Code Breakers: Beta Read online

  Steven shot out a thin and bruised hand, grabbed Gerry by the wrist. “Please Mr Cardle, don’t chuck me out, I’ve got nowhere to go! My parents were reallocated. I’ll be dead in a few days. I don’t want to die on the streets.”

  “I’ve got an idea to keep you safe.”

  His eyes widened with hope, and then lowered again, “Kind of?”

  “I think I can get you off the network, safe from The Family and the lottery, but you’ll be an outlaw like I was. Like I will be again.”

  “How?”

  Gerry thought of Kaden and his stash of chips. If the kid was going to deal, he might as well deal to Gerry. “A chip added to your dermal implant. It’ll take you off the network. Sever your connection to the mainframe, and the routines that govern the lottery. You’ll be free of The Family, but you won’t ever have a normal life here again. And you’ll likely be hunted down all the time you remain here.”

  “Where would I go?”

  That was a good question. Gerry didn’t know. Was anywhere safe now? “I don’t know,” he said, wanting to be honest with the kid. “But at least you’ll be free to have the choice.”

  He hesitated for a few seconds before saying, “Okay. I’ll do it.”

  Gerry contacted Kaden across a secure private network he’d set up to his apartment room so that the kid could inform Gerry of anything suspicious going on. He answered immediately, clearly doing his job. “What’s up, Mr Cardle?”

  “How’s it going over there, Kaden?”

  “Sweet, no issues at all. The security guys wandered by the front of the building a few times, probably realised ‘you’ were in your apartment and were happy at that. It’s working, for now at least.”

  “Good lad. Listen, those chips. You still have them, right?”

  “Yeah, of course, haven’t been out of the building yet and my contact isn’t due to collect until later this evening.”

  “How many do you have?”

  Kaden hesitated then, sucked in his breath, “Why? What’s happening?”

  “Look, nothing bad, I just need one. Can you spare it?”

  “Well, it’s difficult.”

  “How’s that illegal Aliencraft server doing for you? I bet that brings in some nice benefits. It’d be a shame if—”

  “Okay, fine. I’ll square it. I’ll say one was defective or something. It’s happened before with a shipment so it won’t look too out of the ordinary. But there’s only so far you can keep doing this. Just remember I’m on your side here, doing you a favour. Let’s keep that balance right.”

  “Kaden, be smart. Don’t screw with me.”

  “I, erm, sure, I’ll have someone bring the chip to you. Give me your location and it’ll be with you within the hour.”

  Gerry sent him the location details to a storage unit in the next part of town. He turned to Steven. “Okay, the chip’s on its way. You’ll have to go to this address,” Gerry sent him an encrypted private note with the address.

  “Okay, got it,” Steven said upon receiving the message with the address. “Thank you, Mr Cardle. And I’m sorry about your wife and daughters. It must be tough not having them around.”

  “Yeah. That’s life I guess,” Gerry said, trying to not let the pain show on his face. “Stay to the shadows. And grab some clothes from my room upstairs. You look like crap and suspicious as hell.”

  Steven nodded, shuffled from his blanket nest, and headed out of the room.

  His back was worse than his chest: a grid pattern of cuts and welts. They’d really gone to town on the poor kid. But it showed a lot of spirit to stand up to that kind of abuse. And to stay hidden the way he had for this amount of time showed he had some degree of survival skill.

  Once Steven had left the house, Gerry rearranged the basement into a more usable office space. He pulled a desk out into the middle, arranged a number of lights around the surface, and rigged up one of his old holoscreen control units. He didn’t really need it. With his new upgrades he could manipulate the networks around him with ease and send his very consciousness into the code if he had to, but after everything that had happened, there was something comforting about a slower, more physical approach.

  He scanned for the Jaguar’s ID, and found it. The wreckage lay not far from the Dome, half way to GeoCity-1. It broadcasted various error signals: damaged control systems, inoperable engines, hull integrity breaches. The odd thing was it had been sitting there on the dusty ground for nearly a fortnight. Why hadn’t Enna recovered the wreckage?

  He wanted to avoid speaking with Enna, or any member of The Family, for as long as possible, but knowing the wreckage was there meant that either Petal was dead, or she had escaped, but if that was the case, why not salvage the tech of the Jaguar? Even the Bachians would have scrapped it for resources.

  Gerry sighed, succumbed to the inevitable. He’d have to call Enna via his AIA’s direct communication tunnel: a secure setup given to him by The Family. Of course, he knew full well that they would be listening in to everything he said, but that was the plan: take their attention away from his other ways and means.

  He sent a message and waited.

  Chapter 7

  What she could give for a shot of NanoStem right then. She sat there for hours, watching the sun arc across the sky to the west into the evening, willing the pain to die. When it was clear it wasn’t going to shift, she gritted her teeth, pulled herself to her feet, and approached the craft.

  It was similar to Enna’s Jaguar, so much so, Petal wondered whether Enna had developed hers from their designs or vice-versa. This one however appeared to be armed far more heavily with particle cannons on each snub-wing, and twin machine guns.

  She neared the cabin door, noticed her smashed slate amongst the protruding rocks. The screen had broken into a multitude of fragments of glass held together by the nano-threaded circuits. The rear case was dented, scratched but still in one piece. She thought she might be able to recover the data. At least she remembered the coordinates of Criborg’s location, and now she had proper transport. Not such a bad compromise. And her weapons cache had swelled. Soon she’d have enough to arm a small militia.

  Once inside the cockpit of the craft, she found a tube of NanoStem in a medical supplies box under the pilot seat. The syringe slipped through her skin easily, and before she pushed the plunger, her body reacted to the thought of receiving that wonderful drug. At first her skin became clammy and a sheen of perspiration covered her face, then that blissful feeling of the ‘Stem sliding into her blood.

  Millions of nano-machines swarmed through her blood system until they found the source of pain: her broken ribs. It’s a curious and unusual experience feeling one’s bones knit back together. It was like a deep tissue massage on the skeleton.

  She closed her eyes, let the ‘Stems do their work. It’d be an hour or so before the pain was subdued enough to move, but right there and then she didn’t want to go anywhere. She just wanted to revel in the blissfulness. The pilot seat was as comfortable as anything she had sat on in weeks. Her head tipped sideways onto her shoulder. A slick of drool slipped down her chin. She didn’t bother to wipe it away. The darkness that cradled her told her everything would be okay. All she had to do was rest.

  An hour passed, the sun glinted off the screen of the Jaguar, waking Petal from her drug-induced coma. Her dreams were wild and bizarre. They receded away from her with every waking second, blurring her memories. She shuddered and winced in anticipation of the pain from her ribs. But the ‘Stems had done their task. All she felt was a dull ache and stiffness from her awkward sleeping position.

  Her mouth was dry. She coughed. A spatter of blood came out—the results of ‘Stem use. She looked to the back of the craft, towards the main passenger area. It was large enough to carry at least six people, and behind the bulkhead she found a storage locker. It opened easily enough. She found water and rations to last a good few weeks.

  Petal removed a metal box of ration packs, noticed so
mething strapped to the webbing at the bottom of the storage unit: A conical shaped tube with a dark green and grey camo design. Scorch marks covered the opened end. It looked like a recovered front-half of a UAV drone.

  Inside the tip of the drone, she found the usual suite of scanners, GPS aerials, and computer control systems bundled into a neat package. With a toolkit from the cockpit she quickly removed the package, held it in her hand as if it she could somehow divine its contents. Naturally, she thought of connecting to its wireless system with her inbuilt radios, but realised she had no means of connection anymore. Her wrist itched where the implant had crudely been removed.

  She cursed the Widows for neutering her in such a way. Being disconnected made her feel like someone had hacked off a limb. This must be what normal people feel like, she thought.

  She placed the drone control package on the dashboard. The controls of the craft were in that stupid damn language again, but at least she recognised some of the symbols from the last one she was in. She managed to fire the engines without careening into a pile of rocks or the ground and found the main computer control system.

  A holoscreen projected up in front of her. The controls were iconic rather than language based. She hacked into the setup files. Deep into the system, the folders were labelled in English. Luckily, it seemed the programmers were Westerners. It made her wonder if this Jaguar wasn’t Russian-built after all. Within the English files she found a configuration script.

  “About damned time,” she said to herself.

  The system had a number of language packages installed. She simply had to select a new operating system preference. Within a split second the entire dashboard controls were now perfectly understandable. “That makes more sense.”

  While she had access to the Jaguar’s system, she checked the log files and found a recently updated entry within a secure area. At first it wouldn’t give her access, so she brought up a terminal and with a technique learned from Gabe, managed to code an exploit that gave her super-user access, meaning she could now view the previously encrypted files at her leisure.

  First she managed to create a memory overflow within the system allowing her to inject her own code. Using a series of assembly commands within the higher areas of the system’s memory, she gained access as if she were the legitimate administrator. The operating system that the Jaguar used was quite common, being a leftover from the war, so its weaknesses were well known, especially to Gabe who spent years reverse-engineering the various leading military systems.

  Once in, she navigated to the logs.

  “Ooh, this is interesting.”

  The encrypted log file was in fact instructions from what appeared to be the Red Widow base. It was unreadable, naturally. Taking the file of information, she programmed a translation process using the various language packs as the dataset. It wasn’t entirely accurate but it was close enough. The interesting thing was the number of times the word Criborg appeared.

  The file mentioned the operators in that very Jaguar had downed the Criborg UAV while on patrol on the border territories beyond the Khentii Mountains.

  She checked the location stamp and realised it wasn’t very far from her location, which meant she would likely be found soon if she didn’t move. They’d be expecting a report from their patrol.

  The UAV, it said, was of Criborg design. The third one taken down in the last week. Criborg had stepped up its drone attacks on the Red Widow’s territory by a factor of 5 in the previous month. They had also sunk a Red Widow vessel off the coast of Northern Japan.

  Damn. A secret war had broken out underneath The Family’s nose. But then, she supposed, what with The Family taking down or at least temporarily cutting access to the Meshwork, it made it harder for news like this to spread.

  That gave her an idea: she used the Jaguar’s computer to scan for nodes, which it found none, but it did find a complete absence. Even City Earth’s network hadn’t showed up. They had somehow suppressed all of the networks, and cloaked their own.

  “‘Bout time they realised they weren’t invulnerable,” she said.

  The scanner completed its sweep. She had another thought: the UAV used radio systems to navigate and send/receive messages. With the last few remaining computer nodes and network points down or cloaked, Criborg had to communicate with their device. Which means she could too. And she could recover the data.

  It took her at least twenty minutes to crack the encoded signal. Would have been faster with Gerry, she thought. She had the Jaguar’s computer and radio system array send a signal to the UAV’s control device and it returned a confirmation. She was in.

  It was then she realised: it’d been transmitting all that time.

  Streams of data flowed from the unit, updating the recipient with coordinates, locations, video, and audio.

  She quickly placed the unit inside a metal ration’s box. A hundred questions blossomed in her mind: how much had it recorded, had the people on the other end heard and seen her, were they coming to recover their tech, were they coming to attack Red Widow? And damn! Here she sat, dressed in their robes, in their vehicle. What if they thought she was one of them? And given that it was her only vehicle she couldn’t just abandon it and walk on foot.

  Only one thing for it: send them a message via the signal. Tell them who she was, that she had had their chip inside her. Her hand trembled over the controls as she typed out her message, telling them she was coming to their location.

  She hoped they would let her get that far, but then she had little choice. She couldn’t go to City Earth or Darkhan. She didn’t know the extent of GeoCity-1’s safety, and with the Red Widows crawling all over the land and air, options were running thin.

  Her hand hesitated over the send control. Damn it, girl. Just do it.

  She sent the message, entered the coordinates into the navigation computer, and plotted a course to Criborg’s island. The navigation system flagged up a warning: she’d only make it three quarters of the way of the two hours journey on the current fuel load.

  “Let’s hope you guys read my message.”

  With that, Petal fired up the engines, took off, and headed east.

  Chapter 8

  A hour after sending the message, Gerry received a reply from Enna: “Gerry, is that you?” Enna’s voice was right in his head: the AIA patching the signals into his auditory system.

  “Yes, Enna. Or should I say Aunty?”

  “Oh, they told you then. Well, I can explain, I—”

  “No need, just tell me, where’s Petal? I noticed the wreckage of your Jaguar is still out there sending signals.”

  “Oh, Gerry. I’m afraid it’s bad news. I’m sorry to have to tell you this. She, she died. There was an accident with the Jaguar. Jasper’s men crashed it under fire, killing all the crew and their passengers. I’m so sorry.”

  His AIA added a textual layer coming from a different source to the voice and from within a cloaked, encrypted stream hidden with the voice data of the communications tunnel.

  — Gerry, it’s Enna. Look, Petal’s not dead, that was for The Family’s benefit. There’s no time to waste, you have to come to GeoCity-1.

  “No! That’s awful. Are you sure? I mean, the wreckage is still there, what if she got away?”

  — She’s alive? Really? What’s going on? Where is she?

  “She didn’t, I’m afraid,” Enna said. “The bodies were terribly burnt, but I identified her personally. I’m so sorry, Gerry, I know how much she meant to you, and to all of us.”

  — Gerry, she’s with Gabe. Hold on! I know what happened at Seca’s place. It’s not what you think. He didn’t double cross you. I’ll explain all that later. There’s no time now, you have to come here. I promise you that Petal is currently safe. A lot has happened since you were away. Get here as soon as you can. Oh crap, it’s already too late. They’re here. Please hurry. We need your help, Gerry.

  — Connection lost, Mags said.

  Silence. />
  His head rang like a bell. A single thought dominated everything. Petal was alive! After the shock, the other details percolated through. What was going on? She was with Gabe, after what he did? And Enna sounded so panicked. Who were ‘they’?

  “Goddamnit!” He couldn’t ignore her. He needed to get to her, find out more, and find out whom she was so scared of. Gerry initiated his new athletic protocol. He sprinted from his old house to the shuttle landing zone. He had to get out there and find out what was happening. His muscles and heart, modified by smart nano-machines, burned through energy, and had him racing through the streets. Despite the roar of his heartbeat, the thought of Petal grew strong in his mind. Now he had hope, real hope, and no one was going to stop him. Not even The Family.

  He raced across the park and past the tower where Kaden was pretending to be him, rounded the corner, and faced the aviation quarter.

  The evening sun dipped low on the western edge of the dome, casting the huge mushroom control tower into a long shadow. Five individual shuttles sat on the Polymar™ surface. While he approached, he accessed the main aviation computer system. Using his currently borrowed ID credentials, he identified the shuttle’s nodes and sent a stream of instructions.

  The middle shuttle responded first. Its door opened, and its hydrogen VTOL engines whined up to speed. This was it. Time to get to work. As he approached, the security patrol made their way out of the tower and continued on their rounds between the landing pads and a path that circumnavigated the quarter. Gerry immediately recognised Bran and Malik.

  Gerry ran past the twin brothers and continued until he reached a shuttle. He activated the door and jumped in. It was already closing when Bran rushed over. He opened his mouth to say something, his eyes wide. Clearly he’d thought Gerry was in his apartment. Gerry flipped him the bird and engaged the shuttle’s engines. The noise and downdraught of the VTOL props sent Bran flying back on the deck, his legs and arms thrashing about him like a bug.

  Gerry spoke over the PA, “You guys need to be a bit quicker, or perhaps this job is a bit much for you, huh?” Gerry smiled and headed up and away from the landing pads. But in his haste he hadn’t requested from Control the opening of the Dome. The access panel remained closed.