Code Breakers: Beta Read online

  That got him fuming again. She so enjoyed how his face puffed up ready to explode.

  He stepped towards her, sucking in his breath, making himself big and dominating. “How dare you!”

  Petal dashed to the side and circled him so fast he had barely time to consider what had happened. She extended her chromed spikes and brought them up to his ribs. He stiffened at the touch of those sharp points.

  “Just remember who you’re talking to, General. I’m not one of your goons to be ordered around like some dumb soldier. And if you disrespect me, or anyone else for that matter, once more, or pull that sexist bullshit, I’ll make you a eunuch. You understand me?”

  He tensed. Petal could feel the waves of hatred crash against her, but she kept her spikes digging into his ribs, pushing that little bit further. After a few more seconds, with the place quietened to a hush, Vickers almost choked it out like it was something stuck in his throat.

  “Okay, I understand.”

  Petal retracted her spikes.

  Vickers spun round, aimed a great meaty fist at her with a wild swing, but Petal was too quick, and stepped forward into his lunge. Taking his weight and momentum she pivoted on her hip and sent him crashing to the ground face first, while gripping his wrist, pulling his arm back, and placing her boot on his back.

  “We could play this out all damned day, General. I suggest you swallow your pride, and stop trying to assert yourself like some prized cockerel. We need your strategizing and leadership, not your ego-driven nonsense.”

  “Okay, Petal. That’s enough.” Jimmy Robertson said as he dashed across to put his hands on her shoulders. “The General has certain problems, but can we try and keep a lid on all this. We don’t have a lot of time if we’re to make progress to Darkhan.”

  “Sure thing, Doc.” Petal lifted her boot and casually walked away to the same transporter that Sasha had boarded. She ignored the open-mouthed stares from the General’s men and women, and the gleeful smiles of the scientific lot.

  Jimmy was right though: she did feel quicker and more capable with her upgrades. It felt good to be active again, to feel alive and alert.

  When she climbed up inside the plane, Sasha was sitting in a seat in the middle row of three. She was fiddling with a slate. Petal slumped into the seat next to her.

  “You shouldn’t antagonise him like that,” Sasha said. “He’s not such a bad guy. He just has limited social skills.”

  “The guy’s a dick, and his ego will get people killed out there on the surface. You lot don’t know what it’s like up there. You’ve all been so sheltered down here, practising your military tactics with computer-generated enemies. You think it’ll be the same up there?”

  “I guess we’ll see,” Sasha said. “Look, the Meshwork’s getting busier. It seems the news has got out.”

  Petal looked at Sasha’s slate. A traffic analysis program counted the gigabytes of data flowing across the network. It wouldn’t be long before it was terabytes once those survivors out in the abandoned lands knew it was operational again.

  “That’s good. This will help us,” Petal said, thinking of finally getting back in touch with Gerry, and the others too. She wondered about Gabe and Enna, hoped they were safe.

  “Do you have an internal interface, for programming and such like?” Petal asked. She wondered given that she could access the same data and visual representations internally that Sasha was looking at on her slate.

  “No. Jimmy never gave me that capability. Mostly combat stuff.”

  “Gotcha,” Petal said. “Makes sense, I suppose.”

  “We kinda complement each other’s skill sets quite nicely, don’t ya think?”

  “I’d say we do.”

  While Sasha occupied herself watching the network grow, Petal checked her VPN connection with Gerry. She tried to access her internal router, send out a message, but there was no connection. The VPN tunnel was down, or Gerry was no longer running the server on his side. If he was even still alive.

  She ached not knowing what had happened to him or where he might be. Gabe had only said The Family took him. She tried to keep faith that he was still out there, waiting for her.

  She closed her eyes and tried to meditate while the boarding continued.

  After a few minutes of deep relaxation, Petal felt a nudge on her arm. Sasha.

  “Hey, we’re ready,” Sasha said. “Buckle up.”

  Robertson sat in the aisle to her right. He looked over. “Are you okay?”

  “Yeah, I’m okay. Looking forward to some rest. Is anyone staying behind with the other clones?”

  Robertson shook his head. “They’re coming with us. I couldn’t trust anyone to look after them.”

  “I thought they were dead?”

  “Not dead, in stasis.”

  “Yeah, that’s what I meant.”

  “I have to bring them with me,” Robertson said, a sudden seriousness crossing his face.

  She wondered if he had plans of trying to ‘fix’ them. She didn’t know what exactly went wrong with them, or what they did, but sentimentality aside, there was only one reason to keep them in stasis: so that you could bring them out of stasis in the future. Her line of thought broke with the ignition of the engines. The plane shuddered as the props spun up to speed.

  “Damn, I can’t believe we’re finally leaving,” Sasha said.

  “Don’t get too excited,” Petal said. “It ain’t paradise out there.”

  The thrust threw Petal back in her chair as the plane took off suddenly and vertically. Up and up they rose, the painted yellow numbers on the grey tunnel blurring past through the small windows either side of the cabin, and then the yellow smudges stopped, to be replaced with darkness.

  “We’re out,” Sasha said. “This is it!”

  The transporter, Condor, levelled off, turned westward. The sun peaked above the horizon in the east, bathing the sea in a pinkish gold light.

  “What’s the ETA, Doc?” Petal said, not knowing how fast these things were.

  “As I said, we’ll be there in about five hours. If we’re not interrupted.”

  To their side, Petal could see the other two planes: Falcon and Vulture. It felt good to know they had resources, people, and technology. It felt good to be surrounded by decent people. Something she wasn’t always sure of before. These were her people, but she felt a great deal of responsibility. It was like she was leading a gang of chicks to their first walk out in the real world.

  It was then she realised how weary she was. She just wanted to find Gerry and settle down. Be normal for a while. All this fighting was so tiring.

  But where the hell was he? While everyone got settled, she sat back, closed her eyes, and started scanning the Meshwork. She couldn’t find him, but then access had only recently become available and chances are he didn’t know yet.

  Petal created a quick encryption wrapper using a special subclass of Helix++ code. She knew that Gerry, if he were on the network, would recognise it instantly. Inside the wrapper she created a text file with details of what happened to her, where she was and explained that her new implant chip had a different network address. She sent out a self-repeating pattern program that created hundreds of instances of the message. He should eventually see this particular piece of encrypted data and hopefully know immediately whom it was from.

  Chapter 26

  The truck’s lights cut a slice through the early dawn of the abandoned lands. The white OLED beams illuminated the red dust devils as they moved closer to the Sludge: the great expanse of rotten earth. Darkhan and its corpse-towers had melted into the night behind them, and as far as they could tell, no drones or Red Widow vehicles had followed. Clearly they were more concerned with neutralising the threat in the tower.

  They had driven for two hours across the barren land, watching the sun come up, feeling the mild cool winds turn warmer, but not yet warm enough to really call it Spring. It’d be a few months before that would happen. The Cataclysm see
med to have shifted the seasons back by a couple of months.

  It was like a journey through time, Gerry thought. Seeing the tips of ancient temples poking out of the dust and cracked clay ground, surrounded by the rubble and detritus from towns that once supported an advanced and wealthy population. Areas of farmland sported great craters in place of fields of crops, the remnants of war and cruel reminders of the struggles for the post-Cataclysm survivors to feed themselves.

  Liza-Marie leaned forward from the cramped conditions in the back of the truck. “When you reach the shoreline of the Sludge, follow it north, and after a few kilometres you should spot a pair of half-destroyed stone buildings: beyond that is our sanctuary. We can regroup there. Get some rest, food, whatever.”

  “Other than the tower block you lot took us to, is this sanctuary of yours safe?” Gerry asked.

  “Yes, the block before that old hotel has a single story building. We can access a basement there that we have kitted out.”

  “Why didn’t you take Omega there instead of Darkhan?” Gerry asked.

  “We were already near Darkhan. One of our contacts arranged to transport us, but the Widows got to them first.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry.”

  Liza-Marie shrugged her shoulders. “Just part of the game these days.”

  “Well, that’s what we’re fighting for, and trying to put a stop to it all.”

  The Upsider leader stared past him and looked out of the windshield of the truck. Gerry knew she didn’t believe him. Didn’t believe they could make a difference.

  “Can you do me a favour?” Gerry asked her.

  “What?” Liza-Marie asked.

  “Keep an eye on Jess for a while. Make sure she’s okay.”

  She patted Gerry on the shoulder, “Of course.” She returned to the back of the truck. The atmosphere could cut wire. This group of people were a disparate bunch: a member of The Family’s security, Cheska the transcendent, a couple of Bachians, two Upsiders, and that strange waif of a girl Jess.

  What with Kaden and Steven back in the Dome, and now this girl, Gerry felt like some kind of kid magnet. He wondered if it wasn’t just his way of making up for the fact that those who he thought were his kids turned out to be just an illusion, a ploy to make him think he lived a normal life. Regardless if they turned out to be nothing but stand-ins, there was a hole there that needed filling, and seeing these kids struggle with life at such an early age was too much for him to ignore. He couldn’t protect them all, but neither could he turn a blind eye to those who stood right in front of him.

  “Ya gonna talk with The Family?” Gabe said from the seat next to Gerry’s, his elbow casually propped against the truck’s window.

  “I don’t want to. But I don’t have much choice. I have to at least give them chance to defend the Dome.”

  “What is it about that damned place, man? Always trying to protect it from one thing or another. What if ya just let it go?”

  Gerry thought about it for a minute. He had a good point. His entire life there had been a lie. The Family had used him, and were still trying to use him to bring them Petal

  Sure, there were many innocent people within the Dome, but weren’t they part of the problem? All the time they refused to question what was going on, happily playing the game that perpetuated the control and infringement on their freedoms. What if he did let the Dome stand on its own? What then?

  “It’s my home,” Gerry finally said. “As screwed-up as it is, I still have hope for it. If I stand by while these fanatics take it down, what then for humanity? An endless struggle for resources against a tyrannical organisation? We have that already with The Family.”

  “Ah, I get ya. Better the devil ya know, huh?”

  Gerry shrugged. “Something like that, I suppose.”

  “They must have done a real brainwashing job on ya up there on that space station.”

  “I could say the same thing about you and your special time with a bunch of lunatics.”

  “Easy boys,” Enna said, cutting them off. “Let’s focus on securing the servers and then we’ll figure out what to do next.”

  Gabe gave Gerry a smirk and for a short few seconds, Gerry wondered how good it would feel to finally slug him right in the face. Instead, via his AIA and internal display, he cut a video sequence recorded with his eye replacement of Red Widow’s forces in Darkhan.

  He packaged it up and sent it to Jachz, his liaison with The Family.

  Along with the video he appended the message:

  Jachz, thought you’d like to see this. A group calling themselves Red Widow have taken Darkhan and are amassing ranks to assault the Dome. I suggest you get to work assembling security and make plans to get everyone safe.

  All the time Gerry had stayed up on the space station, he hadn’t learned of what their military capability truly contained. He doubted it was much. The Cataclysm wiped out so many resources, and The Family had kept most of their citizens, or lab rats, safely within City Earth doing mundane tasks.

  Other than their UAV drones, he wasn’t sure exactly how many they had available. He hadn’t seen much in the way of military resources beyond their perimeter-stationed NearlyMen who were nothing more than dumb transcendent’s and the regular security staff: people like Malik, Bran and the two women who started off this whole adventure with the swift application of a stun-baton.

  They couldn’t stand up to a full-scale invasion. Malik’s crash-and-burn at GeoCity-1 told Gerry all he needed to know about their capability, if not their bravery.

  “Hey, there’s the two buildings,” Enna said, pointing out a pair of squat tumbled-down dwellings resembling nothing more than ruins carved from rock and rusted metal girders. Tall, sparse dried weeds climbed up the stone and concrete, reclaiming it, dragging it back to earth, erasing any evidence that humankind had ever been there.

  Liza-Marie leaned forward, directing Enna through the piles of rubble and dead buildings until they came to what looked like a cave entrance amongst a formation of boulders.

  “In there,’ Liza-Marie said.

  “Do you have power in there?” Gerry asked.

  “Yeah, some generators. We can use the fuel from the truck.”

  Enna managed to turn the truck around. She avoided colliding with the vast boulders that had fell from various skyscrapers and office buildings, and reversed into the hideout.

  She switched off the main lights, sending the place into darkness.

  “Everyone stay where you are for a second,” Gerry said.

  He got out and navigated his way around the truck. Behind the vehicle was a steel door with no obvious way of entry.

  “Hey, Liz, might need your help here,” Gerry said as he opened the rear truck door. The blue glow of Omega washed out, casting a wash of low blue light, enough for Liza to make her way out and approach the door. Within a few minutes, she had opened the door and flicked a switch that kicked in the generators. The place lit up with a string of low-energy bulbs, giving them plenty of light to get everyone into the bunker-like building.

  The two precious servers were placed at the rear of the ten-meter-square room. A metal shelving rack was attached to the left wall, upon which boxes of dried food and containers of water were neatly stored.

  In the middle of the room was a desk with a damaged holoscreen glowing a dull green. Although Liza assured him it was operational, the various cracks and scratches on its surface made gesturing a difficult operation.

  He’d have to use his internal interface instead.

  Enna set up a medical corner in the right side of the room. There were blankets that she used for beds, or just to keep the wounded warm while she used a medical kit to bandage, and apply anti-bacterial agents.

  Jess huddled into the corner with the grey woollen blanket around her. She still shivered as if the cold of Darkhan had permeated her bones. It’d take a while for her to warm through, he thought. She wore an adhesive Band-Aid around her neck.

  After h
elping Liza-Marie and Ghanus put the servers in place, Malik approached Gerry by the desk.

  “What did they say?”

  “Not heard back from them yet,” Gerry replied.

  “Did you tell them about the size of Red Widow’s force?”

  “Yeah, sent them a video clip from this,” Gerry taped his optical prosthetic. “I assume they’re analysing and preparing a response.”

  “So what now?” Malik asked.

  “We wait. Get warm, eat, and see what The Family are going to do before we decide.”

  “Look, Gerry, I wanted to thank you. You know, for saving my ass.”

  “I couldn’t leave you there to die now, could I?”

  “I wouldn’t blame you if you did the way I acted.”

  “You were just doing your job,” Gerry said trying to absolve some of the guy’s guilt. “You’re as much a puppet of The Family as anyone, it’s not like you had free choice.”

  “Well, that’s the point of all this, isn’t it?” Malik said. “Why you do what you do, why you refuse to be dictated to. We do have free choice. Just most of us ignore that fact and do what we’re told.”

  “Don’t beat yourself up about it,” Gerry said, standing from the desk and clasping him by the shoulder. “You didn’t have all the facts at hand. You lived in a reality created and controlled by The Family. I was much the same until my eyes were opened.”

  “Thanks to you, I can appreciate there’re other ideas out here,” Malik said. “And I wanted to let you know that you can count on me, whatever happens next. I owe you my loyalty.”

  “Thanks. I appreciate that,” Gerry said.

  Malik looked away before turning back to Gerry, screwing his face up and grimacing slightly.

  “What is it?” Gerry asked.

  “If we go back to the Dome, I’d like for us to find my brother before the crap hits the fan. He’d be useful to us, I’m sure.”

  “I understand. You want him safe. I would too if he were my family.”