“Yes, sir,” he said.
“Please, call me Carl.”
Please.
Chapter Three
I left my office maybe an hour later and headed home. I needed to get started on Omicron, but I didn’t want to do it on company infrastructure. Anything I did on their system would be visible to someone in the company, and Javier said he wanted to keep it quiet. Thanks to Dernier’s efficiency, I could pull the list of Omicron names down from my system at home. His work would leave some tracks, for sure, if somebody really wanted to find it, but I figured legal types knew how to protect themselves.
I descended to the marble palace that VPC called a lobby and exited through the ridiculous revolving doors. A chilly blast of wind whipped down the canyon of skyscrapers and made me gasp as I stepped out onto the sidewalk. I regretted leaving my coat in my office. The wind always blew on Talca 4, at least in the parts I’d visited—the one drawback on an otherwise nice planet. Not that I had had a choice in where I lived. All the big military technology companies headquartered on Talca. They needed access to the politicians, and more important, the military bureaucracy.
I walked a hundred meters to the transportation stop and pulled out my device while I waited. I punched up my contacts and spoke a message to Karen Plazz, a reporter I knew from my time on Cappa. “Call me. I’ve got a story for you.”
A few seconds later the bus hovered around the corner and I stepped on, finding a seat easily as normal people still had to work in the early afternoon. I kept my head down, trying to avoid eye contact with the dozen or so other people on board. I made it to my seat about halfway back thinking nobody had spotted me, but when I looked up the man sitting across the aisle was staring at me with a goofy grin.
“I’m sorry to bother you, but I have to say it’s an honor to be on the same bus with you, sir. You showed those alien bastards who runs the galaxy.” He kept grinning. I gave him a flat smile and nodded in a practiced gesture of acknowledgment that seemed to make people happy. Alerted by the man’s words, the woman a couple seats down looked over and then made an exaggerated show of looking away, as if she wanted to make sure I knew of her distaste. I knew. It happened often enough.
I put my face down into my device again and blocked them out, spending the thirteen painful minutes it took to reach my stop scrolling through the news, searching for anything related to Omicron. Nothing jumped out at me. I got off and walked fifty meters to the door of my building. I didn’t have the best address, but the easy access to transportation helped make up for it, and I’d lived in worse places. The nondescript apartment building had a fake stone facing that the architect meant to look sophisticated. Instead it looked cheap. I took the lift to the seventh floor and keyed the dual encryption to turn off my alarm. What I saved in rent I spent on security.
As soon as I got through the door of my two-bedroom unit, I called Sheila Jackson, making sure to use her personal device and not anything associated with VPC.
“Hey. Where are you?” she asked.
“I cut out early,” I said.
“Must be nice.”
“It is,” I said. “Hey, what do you know about Jacques Dernier?” Sheila knew everybody. She had one of those minds that remembered faces and names. I couldn’t really relate.
“From legal?”
“Yeah.”
“Not much,” she said. “He’s been with the company six or eight years. Joined up right out of law school, I think.”
“Who’s his patron?” I asked. “Does he have one?”
“He’s tight with Abarri. Deputy VP for legal. I don’t know how much there is to that, but they’re definitely friendly. They eat lunch together, sometimes.”
“That could be business,” I said.
“Probably is,” said Sheila. “But people tend to find other options for lunch if they don’t like somebody.”
“Right. So who is Abarri hitched to?”
“You mean other than the CEO?”
“That’s what I thought,” I said. “Abarri is Javier’s person in legal?”
“Pretty much, yeah. Javier doesn’t really get along with the VP for legal, so he’s got Abarri in the number-two seat.”
“So if Javier wanted a lower-level lawyer, he’d probably ask Abarri, who would give him Dernier’s name.”
“Very possible,” said Sheila.
“Thanks. You’re the best.”
“This is true,” she said. “You owe me lunch.”
“You got it.” I hadn’t learned much, but I appreciated the background in case something came up later.
My device hummed before I even set it down. “What do you have for me?” Karen Plazz’s voice said. She worked the capital beat now, and we kept in touch every month or so. We always said we should talk more often, being on the same planet, but we never did.
“I need a favor,” I said.
“That’s funny, I could have sworn your message said that you had a story for me. I should have known you’d have questions.”
“I’m wounded,” I said.
“Stop me when I say something that isn’t true. Do you have a story or not?”
“Sure I do. But I don’t know what it is yet.”
“Gah! You kill me, Butler. You’ve got to give me more than that. That’s how this reporter thing works. You tell me things.”
“Remember that time back on Cappa where I didn’t tell you anything, but then it was the biggest story of the year and you broke it, then you won that award? The Jacob Prize, I think—”
“Yeah, yeah,” she interrupted. “How long are you going to try to live off of that?”
“I don’t know, how long are they going to refer to you as a Jacob Prize-winning reporter?”
“So to be clear,” she said, “you’re saying I owe you.”
“I’m saying that maybe I’ve earned a little bit of trust, and when I say I’ve got something, I really have it.”
“I’d love to do this all day, Carl, but some of us actually have to work.”
“Fair enough,” I replied. “There was a security breach at Omicron. Nobody is reporting on it. There’s your story.”
“What kind of security breach?”
“I’m not sure. Something big enough where important people are interested.”
“Which important people?” she asked.
“I’m not sure yet.”
“Then how do you know?”
“You really do ask a lot of questions,” I said.
“That’s kind of the job.”
“Right. I can’t tell you,” I said.
She paused a moment, probably taking notes. “This is thin.”
“Yes it is. But it’s also real.”
“Be honest with me, Carl. Why are you giving me this?”
“Old times’ sake?”
She laughed. “So then it’s not because you want to know more about something and want me to do the work?”
“You know, you’re a remarkably good reporter,” I said.
“And you’re an asshole.”
“I really am. But that’s not news. I’m telling you, there’s something there. You can get on it, or you can read it somewhere else.”
She made an exaggerated gasp. “Carl Butler, are you suggesting that you’d cheat on me with another journalist?”
“Don’t be ridiculous. You know I hate reporters. But if I know about the breach, then that means other people know about it, too. It’s only a matter of time until it gets out.”
“Okay,” she said. “I’ll see what I can dig up.”
“Let me know what you find,” I said, trying to sound light.
“You’ll be able to read about it,” she said. The line went dead.
I laughed to myself. It was early to start drinking, but I’d already had one with Javier, so I poured another. “Sharon, activate. Give me anything you can find about people who work at Omicron Propulsion Technologies. Send it to the monitor.” Yes, I named my household AI after my ex-
wife. Dr. Baqri had a field day with that one. I’d promised the doc that I’d change it, but I hadn’t gotten around to it yet.
I sat down and read some news about Omicron. Puff pieces, mostly. Their CEO, Ellen Haverty, was somewhat of an icon, known as much for what she did outside the boardroom as in it. She piloted her own luxury space cruiser and funded several race teams. She wrote it all off as research and development for new engines. She could afford it, since Omicron Propulsion drove half the ships in the military fleet and at least a third of civilian space traffic as well. They had their hands in everything that required science and made massive amounts of money.
I read a few business-related pieces, some naming public-affairs personnel or a VP or two but nothing that jumped out at me as useful. I swiped through a few pages trusting that I’d know what I wanted when I found it. I opened the page that Dernier had created and looked at what he’d put in there. He’d been busy. On top of the list of names I requested he’d dropped in a dozen articles, each with brief notes.
The third article caught my attention, though the piece itself didn’t give a lot of information, and Dernier’s mundane notes didn’t add much. The source was a second-tier science journal reporting on a potential breakthrough in some medical technology called the Phoenix Project, which I didn’t understand. But I recognized a name: Warren Gylika, a retired general. We didn’t know each other personally, but with senior officers there was almost always only one degree of separation. A friend of a friend. I could reach out to some of my contacts and find somebody who knew him and set up a meeting. I didn’t know what I hoped to get out of him, but when you don’t know what to do, you move forward and see what happens. It beats standing still.
Chapter Four
It didn’t take me long the next day to find the connection. I did a little research on Gylika, found out where he’d been stationed in the past and then called the people I knew who had been in those places. Gylika had been high-enough profile that most everyone had known him, but it wasn’t until my third call that I found someone who kept in touch. She agreed to set up the meeting for later in the week.
Since that left me with time on my hands, I tried another angle while I waited. Dernier had continued to pile things up in the computer file, but I wanted to avoid him for a little bit so I ignored them. Instead, I sent an email to the information technology department, and twenty minutes later Ganos knocked on the frame of my open door and walked in to my office.
“You called, sir?” Ganos looked much like she had two years ago on Cappa, small and fidgety, except now she sported blue hair. She’d married her fellow soldier, Parker, and she needed a job while she waited for him to finish up his stint in the military. I’d convinced VPC to hire her when she finished her tour of duty, because there’s no point in having power if you don’t use it to help out good people. It didn’t hurt that she was a computer genius, either. And I did work in the security department, after all.
“How’s it going, Ganos? Heard from Parker lately?”
“Every day, sir. He’s on Aranna 5, and you know us techies always have a good comms link.”
Newlyweds. “That’s good. I’ve got kind of an off-the-wall question.”
“That’s very surprising to me, sir.” She said it with a straight face, but a slight hint of mocking crept into her tone.
“I think I liked you better when you were shy and scared of me,” I said.
“I’m not sure we remember that the same way. What can I do for you, sir?”
“I want you to break into Omicron’s computer network.”
She paused and looked at me as if assessing my sanity, but to her credit she didn’t overreact. “I can do that, sir,” she said, after maybe half a minute of thinking.
“Really? I thought you were going to tell me it’s impossible.”
“Nothing’s impossible with computers, sir. I’m going to need full-time access to three LMR-2800 supercomputers and eighteen months.”
I chuckled. “Seriously?” Even I knew that an LMR was a top-of-the-line machine that cost millions. A high-end research facility might have one, and the time on it would be booked out in small increments a year in advance.
“It’s not impossible, sir. But it’s pretty close.”
“Okay,” I said. “On a scale of one to ten, where ten is high-end military security, where would you rate the security of a company like Omicron?”
“Eleven,” she said, without thinking about it.
“Really?”
“Without a doubt, sir. Our security here in the high-end corporate world is better than we were running on Cappa. It’s not close.”
“Well that’s a little bit frightening.” What was more frightening was that somebody had potentially cracked it.
“Yes, sir.”
“So then hypothetically, if I wanted to learn something from inside Omicron’s system, how would I go about that?”
She thought about it, bouncing her weight from one foot to the other. “You’d get a job at Omicron.”
“That makes sense. But even then, I might not have access.”
“You might not, sir, but you’d be in a better position to break in. Most of the security faces outward. It’s much, much easier to break into internal stuff once you’re on the inside.”
“So all I need to do is get onto an Omicron terminal,” I said.
She laughed. “No, sir. All you need to do is get somebody like me onto an Omicron terminal. You’d be next to useless. Sir . . . I have to ask: Are we really trying to break into another company?”
I debated quickly how much to tell her, and decided on most of the truth. “We’re not trying to break in. But there’s a rumor that somebody else already did. I wanted to get an idea of how it might happen, so that we can better protect ourselves from a similar attack.”
She nodded slowly. “That’s a hell of a hack, if somebody did it. I’ll keep my sensors up in the tech community and see if I hear anything. If this is real, people might be talking about it. Or they won’t be talking about it. Either way, it might give us a clue where to start looking.”
“That would help a lot. Thanks, Ganos. And if you would, I’d appreciate if you kept this between you and me for now.”
She looked at me like I had a dick growing out of my forehead, offended. She wouldn’t dream of breaking trust. Somehow, though, her “Of course, sir,” came out with relative politeness.
The meeting with Gylika happened faster than I expected. I hadn’t been sure he’d contact me at all, and when he did he surprised me by setting something up for lunch the next day. We agreed to meet at an out-of-the-way place that I picked. I went there because they knew me and did a good job helping me maintain some semblance of privacy on the few occasions when I ventured out into the real world. They catered mostly to locals and didn’t get much tourist traffic. They had a decent menu, but nothing special—it was all about the location.
“General Gylika,” I said, as I walked up to his table in the back corner of the dimly lit space.
He stood, pushing his heavy fake-wood chair back. “Please. Call me Warren. It’s good to meet you, Carl.”
“I was surprised you set this up so quickly.”
“How could I pass up an opportunity to have lunch with a celebrity?” He gave me a lopsided smile that lit his entire face.
“Right. I forget about that sometimes.”
“I’m just busting your balls. It was curiosity, more than anything. Gets me away from the office, which the Mother knows I need to do more often. What are you up to these days?”
I was sure he knew my job situation and was only making conversation, but I obliged him. “I’m with VPC. I work in the security department.”
“Sounds like a nice gig,” he said.
“It’s not bad. Pays well, and the hours are pretty good. Nothing as exciting as what you’ve got going with the Phoenix Project.”
He glanced down at the table for a split second, then met my eyes again,
hiding the moment of discomfort. “I really can’t talk about that. I hope that’s not what you wanted to meet for.”
“Not at all,” I said. “I just saw it in the news with your name attached to it.”
The waiter showed up and took our order. I chose a grilled-chicken sandwich without looking at the menu. Gylika dithered for a moment before breaking down and ordering a burger. The whole interchange gave us a moment for the slight awkwardness I’d created to pass. I also ordered a whiskey on the rocks. If Gylika had a problem with me drinking at lunch, he did a good job of hiding it, though for his part he stuck to water.
“So what’s going on?” he asked, once the waiter had moved away. I liked him. He knew I didn’t call him on a whim, and he got right to the point.
“It’s about security,” I said. “There’s a pretty strong rumor going around that Omicron had a significant breach. I know you can’t tell me everything, but I’m hoping you can tell me something. The non-classified parts. My boss wants to make sure we’re not vulnerable to the same kind of attack.” Truth be told, I wanted the classified parts too, but it wouldn’t do to say so. He’d either tell me or he wouldn’t, but asking would have been bad form.
“I’ve heard about it, but I don’t know much.” He said it casually, keeping eye contact. He seemed totally at ease, and his lack of reaction made me believe him.
“That’s too bad,” I said.
“I’m sure I can find out,” he added. I listened for a hint that he wanted something in return, something I should offer, but it didn’t feel like that kind of thing. I didn’t want to flat out ask, either, so I waited for him to speak again. “I’ll ask around, and give you a call if I find anything useful.”
“Great,” I said. “Thanks.”
“Anything for a war hero.” He smiled again.
I smiled back, genuinely amused. “Let me know if I can ever do anything for you.”
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