Chapter 28

I am outside and it’s getting dark. The alley is deserted but, humping two bags over my shoulder, I am extra careful. I hear a noise at the very far end where the shadows bleed into deep darkness.

The Hub is not the kind of place where you want to take your chances when the deck is not stacked for you. I have a brief vision of Regulators with dark insignia on their lapels or maybe the Hub’s special brand of muggers.

I take off, the bags weighing heavy on me and my boots striking the Hub surface beneath me with exaggerated force. Whatever was in that alley is soon left behind.

Running while weighed down is never easy. I take care to pick my route so I don’t run into a crowd. I have the sense that I am being followed but tell myself that this is me being paranoid. If it was Regulators I would have been picked up already and if it was muggers, well…

I run.

Out of breath and within reach of RIM Corp, Regulator HQ in the Hub. I used the time I was running to clear my head and formulate a plan. The easiest, I know, is never the best.

I could go in all guns blazing. Make so much red dust that there will be more tales told about me, but that’s not really my style. There are Regulators in there who don’t deserve that. So here I am, hiding behind the last available cover, watching RIM Corp carefully through a pair of augmented reality binoculars that give me all sorts of telemetrics.

I think to myself that this must be partly what Reed feels like all the time. The thought of the codebreaker adds to my sense of sadness and drip-feeds my anger. I notice I have used the present tense yet I have no evidence that he is, indeed, alive. The thought momentarily distracts me. Never a good thing to happen in the Hub.

“Daydreaming?” Spoken softly, off to my right, and I get to my feet. Fast. My right hand is already reaching for my blaster when I recognize the voice through the whispered undertones.

“Raynar?”

The Regulator steps out from behind cover. Reed on his heels. I feel like hugging them both but the gesture would be out of place right now and I have not forgotten what I am here to do.

“Missed us?” asks the Regulator. He sounds matter-of-fact but I sense there is anger in his voice.

“What happened?” I ask.

“The Jackal happened,” he says. “We were clear of the docks, Ellie and her uncle going home, Reed and I thinking of getting somewhere we could spend a day or two figuring out what to do next. The Jackal’s men intercepted Ellie, killed her uncle and his hired muscle. Took the girl prisoner. Reed here intercepted messages from across the grid.”

I nod. His words fill in all the blanks. “How did you find me?” I ask.

“Oh, that was Reed,” says Raynar.

I look over at Reed and the codebreaker looks sheepish. Then: “I put a tracer on you. As a precaution,” he says at last. Looks down.

“You tagged me?” I am trying to remember how it could have happened.

“Back at Dock 17,” he says, seeing me frowning. He understands I am thinking back. “All that melee with Tessa and those goons in black. I thought that if you took off and we needed you we had no way of finding you. Plus…” He pauses and shuffles his feet a little, looking at the ground. “All that Red Reaper stuff. There’s a huge reward out for you. I thought it wouldn’t hurt knowing where you are.” He lifts his head to look at me now.

My reputation is a burden as well as a boon. I understand why he did what he did. “Where? Where’s the tag?” He does that thing he does behind his eyes. The pupils momentarily unfocus and then I feel the slightest buzz at the back of my neck. Just under the hairline. Clever. Codebreakers.

“It’s off,” he says.

I rub my hand along the hairline and it comes away with the thinnest of skin scales. Almost entirely transparent. No wonder I never felt it.

“Why are you here?” More to the point.

“We’re here to help,” from Raynar.

“Yeah, no way you’re doing this alone,” confirms Reed.

In my life, most times, I have operated alone. Sure, I make and use friends and allies here and there but really, because they usually die, I prefer to work alone. That way the nightmares I have late at night are not populated with people I liked.

“No way,” I say and mean it. They have no idea what they are getting into.

“Yes way,” says Raynar. Childish retort really. I shrug. Begin to turn away. I know I need to get rid of them both. “What’s your plan anyway?”

I turn back to look at him. He stands cocky, hands on hips. He knows now that he can’t really take me even if he tried his hardest but still. “I’m going to make a diversion. Infiltrate it and then clear the rooms one by one until I find Ellie and free her,” I say. It sounds crazy even to me but I haven’t really had a lot of time to come up with a plan and now I am just playing for time.

“That’s insane!” says Reed. “How long do you think you’ll last in there?”

He has a point but then again they don’t quite know everything about me. I have survived some pretty tough odds in my life.

“If three of us worked it wouldn’t it be easier? Improve the odds of getting Ellie out alive?” asks Raynar. It’s a reasonable question and I cannot fault the logic of his asking. While I was running I thought of a plan. A couple actually. My brain used the time to clear out its thinking. What I said to Raynar and Reed is correct. It is one of the plans that occurred to me, but only one of them.

It occurs to me, as I am about to open my mouth, that I may be handing out death sentences. I pause. Mouth open.

“Is a sound going to come out some time?” Raynar asks. His sense of humor is insufferable at times.

“Well?” Even Reed is impatient.

Why do people rush in to die but fail to apply the same haste to living a life? The thought has preoccupied me before. I have no answer to it. Not yet.

“There may be a way,” I say. “We might be able to pull something off without killing anyone or dying ourselves.”

“That would be a trick worthy of the Red Reaper,” Raynar says.

“It will take all of us. And a lot of running and climbing,” I say.

“We can do it,” says Reed. He really doesn’t know what he is letting himself in for.

I begin detailing my plan. Reed is the first one to understand it. He pulls up a schematic from a Hub archive. It shows RIM Corp from above in 3D. We begin to carve out our roles in this, look at each part we have to play in detail, think of alternative scenarios.

Ping. Time’s up. I know that sound.

“Well, are you there?” The Jackal’s voice is all choked up with barely suppressed rage. We all momentarily look at the comms device at my waist and then we all silently nod.

We are on!

I raise the device to my lips and answer: “I am here. The girl?”

“Let me see you.” The Jackal has a sense of humor then.

“Not a chance. You think I am stupid?”

“You killed my sister. That was a really stupid decision.”

“Your sister had it coming. Besides, I saved her first.” I don’t expect the Jackal to understand this. But he doesn’t have to. All I need to do is keep him talking long enough for Reed to work his magic.

On cue Reed and Raynar take off. They run hunched over. Each holding some of the toys I got from Snug’s little toy shop. Telemetry beacons, 3D projectors, some really advanced satellite imaging stuff. They are busy running like hell, setting up an electronic perimeter around RIM Corp as they go. It’s going to be funny. I don’t think a Regulator HQ has ever been under siege before. This one is going to be one for the history books.

I am banking on the Jackal doing two things. First, living up to his name and trying to hunt me down quickly and take me alive. And second, double-crossing me, which means that Ellie is not anywhere easy for me to get to.

RIM Corp follows standard Regulator rules. It is offices upon offices on the outer layer, followed by training suites, living quarters and finally, in the innermost layer, holding cells.

“Are you coming in or not?” The Jackal’s voice comes in again. Tense. Angry.

“Yeah. I am.”

I hear the first siren going off. Reed and Raynar must have finished putting all the gear in place. On the far side of the RIM Corp building, the side I cannot see because it is furthest away from me, I see flares going off and what looks like smoke. It has started.

“You’re dead!” the Jackal hisses through the comms link and then the device goes dead.

I use the time to run as fast as possible to the far corner of the RIM Corp building.

Normally it would be covered by sophisticated electronic surveillance but the equipment I bought from Snug is designed to piggyback on existing electronic grids. The AI system governing it raises a parallel echo that mirrors what is going on around a specific perimeter but then scrubs it clean of intruder data.

RIM Corp would be hardened against something like this, of course. But I am banking on them not knowing quite the level of sophistication I have brought to bear. Plus Reed.

Reed, actually, in my revised plan, has become the ace up my sleeve.

AI systems are not as smart as most people think they are. They have heuristics that guide them and there is a learning algorithm at their core that helps them adapt to their environment. But they still need to learn new things every time and when time and data are not on their side they can actually be pretty dumb. But they are fast.

With Reed guiding it the system receives training data from the second we deploy it. Plus Reed fine-tunes the parameters. Right now, as Raynar, Reed and I run to the RIM Corp building and start climbing up one of the steep walls that has no windows, the system renders us invisible. All the surveillance equipment looking down at us is being overridden and told to scrub us from its memory.

To confuse the system further the AI throws up false flags. Sets off perimeter alarms in areas we are nowhere near.

Carrying some extra equipment still, the climb up a steep wall is not easy. I use grapplers on feet and hands, old-school ninja style. There is no electronic signature and because there is no power pack either I can guarantee they will not run out and strand me.

I work up quite a sweat and then Reed’s voice crackles in the intercom in my ear: “Ellie’s on the twelfth floor, not the basement,” he says.

My guess is he has been interrogating the smart system that runs the building. I do not ask how he knows or if he is sure. I take it that if he says so, he is sure. “OK,” I say. I keep on climbing.

I break through a skylight on the twelfth using a heat charge to melt a hole in the glass. It’s efficient, quiet and fast.

“I am going to find you.” The Jackal’s voice comes through the comms device on my belt. I dial down the sound. The last thing I want is him giving my position away when I am inside.

“I thought I was dead,” I say deadpan. I want to enrage him further.

“We shall find you!” he yells back. This time I kill the comms. He is angry, which means he is not thinking clearly.

“Reed, Raynar, you guys OK?” I whisper.

Reed’s voice comes in first: “Peachy.”

Then Raynar: “They can’t spot us and we’re not out in the open. We’re cool.”

Relieved, I push on.

Inside the building I stop to get my bearings. Reed’s schematics showing me the layout come to mind. There are strobes flashing ahead and the building is partially in darkness inside. My guess is this is their lockdown mode. There will be cameras everywhere but thanks to Reed and Snug’s clever toys I am invisible to them.

I run down a corridor, find a door, descend half a floor on a flight of steps and then find another corridor to get through.

By the time I find where Ellie is being kept I am out of breath. A semi-permanent condition for me this run, I think to myself.

The room she is in is old-style on purpose. Door with a heavy lock. No electronic access. The klaxons calling emergency in some other part deep inside the building have drawn everyone else away. Reed’s work is genius.

I give the door a few heavy kicks -

and watch the lock buckle. The door swings open with a thud against the wall. Ellie is inside, curled into a tight ball against the far wall. Even in the low-level lighting of the room I can see the bruises on her face.

“Sef!” She looks up, surprise showing on her face.

“Yeah, I know. I didn’t expect to be here either,” I tell her. I help her up. She grimaces. “Can you run?”

“Well enough.”

“OK then. Let’s go.” To the device in my ear I murmur: “Reed, we’re heading back. Can you make sure Ellie doesn’t show?”

“Got it.” Reed is in working mode. His words sparse. Ellie will be scrubbed from all devices just like we are.

We run like mad.

I have my blaster out but we don’t meet anyone else. It makes me wonder at the quality of the cyber diversions thrown up by the equipment Snug supplied and the scenarios being boosted by Reed and Raynar. We get to the melted window without killing anyone.

The climb down is harder. I am supporting Ellie this time and she is heavier than she looks. I am glad for the strength training I have done in the past.

“Once we hit the ground we shall have to sprint to the perimeter. Then arrange to meet up with Raynar and Reed.”

“They’re here?” Ellie looks up. Despite whatever pain she is in she seems in good spirits.

I nod. Notice how she lets a smile flit across her face.

We sprint to the perimeter and then crawl the last few hundred yards to the very edge of the cyber protection offered to us.

We both get under cover. When we can both safely look back at the RIM Corp building we see the magnitude of the cyber attack and I realize just why the building was so empty inside.

There are knots of armed men running in several directions outside. Plumes of smoke and flashing lights are coming from several points of the massive building itself. Internal systems and false alarms. System malfunctions and false readings. RIM Corp was just never ready for that.

I wonder whether I should send one last message to the Jackal but I hear steps just behind us and turn. Reed is coming towards us, face flushed with sweat. “Their comms are down too,” he gasps. “Can you believe it? The poor souls are isolated. Completely.”

He waits for Raynar to come over before he explains what he has done. The heavy-duty AI of the system I brought broke internal encryptions and rewrote all attack and defense algorithms. The RIM Corp building, in effect, started fighting with itself. It still is. “It’ll take them hours to sort this stuff out. By then we shall be long gone.”

“And Ellie?” I ask.

“Well,” Reed says, “the building reports her down in one of the heavy security holding cells in the basement. One that’s destined to blow up as a gas main adjacent to it explodes.”

It is almost an anticlimax. We see Raynar and Ellie to a launch pad. Quick tickets out of here are purchased.

It feels easy. Too easy, but I know that only in retrospect.

“Where will you go?” I ask.

“My uncle’s house. Look for my dad.”

“We’ll make sure she gets there safely,” says Raynar. He puts out a hand. I take it. “You?”

“I shall go too. Shortly,” I say. I am lying. I have a few loose ends to tie up first.

They both nod.

“Shall we see you again?” from Reed.

“Doubt it. You shouldn’t even have seen me the first time.” He and Raynar exchange smiles.

I hang about long enough to make sure they make it safely on board and their flight takes off. I then leave, melting through back streets and dark alleys. Taking the longest route from the launch pad back to Hub Central.

Running so as not to use transport and avoiding people whenever I can.

There is something still left for me to do. Before I go.