The Girl in the Machine (Leah King Book 3)

by Philip Harris

  Leah sat up a little straighter. “Of course. Is it another drone run?”

  “No, this one’s different. It’s an insertion. They’re a lot simpler, but you won’t have a lot of time.”

  Leah’s heart sank at the thought of failing again, but she tried to look confident. “I could do it now if you want.”

  “No, you really do need to get some rest. Meet me in Training Room 3 at 0900 tomorrow.”

  Leah nodded. The mention of rest triggered a yawn.

  Alice laughed. “Come on, let’s get you back to your room.”

  3

  Alice pressed the edges of the port in the back of Leah’s neck. The skin was tender, and Leah couldn’t help but wince. They were back in the training room in their familiar roles—Leah lying on the padded table, Alice controlling things via computer.

  “Are you sure you want to do this? We can wait.”

  Leah shook her head. “No, it’s fine. I need to practice.”

  “Okay, if you’re sure.”

  Alice pulled the spiderlike VR interface from a tray beside the computer. The metal tube that led to the boxy computer that held the guts of the VRI crackled as it moved. Alice peeled back the VRI’s legs then slipped it onto Leah’s neck, triggering a shiver. Three red lights appeared on top of the computer.

  “Right, I’ll drop you directly at the interface to a secure data system.” Alice pushed a storage module into a slot on top of the computer. A green LED on the module lit up. “You’ll have two pieces of equipment with you inside the simulation—a storage module and an infiltration kit. Insert the storage module into the interface first; the software will run from there. The kit’s pretty simple to use. There’s a box with a circular pad wired to it. Open up the interface, and attach the metal disk to the main processor. The kit will do the rest.”

  “That sounds easy enough.”

  “Unfortunately, you’ve only got four minutes, and the software needs ninety seconds of that.”

  Two and a half minutes. “Are there going to be drones?”

  Alice hesitated for a moment as though searching for the right words. In the end, she said, “If there are, try not to get their attention.”

  Alice moved Leah’s hair aside. “Ready?”

  “Yes.”

  Leah tensed as the interface clipped into the port on her neck. She felt a momentary tingle down her right arm, and her vision blurred for a fraction of a second. Leah waited until she was sure the blurriness wasn’t coming back then gave a thumbs-up.

  Alice checked her watch. “Okay, thirty seconds.”

  She flipped a switch on the computer. The three red lights on the top of the box turned green. Inside the computer, a fan began to whir.

  Alice picked up a tablet from the desk and tapped the screen. “Fifteen seconds.”

  Leah had just begun to wonder why the timing was so important when Alice tapped the tablet. The training room faded to nothingness, and vertigo slammed into Leah.

  4

  The virtual world materialized around Leah. Her head swam as the vertigo intensified. She closed her eyes, clenched her jaw, and sucked in three slow and steady breaths. She staggered a couple of steps to the left then managed to regain her balance. Gradually, the vertigo loosened its grip, only to be replaced with an intense sense of claustrophobia once she opened her eyes.

  She was in a small room, little more than a storage closet, really. If storage closets were made of glass. Even the ceiling and floor were transparent. Beyond the glass, there was nothing but blackness, but when Leah looked down, she saw a network of colored tubes running beneath the room. Pulses of light rushed along them, creating a strobe effect.

  The tubes led to a steel column that rose from the invisible floor to just above waist height. The top was sloped and fitted with a panel made from what looked like black glass. A row of red lights ran along the bottom of the panel, and there was a slot at the top.

  Leah’s heart quickened as the feeling of being trapped began to overwhelm her. She closed her eyes and took another deep breath, but the feeling of confinement only grew stronger, and she had to open them again. Transparent though they were, the walls seemed to be closing in around her. No matter how much she tried to remind herself that none of this was real, her mind refused to accept she wasn’t about to be crushed or suffocate to death.

  She focused on the column, and the lights in particular. They wavered in front of her eyes and triggered a wave of nausea until she put her hands on the column itself. The touch of the cool metal settled her mind. The walls seemed to recede. Leah breathed a sigh of relief.

  The feeling was short lived. She was acutely aware that she’d already lost valuable seconds wrestling her body into submission. Seeing the slot in the column, she felt around in her pockets until she found the storage module then pushed it into the opening. It clicked into place. One of the tubes beneath the floor turned a solid, angry red.

  Hesitantly, she touched the glass surface of the column. She felt an odd tingling sensation and had to force herself not to pull her hand away again. Her fingers were touching the slightly warm glass, but there was something else, too. She could feel an energy behind the glass. It flickered erratically—a stream of static that seemed just too regular to simply be random noise.

  Patterns began to emerge in the static. Sequences repeated themselves. Brief periods of silence marked the beginning and end of other sequences that were longer and more complex. Leah could picture them, though, as easily as if they were words written on a piece of paper in her hand. The words themselves were gibberish, but she recognized them for what they were—data.

  She removed her hands from the column, and the rush of data vanished. The lights were still red, but then she hadn’t actually done anything yet. And time was ticking away.

  The infiltration kit was a box clipped to her belt. It unfolded to reveal an array of black boxes, probes, circular pads, and a multitool. Leah picked one of the circular pads that was attached by wire to a rectangular box with an LCD on it and removed them both from the kit. The disk was made from some sort of thin metallic material. The box was plastic and very light.

  There was a rectangular panel on the front of the column held in place by four bolts. She undid them using the multitool and removed the panel. There was a green circuit board inside with a single large rectangular chip in the middle of it. It had dozens of silver legs like some sort of robotic mutant spider.

  Leah pressed the metal pad onto the chip. Hesitantly, she removed her fingers, but it stayed in place.

  A red disk appeared on the rectangular box’s LCD. Leah thought she maybe had to do something to trigger the software, but then a thin slice of green appeared in the disk. The right-hand side of the wedge began slowly creeping clockwise around the disk like the second hand of a clock.

  Leah watched the green slice slowly growing until a familiar whine reached her ears. Panicking, she looked hurriedly around for its source and found it above and to her left.

  It was a drone, but it was different from Transport’s usual models. This one was smaller and built from makeshift components. Oddly shaped panels had been welded together to form a rough outer shell. Bent and twisted antennae dotted its surface, and there were flattened metal disks where there would normally be black-eyed cameras.

  Leah froze as the strange drone swept through the air toward her. There were no indicator lights on it, and without the cameras, she wasn’t sure it was recording anything, but that didn’t stop the fear building inside her.

  The drone shifted its course, moving clockwise around the room. Leah watched it until it was swallowed up by the darkness, then held her breath as the whine receded into the distance. Once it had reached the limits of her hearing, she returned her attention to the black box.

  The green wedge swept through the final few degrees. The red stream beneath the floor turned green, and a high-pitched beep came from somewhere inside the column.

  Leah felt a surge of excitement
. The lights on the interface turned green, and a blue progress bar appeared in the middle of the glass panel. It ticked rapidly upward, marking the progress of what she assumed was the program on the storage module.

  The progress bar slowed. Leah willed it to speed up again, but the blue bar continued to grow agonizingly slowly. A gritty chattering noise started up from somewhere beneath her feet. The exposed data stream flickered yellow then turned green again.

  There was another beep as the progress bar filled and the words DATA MERGE COMPLETE appeared on the glass panel.

  Behind her, Leah heard the return of the drone. She peeled the disk from the chip, pushed it back into the case, and clipped it to her belt. She replaced the panel on the column and moved to the middle of the room. All she had to do now was get out of the room.

  She pictured the glass walls around her vanishing and her body re-forming back in the real world. Alice had drilled this visualization into her dozens of times. If there was one thing she needed to be good at, it was getting out of a simulation.

  The vertigo returned. Jagged cracks cut through the room’s glass walls. A ripping sound filled the air, and the walls exploded. Leah raised her arms to fend off the shards of glass rushing toward her face.

  The shards never reached her. Instead, Leah felt Alice’s cool hands on her wrists.

  “It’s okay; you’re back,” said Alice. She pulled Leah’s hands down.

  Leah’s gut churned, and she felt her last meal threatening to crawl back up her throat. Her skin felt hot, and her eyes were watering. The muscles in her right thigh were shaking.

  She blinked away tears. “Did I do it?”

  Alice tapped the screen of the tablet she was holding. Several long seconds later, she smiled. “Yes, well done.”

  Leah’s delight was short lived. A frown flickered across Alice’s face.

  “What?” said Leah.

  “You left the storage module in the interface.”

  It wasn’t a question. Leah blushed. “I’m sorry.”

  Alice tapped the screen. “Never mind, it’ll be okay.”

  “I can do it again.”

  “No, that was a one-shot deal. You did a good job.”

  Leah wasn’t convinced. “I saw a drone while I was in there; at least I think it was a drone. It looked kind of homemade.”

  Alice didn’t look surprised. “It was just a different model. Did it see you?”

  “No, but it should have. It flew right past me.”

  “Those things are pretty basic.”

  “There was something else as well. When I touched the interface, I… felt weird. It was like I could see this data from somewhere, but I couldn’t understand it.”

  “Hmm. Maybe it was a programming glitch.”

  “Yeah, maybe…”

  Alice returned her attention to the tablet. She seemed distracted, as though she was still concerned about Leah’s mistake.

  The spidery VRI was lying on the table beside the computer. Its metallic tip was slick with a gray-brown fluid. A pool of it had formed beneath the interface. Leah looked away.

  Alice had told her it was a conductive fluid that helped make the link between the VRI and the port, but Leah always imagined it was spinal fluid that had been sucked out of her body to power the computer. She’d tried to tell herself it was a stupid, childish reaction, but the feeling persisted.

  When Alice finally looked up from the tablet, there was a worryingly grim look on her face. Leah half expected a reprimand, but Alice just slipped the tablet into her pocket and said, “You should get some rest. Tomorrow’s going to be a busy day.” Then she walked out of the room.

  Guilt gnawed at Leah as she waited for Alice to get far enough away that they wouldn’t run into each other. Alice’s storage module was still sticking out of the computer. She’d done exactly what Leah had and forgotten to take it with her. Leah pulled the module out of the computer and slipped it into her pocket.

  She checked that Alice was gone, then made her way back to her room. Her spirits were the lowest they’d been for some time, despite her success in the simulation.

  5

  Alice was late to breakfast the next day. Leah sat in the mess hall with Hobbs, Doukas, and Da Silva, her guts a tight ball of nerves. She barely ate anything. Hobbs finished off most of her food as well as his own and earned himself a glare from Da Silva. An unspoken agreement kept them all talking, killing time with meaningless chatter until their sergeant arrived.

  When Alice finally did walk into the mess hall, she ignored the line of soldiers queuing for food and came directly to their table.

  “Eat up,” she said. “You’ve got a briefing in five minutes.”

  Hobbs looked at Alice, puzzled. “More training?”

  “No, we’re going to break out Morgan.”

  Da Silva had a spring in her step as they left the mess hall. She tried a couple of times to get Alice to tell them what had happened to change Billingham’s mind, but the sergeant had shushed her and promised to explain once they had some privacy.

  Privacy meant the small recreation room that had been converted for use during briefings. Ten chairs split into three rows faced a wooden desk standing in front of a battered whiteboard. Alice closed the door and directed them to the front row of seats.

  Alice’s excitement was more contained than Da Silva’s, but it was there nonetheless. Leah could see it as she plugged her tablet into a connector on the desk. A projector hanging from the ceiling chirped to life, its fan whirring.

  Da Silva didn’t wait for Alice to speak. “So, how did you change Billingham’s mind?”

  “I didn’t. Billingham got the information he needed to convince him that Morgan really is where our informant told us he’d be.”

  “Did Jenkins’s crew get their data?” said Doukas.

  “No. We lucked out and picked up some communication on one of the standard data feeds. Just chatter really, but it referenced Morgan’s alias, Martin Day, and his location.”

  “And that was enough for Billingham?” said Hobbs.

  “Yes. Well, it was enough for him to authorize a light recon.”

  Alice’s gaze stopped on Leah, and it seemed like she was expecting a question from her. The barest glimmer of suspicion formed in the back of Leah’s mind.

  “So, we’re not going to get him?” said Da Silva. There was an edge to her voice.

  “No. Not officially. Of course, if we get there and it looks like there’s a risk Transport is going to break his cover, then we’ll have to go in.”

  The grin on Da Silva’s face grew almost wide enough to split her head in two.

  Alice tapped the tablet, and a picture of a building appeared on the projector. “This is the information that Leah got for us when we broke into the data center. Morgan’s in a low-security facility in a town called Adderbury.”

  The scuffs on the whiteboard obscured some of the details, but Leah could make out a chain-link gate protecting an open parking area and a squat concrete building beyond that.

  Alice tapped the tablet, and the image changed to a map of a small town with a single-line railway track running through it. Alice scrolled the image around and then zoomed in on a midsize building.

  “It’s not an actual prison, just a converted police station. As far as Transport is concerned, the prisoners they have are just run-of-the-mill civilians. It probably won’t be heavily guarded.”

  “Probably,” said Hobbs.

  “Shhh,” said Da Silva.

  Alice switched to a satellite view. She zoomed in on a space at the back of the police station. “This is our way in. All we need is a Transport vehicle. These small stations are mostly automated, and the vehicles have a transponder that will open the gates for us.” She pointed to a white roof attached to the back of the station. “We get inside here.”

  Alice tapped the tablet’s screen again, and the exterior view changed to an interior blueprint. “There’s a control room here that will give us acces
s to the station’s network. That’s where you come in, Leah. Da Silva, Hobbs, Doukas, and I can find Morgan and break him out, but we’ll need you to run interference.”

  Leah frowned.

  “She means opening doors, turning off cameras, that sort of thing,” said Da Silva.

  “That’s right. It won’t be a full VR system, just an ordinary network. Simple stuff.”

  Leah smiled, but the thought of being responsible for everyone else’s safety made her intensely nervous.

  Alice must have seen her concerns. “Don’t worry; you just need to find the right systems and unlock them.”

  “And they’re just going to let us walk right in?” said Hobbs. His voice was filled with skepticism, but there was a curve to his lips that suggested to Leah that he knew Alice would have an answer for him.

  “They will if we’re in Transport uniforms. We’ll get them with the car.”

  “The uniforms won’t get us logged on to the network,” said Doukas.

  “True, which is why it’s good that Leah’s information included the access codes.”

  “We’re placing a lot of trust in that data.”

  “It’ll be fine,” said Da Silva.

  “Just so we’re clear,” said Hobbs, “we’re going to steal both a Transport vehicle and uniforms to go with it, waltz into a Transport lock-up, hack their computer systems, find Morgan and break him out, then drive back out in that same Transport vehicle?”

  “That’s about it,” said Alice.

  “Just the five of us?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Billingham won’t be happy.”

  “No, he won’t. This could cost us once we get back to the station.”

  “Assuming we don’t get shot?”

  “Assuming we don’t get shot.”

  Hobbs stuck out his lower lip and nodded. “Okay, I’m in.”

  “Sure, I’m getting bored anyway,” said Doukas.

  Da Silva just grinned.

  Alice turned to Leah. “If you’re not comf—”