“More than likely. But I don’t have admin access to KE’s mainframe. Hacking them isn’t as easy, and you don’t want me to raise any alarms.”
Sometimes Shax’s mind amazed Draco. He was used to his flunkies being stupid. But this ork was far from that. “No. I don’t. I guess it’s possible Tetsu has friends inside KE.”
“The security guard?”
“No. Hapless idiot, that one. Keep looking into it. I believe if we find who helped him, we can find where he is and were that data is.” Draco pulled up Tetsu’s KE personnel file again and rescanned his relatives.
The only known family member was his father, and he lived in Chiba. Retired. All reports he’d fingered from KE said the old man was recovering from heart surgery. Sister missing. He was pretty sure she was the reason the technomancer had been digging around in Horizon’s business. But Hitori had worked for Ares prior. He searched through his contacts and came up with an old name—one he hadn’t used in a long time.
Ah, but favors were timeless, weren’t they?
“Keep working on finding out who helped Tetsu. I have a call to make.”
The ork left the office as Draco set up his call. He had to go through a few people, reroute tracers he detected, and made it look like the call initiated from Horizon.
“Debiassi.”
“Hello, Carol. It’s been a while.”
Carol Debiassi. Now that was a story. One of the survivors of the Renraku Arcology shutdown. Carol and he had met inside that hell and survived, along with seven others in their group. Draco had gotten them out before Deus found them. And for that, all seven of them owed him favors. This was the first one he’d ever cashed in.
The line went quiet long enough for Draco to check to see if she hung up. Then, “What do you want?”
“I want information. That’s all. And it’s not any kind of secret information.”
“On what?”
“A former employee. Hitori Tetsu.”
There was a long pause. “Where do you want it sent?”
He gave her his client email, making the transaction look like business as usual. An employee from Horizon requesting a file from Ares. When his commlink pinged to let him know he’d received it, he opened the file to double check.
Yes…this file was more than he expected, and Ares collected more on their employees than Knight Errant.
“Are we done now?”
He detected the hint of nervousness in her voice. She didn’t want him near her, or her family, of which he’d kept up with since their escape. “We’re done, Carol. Please, have a nice life.”
Once he severed the connection, Draco started sifting through the documents. Hitori was twenty-six, a well-known artist in her field, headhunted by Ares… It also said she had been caught in the Crash of ‘64, along with her brother, whom she had been playing a game with.
He searched for Kazuma’s name and it came up frequently. Hitori and Kazuma were twins, fraternal, and both had been born in the UCAS. Their mother was an elf, but didn’t appear to be involved in the kids’ upbringing. Draco couldn’t find a name in any of the files.
Their father was from Chiba, and took the kids back home for several years before returning and settling in San Francisco. While living there, their fraternal grandmother passed away and their father returned home, but left the kids in the care of an old family friend, Mama Risen. “Really? Is that her name?”
When their father returned, he kept the family friend on retainer, and it was this Risen who had raised the kids.
Draco did a quick search of living residents in the San Francisco area. He came across two M. Risens. One was deceased as of three years ago. The other moved. The name was Myddrin.
Myddrin?
He searched for a Myddrin Risen in Los Angeles and came up with the name, and an address. Unfortunately M. Risen had died less than a year ago. Draco changed his search to estate holdings and distributions, adding in Hitori, Kazuma, and Myddrin.
He laughed when he found a house east of the main city of Los Angeles, left to Hitori and Kazuma Tetsu. The house was still in Myddrin’s name, but the ownership had been transferred to the twins. All the property taxes were paid up, and the yard maintained by a private lawn company.
“Shax!”
The ork was back in his office within a second. Draco assumed he had remained outside the door. “Yes?”
“I’m sending you information about a house, its address, and its owner, and I need you to see if the place has a host. See if it’s crackable.”
“You want me to settle in?”
“We’re both going. Get the van ready, and meet me downstairs in an hour.”
Shax nodded then stopped. “Is there anything else?”
Draco removed his monocle. “Yes. You have access to the Gestalt lists?”
“No. But I can get it.”
“Good. Look up Hitori Tetsu. See if she’s there.”
“Is she important?”
The dwarf starting packing his commlink and monocle away. “I think she could be used to gain you and me a very, very large payday.” He removed his glove and thought of something. “Oh, and Shax?”
The ork turned.
“I need a kill file activated on Carol Debiassi. Do it quickly. Accident, and all that rubbish.”
“Consider it done.”
Draco watched him leave. The ork looked almost giddy. But then, he had just given him permission to do the one thing Shax liked doing the most.
Kill someone.
Chapter Thirty
Outside the Risen Residence
“This is crazy.”
Netcat glanced at Silk. The dark-skinned rigger sat behind the wheel of what she called her prized Hummer while Netcat occupied the passenger’s side. Kazuma and Moon were in the back, both with their eyes closed, checking out the house.
Across from the neighborhood where Tetsu’s ‘grandmother’s’ house sat was a used car lot. The security had been easy enough to dispose of with no discernible spikes in overwatch. Silk had slipped the refitted Hummer into a slot between a large black van with the windows knocked out and a smaller Honda. With the lights off and the tinted windows hiding them from the outside world, the vehicle looked like just another abandoned vehicle for sale.
“Why’re you on edge?” Silk was looking at her now. “You worried about Jack?”
“No. He’s great, and I miss him terribly. It’s…” Netcat shrugged.
“Is it Slamm-0!? You two having problems? I mean…I am a little concerned that you’re here with us and not with him and your son.”
“It’s complicated, and I’m not even sure where to begin talking about it, even if I wanted to. But I don’t.”
There was a beat of silence.
Then, “Okay, it’s nuyen. Bills. But that’s what it always is, isn’t it?”
Silk slowly nodded. “Kids are expensive.”
“Yeah, they are. But we love him to death. Even Junior loves him.”
“That your critter?”
“Yeah.” Netcat wished Junior were here with her now. She’d love to feel that fuzzy cat purring on her lap. “With Jack, it’s hard because we both can’t always be working. And in the past few months, I’ve been crazy busy trying to fight for technomancer rights, free the ones we know about—and it’s not a job I’m getting paid for. Slamm-0!’s turned down quite a few good paying jobs because I was…busy.” Her shoulders slumped. “I know he’s itching to get back out there. I mean…we’ve been playing it pretty safe since the baby. Especially after that jackass tried to sell me off to NeoNET.”
“Who? What?” Silk frowned at her. “Wait—you talking about that run-in with Clockwork?”
“Bastard. Yeah. It was a few years ago, but I’m still a little jumpy about it. So’s Slamm-0!. I know he worries when I’m out like this. We had a fight the other night before I came down here, and then another one right before I saw the dwarf outside Horizon.”
Silk reached out and put he
r hand on Netcat’s and squeezed. “It’s going to be fine.”
“He’s not answering any of my calls—so that just makes me worried about him and the baby. Where is he? Is he okay? Did someone find him? Did he get into trouble? Am I a bad mother? Running off like this to save the world? Should I ditch this problem and go home? Find Slamm-0! and my little boy?” Netcat shrugged again. Eventually she smiled, and leaned her head toward Silk. “So…you and Soldat.”
“He doesn’t like being called that on this side of the commlink.”
“Then why did he take it?”
“Oh…some guy told him to. A PI he’s been talking to off and on while trying to find his sister. Said it would be important one day.”
“It means soldier.”
“Yeah, it does.” Silk squeezed her hand again. “And he is a soldier, whether he’ll acknowledge that or not. He’s gotten a lot stronger since we met, both in the Matrix and physically. What you’ve seen of him isn’t his better side. He was shot by that hacker while at the Annex, and that wound hasn’t quite healed, and then having that damn technocritter bite the back of his neck didn’t help. I think that whole encounter with the dwarf scared him.”
“It would scare the hell out of me.” Netcat looked out the windshield at the silent house. “You think his sister’s still alive?”
Silk looked out the window as well. “No. And I think deep down, he doesn’t, either. On the surface, she’s become this beacon he has to move toward. I’m terrified that if he finds out she’s dead—” She took a deep breath as she looked at Netcat. “—if he sees the reality, it will destroy him.”
Netcat could empathize. She’d seen what FastJack’s disappearance and surrender to Cognitive Fragmentation Disorder had done to a lot of the runners in JackPoint. CFD was another nightmare she didn’t want to think about—and so far they hadn’t run into anyone infected with it. She wanted to keep it that way. She looked at Silk. “So, what else did this detective tell him?”
“He really didn’t tell me much about it. Just to change his handle from Dancer to Soldat, keep searching for his sister and be on the look out for Caliban.”
“Caliban? What’s that?”
Silk shrugged. “I don’t know. Kaz doesn’t know either. But he said he added it to his search specifics. Then about a month ago, he found something while heading up the group cleaning out the Horizon Annex. He said it was minor, just a name on a manifest. But the manifest was in an encrypted file on one of the hosts there.”
“And that’s what he took?”
“Yeah. It was all kind of weird, though. That host wasn’t connected—just old-style. And he didn’t trust these new cyberdecks to hack it, so he took a vacation and went through his third submersion, looking for a better way to remove the data.”
“Ah…let me guess. He learned how to skin link.”
“Yeah. Not something I’ve mastered yet. But then my interest and talent has always been in rigging. I love the inner workings of things mechanical—even if I don’t really need the mechanics. But I do have my old RCC—I keep it with me all the time. I also know I’ll never really become that powerful in the Matrix, like Kazuma can, or you or Moon. Got too much cyberware.”
“Don’t think of it as a competition,” Netcat said. “You’re becoming the best at who and what you are. And that’s all that’s important. But, you helped him? That night?”
“Yeah. And everything was great—till this other hacker showed up and all hell broke lose. Luckily I was in the right place and spotted their rigger. Made nicey-nice with her RCC.” Silk beamed with pride. “But then that girl got killed—which Kazuma did not do—and those security guards. I had to pack up and get to the car and pick him up myself.”
“And he’s sure his sprite brought the data here?”
“I know he keeps an active, encrypted folder on this host. He’s stored everything he’s collected since Hitori disappeared in it.” Silk sighed. “You know she disappeared on him before. Back in ’73. He was trying to find her then, and ended up getting shot in a coffee shop when he stopped some hackers. Turned out Hitori was just fine.”
“Where was she?”
“Submerging with a bunch of other technomancers. This was back when it was really all new, and she learned she could get more powerful by doing that. Went all beautiful mind on him and told him about the things she’d seen—the Resonance Realms—showed him what she could do. But Kazuma was terrified to submerge like that. To just let go. He’d been suffering from AIPS, and his headaches were debilitating.”
“But he eventually did it?”
“Oh yeah. She talked him into it. That’s when I met him. She wanted me to help them because she wanted to be there for him.” Silk smirked. “So here he and I are.”
“You make a great team.”
“So do you and Slamm-0!. You’re just going through the growing pains of raising a family. Maybe after this, Kaz and I can come see Jack?”
Netcat smiled. “I’d love that.”
A noise from the back made the two of then turn in their seats. Kazuma had his eyes open, rubbing his face. Moonshine opened his while Netcat was watching him. “Well?” she prompted.
“On the outside,” Moon began as he sat up. “Everything looks fine.”
“And on the inside?” Silk said.
Kazuma pulled each of his arms over his head to stretch. “Someone’s been here. I detected at least two other signatures. Couldn’t read who they were—”
“But one of them was a technomancer. And a creepy one. The whole house system felt…” MoonShine shuddered. “Tainted.”
“Dissonant TM,” Netcat said. “I’d be willing to bet that was the dwarf. One of his people, going on the assumption that critter of his had been dissonant as well, looking around for that data. Did they get it?”
“No.” Kazuma said. “Ponsu’s got it buried so deep and encrypted so well even I couldn’t get to it from here. And I didn’t want to risk pointing out which system folder it was in, just in case they were still hanging around.” He frowned as he looked out the window of the Hummer and then up.
“You sensed them?”
When Kaz didn’t answer, Moon did. “Just the signatures. They’ve come and gone.”
But Netcat was watching Kazuma. “Kaz…what’s wrong?”
“I don’t know. I get the feeling we’re being watched. I’m being watched.”
“What? You mean from some point higher?”
“Yeah…but not by…” And his expression moved from worried to confused. “While I was in AR, I kept getting flashes of seeing the house from the sky. I thought maybe I’d accidentally tapped into some helicopter’s security camera—”
“That’s pretty unlikely,” Silk said.
“I know. But…” He pointed out the window. “There’s this small shadow that keeps moving on top of the house.”
“You think it’s one of the dwarf’s people?” Netcat leaned into the front dash and looked at the house through the windshield.
“No. This is small. And it’s more of a…feeling…”
Suddenly Netcat laughed as she looked back at him. “Kaz, you’re feeling a critter. Like my Junior. You felt it before?”
He looked surprised. “No.”
“Then don’t worry about it. If it doesn’t feel like the wolf did, then it’s not tainted.” She chewed on her lower lip as she looked at him, but didn’t really see him. “So here’s the deal—how did anyone else find this piece of property? You said you kept it hidden. It’s not even in your name?”
“I can only assume someone got it through Hitori’s personnel file at Ares. I have a copy of it because she gave it to me. I told her when I saw it that she had too much personal information on it, and suggested if she was going to go out there and be an artist by day and a technomancer vigilante by night, she needed to keep a lot more of her life private.” He raked his long fingers through his hair. “I’m assuming she didn’t listen to me. She never listens to me.”
<
br /> “So…” Silk reached back between the driver and passenger seats and put her hand against his cheek. He put his hand on hers and smiled. “Do we go in, baby? You think it’s safe enough?”
“I think we should wait. Just in case mine and Moon’s intrusion was noticed or we triggered something.”
“I didn’t trigger anything,” Moon said from behind Kazuma. “I’m like a ghost.”
“You look like a ghost,” Netcat smiled. “That cooler has some snacks in it. I know how hungry I am after being online for any length of time.”
Both men hit the food, with Moon grabbing a moon pie and Kazuma a bag of nuts. Netcat made a face at the two of them. They’d been online for over an hour looking through the house. If their presence had triggered anything—wouldn’t they already know it?
“So we wait an hour?” Silk looked back at the men.
Everyone nodded.
She kicked the seat back and looked at Netcat. “So, tell me about Jack.”
Chapter Thirty-One
Risen Residence
Boss? Why is that bird hanging around?
Kazuma smiled at Ponsu. They kept to the shadows as they approached. Netcat used her e-sense to make sure no one was near. When they faced the house, Kazuma pulled up a small AR window and used his admin access to his grannie’s house host. On the screen he could see the wear and tear on the outside of the virtual door—where someone had recently tried to break into the host.
Yes Boss. Someone else has been here. Actually, several someone elses.
The golden swan frowned at him as she shrank in size. Yes. One of them is that wolf-hacker from the Annex. The other is… The sprite shivered. The other is something scary.
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