Spaceside

by Michael Mammay

  “Got it,” I said. “But if you didn’t get anything, what was the point of me getting you into his office?”

  “I left myself a door.”

  “A door?”

  “Right. A tiny hole, really. One that I can exploit from outside.”

  “Won’t they see that?”

  “They will. Depending how good their security is, they’ll find it somewhere between twelve hours and three days from now. They’ll wonder how it got there, and depending on their protocol, they’ll either look into it or treat it as routine. Odds are on routine.”

  “But you said that if you brought information to Turkov’s terminal, they’d see it.”

  “They would, if I did it from there. But since I now have all the time I need, I’m going to be more subtle than that. So they might not notice. And if they do, I’m going to be routed through about a thousand different proxies on the way in.”

  “So it’s untraceable?”

  She walked over and flipped a few switches on her system. “Nothing’s untraceable. But pretty much, yeah.”

  “That’s quite a setup,” I said.

  “I enjoy my work,” she answered. “So this is where all my money goes, other than spoiling Cisco. You might as well make yourself comfortable. This is going to take a bit to get fired up.”

  I took the comfortable chair and Ganos moved behind her computerized creation. Fans hummed and more lights danced, and she went to another place, lost, as if I wasn’t there. Cisco apparently decided I passed muster, and came and lay down between my feet. I pulled out my device and flipped through the news, checking on whether the police had anything new on the murder of Gylika. They didn’t, but one article led to another and I burrowed into some other stories until Ganos interrupted me.

  “Sir, what’s Project Phoenix?”

  “Phoenix. Shit. Something in the medical field that Omicron has working. I don’t know exactly what it is, but it’s important. What have you got?”

  “I think that was the breach. Or, rather, Phoenix didn’t make the breach. The breach was in Phoenix.”

  “That doesn’t make any sense,” I said. “Gylika . . . he was my contact at Omicron. He worked on Phoenix, at least in some capacity. But I met him after the event happened, and he didn’t know anything.”

  “There are a couple of emails here. Medical research . . . blah blah blah . . . revenue estimates. Holy shit, that’s a lot of zeroes.”

  “Does it say anything about ortho-robotics?” I asked.

  “Yes, sir. You knew about this stuff? It looks like it’s something to do with DNA splicing.”

  I froze. I don’t know how long I sat there, silent. I’d heard it before, but this time it really sunk in deep. I couldn’t deny it any longer.

  “Sir, your face went pale. What is it?”

  I took a deep, slow breath to calm myself. “Can you tell who breached it? Who stole the data?”

  “Let me see . . .” Her fingers flew across the keys. “Whoa. It’s not medical. It’s military. Sort of. Something to do with manipulating DNA. Somehow it’s supposed to make people tolerate cybernetics better. I don’t understand it, but I think they’re trying to make mechanical soldiers. Or partially mechanical. I can’t tell—there’s not enough here.”

  “Ganos . . . I want you to close it and get out of there.” I’d heard enough. I wanted to know who cracked it, but this information was explosive. I had had suspicions, but this confirmed it. I needed Ganos away from it for her own good.

  “Hold on, sir. I’m trying to find out who broke in.” She buried her face back behind the monitors.

  “Close it,” I said.

  “I just got in. Let me download some of this stuff to local storage.”

  I stood up, and in my most “I’m a Colonel” voice said, “Close everything and seal it up. Hide the fact that you were ever there as best you can. Take every precaution. Everything you know how to do.”

  She met my eyes over one of her monitors. “Sir, you’re scaring me. What’s wrong?”

  “Just do what I say,” I said. “I promise, I’ll explain everything. But you’ve got to get out of there right now.”

  My mind raced while she clacked away at her keyboard. They had never shut down the project. They moved it to a different location and gave it another name, made it corporate instead of military. And now there were Cappan hybrids, probably unstable, chasing me around the city, bent on revenge. I stood and paced the width of the room. Cisco scampered to a spot on the floor between Ganos and me and started growling. Even the dog could sense my anxiety.

  I couldn’t think clearly, but one thing was sure: I couldn’t involve Ganos any further. That would put me in a bind for gathering more information since she’d been my one reliable source so far and the only person I trusted. But I’d put her in enough danger, and I had the thread I needed. I’d find another way to pull on it. I’d played a stupid game where I didn’t understand the stakes, and now that they had become fully apparent, I found myself three moves behind.

  “Do you have any vacation time saved up?” I asked. “It might be good for you to get out of town for a couple of days.”

  She paused her typing. “Sir, what the fuck is going on?”

  “This is big, Ganos. It’s tied to what I did back on Cappa, when I blew up the planet.”

  She stopped typing, her hands hanging there over the keyboard. “Sir . . . tell me everything.”

  “Finish, first, and I will.”

  She did, and so I did. I told her all of it. What happened back on Cappa with Elliot, and everything that had happened since. When I finished, I expected her to say something. To yell at me for getting her involved. Something.

  Instead, she nodded slowly a few times. “Wow. This is big.”

  “I think it is. You’re sure you hid your entry into the system?”

  “Yes, sir. I’ve plugged the hole the best I can. It would take the best techies alive to trace this shit. I’m not worried.”

  I wished I shared her confidence.

  Chapter Seventeen

  HR had told me to take some days off after my hospital stay, but I couldn’t hang around the apartment stewing over the information Ganos had found. I left my place a little after lunch and took an alternate route to work, checking behind me the entire way, looking for my Cappan-hybrid friends. My newly repaired leg needed the workout anyway. Sirens played a symphony that sat over the normal background noise of the city, but I never got close enough to them to see what brought in the emergency crews.

  I had barely reached my office when Ganos bounced in, practically vibrating with excitement. “Sir! You’re here.”

  I frowned. “I thought we discussed you taking a few days off.”

  “Technically you said that. But never mind the semantics. You’re not going to believe what happened.”

  “People keep saying that,” I said. “Tell me you didn’t go back into the place I told you not to go.”

  “I didn’t. But I pulled that picture of the woman that we had, and I poked around looking for known associates, other pictures, those sorts of things.”

  “And you found something?” As much as I wanted her away from the situation, I couldn’t pass up that kind of information. Besides, if she’d already done the work, my getting it from her wouldn’t change anything.

  “Yes. No. Sort of.” She waved her hands as she spoke.

  “Slow down, Ganos. Start from the beginning.”

  She took a deep breath. “Okay. I was looking for things, searching a bunch of different databases. Kinda deep work, but nothing super technical and not particularly dangerous. Then, all of a sudden, wherever I entered, someone closed the door.”

  I let my confusion show on my face. “Help me out, here.”

  “The places I was looking . . . they’re not exactly public access, right?”

  “Sure. I’m with you so far.”

  “Every time I got inside, something shut me down. Not once. Every. Time. No matter
where I went. I thought it was a fluke the first time. These things happen. The second time I started to wonder. By the fifth time?”

  “So the agencies who maintained the databases were onto you?” I asked.

  She shook her head. “No way. All of them? They’re not part of the same system. Each action was independent.”

  “I don’t understand. How did it happen, then?”

  “I thought about that for a long time,” she said. “Somebody else had to have hacked the same systems and shut them down on me.”

  “That’s possible?”

  “It shouldn’t be. To do that . . . you’d have to be watching every single system out there. And here’s the kicker. It’s not happening to anybody else in the community. I’d have heard about it. It specifically targeted me.”

  A chill ran up my spine. I thought about my own situation, and how they’d been following me. “I don’t know much about computers, but you said they’d have to be watching everywhere you went. What if instead they were watching you?”

  She nodded. “That’s the conclusion I came to, too. I searched everything I had. It took me a day, but I found it. Barely. A hint of a track in my system. They hacked me, then they hid it so well I almost couldn’t find it. Kind of embarrassing, actually.”

  “How could they do that?”

  She shrugged. “I’m working on it. But it’s got me spooked, I’ll tell you that.”

  “Me too.” She seemed to be focused on how they did it technically. I was more worried about how they knew to watch her in the first place. I didn’t know crap about computers, but it had to be Omicron. I didn’t want to say it out loud. “What’s the damage?”

  “That’s just it. There isn’t any. Whoever did this could have triggered alarms in the systems while I was inside, and I might have gotten caught. But they didn’t. They booted me out and locked the door. That’s it. The administrators probably don’t know it happened.”

  “That’s—”

  “Colonel Butler?” A coworker I recognized but couldn’t place poked his head in and interrupted.

  “Yes?”

  “Sir, I need you to come with me.”

  “Give me a minute,” I said.

  He didn’t leave the door. “I’m sorry, sir. It has to be right now.”

  I glared at him, but I couldn’t muster any real anger. My brain was still spinning from what Ganos had told me. “I said—”

  He cut me off. “Sir, the police are in the lobby, and they insist on seeing you immediately.”

  I bit back the reply I’d been about to give and looked at Ganos as I walked toward the door. “Get out of town. Better yet, off the planet. You hear me?”

  “Yes, sir,” she said. I didn’t believe her, but I couldn’t focus on that at the moment.

  It didn’t surprise me when we walked around the corner into the lobby to find Mallory and Burke waiting for me, though they did seem incongruous somehow in that environment: the cops in their cheap suits surrounded by the opulence of VPC’s lobby.

  “What’s going on?” I asked.

  “Colonel Butler, we’re going to need you to come with us,” said Mallory, while her partner skulked behind her.

  My mind spun. Having just talked to Ganos, I wondered if somehow somebody tied her semi-legal computer activities to me. But they couldn’t have. At the most, it was highly unlikely, since they hadn’t asked to see her as well. The legal team had assured me I was cleared to go when I left the hospital, so it couldn’t be that. “You want to tell me what this is about?”

  “Not really, no,” said Mallory.

  “What if I say I’m not going?”

  “You’re going. We can do this the easy way or the hard way.” Mallory patted the handcuffs on her belt.

  “Please say the hard way,” said Burke. “Please.”

  It sounded like something he had heard in a vid. Asshole. I didn’t really consider it, but I hesitated a few seconds to make them think I had. “I think I’ll take the easy way, thanks.”

  “Smart man,” said Mallory. “Let’s go.”

  I followed them out the front door, absorbing the stares of a couple dozen people who happened to be transiting through and some who showed up when they heard the news. I’m guessing it probably took ninety seconds to spread through the rest of the building.

  Mallory opened the back door of their hover-car, a bulky, armored thing that looked twenty years old but somehow still functional. More classic than outdated. They avoided all my attempts during the drive to get information out of them, which meant they didn’t want me to know what they had. I wondered who died. It took me a couple minutes to reach that conclusion, but it had to be that. Somebody died, and somehow the police tied that person to me. The list of people within their jurisdiction that I legitimately cared about was pretty short. I’d just seen Ganos, so that left Plazz, Sheila Jackson, and Serata, who I considered friends. Jackson worked at VPC, and the other two would have made big news splashes, so if it was any of them I’d have probably heard about it. It didn’t resolve the question, though. I almost asked Mallory to tell me who died, but I decided to save that for a moment when I could see their faces and gauge their reactions. Riding in the vehicle, I could only stare at the backs of their heads, which held no answers.

  At the station they hustled me in through a side door near the parking area for police vehicles. We walked, Mallory in front of me, Burke behind, through an area of desks and low dividers where at least a dozen officers worked on modern computers, a few talking to civilians, taking statements or some such. A couple people glanced up, but none for more than the briefest moment before going back to work. Whatever they brought me in for, either it wasn’t that important or nobody else in the room knew about it.

  Mallory led me into the same interrogation room I’d visited the last time I came to see her, but with one small difference. This time I couldn’t leave if I wanted to, and that made the space seem smaller and darker. The presence of the perpetually angry Burke didn’t do much for the ambiance either.

  “So who’s dead?” I asked. Burke’s long glance at his partner confirmed my guess. She shook her head slightly, as if to silence him. I took that to mean he wanted to ask me how I knew somebody was dead, but she wanted to go in a different direction.

  “I need you to tell us where you’ve been for the last twelve hours,” she said.

  “I arrived home last night before dark. I stayed in my apartment until I left for work a short time ago.”

  “What time did you leave for work?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe an hour ago? I heard a bunch of sirens as I entered VPC. That might give you an estimate of the time.”

  This time it was Mallory who glanced at her partner. I couldn’t be sure, but I think my mentioning the sirens triggered something. “Did anybody see you at your apartment?”

  “Not that I know of,” I said.

  “You know that we can pull camera feeds from the area—”

  Raised voices from the hallway cut Mallory off. “Sir! Sir! You can’t go in there!”

  The door opened and a tall, dark-skinned man in an exquisite charcoal-colored suit stepped halfway through. He wore his hair short, immaculately trimmed, and he smiled at the officers the way a predator looks at its next meal. “Excuse me, officers. I’d like to confer with my client before you question him any further.”

  Mallory looked at me. “This is your attorney?”

  “My client is not going to answer any questions until we’ve spoken. I’m Mark Gaspard. I’ve been retained for Colonel Butler’s representation.”

  Mark Gaspard. I didn’t recognize him, but I knew the name. Everybody knew the name. He was the highest-profile defense attorney in the city, if not on the planet. Somebody like me couldn’t get a meeting with him. And somebody like me definitely couldn’t afford him.

  “Colonel Butler?” asked Mallory. “Despite what this very high-priced gentleman says, you only have the right to consult with h
im if he is your attorney. So I’m afraid you do have to answer.”

  “You only need an attorney if you’ve got something to hide,” said Burke.

  “Cut the bullshit, officer,” said Gaspard. “It’s unbecoming.” For a moment Burke almost looked embarrassed. I’d have signed on with Gaspard for that alone.

  “Yes. Mr. Gaspard represents me.”

  “We’ll leave you the room.” Mallory snapped her device cover closed a little harder than required.

  “That won’t be necessary,” said Gaspard. “It’s not that I don’t trust you with your listening devices. Call it a precaution. You understand, right?”

  “Well, he can’t leave . . .”

  Gaspard smiled. “Is he under arrest? What’s the charge? Look, I’m not trying to be a hard-ass, here. Give me five minutes outside, and we’ll come right back. You have my word.”

  Mallory sighed and looked at Burke, who shrugged. “Fine,” she said.

  I started to speak as we walked through the station, to figure out where my legal savior had come from, but he waved me off until we reached the street.

  “Would they really listen in on us?” I asked.

  “Hard to say,” said Gaspard. “But why give them the temptation? Mostly I just wanted to fuck with them.”

  I chuckled. “I assume VPC sent you?”

  “I got a call from Javier Sanchez himself. Sorry I didn’t get here before you arrived, but your detention was somewhat of a surprise, I understand.”

  “Very much a surprise. I don’t even know what I’m here for.”

  “I’m not sure either, which probably means we can get you out without any further questioning, if you want.”

  I smiled. “As much as that sounds like fun, if they’ve got legit questions and I can help, I don’t mind. And I’d really like to get some information from them too, if I can. Something happened, and they have at least some thought that it’s associated with me.”

  “Okay. I’ll lead into it, and then I’m going to stay there with you during the questioning. That will likely be enough to keep them in line and prevent them from working you over too hard. Give me a rundown on the situation and then we’ll go back in.”