU interface, that I can do here, but for the rest I’ll need those parts.”

“It’s no good,” Petal said. “We need to use the existing parts.”

Shelley narrowed her eyes. “Why?”

“It’s not important to you. We just need you to get it up and running again.”

“Not like this I can’t. You get me the parts and perhaps I can cobble something together that uses most of the original hardware.”

“It’s the best we’re gonna get,” Gabe said to Petal. “It’s a risk, but we don’t have any other option.”

“You’re right, Gabe.” Petal sighed and then asked Shelley, “So the processor isn’t totally screwed?”
 

Shelley pointed to the right-most holoscreen. “That’s the I/O for it. See that flow of information? That’s coming from the processor, the quantum core. But here’s the odd thing. I ain’t doing anything to it; it’s calculating stuff on its own. I’ve not even booted the OS. It’s like its running stuff itself. So although it seems faulty, it’s running perfectly—on its own. I’ve never seen anything like this before. Something this old shouldn’t be able to do this.”

Petal smiled at Gabe, a smile of hope, the smile of someone who had found a lost friend, or had good news about a loved one once presumed dead, now alive. Gabe refused to get his hopes up. Experience had told him to never get too excited.
 

Still, he got up from his seat and stood beyond Shelley, leaning forward and inspecting the stream of data. His blood cooled, and his muscles tensed in his shoulders. Without realising, he was grinding his teeth.

“What is it?” Petal asked.
 

Gabe looked to Shelley, then Petal. He didn’t want to go into details with the crazy old woman listening in. She was the type that information could be used as a weapon, and despite agreeing to the deal, he trusted her as far as he trusted anyone—not at all.
 

“Nothing,” Gabe said. “Just eager for us to get this fixed and move on. No offence, Shelley.”

“None taken, Coffee. I don’t like the stink of you two much either. Quicker this is done and you both fuck off, the better.”

“Charming as ever. Petal, come outside with me for a moment. Let’s get some fresh air and let Shelley continue her work.”

Petal and Gabe stood and made to leave the workshop. Gabe stopped on the way out, taking one of Shelley’s slates from the workbench. “Can I borrow this for a few minutes? I just need to check something out.”

“Yeah, if it’ll get you two out of my face for a while, but don’t mess with it.”

Gabe gave her a begrudging smile of thanks and exited the plane. Petal followed.
 

They walked away from the plane Shelley had made her home, and approached the fence surrounding the compound. Gabe stopped and turned to Petal.

“What’s up?” Petal asked. “Something wrong?”

“Alpha. That data stream?”

“What of it?”

“It’s Elliot. He’s everywhere. Look.”

Gabe showed her Shelley’s slate.
 

“What am I looking at?” Petal asked as she took the slate and stared at the screen. Gabe had downloaded a programme via his internal computer. It was a basic data analysis tool that he used regularly for his various hacking jobs. It looked into network traffic and identified the kinds of data they were, whether it be graphical images, text, code, or as in this case, something else entirely.
 

“Ya’re looking at dark traffic,” Gabe said. “I noticed it shortly after we arrived. Our private network is okay, but then that’s only because it’s encrypted between us. All radio frequencies are being smothered by something. When Shelley got to work on Alpha, I recognised the data patterns from when Elliot dragged you into Alpha. It’s a kind of scrambled anti-data, it’s the stuff that he’s made from: his uploaded consciousness.”

Petal blinked, opened her mouth, and then closed it, trying to understand the ramifications. Gabe waited while she worked it out. After a few seconds she squinted at the screen, taking in the flow of dark traffic. “Shit,” she said. “That means he’s... fuck. He’s in all the networks, even Shelley’s.”

“Yeah, that’s what I first noticed. Even before she hooked up Alpha, I saw the data on her holoscreens. At first it just looked like the regular flow of data she’d be used to. There’s the node in Baicheng, and it seems she’s hacked into the Red Widow’s systems too, but it ain’t right. He’s got in everywhere that ain’t secured. Can’t be long before he gets into Cemprom’s network in the Dome.”

“Where’s the data source coming from, though? One of the satellites, surely?”

“It makes sense,” Gabe said. “As far as we knew, Elliot was being partly held in the Family’s satellite that you and Criborg blew up to gain access to the Meshwork, but after Gerry had dragged yours and his mind out of Elliot’s influence and we shut off Alpha and Omega, his code base had to go somewhere, it had to exist somewhere else. With so few computers around, and fewer networks, he’d need somewhere large enough to hold his vast capacity—there must be loads of old satellites up there waiting to be used.”

“So what do we do now?”

“Hunt him down. Kill two birds with one stone.”

“How’s that?” Petal asked. She traced her gaze across his head, seeing his scars.

Gabe had noticed that since he shaved his head, she’d been staring at them, no doubt wondering about their origins. Perhaps one day he would tell her what happened.
 

“Shelley needs parts, right? And we need a network. Who do we know that’s likely to have that out here?”

Petal sighed. “Xian? Really, Gabe?”

“Yeah. We’ll be there in a few hours if the mad old bitch will give us some transport. Xian was one of the first to establish a network with his microwave and radio transceivers. If anyone’s got the gear to hack a satellite, it’s him. And if I’m right in thinking that’s where Elliot’s code base is... well, we can try a little old-school techxorcism, and stop this madness at the source.”

“Now that’s a fucking great plan,” Petal said. “We need to let Enna know. And Sasha, James, and Fuentes, as they’re dealing with the ronin-chips.”

“Aye, that’s easier said than done, though. I tried to get in contact when we first arrived, but with no Meshwork and the radio frequencies being scrambled by something—probably Elliot—I couldn’t find a connection to anything before. I had hoped to use Shelley’s network, but it looks like that’s been compromised, too. We’re gonna have to find another way.”

“We’ll have to do it at Xian’s if he ain’t compromised.”

“That’s the plan. We can take one of Shelley’s quad-bikes. I noticed she had a couple back there. They weren’t there when we were last here, so I’m guessing they’re operational.”

“There’s one other thing we can deal with when we get there,” Petal said.
 

Gabe said nothing.
 

“Gabe? You missed something out,” Petal said, taking his silence for misunderstanding.
 

He knew what it was, and he purposely didn’t want to talk about it: his family, and their people.

“Gabe?”

“Yeah, I know.”

Gabe took the slate back and headed back to Shelley’s plane, trying to ignore the sounds and images of those poor bastards being slaughtered by the Widows—and the one image that had yet to leave him: the frail visage of his father, the fear in his eyes, the resolute expression as he walked forward in that line...

No matter what Gabe would do or see, he’d never forget that. Never forget that it was his fault that his father had ended up in that line. But there would be time yet for Gabe to avenge his father, time yet for Gabe to make the Widows pay. More death never solved anything, but it was the only thing that kept him going, kept him moving forward. If he dwelt on it for too long, he’d be paralysed with guilt and grief. Right now he had not only his personal demons to slay, but also he had a new city, a new people, and a new peace to protect from an out-of-control insane posthuman entity.

He failed his family; he refused to fail his friends.
 

Back inside, he stood behind the hunched old woman and squinted at the holoscreens. It was definitely that same dark traffic pattern he’d seen before. He thought about how much of the truth he should tell her. He certainly couldn’t tell her everything. She was so damned crazy she would probably welcome Elliot.
 

“There’s a virus in your system,” Gabe said.
 

Shelley turned her head and pulled the visor up to her forehead. “What the hell are you talking about now?”

Gabe pointed to the holoscreen and handed her the slate. “Check the traffic. You’re only on a small network; it don’t generate that much data. You’ve got a virus in your system, and worse, it’s trying to access Alpha. That’s where all that spontaneous computation is coming from. It’s trying to protect itself.”

Shelley squinted at him, giving him an expression like she’d just been handed a rotten turd. But she looked closer at the slate, then back to the holoscreen. “Well, fuck me. How did I not notice that?”

“You better get off the network. Now.”

“But, I need—”