Cloak & Ghost: Lost Gate

by Moeller, Jonathan

It was a big room with over twenty workstations. Each station had a pair of large monitors and a set of tools, and a dozen tables held various prototype devices in different stages of assembly. Caina didn’t know anything about robotics, and she didn’t know what most of the machines did. Robotics research had been restricted for centuries, but if the High Queen really was going to relax those regulations, maybe Caina would find out what these machines did soon enough.

  Assuming, of course, the High Queen did not destroy NRC.

  Caina supposed the contents of their servers would determine that.

  “Nerina,” murmured Caina, looking around. “Do you see anyone on this floor?”

  “No,” said Nerina. “Looks like everyone is still on the factory tour. Some people stayed in the lobby for more drinks and…I think one couple just slipped into the stairwell for a, er, romantic encounter, but no one’s on your floor. I’ll alert you if anyone heads up.”

  “Thanks,” said Caina. “I’m entering the server room now.”

  She crossed the lab and came to a closed steel door with an electronic lock. The lock also had a keyhole in case of power failure, but Caina would need to bypass both the electronics and the mechanical lock itself to access the server room. She dropped to one knee before the door, reached into her belt, and produced a small flat black rectangle of metal. Caina pressed it against the card reader, and the rectangle buzzed and settled in place with a metallic click as its magnets took hold. The light on the card reader shifted from red to green as the electronic lock override took hold. That wasn’t enough to physically open the lock, so Caina produced a lockpick gun and got to work.

  It only took three tries to open the lock. Caina felt a surge of disapproval. Given the value of NRC’s technology, they kept their lab server room behind a bog-standard lock? Of course, it made her job easier, so her disapproval was irrational.

  She pulled the door open and stepped into the server room. It was more of a large closet, with a row of racks holding boxy black servers covered in blinking LEDs. This was the dedicated server room for NRC’s lab, storing their designs and research data. It was also completely isolated from the Internet, which was the entire reason Caina was here.

  The file server was in the center of the rack, connected to a massive array filled with thirty high-capacity hard drives, all of them linked and mirrored for backup and data redundancy. Caina drew another object from her belt, a portable hard drive joined to some custom and highly illegal electronics that Nerina had prepared. She plugged it into one of the ports of the server storage array (they really should have soldered them over) and switched the device on. An array of red LEDs lit up on the back of the drive, then switched to blue as the device came online. One by one the LEDs switched to green as the drive copied off the lab reports from the server.

  “Drive’s going,” said Caina.

  “Good,” said Nerina. “It should take about five minutes for the data transfer to complete.” She sounded annoyed. “I am unable to calculate a precise time for transfer due to the number of unknown variables. Estimates are always so vexing.”

  “Then give me a precise number,” said Caina. “How much longer do we have on the camera worm?”

  “Fourteen minutes and thirty-eight seconds,” said Nerina, sounding much relieved. She hated giving imprecise numbers.

  “All right,” said Caina. “That should give me nine minutes to get out of here.” Nine minutes was doable. She’d planned for a minimum of six and a half.

  “But someone is coming up the stairwell,” said Nerina.

  “What?” said Caina. “Do you recognize them?”

  “I do not,” said Nerina. “The man is middle-aged, the woman somewhere in her thirties. Both have imbibed a large quantity of alcohol and seem to be in good spirits.”

  “Damn it,” muttered Caina. “All right, give me a warning if they make it to the top floor.” She watched the drive, willing the LEDs to change to green. Not that it did any good. Even when she had been a small child, learning to use a computer for the first time, willing a progress bar to go faster had always been a futile exercise.

  Another minute passed. About two-thirds of the LEDs flipped from blue to green.

  “Caina,” said Nerina. “That man and the woman, they’re coming to the lab floor.”

  “Damn it,” said Caina. The server room door was open, and she had left it open so the lock wouldn’t re-engage when the door closed. Anyone who walked into the lab would notice it at once. She reached into her belt, pulled out a roll of tape, and put a piece of tape over the lock plate on the door frame. Once it was secure, she slipped the door closed and went into the lab, ducking beneath one of the workstations.

  A moment later the door opened, and the man and the woman stumbled into the room.

  The man was in his middle fifties and a bit on the stout side, his face flushed from alcohol and possibly the exertion of the climb up the stairs. The woman was only a few years older than Caina and swayed in her high heels as she clung to the man’s arm. Caina recognized him as one of the wealthier members of NRC’s board of directors, and the woman as the manager of NRC's human resources department.

  The woman planted a long, sloppy kiss on the board member’s mouth.

  Guess that was her idea of managing human resources.

  The board director kissed her hard, her arms wrapping around his back. He backed her up until her hips thumped against a table, and then the woman laughed, slipping out of her jacket and then her blouse, draping them over the instruments on the table.

  “Dear God,” muttered Nerina into Caina’s ear. “Don’t they know that they’re on camera, even if I am suppressing the footage? And don’t they know that’s a thirty-seven thousand dollar piece of equipment?”

  At the moment, Caina supposed, they were thinking about a different kind of equipment, but she kept that thought to herself. Partly because it was crude, but mostly because making any noise would give away her position.

  The woman’s undergarments and most of the man’s clothing ended up on the floor. Caina was just starting to think of a plan, and then fortune turned in her favor. The board member and the HR manager staggered into one of the offices and closed the door behind them. Thankfully, it wasn’t the office she had used to access the lab floor.

  “Seems like they’ll be busy for a while,” said Nerina.

  “Let’s hope,” said Caina, thinking uncharitable thoughts about the board member’s likely stamina. She got to her feet, hurried to the server room, and slipped back inside. The last of the LEDs on the drive changed from blue to green just as she looked, and Caina pocketed the device. “Time left on the camera worm?”

  “Thirteen minutes, forty-seven seconds,” said Nerina.

  “Right,” said Caina, peeling the tape off the door. “I’m getting out of here.” She eased the server room door closed behind her, and Caina heard an exaggerated moan of feminine pleasure from behind the door the office the HR manager and the board member had claimed.

  She headed back to the office she had used for entry, climbed onto the desk, and scrambled back into the duct. Caina crawled forward on her hands and knees as quickly as she could, hoping she didn’t make too much noise. Likely the board member and the HR manager would be too distracted to notice. A few minutes later she heaved herself into the air handler and onto the rooftop, breathing hard.

  “Time?” said Caina

  “Ten minutes, twelve seconds,” said Nerina.

  “Acknowledged,” said Caina, jogging to the edge of the roof. The grapnel and rope from her ascension gun were still there, and she couldn’t see anyone below. Caina took a deep breath, bracing herself. She didn’t have a fear of heights, but it was still a long damned way down.

  She swung over the lip of the roof, grasped the steel cable in her gloved hands, and started down. It took less time to climb down then it had to climb up, and she hit the ground and flipped a switch on the ascension gun. A mechanism within the device whirred, and the g
rapnel released. It hit the ground with a faint clink, and a few seconds later the winch within the gun had retracted both the cable and the grapnel itself.

  Handy trick, that.

  Caina clipped the ascension gun to her tactical harness, grimacing at the weight, and then turned and ran. She crossed the darkened lawn surrounding the factory and came to the chain-link fence that encircled the land. Razor wire topped it, but a few days ago Caina had prepared some loose dirt at the base of the fence. She moved aside a cut square of sod, wriggled under the fence, and pulled the sod back into place behind her.

  Then she ran for it.

  Fortunately, it was a short distance. A few minutes later, Caina came to one of the county highways that bordered NRC’s property. A long passenger van had parked on the shoulder of the road. Caina jogged to the van’s back door, pulled it open, and climbed inside. All the seats had been pulled out, and cases of equipment lay inside, secured to the floor and walls by cargo webbing.

  “Go,” said Caina, pulling herself toward the front of the van.

  “Oh, good, you are here,” said Nerina Strake from the front passenger seat. She was a small, frail-looking woman with intense green eyes and finger-length red hair that looked as if she cut it herself, which she did. Nerina wore a massively oversized gray sweater, ragged brown cargo pants, and had a laptop resting on her legs, her fingers flying over the keyboard. “That is actually ninety-seven seconds sooner than I calculated.”

  “The boss is efficient,” said Nerina’s husband, starting the van’s engine. Malcolm Strake was a short, broad man with gray-streaked black hair and a salt-and-pepper beard that would have been bushy if Nerina did not make him trim it every week. Malcolm looked like a medieval blacksmith, which was an amusing coincidence because he was considered the best gunsmith in North America. His company, Strake Armaments, made custom-designed firearms for Elven nobles and others who could afford to pay his astronomical rates. “I mean, you’ve seen her legs. She doesn’t have enough body fat to be slow.”

  “That is true,” said Nerina as Malcolm pulled the van onto the road. “It would be an interesting experiment to calculate the efficiency of her muscle-to-mass ratio, and…”

  “For God’s sake, you two,” said Caina with a mixture of exasperation and affection. Nerina’s eccentricities were obvious to anyone who talk to her for more than five minutes. Malcolm’s were subtler. As a child, he had been interrogated by a Knight of the Inquisition who had probed his mind, and the Elf had made a botch of it. The damage to his mind meant that Malcolm was incapable of lying, which had caused him all manner of problems.

  It was just as well, Caina thought, that Nerina and Malcolm were married to each other. God knows no one else could put up with the two of them.

  “She is right,” said Nerina. “We should focus on our escape.”

  Malcolm snorted. “Some escape. No one’s even shooting at us.”

  “Your drive worked,” said Caina. She pulled off her mask and goggles, wincing a little as she ran a hand through her sweaty hair. The tightness of the straps always gave her a headache. “Did you bring my laptop?”

  “Bottom shelf on the left,” said Malcolm.

  Caina reached for the shelf and pulled out a ruggedized laptop, the sort designed to sit on the front dashboard of Homeland Security patrol vehicles. She booted up the machine and plugged in Nerina’s drive, and then used the cellular modem to connect to a secure, encrypted site.

  Specifically, one of the servers sitting on the Skythrone, the High Queen’s mobile fortress and citadel.

  A moment later the data was uploaded.

  “Better wipe this,” said Caina, passing the drive to Nerina.

  “This will be entertaining,” said Nerina. “I’ve never overwritten a hard drive while in a moving vehicle before.”

  Malcolm grunted. “Just so long as you’re not the one driving.”

  One more thing to do, and then the job was done.

  Caina tugged off her glove and then focused on the ring resting on the third finger of her right hand. Nerina and Malcolm couldn’t see it, but the ring was invisible to anyone but the High Queen and her shadow agents. The red stone set in the golden band was Caina’s blood, crystallized and set within a gemstone, and the magic of the ring let the High Queen speak to her from any distance, and let Caina communicate with her as well.

  Idly, and not for the first time, Caina wondered what other spells Tarlia had built into the ring. Perhaps it included a way to kill Caina remotely should she betray the High Queen. If so, Caina would likely never know.

  She pushed aside the musings and concentrated on the ring.

  “It’s done,” she said inside the silence of her mind, and she felt the ring take the words and relay them.

  Caina let out a long breath and made herself as comfortable as she could in the crowded van.

  “Boss?” said Malcolm.

  “Yeah?” said Caina.

  “Where to?” said Malcolm.

  “Back to base,” said Caina.

  Traffic was light this time of night, or at least as light as it ever got in the New York metropolitan area, and about an hour later they reached the Ghost Securities branch office in Queens. It was a grim-looking cinder block building that had started as a warehouse. A chain-link fence topped with barbed wire encircled the compound, and security cameras monitored all the approaches. Malcolm drove through the gate and parked the van in one the garages inside the main building.

  “I think Nerina and I are going to head home,” said Malcolm as Caina locked the van. She would have it unloaded, and the equipment checked back in tomorrow. “You want a lift back home?”

  Nerina gave him a sharp look. She knew Caina well enough to know that Caina never liked to go home after a job. At least, not now. Going back to an empty apartment would give her too much of a chance to brood, and if she brooded for too long, she would start to think about Corwin Aberon, and that would be bad.

  “No, that’s fine,” said Caina. “You two go home. Why don’t you take tomorrow off, Nerina? I don’t think there’s anything urgent happening.”

  “Ah, you know she’ll check her laptop at least three or four times,” said Malcolm.

  “Thanks for your help,” said Caina with a smile.

  Malcolm winked. “Once a Ghost, always a Ghost, yeah?”

  With that, he and Nerina left.

  Caina could have gone home and tried to get some sleep. It was past eleven now, and sleep sounded like a good idea. Yet after a job like this her mind was too revved up and needed time to slow down, and she found the thought of going back to her empty apartment depressing. Instead, she went to her office, noting again that she needed to have better décor installed, and sorted through her messages. Nothing critical had come up during her absence. There were the usual administrative matters of running a private security company, and Caina dealt with those, approving budget requests and scheduling meetings.

  It only took a half-hour, and Caina’s mind was still too buzzed to sleep. If dealing with budget requests could not make her sleepy, she thought dryly, then she was going to stay awake for a while.

  So, she went downstairs. The basement levels of the Ghost Securities facility held an armory, a gym, the server room, and an infirmary, and several other utility rooms. It also had a small, austere apartment that Caina used (being Director had to have some perks), and she stored her personal equipment there. She changed to yoga pants and a tank top and went to the gym, powering through an exercise session with the free weights.

  An hour later, she was exhausted, drenched in sweat, aching, and maybe tired enough to sleep. Caina went back to the little basement apartment, showered, and collapsed naked into bed.

  To her mild surprise, she fell asleep at once.

  Fragments of nightmares danced through her head. She saw again Baron Maglarion, his Elven features distorted by the scar across the left side of his face, the crystal that had replaced his left eye glowing. There was her mother
, cold and cruel. She dreamed of Corwin, of his flashing green eyes and close-cropped blond hair, his mocking smile, his strong hands.

  And of the way he had died as they tried to stop Maglarion’s final spell.

  No. No, Caina didn’t want to remember that.

  She also dreamed of…

  A ringing cell phone?

  An odd dream, that.

  No. It was real.

  Caina’s eyes fluttered open, her mouth dry, her head aching. The room was dark, save for the clock on the nightstand that said it was ten minutes past six in the morning, and the glow coming from her phone…

  Her phone?

  Caina reached for it, looked at the display, and cursed.

  It was Andromache Kardamnos.

  ***

  Chapter 2: Let’s Avoid A Scandal

  Caina didn’t want to talk to Andromache, but she had to take the call.

  Kardamnos Shipping was one of Ghost Securities’ chief clients, and so was Kardamnos Memorial Hospital in Queens. Given that the High Queen owned Ghost Securities, and Kardamnos Shipping was one of the few large international companies the High Queen allowed to flourish, Tarlia expected that Ghost Securities and Kardamnos Shipping would cooperate.

  Of course, Caina didn’t want to talk to Andromache…but she was utterly certain Andromache didn’t want to talk to her. She still blamed Caina for the disaster that had been her brother’s wedding.

  The only reason Andromache would call was trouble.

  Serious trouble.

  Caina sighed, accepted the call, and lifted the phone to her ear.

  “Hello?” she said.

  “Miss Amalas,” came Andromache’s voice, cool and polite. After all her years in the United States, Andromache only had a trace of a Greek accent.

  “Ms. Kardamnos,” said Caina. She thought about calling Andromache “Mrs. Ravenwood,” but that would just annoy her. Best to start the conversation on the right foot.

  “A situation has arisen at Kardamnos Memorial Hospital,” said Andromache, “and your unique skills are required. Meet me at my office at the hospital at 8 AM this morning.”