I bit down on the instinctive denial. This morning’s kiss hadn’t felt uninterested, but then he’d gone and ruined it by apologizing. I didn’t know where we stood, only that we needed to talk.
“He wasn’t, but now I don’t know. He kissed me this morning, then apologized and said it wouldn’t happen again.”
It was harder than I expected to open up to Ada. Before my marriage and her escape, she’d been my closest sibling. But I’d been keeping secrets for so long that I almost didn’t remember how to share pieces of myself.
“He kissed you?” she hissed excitedly. “Why didn’t you lead with that? How was it?”
Heat suffused my cheeks. She took one look at my face and dissolved into quiet laughter. “That good, huh?”
I also had forgotten the pure joy of laughing with my sister. Ada would always, always be on my side. So I gave her an honest answer because I could use her advice. “It was incredible. But then he ruined it by calling it ‘a lapse’ and apologizing.”
“Are you sure he wasn’t interested before?” she asked gently.
“When he first became my bodyguard, I expressed interest. He called me an ‘empty-headed princess’ and said in no uncertain terms that he wouldn’t let me derail his career.”
Ada winced then scowled toward the door. “Can I kick his ass now?”
Emotion overwhelmed me and I pulled her into a hug. She silently hugged me back. Ada had always been good at knowing what I needed, and after years of Gregory’s callous disregard, I was starved for simple physical affection. When I let her go, she said, “I’m glad you’re here, Bee. Now tell me why you won’t let me kick his ass.”
I smiled at her tenaciousness, but the smile died when I returned to the subject at hand. “I think he had a reason to dislike me.”
When I didn’t continue, Ada prompted, “Why do you think so?”
“I have no proof, but I think he’s a member of the Genesis Project. You know how the Consortium treated them.” It felt strange to say it out loud, even to my closest sister, the one I’d helped find data on the Genesis Project in the first place.
Ada didn’t scoff. She tilted her head, considering. “Loch hasn’t said anything,” she said at last. “But I could see it. Have you asked him?”
“Not in so many words.”
“Loch didn’t tell me until we decided to give a relationship a shot. Give Ian time. It can’t be an easy thing to reveal.”
“I don’t have the best track record with relationships.”
“And you think I did, before I met Loch? Remember my first season?”
It seemed that all of the von Hasenberg women were destined to have disastrous first seasons. Ada had been lucky, in the end, but it had killed me to watch her heart break.
“When you’re ready to talk about what happened while you were with Gregory, I’m here,” she said.
I flinched and wavered. Ada could read me better than anyone else. Of course she’d noticed that something had happened. Would it be so bad to tell her?
Before I made up my mind, she continued, “But don’t let Gregory’s ghost ruin the rest of your life. I’m biased against Ian because of the last two years, but even I can see that he’s a good man. I think you should give him a chance. Kick his ass for being an idiot if you need to, but give him a chance. You may not see how he watches you, but I do. You’re not just a job for him. I saw it when we were in Serenity.”
“He has a funny way of showing it,” I complained.
“Let me guess, he’s trying to protect you and you’re making it difficult for him.” She grinned at my incredulous expression. “Don’t look at me like that, I’m not taking his side. I’m just pointing out that both of you could be looking at the same situation and seeing different things. Loch and I bang heads occasionally because we each want to protect the other.”
Hope bloomed, as fragile as spun glass. I warned my heart against it, but it was no use. It had sprouted roots and clung tenaciously. Ian truly did have the power to hurt me now. I half hoped he never found out.
Loch and Ian were staring at the blueprint and speaking quietly when we joined them. “Changing the strategy?” I asked.
“No, just checking the exits,” Ian said with a knowing grin.
My cheeks heated, but I refused to rise to the teasing. “So we’re still going through the housekeeping closet?”
Ada had failed to mention that the hotel didn’t have direct access to the maintenance areas. From the suite, we’d have to go through the floor, which would be difficult to hide. But the housekeeping closet next door backed to the metal sheeting surrounding the crawl space. It should be fairly easy to cut a hole, then tack the cut piece back in place after we were done. By the time it was discovered, we’d hopefully be long gone.
“Yes,” Ian said. “Loch and Ada will cut the hole while you and I serve as lookouts and a distraction if needed. Once we’re in the office, the roles will reverse. You’ll have approximately twenty minutes to find what you’re looking for.”
I would need every one of those twenty minutes.
“In case things go wrong, the northwest stairs lead to the building’s ground-floor service entrance. That’s the primary means of quick escape, but the main stairs, maintenance crawl space, and elevators can be used if needed. Be prepared for resistance, but try not to kill anyone.”
We nodded and geared up in silence. I had my main com, two secondary coms, various connection cables and transmitters, a small tool pouch, a pair of stun pistols, a codebreaker, and my smart glasses. I touched everything a second time to make sure I hadn’t forgotten anything.
We all had transmitters and earpieces in addition to our smart glasses. We tested the communications before Ada and Loch left the room. Thirty seconds later Ada murmured, “We’re in and the hallway is clear. No surveillance in here. Cameras are planted.”
I used my smart glasses to pull up the video from the tiny cameras Ada had attached to either side of the housekeeping closet door. The first video showed the empty hallway. The second video showed Loch sprawled under a shelving unit, cutting a hole in the back panel with a portable plasma cutter. Various buckets and bottles of cleaning supplies had been pulled out to make room for him.
“I have eyes on you,” I said.
It seemed to take forever but eventually Loch disappeared from view. “I’m through,” he said. “There’s a two-meter drop when you come through. Ladies, I’ll lift you down, so don’t try to stab me when I grab you.”
Ada chuckled. “You deserved it, you jerk,” she said without heat. I wondered at the story behind the gentle ribbing. Ada hadn’t revealed much of what had happened when she and Loch first met, but I doubted it had been an easy meeting.
Ada quickly replaced the supplies under the shelf, pushing everything to the sides. She crawled through the opening in the middle. She disappeared, then squeaked and laughed. “If you grab Bianca like that, I’m pretty sure Ian will remove your arms,” she warned.
“I don’t need Ian to fight my battles for me,” I said drily. “I’m perfectly capable of removing Loch’s arms on my own, so keep it appropriate, buddy.” I checked the hallway video. “The hallway is clear. We’re on our way.”
Ian and I didn’t encounter anyone on our way to the supply closet. “With the drop on the other side, I will go first,” Ian said, “and hold you up while you reorganize the supplies.”
Loch’s quiet laughter rang through the earpiece but he didn’t say anything.
Ian shimmied under the shelves. I heard the faintest ring of boots on metal as he landed. “Okay, Bianca, come through feetfirst on your belly,” he said. “I’ll grab your legs.”
Loch had cut the panel at the floor so I didn’t have to worry about a sharp edge digging into my skin, but easing my feet into a black hole while under a shelf wasn’t exactly the most fun I’d ever had.
Strong hands gripped my ankles. “I’ve got you,” Ian said. “Come back as far as you need.”
&nbs
p; I slid my lower body farther into darkness, trusting Ian to hold me up. Working quickly, I spread out the supplies so there wasn’t an obvious empty space that someone might wonder about.
Movement in the hallway video caught my attention. “We’ve got potential incoming,” I said. “Where is the panel?”
“It’s folded up on this side. Get clear and I’ll get it,” Loch said.
I pushed myself backward into the hole and for a brief, dizzying moment, I thought Ian would drop me before one of his arms moved up and pulled me down to sit on his shoulder.
I gripped his head for balance, burying my fingers in his hair. A blink later, my smart glasses adjusted to the dark and I could see Loch taping the panel into place.
He hopped down from the railing he’d been balanced on and started to say something.
“Quiet,” I whispered as the supply-closet door opened. The hotel manager who had been bothering us earlier stepped inside and glanced around before moving to the wall on his right—the wall that was shared with our suite.
“You just had to sweep the suite, didn’t you, you little bitch?” the man grumbled to himself. “Well, let’s see if your fancy trackers can find this, hmm?”
He crouched down next to the shelves and peeled back a piece of tape that had been painted the same color as the wall. Whatever it was, it was just slightly out of frame, but when he pressed his face to the wall, I had a pretty good idea. The bastard had a spy hole into the primary bedroom. Ada and I had changed in that room.
He took something out of his pocket, aligned it just so, then carefully reapplied the tape. Unless you knew what to look for, you wouldn’t notice anything wrong with the wall. Fifty credits said he’d just planted another camera or bug.
My fingers tightened in Ian’s hair. If Ferdinand’s life wasn’t on the line, I’d climb back up there and give that asshole what he deserved—a solid ass-kicking.
“Hold on,” Ian whispered. He moved down the walkway, his own smart glasses allowing him to see without light. Ada and Loch followed, silent as ghosts.
When the ceiling dropped, turning our walkway into a crawl space, Ian gripped me under my arms, lifted me off his shoulder, and then slowly lowered me to the ground. I tried not to think about exactly how much strength that move had required or I wouldn’t be able to focus on the mission.
“Was that pervert trying to spy on us?” Ada asked in a furious whisper.
“Seems like it,” I said.
Ian and Loch shared a glance that could only be called murderous. The manager was lucky we were busy or he might not have survived the night with all of his bones intact.
For once my height worked in my favor. The crawl space was just tall enough that I could walk crouched down, but Ada, Loch, and Ian actually had to crawl on their hands and knees.
Moving slowly and quietly, it took us a few minutes to reach the corner of the building. I took a deep breath and reached out for the messages swirling through the air. Pain spiked, but I didn’t see anything from building security in my brief scan.
Ada flattened herself to the walkway and eased a tiny camera between the plastech ceiling tiles. The video came up on our smart glasses, and as one, we froze.
The overhead lights were off, but the office below us was not empty.
A blond woman lay half on the desk with her demure ivory skirt hiked up to her hips. Her legs were over the shoulders of a kneeling, dark-haired woman who had her face buried between the blonde’s thighs. The blonde gave the brunette’s hair a demanding yank and we could hear her groan straight through the ceiling tiles.
I barely dared breathe. The blonde was Carly Vignette, MineCorp’s executive vice president on Sedition. I didn’t know who the other woman was, but she clearly wasn’t Mrs. Vignette’s husband.
“Do we have any sedative?” I asked in the quietest whisper I could manage.
“No,” Ian said, his voice equally soft. “Don’t even think about it.”
“With her access, I’ll be done in five minutes.”
“As soon as she signals distress, security will be here in two,” he argued.
“So you’ll have to keep her from doing that,” I said.
“And then, as soon as we leave, she’ll order Ferdinand killed.”
He was right, dammit. We could probably stun her before she saw us, but the risk was too high when I could get into the system on my own. I cast one last, longing look at her arm. She was too far away to clone her identity chip, even if I had brought the appropriate equipment, which I hadn’t.
I captured twenty seconds of video, just in case I needed leverage later, then turned to Ian. “Do you have a Plan B location in mind or do you want me to decide?”
From what I could recall of the blueprints, other than the vice president’s office, this floor was almost entirely open. If we were lucky they had built freestanding cubicles, but based on how tonight was going, I wasn’t counting on it.
Ian led us back the way we had come. Ada left the camera, allowing us to keep an eye on our after-hours complication. At least their presence meant the motion sensors were likely already disabled.
We worked our way back to the middle of the building. “Let’s see what we’re dealing with,” Ian whispered.
“This is the last camera,” Ada warned. She once again slipped the tiny device between the plastech ceiling tiles.
I groaned as the video appeared. A sea of open desks stretched from the vice president’s office to the far wall. There wasn’t a single handy cubicle in sight. As soon as I brought up one of those terminals, I’d be visible from the entire floor. The desks had half-height privacy panels underneath. I would be partially hidden if I stayed on the floor, but if anyone got down low enough, they’d spot me immediately.
The only good news was that the motion sensors were indeed turned off and I didn’t see any obvious signs of video surveillance. It was technically doable, but I wasn’t sure if it was actually less risky than breaking in on Mrs. Vignette and her lover.
“Do you think they’re going to stay busy for the next twenty minutes?” I asked.
“Hard to say, but we’ll have a little bit of warning before they appear. It should be enough for you to hide.”
“Okay, let’s go. Far corner. Ada and Loch, you two are on lookout. Let me know if anyone comes up the stairs or elevator, or if the ladies decide they’re finished. I won’t have enough brain power to watch the video while I’m working, so keep an eye on it for me.”
Loch grinned and Ada smacked him playfully on the shoulder. “I’ve got the video,” she said. “You watch the stairs.”
“Ian, once I’m done, I’ll need your help up,” I said. There was a time when I could do pull-ups with the best of them, but that was long past. Once I dropped down into the office, I’d be stuck without help.
“I’m going with you,” he said.
I didn’t even try to argue. I wouldn’t win and it would just waste time. “Can you get us closer to the corner before we drop down?”
Ian nodded and started down a new crawl space. I waved at Ada and Loch, then followed him. The path didn’t make it all the way to the corner, but it got us to the far wall.
Ian said, “I’m dropping in.”
Loch grunted his assent. “Stairway is clear.”
“Ladies are still busy,” Ada said.
Ian lay on his stomach and pulled up one of the square, meter-wide plastech ceiling tiles from the wall side of the crawl space. He slid it over the tile next to it. The metal grating of the crawl space walkway hung over the opening by about a centimeter. Ian leaned down and peeked at the office. His head appeared on the video from Ada’s camera.
He must’ve been happy with what he saw because he gripped the walkway and slid into the opening head first. Before I could ask him what in the world he was doing, his legs came up and he pulled his upper body parallel to the ceiling. In a ridiculous show of both arm and core strength, his legs dropped down as he lowered his hips, until he hung
straight down from the walkway.
He dropped lightly to the ground and grinned up at me. “Your turn.”
“Show-off,” I grumbled.
My descent was far less impressive, but I made it to the ground without breaking anything. Ian pulled the ceiling tile back into place while I set a timer for twenty minutes. The time counted down in the corner of my smart glasses. I needed to make these minutes count.
I chose the desk in the corner. A hand wave brought up the display and the embedded keyboard in the desk lit up. I turned the display brightness all the way down, but it was still bright as hell in the dark office.
“Do you have to use that?” Ian asked.
“It’ll be faster if I can get in.”
Users logged in to these terminals with their identity chips but that didn’t mean there weren’t other ways in. Chip readers failed and system administrators couldn’t always replace them immediately.
I brought up the admin log-in page and tried the most common options. All failed. Of course this had to be the one company with competent sysadmins. Tori had warned me, but I’d held out hope that maybe she was wrong.
She wasn’t.
I waved away the display and plugged one of my secondary coms into the diagnostic port underneath the desktop. Time to break out the big guns.
If the sysadmins were good, and I had every reason to believe they were, then trying to brute-force the admin password would set off all sorts of internal alarms. The terminal would automatically be quarantined and someone would alert security to physically check out what was happening.
But even well-run networks had to contend with users, and users didn’t care about security, they just wanted their stuff to work. By using the diagnostic port, I could access the internal network from my com. And according to Tori, those same users would be my ticket in.
I kicked off two scripts. The first looked for vulnerable services that would give me access to a terminal. I didn’t need a terminal to access my brother’s information, but leaving myself a back door so I could check again later from outside the office was worth the search. The second script looked for servers with open ports.
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