Pivotal (Visceral Book 3)

by Adam Thielen

  “How long will the tracker keep reporting?”

  “At least another two hours.”

  Tsenka took a deep breath. “Dammit. Listen, Kate, I don’t want to get involved in a firefight in Chantech territory over this girl, especially not while the clock is ticking.”

  “We would be wise to stay undetected as long as possible,” added Drew.

  “I agree,” said Kate. “We can do this quietly.”

  “You and Drew can,” proposed Cho. “While I follow him to Baoding.”

  Kate looked at Drew then back to the vampire. “Split up?”

  “Yes, just for a while.”

  “So you can g-go after h-him alone?” Kate said, her brow furrowed in frustration. “You’d have to leave us without transportation!”

  “I don’t see any other way for us to both get what we want,” said Cho. “You can program this thing to land at a designated spot, right?”

  “N-no! I mean yes, it can do that,” stammered Kate. She turned back to the cockpit windshield. “Fine. Drew, can you plot a course for the copter to land in Baoding?”

  “I believe so, Ms. Jones.”

  “You will have to m-make your way through the city on foot,” informed Kate. “We’ll communicate over an intermediary site, so if either of our coms go dark, we can retrieve messages later, and someone snooping on one end won’t be able to geo-track us.”

  Tsenka nodded. “Good.”

  “I’ve prepared a cover story for us, complete with authentic docs,” noted Kate. “I would avoid interactions with any security officers.”

  “Abso,” agreed Cho.

  “We will be at the landing zone shortly,” announced Drew. “I managed to find a spot just a klick and a half from the coordinates where Desre disembarked.”

  “Nicely d-done, Drew,” said Kate. She turned to Tsenka. “Listen, I know what this m-means to you, but do not engage him on his terms. We will message you when his sister is secured.”

  As the craft landed, Kate rose to her feet and walked toward a set of lockers in an alcove next to the cockpit. Her left leg dragged slightly as she walked, and once she reached the lockers, she leaned against them and shook her leg as Drew watched with concern.

  “Just a little tingly after sitting,” she explained, opening a locker and removing a short-barrel shotgun and a pistol. She tossed the latter to Drew, who caught it effortlessly.

  “I thought you were going to be quiet,” said Cho.

  “If things go sideways, I’d rather shoot my way out than get captured.”

  “How are you planning on getting her out of there?” pressed Cho, moving into the pilot’s seat.

  “Honestly?” said Kate. “I have no idea.”

  “Drew,” addressed Tsenka. “Keep her safe.”

  “Of course, Ms. Cho,” said Drew.

  Kate and her android companion stepped down the ramp and onto a rocky valley devoid of civilization and started toward the facility. Cho sat in the pilot’s chair, but the craft piloted itself, lifting off and heading toward Baoding, following a set of waypoints preprogrammed by Drew.

  “She’s cute, isn’t she?” asked Kate, hiking up a rocky hill.

  The landscape was picturesque, even in the dim light of the moon. Marker lights blemished the land, but it remained otherwise untouched. The corporation had not yet found it economical to terraform the land to be suitable for a foundation, and security kept refugees and vagrants far away. From her vantage point, Kate could see the towering lights of Beijing.

  Drew took a moment to process Kate’s observation, tracing back their conversations. “She underestimates us,” he concluded, following her up the path. His legs found irregular elevation changes surprisingly difficult, and his brain worked to adapt.

  “What about you?” asked Kate. “What do y-you think of our chances?” She stopped at the top of the hill to catch her breath.

  “I think you are an amazing woman,” replied Drew, placing his hands on the ground to maintain his balance as he climbed.

  “Oh, Drew… I have to wonder if you are avoiding the question I asked.”

  “Security has advanced considerably since your last outing,” noted Drew. “We should begin mapping signals.”

  “I will take the lower spectrum,” said Kate. “Be ready to activate your jammer on a spike of activity.”

  “Affirmative,” stated Drew.

  “Okay, let’s move.”

  Around the perimeter of the facility sat various cameras. Their distance from other electronics made their electromagnetic noise easy to pick up and decode. The duo used feeds from the cameras and their motion to carefully maneuver, staying just out of view. When they got close to the facility, they discovered another set of wide-angle thermographic cameras that would be capable of spotting Kate’s heat signature.

  Drew approached by himself until he came to a standard chain-link fence with non-standard intrusion detection. The current breeze would not be enough to mask an attempt to climb it. The robotic man began decrypting the network signals the cameras used to communicate. He found the access point’s signal and emitted a matching frequency. It would black out all the cameras temporarily as they switched from one channel to another.

  Kate sprinted to Drew, almost tripping over her own feet but catching herself. Without stopping she jumped onto his hands as he placed them interlocked near the ground. He boosted her up and over the fence. Her landing on the other side was not graceful. Kate’s feet hit first, but her body leaned forward and she fell onto her knees and then rolled onto her shoulder with a grunt.

  Drew prepared to start cutting open the fence to grab Kate and attempt to escape, but to his surprise, Kate rose to her feet unharmed and sprinted behind a trailer out of the view of the inner cameras. Her position was precariously close to a small dome-shaped bunker made to house soldiers who were prepared to react at a moment’s notice. She rested for a minute against the side of the trailer, then looked for a door inside, finding none. It must be on the other side, she thought. But Kate knew moving around to the other side would expose her.

  The trailer wore a corrugated skirt all the way around, and Kate began to carefully pull on it, trying to loosen one of the panels. As she pulled, one of the nails came loose with a screech, and Kate instinctively reached behind her shoulder for the grip of her shotgun. She listened for any shortwave broadcasts or signal spikes and breathed a sigh of relief when it seemed she had not been detected.

  She continued prying the same panel until it created a gap just large enough for her to crawl through. Underneath, she found what she was looking for—a hatch in the floor, rusted, but still usable. She placed her ear to it and listened. Hearing nothing, she pushed it open and crawled inside. The trailer was dark, with only a few stray beams of moonlight shining through slim rectangular windows.

  It appeared at first as though the building had been long abandoned as Kate rummaged through recessed drawers and shelves. She spotted an old stationary terminal built into the wall next to the door. Please be active, she begged. The neuro-hacker pressed her thumb to the screen, and after a short pause, the device lit up with a welcoming chime and displayed a status message: Please Wait… Connecting to Server.

  The screen went blank again, then a new interface appeared with very basic functionality, mostly for making calls and checking corporate notifications. Kate wedged her EM modulator, a playing card-sized device, between the wall and the terminal and activated a scan. She hijacked the terminal’s connection to the server and routed it to her neural processor.

  “Damn,” she muttered. “Drew, their network wants to install a rootkit for auth.”

  “If you can get me in, I will do it,” replied Drew.

  “I don’t see how to get you past the fence.”

  Drew considered alternatives and came up empty. “I would prefer you not do this,” he said. “Can you sandbox it?” he asked, referring to a way of virtualizing her implant's operating environment so that changes could be reve
rsed simply by ending the virtual session.

  “I can try,” she answered. “I’m not sure it’s worth the risk. I sent you the name of this system, do we have any info on it?”

  “Negative,” reported Drew. His brow turned up. “I do not know what to advise.”

  “Blaze it, I’m diving in,” she said, accepting the install request. A moderate-sized package downloaded into her drive then began installing itself by placing dependent files and non-file strings of code in various locations. It then began rewriting some of her operating system. She used a debugger program to document the changes and with any luck, she could reverse them without resorting to a wipe.

  To her surprise, shortly after installing, it opened up a session to the server and began dumping all of her stored data. “Sheeeet,” she slurred, activating an encryption stream to make the data unreadable on the other end, then deleted the key. Two minutes passed while the server took a copy of her drive, scanned her environment, ran some tests to ensure it had administrative privileges on her hardware, then gave her a welcome message.

  “Are you alright?” asked Drew.

  “Fanto,” she said. “Now it’s my turn, assholes.”

  The network piped a new message through her interface: Obfuscation detected, retrying data download.

  “Aw, goddamn,” whined Kate.

  “What’s wrong?” asked Drew.

  “I’m going to get locked out, need to move fast.” Kate activated her codebreaker, and her neural interface bridged the connection from her implant to her brain matter, utilizing her synaptics for multi-lateral computations that were much faster than what a transistor-based computer could manage. Advancing technology had come close to closing that gap, but it hadn’t rendered Kate obsolete yet.

  A guidance matrix appeared in front of her as her mind was immersed in a visual representation of the paths the codebreaker would take in order to attempt to follow clues and reverse encryption keys. The virtual space allowed her to detect weaknesses in the cipher based on subtle visual cues that even her software couldn’t emulate.

  The hacker’s first task was to access the root file structure inside the mainframe, an easy task. She then broke through the protection placed on the files, assigning ownership to her account. The tricky part came when she was unable to shut down the software protection service running on the server. It would regularly do checksums on critical system files to ensure they had not been tampered with.

  A progress bar had appeared in front of Kate, slowly filling up, indicating how long the server would wait to receive an unencrypted copy of her drive. She couldn’t let them have it, even if she believed she could delete it later. She was running out of time. Drew found himself fidgeting, a result of his human emulation, as he worried in silence.

  Kate decided to run a checksum herself and then started to rewrite her malicious files to match the same size, including security bits placed at the beginning and end of the system files. With a few seconds left, Kate threw a dozen instances of a prime number generator at the server, overloading it. Her connection closed shut and the world around her appeared normal again.

  Kate stared at the blank terminal and waited, giving the server time to reboot. Text began to scroll across a black backdrop, and a few seconds later a welcome message appeared, and an interface then replaced that. Kate muffled an excited squeal. It was now her interface, with commands to all functions in the facility and access to all of their data.

  “Ms. Jones?” asked Drew.

  “I’m in,” she said. “Attempting to disable the rootkit… I think I got it. I don’t know how long it will last, but we have the building.”

  “Like I said, amazing,” remarked Drew.

  Episode 9: The Captive and the Free

  The western edge of Baoding consisted of sparsely inhabited mountains and hills. Once the pollution capital of East Asia, the city had made great strides through the decades to reform. Like Tibet, the region had invested heavily in wind power before the Collapse, and while fission technology boomed afterward, Baoding was one of few cities that had simply spent too much on towering windmills to change course. Over twelve thousand of them rose high above the trees, each one housing at least one maintenance worker whose sole purpose in life was to keep his blades turning.

  The monocopter carrying Tsenka Cho passed over the windmills and continued on into the city. It had been cleared to fly in the city’s airspace. While fairly independent, the airspace was still monitored by Chantech. Where travel was fairly open in most of the world, and every territory still relied heavily on tourism dollars, all unofficial aircraft traversing the mainland had to have GPS trackers installed to ensure they stayed within visitor boundaries.

  Kate had rented a small launchpad near the center of town to give Cho a decent chance to track wherever it was in Baoding that Roland was headed to. A cool breeze whipped over her clothing as she stepped out of the copter, and she removed her mask and hood to better enjoy its caress. It was night, and she felt invigorated now that the sun could no longer sap her strength.

  A wireframe map of the city overlaid her vision, showing a marker for the coordinates of the tracker. The city was geographically large, over sixty kilometers from one end to the other. It would take her far too long to run, even at her speed. She requested a car to her location and stood on the edge of the roof and looked down. Cho expected to feel fear, but only felt curiosity at what it would be like to fall. And then she did. The wind whipped her cloak above her head, keeping her upright. She bent her knees slightly before landing, but the inertia of her descent was much more than she anticipated. Tsenka’s legs folded and she fell forward, stopping herself from face-planting with her hands, but just barely.

  A few seconds later, a blue car just large enough for four people without legs pulled up. It had two other passengers already; such was the nature of automated transport. One was an older man in a poorly fitted suit, and the other a slightly younger man in shorts and foot gloves made of thick, bright yellow rubber. The former’s eyebrows raised as Cho sat in the back seat next to him. He eyed her sword and attire nervously.

  Tsenka eyed him in return. “Sup,” she greeted. The man uttered something neither she nor her HUD could decipher, then faced forward as the car took off toward its next profitably calculated destination. It dropped the younger man off first, then took a right and headed away from Tsenka’s target. She considered hijacking the vehicle.

  The scenery of the city distracted her temporarily. The car zipped through well-maintained streets lined with brightly lit towers of the Yuhua shopping district, and as it traveled east, new buildings morphed into traditional stylings with swooping rooftops and large static signs covered in Mandarin characters. The car came to a stop in front of what appeared to be a brothel. Tsenka based this on the overwhelming number of boobs on the building. Her HUD scanned the sign and roughly translated it to “Sex Shop.” Uh, yup, she thought as the second man stepped out.

  Another man stumbled toward the car and Tsenka grabbed her pistol and waved it at him, shooing him away. He stepped back and tried to pull his com out of his pocket, but dropped it on the ground. After a minute of waiting, the car gave up and accelerated toward Cho’s destination.

  Halfway to the target, the tracking dot in Tsenka’s optics began to move again. Shit, she thought. This thing won’t match a copter and Kate’s will be returning to her already. She quietly seethed the rest of the trip, as the car exited the tourist districts and the scenery transitioned to a block of residential complexes. In placement, they resembled those in the West but were styled more traditionally. A thin road led out of the neighborhood to the east edge of the city, which gave way to a large, barren tract of desiccated earth. A light flickered in the distance that grew as Cho’s car approached its destination, morphing into a raging fire.

  The smart car’s cameras picked up the fire and came to a stop.

  “Please remain seated while we contact emergency services,” it said in Eng
lish, then what Tsenka guessed was Mandarin, then more tongues.

  She pulled the emergency release on the door and stepped out, then sprinted toward the burning building, covering half a kilometer in under a minute. She stopped and wheezed, breathed in smoky air, then coughed and wheezed some more. Doubled over, she raised her head and noticed that only half the building was engulfed in flames. She jogged to the other side and peered in through a window. Seeing nothing, Tsenka punched out the glass and climbed inside. To her surprise, the building, which appeared to be a three-story-high factory from the outside, was empty on the inside save for dust, trash, and a long conveyor belt with rusted idlers.

  The nightstalker cautiously moved toward the source of the blaze. She ordered her com to dig the net for names of entities attached to the property. She shuffled that process to the background and focused on temperature readings from her suit and skin as she approached a wide stairwell partially covered by a sliding hatch. Her optics concluded, based on the temperature of the blaze filling the stairwell, that an acetylene-based accelerant was involved in the continued burn, and her skin told her she would come no closer. Tsenka was forced to retreat back the way she came as the fire spread.

  Cho started back toward the smart car when a dozen headlights shone her direction, beamed from vehicles barreling toward her. She turned toward the open dirt fields, and considered running, then changed her mind. Tsenka waited for the cars to position themselves in a quarter-circle around her. Her com told her that the building belonged to Ping Interests Group. PIG, she thought with a chuckle. Large stylized Mandarin badges painted the sides of the vehicles, and the English lettering underneath confirmed that they were corpsec.

  Ping retained security jurisdiction over Baoding to the ire of Chantech. In order to lower their own costs, Chantech had often allowed smaller corps to manage various districts where they operated their non-competitive industries. But in Baoding, it was Ping that governed with near autonomy and without subservience. While Chantech had plans to remove the blemish from their corporate state, for the time being, they tolerated its existence, seeing it as too unprofitable to engage in corporate warfare.