Code Breakers Complete Series: Books 1-4 (89 page)

“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.

Chapter 23

Sasha cursed herself for breaking the slate so definitively. She’d even broken the RAM that held the location of Elliot’s central data-centre. Without that, she couldn’t get word back to Jimmy or Petal and Gabe about his whereabouts. If only she could have been stronger, stayed in the network longer, until she could memorise its address.
 

A shuffling noise made her spin round.

The man she’d tied up earlier had somehow got his arms free and launched at her, wide-eyed and frothing at the mouth. His weight fell onto her before she had time to set an appropriate stance, but she twisted her hips and used his momentum to fling them both to the base of the console desk.
 

“You bitch.” He clawed at her eyes, his hands talonlike as they scraped down her cheekbones, trying to dig into her flesh. Sasha pulled back, swatting his arms away before mounting his chest, her knees on either side of his ribs.
 

He bucked beneath her, but she clung on and rained down a series of heavy roundhouse punches to his face, turning it into a bloody pulp. The fight-frenzy took her, and she kept punching long after he was unconscious. She only stopped when a hand gripped her shoulder from behind.
 

She spun and saw Malik hobbling on a crudely made crutch created from bent metal pieces of his chair.
 

“Easy. It’s just me,” he said, his voice low. He ducked down to Sasha’s position, not wanting to be seen by the factory workers through the wide console room window. “It’s okay. Calm down.”

He wrapped a hand around her bloodied, cracked fist and gently pulled it away.
 

“We’ve got to stop them,” she said, crouching off the man’s body but remaining below the window. “There’s a guy with a box of chips. We’ve got—”

“It’s okay. I... dealt with him. I have the chips here.” Malik pointed to a case placed by the closed door.

That’s when she noticed the bruises and swelling around his left eye. It looked like an emerging eggplant. “Are you hurt?”

He smiled. “I’m always hurt these days. Listen, did you manage to find a way out of the network? Get word to anyone?”

“I did, but I don’t know if it got out, or if it did, who read it. We’ve got to deal with this situation ourselves until we know for sure who’s on our side. Fuentes might have the entire Security Service and Cemprom working for her, for all we know. We can’t trust anyone but ourselves.”

“Agreed. So what’s the plan?”

“I think I can get into the computers for the factory and disable the machinery. Maybe that’ll cause a distraction, and we can make an escape. I need to get word to Jimmy, tell him about Elliot.”

“What about him?”

“I saw him, his network. It’s closer than we thought. It’s somewhere in the city.”

“Must be here, surely.”

She shook her head. “No, I would’ve known if it was. This place is definitely just an external part of the greater network. I detected traffic coming from, or at least being routed through somewhere else in this pox-ridden city.”

“I can only think of one other place that would have that kind of computing power: Cemprom. That’s where Jasper tried to hack into, after all. Who knows what they have in their underground secure bunkers?”

“Well, we can’t do shit until we know for sure, and I’m afraid my evidence is fucked.” She pointed to the fragments of the slate, now littered on the floor.
 

“Can you get into these systems, find us a way out, and shut down the production? I doubt we’ve got long with three dead bodies waiting to be found. Not to mention the both of us missing.”

“Fuck it. I’ll try. You watch the door, and I’ll see what I can do.”

Without the slate to connect to the ronin’s network, she’d have to go directly into the console. The thought of Elliot’s mind lurking in the dark corners of the network like a massive and terrible shadow of intelligent malignancy, stalking her every move, made her throat dry and tight.

She connected with the manual cable from the console desk, plugging it into her neck port. Unlike Petal, she didn’t have a suite of internal systems to allow her to connect and hack things remotely. She needed an appropriate slate or a direct connection. The latter brought a host of risks, not least being a high-bandwidth gateway for Elliot to get into her head. She doubted he would so easily fall for her trick a second time.
 

Still, she and Malik had to get out, so she figured the risk was worth it.

Hunkering down in front of the desk, she waited for her network chip to log her on. The system had the usual Legacy-inspired operating system interfaces. She navigated through the files, spoofing the login credentials of the unconscious man lying next to her.
 

An interface browser represented, in three-dimensional graphics, the topography of the network in the warehouse district. The place had thousands of computers interconnected, some so small and insignificant their only task was to record the time each door opened and closed.

Then there were servers whose role was to deliver job orders to the factory. She followed the traffic from the node. Like a bloodhound, nose to the trail, she stalked the scent through myriad connections from one node to the next, until she came to a much larger capacity machine: the central factory management server.
 

Branching off that main server were the individual machines on the conveyer line.
 

“I think I’ve found something,” she said.

“What is it?”

“A server. If I can overload it, I should be able to shut down the factory.”

“Go for it.”

The server in question was wrapped within a level of encryption. She didn’t have the kind of cracking tools Gabe and Petal would have used, but she did have knowledge of encryption systems thanks to hours of drudgework for Jimmy, during his numerous projects.

This particular system wasn’t half as complicated as the stuff she’d worked on before, but still, it’d take time.

She got to work, probing the various ports and connections to the server to ascertain a weak point. She’d only need one small entry zone, a stream of data to piggyback so she could manipulate the system. A scanning algorithm she’d used before would do the job. Still using the console man’s credentials, she opened a file and mentally typed out a series of code that when executed would test the server for vulnerable areas.

A status bar ticked over when she activated it. It would take a few minutes to deliver its results. She could’ve perhaps come up with a more elegant solution, but under stress she just didn’t have the skills equal to her sister or Gerry. He could probably crack the server with just a couple cycles of his brain, she thought.
 

“We’ve got a problem,” Malik said. His voice sounded as though it came from underwater.
 

The scanner still had three minutes to complete.
 

“What is it?” She opened her eyes and allowed her mind to drop the Legacy interface but remained connected. Malik was crouched by the case of chips to the side of the door, the scalpel in his hand as if readying it to strike.
 

“I think they’ve found the bodies. A group of five ronin rushed from the factory and down the hall. I doubt it’ll be long before they come back and realise what’s happened.”

“Fuck, we need to wait. I need to get into the server. Got two and a half minutes to run yet.”

“And then what?”
 

“I get into the server and destroy the files, stop the machines running.”

“But what about the network? We need to get a message out. We’re sitting ducks here.”

“I’m trying. I wasn’t made for this kind of work.”

She heard a commotion coming from the factory floor: raised voices and the clatter of feet across metal gantries. Peeking over the console desk and out of the window, she saw a group of fifteen armed guards rushing across the metal mezzanine straight for the console room. The man in front pointed to her location.

“Heads up, Mal, got a bunch of guards coming this way from the factory.”

“Shit, that’s all we need.”

“Oh, fuck me, there’s worse!”

Malik turned to her; his face said it all.

The console operator’s body began to shake and spasm. His chest heaved, and frothy spittle came from his mouth. Smoke snaked from the ronin-chip on his wrist. She knew what was coming next and berated herself for being so stupid and forgetting. She’d already seen how Elliot had manipulated the chip on the nurse. She ducked away, bracing herself.

Chapter 24

Gabe’s internal system told him it was approaching 20:00. The storm had died down. The cacophonous scraping against the bunker’s ceiling had ceased, leaving behind it the low hum of the power source and the console. A number of ronin moved in the other room. An hour previously he had heard typing; no doubt they were updating their boss of the situation.
 

“I’m nearly there,” Gabe mumbled through his gag as he rubbed the fabric ties around his wrists against the sharp edge of the racking frame.
 

For at least three hours he’d struggled with his hands behind his back, scraping the ties against the metal. Bit by bit he managed to slice through the material.

It was clear to him that these so-called ronin were not well trained. They were just regular citizens incorporated into Elliot’s remote army, and, luckily for him and Petal, their captors had made a number of mistakes.
 

Not killing them was the first; leaving them alone for so long the second. In this instance, he was glad the storm had stuck around for as long as it did. It had probably kept him and Petal alive by not allowing the ronin to finish their job and return to Libertas with the Alpha parts and their corpses.

A few minutes later his hands were free, the fabric finally splitting.
 

He wiped the sweat from his face and collapsed forward, allowing his sore arms to rest and recuperate. He pulled the gag from his mouth, breathing in the arid air, which was as sweet as anything he’d experienced. The corners of his lips were cracked and sore, but he was free.

“Finally. Fuck that hurts.” He rotated his shoulders and arms, trying to work out the soreness that had developed during his frantic cutting action.

Getting to his feet, he approached Petal on the other side of the room. The shadows wrapped around her so that he could only just make out her shape and the dull pink of her hair.
 

He kneeled beside her and took the gag from her mouth.

“Are you okay, Gabe?” she said, her voice dry and cracked.
 

“I’m okay. You?”

“Doing all right. Gerry’s kind of helped—kept me calm, you know?”

“If only I did, girl. I’ll get ya free in a minute. I need to find something with a sharp edge.”

The ronin did a better job on Petal’s bonds. Along with cloth strips they had tied her wrists to the metal frame with plastic zip-ties. Unfortunately, they had taken his katana, and Petal’s spikes would be no good with the way her hands were tied so tightly together.

The room didn’t seem full of options.

Only a glimmer of light from outside dared to breach the door around its rim. It wasn’t enough for him to navigate around, but he padded about the room with his hands out to find a tool or a blade. The shelving racks had nothing of note, just boxes of out-of-date ration powders, a few plastic boxes of basic medical supplies, and dead H-core fuel cell batteries.
 

He heard movement from outside. It spurred him to hurry his search for something useful when he thought about the bodies, the dark shapes piled into the corner like a mound of meat.

It was a long shot, but perhaps one of them would have something of use on them. And he knew that he had to look anyway. With the photo of his mother and him, plus the book, it was obvious his father and his people had stayed here.

A dread gripped him as he approached the pile.
 

They didn’t smell like death. He had come to know that stench well over the years, which told him that if they were who he thought they were, they would have not been dead long. In the darkness, he saw and felt no evidence of blood or other liquids on the floor or around the sheet that hung over them.

He reached out and gripped the edge. His hands shook.
 

Slowly, as if by revealing too fast he’d increase the odds of confirming his nightmarish thoughts, he pulled away the sheet.