“Right where the carrier hotel was located,” Braintrust gasped.
Psy-Block came up to them, gaped at the destruction and spoke. “Oh, she was here. There’s a definite vibe of an angry twenty-something. She was worried, very concerned about the potential for loss of life. She wanted to wreck the structure, but she didn’t want anyone to get hurt.”
“Where did she go?”
“I’m not sure. But I caught one thought very strong: ‘two down, two to go.’”
Strongarm headed back to the black SUV. “Better get going. Come along, Agent Carson. Let’s give the tech heads something to do.”
Carson drove them downtown, straight into the Battery Tunnel. He hit a switch on the dash and a wall slid open, allowing him to break from traffic, and sliding shut before anyone could take advantage of the new route. A maze of twists and turns later, they emerged into a cavernous basement, driving past rows of trucks, cars, and plainly military-style armored personnel carriers. Finally, he found an empty spot and led them to an elevator. When the doors opened, they found themselves in what could have been any self-storage outlet. Except for the digital code readers and armored doors that stretched into the distance.
Carson led them down the hall, swiped a key card. The lock popped open with a beep and a click. Mizu’s history was stored in racks, powered down, harmless. It took an hour to re-assemble them into a working network, hard-wired for security’s sake. Crypto and Braintrust conferred constantly as they dug into Mizu’s past.
“God, this stuff is old,” Crypto noted. “We won’t even talk about the food stains on the case or the crumbs jammed between the keys.”
“Who taught this kid how to code?” Braintrust demanded. “It reads like an open source nightmare.”
Carson leaned against the door frame, arms folded. “No one did.”
Braintrust stared at Carson as if he’d grown a second head. “So she taught herself?”
“She said it came naturally to her. And she clearly knew what she was doing.”
“Wasn’t clear to me,” Kyle mumbled.
Carson glowered. “Kyle, if you’re going to slam me, at least be straight about it.”
Crypto looked up. “Fine. Straight up. You had no idea what she was doing. You didn’t even care as long as she got results. This isn’t coding. It’s something completely different.”
“Show me.”
Braintrust’s hands flew over the keyboard. “Hacking just means coding for harm. Applications are written in languages specific to the purpose. She wasn’t programming. In fact, I don’t think she’s ever actually coded an app in her life.”
For the first time, Carson seemed confused. “So how did she do the work?”
Braintrust shrugged. “She was…I don’t know. Thinking at the machinery. It obeyed her, so she probably thought she was coding.”
“But that’s what you do!” Carson said.
Braintrust grinned crookedly at him. “I use an AI compiler that translates my thoughts into an app. This is closer to computer telepathy. This is new to me.” She glared at Carson. “Did you even bother to check her work?”
“I have specialists for that. SCRAM has supervisors. If a system does what it’s supposed to, they sign off and Bob’s your uncle.”
“Yeah, well. Kyle, come here and tell us what this stuff means. It’s just gibberish to me.”
Crypto paged through reams of material. Tens of thousands of lines of code ran past the screen in a unique programming language. “Looks like the structure you’d have in an object-oriented approach. But some of the objects she designed…’whorls,’ ‘grizzles,’ ‘gumps,’…I dunno…”
“Just your best guess,” Carson urged.
“My best guess is that she created a sorting tool. Some way to funnel server information to a new set of IPs. But there’s no central admin point. She logs in remotely, and the system reconfigures on the fly.”
Braintrust’s eyes grew wide. “So. If she still thinks this way, all she needs is a single access point. Right?”
“Right.”
“And, Kelly, she was thinking she had two more targets?”
Psy-Block looked up. She was hugging herself, trying not to shudder. “Yeah.”
Crypto reached out to her. “You all right?”
“This whole building is psych-shielded. I can’t hear anything at all. Except from you guys.” She shrugged. “Feels weird, I’m so used to having to close off most of the world.”
“Here’s her goal.” Braintrust called up a GPS map, and two items stood out. One was on the west side, the other was much further uptown. “These are carrier hotels. Big buildings filled with all the wiring that allows internet vendors to do their jobs. If she takes these two facilities out, she’ll wipe out everything east of the Mississippi. But what does she do then? And if she kills her own access, what’s the point? Not simple revenge?”
“Orders from Scythe?” Strongarm suggested.
They all looked at Carson. He knew her best. “No. She’s following a higher path. She thinks she’s on the side of righteousness. She thinks Scythe is the better of two options.”
“She wants to kill SCRAM. Best way to do that is to kill its network. Without instantaneous communications, SCRAM has no backbone and Scythe can pick agents off at their convenience,” Crypto said.
Braintrust paused, hopping from one foot to the other, her lips moving as if running number through her head. “I have an idea,” she said. “If we cut out everyone’s access to the remaining carrier hotels, she’ll have to come here to screw with the works in this building directly. Then we make her play our game instead of us playing hers.”
“What do you need?” Carson asked.
“I need to not be dark. What’s the best-protected server farm in SCRAM?”
Carson pointed at the ceiling. “Ten levels straight up. I’ll walk you.”
“Agent Fist won’t like you bringing in new people,” Kyle cautioned.
Carson shrugged and headed back to the elevator. “I won’t tell her.”
The elevator resembled an armored garage lift, fit for moving heavy pallets and small vehicles as well as people. It occurred to Crypto that a man with a machine gun could do a lot of damage if he sprayed the interior of the car. He shuddered, fighting to get himself under control. Two hours in this place and he was already reverting to SCRAM’s paranoid ways. Evidently, their training was still in his head, somewhere.
“So whose brilliant idea was it to put the intelligence community’s nerve center underneath the busiest city in the country?” Braintrust asked.
Carson entered a twenty digit code on a keypad and swiped a key card. The elevator began to rise with a hum. “9/11 changed things. Where the DOD saw a smoking pit in lower Manhattan, SCRAM saw an opportunity to establish a presence. So while the politicians argued about what to build in the space, we dug down a few extra levels. No one suspected a thing.”
“How far down does the complex go?” Crypto asked. It was something he always wanted to know.
“There was a certain limit to what we can hide,” Carson told him. He almost cracked a smile. “This is just a regional response center.”
Strongarm raised an eyebrow. “And how many people work here?”
The doors slid open to show them an answer to his question. Agents of SCRAM filled hallways, everyone dressed immaculately in the standard uniform of black slacks or skirts, white tops, and glittering holographic ID cards dangled from countless lanyards.
“A few,” Carson said as he stepped off the platform. The New Angels couldn’t help but gawk at the institutional décor as they hustled to keep up. Despite the activity, the base gave an impression of size. Like an office building rather than a military outpost, but able to do the work of either if needed.
The communications section opened into a dark room with rows upon rows of cubicles dominating the space. Brightly lit screens poured their contents into men and women wearing headsets and intently focused on the
ir jobs.
Carson ushered them into an unused space at the back of the room, a shielded cubby the size of a closet, filled with telecom gear and surrounded by stone walls. Carson sat down and logged into the network. “I have a lot of secure privileges but shutting down the carrier hotels and routing their traffic through here is above my pay grade.”
“Not above mine.” Braintrust plugged a dongle in the back of the CPU. “In five minutes I’ll have everything re-routed. Then we wait for an alarm when she breaks in somewhere.” She looked around. “It’d be better if we spread out a bit.”
Crypto pulled out an ear-piece and turned it on. “I’ll stay here. I can read the trace-map, you can’t. When she starts re-writing the code, I’ll ping you on comms.”
“All right,” Strongarm said, as he squeezed his shoulder. “Let’s go, people. You, too, Carson. Let’s give Crypto room to work.”
They left him alone with his borrowed workstation and his thoughts.
His time with SCRAM hadn’t been a bad deal, to be honest. Carson was a good leader. Jemisin on weapons and defense, McElroy the pilot and driver, Alvarez the electronics guy, Tabriz, the field scientist. Kyle had been the intelligence specialist, picking out clues from the ether and pointing the team toward the next goal. The guy behind the desk. The guy in the chair with the comm that never turned off. That guy.
Then, the cyber attacks. The van by the river. Deep Six. Her arrival changed everything. Suddenly Kyle was the other guy. He still worked his console, picking out leads and identifying targets but Deep Six had gotten the combat training. The survival tricks. The cool stuff. When he complained to Carson that he was senior to her, so he should get the field work, he was rebuffed. Kyle’s skill set was unique. Deep Six, for all her whizz and bang, couldn’t read any language but English. The intelligence desk needed Kyle Richards, and that was that.
God, he hated her.
Alarms blared, and Crypto reached out to silence them as he peered at the monitor. The code was changing. She was here somewhere. He tapped his comm. “Brainy, Carson, heads up. She’s in.”
He received a static-filled burst of noise in response. He tried again and again, but there was no response. Finally, he stood to leave and then the blast door slid shut in front of him. The lock clunked, and an LED changed from green to red. Locked. He dug into his memory, trying to recall access codes, and tried a few. Nothing worked.
Suddenly an eerily familiar voice spoke to him from his workstation. “Kyle? You there?”
“No way,” he murmured. “It can’t be.”
“Ha. There you are.” The screen blacked out and flickered. He found himself looking at a pixelated CGI image of Margaret Arrow, aka Deep Six.
He squinted as his mind played a long string of long-forgotten scenes behind his eyes. He could almost hear the universe laughing at him. He’d thought of her as a historical bookmark for so long…
And yet his throat was dry as he tried to talk to her. “So,” he croaked. “It’s Mizu, now? That’s original.”
“Don’t be a bastard, dude.” She had a round face, dark hair, and green, almond-shaped eyes. There was mixed heritage there somewhere, but she never spoke of her parents, and none of the team had ever tried to guess. Her exotic looks hadn’t hurt, he was sure.
“What do you want, dear?”
“I want to make things right.”
“How, by dissolving the internet one building at a time?”
“No! No, that’s not what I’m doing. I’m saving you. Us. The world. Everyone.”
“You’re going to have to explain how.” Keep her talking. He needed to get out of here or at least hope that Braintrust was listening. He was sure his team was trying to help track her down.
Mizu’s image stared back at him, finally giving him a languid blink. “This is about me coming on the team, isn’t it? Kyle, that was four years ago. When are you going to get over it?”
“When I can look at you and not want to punch you in the face.”
Mizu rolled her eyes. “Look, for the millionth time: I’m sorry for how things went down. The truth is SCRAM doesn’t want intel guys, they want combat types. Fire throwers, telekinetics, lightning zappers, anything that can wreck a city block. That’s not you.”
Kyle fumed. “No. It’s you.”
“Sure, now. Not then. You remember what I was like when you guys found me. I was living in a van, for chrissake.” She leaned in to the screen. For a moment he felt as if he could reach into the glass pane and grab her nose. And pull. “We’re afterthoughts, Kyle. We’re the ones nobody has a use for. We just read their mail and send their letters, and that’s all we were ever going to be. Lackeys.”
“And that’s why you left home to work for Scythe?”
She snorted, rolling her eyes and shaking her head in an elaborate display of disgust. “No, you moron. I’m working for myself. I’m taking over the data. All the data. SCRAM and Scythe’s too. Without records, both organizations will fall apart, and the world is instantly a better place.”
“Yeah, somehow I don’t think it works that way.”
“Whatever, Kyle. I know what I’m doing.”
Stall, stall, stall. “Why are you telling me this?”
“Because I want you to know the truth of it. Scythe isn’t the problem. SCRAM is.”
“I will never listen to anything you say.”
She blinked, hung her head, and finally looked into his eyes. “Why?”
“Because before you showed up, I mattered,” he blurted. Now that the cork was off the bottle the rage boiled up and shot out of his mouth. “I was the intelligence guy, everyone came to me for ideas, for observations, for what I knew. Then Carson took a shine to you, and I was second fiddle. They stuck me in a closet. I wasn’t even called to the weekly staff meetings anymore. There wasn’t any point to my work. I had to leave. Where did I end up? The New-freaking-Angels, and even that nearly got me killed.”
“Your choice.” She raised a hand, twiddled her fingers, and a countdown appeared on his screen: two minutes.
She was still in the system. She was live. There was an opportunity to fix this. “No, dear. Your choice.” He reached out and pressed his hand to the screen…
…and connected.
He couldn’t find her body, but he could trace her trail of whorls, zingers, and twirlies through it. It was like following a loaf of bread to the oven by sense of smell. He saw the codes she’d placed in the system, writhing and slipping away from him, snake-like through a dark pipe. She’d built an elaborate network of commands, contingencies, and countermeasures in case he or anyone with network skills tried to follow her.
Braintrust was right: Mizu was ‘talking’ to the machines, and they were listening. Doing her bidding. No wonder SCRAM wanted her dead. Crypto had to dig into his moral code to not want to help make it happen.
He hated her so much.
“So that’s how you want it?” he heard. The system itself was speaking to him through his connection to the network. “I don’t need you people. I’ll save the world myself!”
He fell back as the connection shattered, gasping in the office chair he collapsed into. He felt a drip on his arms and the top of his head. He looked up. It was raining inside the room, the ceiling turning into water one drop at a time.
He belatedly realized what she was doing as he moved to the terminal and tried to log back into SCRAM’s network only to jump back as the water from above became a torrent. The workstation’s circuits fried and the emergency lights glowed red while the water rose inch by inch. Where was she? She had to be close by…or did she? He realized that he had no idea how her water-power even worked. Will Carson hadn’t actually told them that. Did he even know?
Crypto stumbled to the door, tried to get a grip on the solid sheet of metal and watched as the electronic locks shorted out. The door was locked, and he couldn’t get a grip on the smooth, slippery metal. Even if he could, strength wasn’t his strong suit. He struggled beneath
a full pack even on the best of days.
He punched the door out of rage and shame and barely heard when the door punched him back.
He backed away as the heavy thumping continued. He could see bulges appear in the door as the metal stretched and strained beneath the impacts. Finally, the door bent and sparks flew as the metal was pulled to the side. Strongarm’s face and arm, then his torso and legs appeared.
Water flowed out of the room as Strongarm reached in and pulled Crypto out of the gap he’d punched in the doorway. Water pooled around their feet as he pushed Crypto against a wall, his face contorted in anger.
“That’s what this is all about? A damn case of sibling rivalry?” he demanded.
They’d heard his exchange with Mizu, then, All right. Better that they should know his past. “It’s more than that.”
“Not from where I was listening. You had Carson all to yourself, and she took him away from you. Now you hate her for it. You hate him, too. You never cared about national security, it’s all about showing us that Carson is a failure. That’s your head game.”
“Maybe. But if you’d been there…”
“No. This is about you and only you. I’m of a mind to kick you off my team right now, but the womenfolk would complain, and you still have a job to do. Now, where is she?”
He coughed the last of the water out of his chest. “Level seven. Near the main trunk exchange. She’s talking to the main computer, turning it into a node for her own network.”
“Not Scythe?”
“She says she wants everything. Our stuff and theirs.”
“Come on, then.” He toggled his comm. “I have him. Meet us in the main server exchange.”
They maneuvered their ways through corridors, ignoring and being ignored by the SCRAM personnel who raced through the hallway on their ways elsewhere. Alarms blared, and lights flashed. Crypto could see what Mizu was doing: setting off every alarm in the hopes of dispersing SCRAM agents throughout the building. She needed to be everywhere at once and was doing a good job.
They arrived at an intersection, Carson running up with Braintrust and Psy-Block in tow. Carson took them the rest of the way, stopping in front of an armored door. A thumbprint later they were inside. Hundreds of armored servers whirred in place like roman columns. The air conditioning alone made the place feel like a freezer; Kyle had it worse as his wet skin chilled him to the bone.
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