* * *
The torus was a bustling station, but it lacked the shine and polish of a place like Leavitt. This was a mining platform; those who’d built it hadn’t bothered with finishing touches.
The thick bulkheads were exposed, unpolished metal. They arched up to meet clearsteel panels along the inner rim, which allowed illumination from the small, fusion-powered sun at its hub to shine through.
The torus was small enough that there was only a single pair of maglev tracks that circumnavigated the fifteen-plus-kilometer habitat. Trains operated in opposition to each other, the cars running along a synchronized, scheduled route.
The nearest maglev platform was a half kilometer from the hatch, and Micah broke into a slow jog, mindful that, with his suit on active stealth, he was now hidden from view. The last thing the team needed was for someone to report a cloaked intruder after they ran into an invisible wall.
There was a train stopped at the platform, but not a single soul was on board. The sign that normally showed departure times was dark.
That was odd. In all of Micah’s travels, he’d yet to see an empty maglev car in a habitat of this size. There were always at least a few workers heading home after a long shift, or on their way to a late-night dinner.
Unless the car had been pulled into service for a special reason, by someone with the resources to make that happen.
His suspicions were confirmed a moment later.
Found him, but you’d better hustle, Jonathan advised. Will says he just boarded that train, and it’s about to depart. Guy has bodyguards with him, too. Assume they’re running active scan.
Micah began sprinting toward the train. You have got to be shitting me. Which car?
The last one.
Micah had a split second to make the call. He didn’t dare risk entering that last car for fear their scan would pick up the disturbance in the air—despite him being fully stealthed—but the doors to the other cars were already sealed. Unless he could hack them in time.
Problem was, the train would be taking off at any moment, and he’d be out of luck.
He’d just reached the next to last car, the one in front of his quarry, when the maglev began to move.
Aw hell, he thought, and before he could talk himself out of it, made a mad leap. Tell Will to bypass the sensors on the train’s hull, he gritted out, or this party’ll be over before it has a chance to start.
A tense few seconds passed before Jonathan confirmed Will had successfully hacked into its system, bypassing safety protocols and allowing him to remain undetected.
As the maglev continued to pick up speed, Micah pressed his body closer to the car when air resistance tried to peel him off. The wind brought tears to his eyes, but before he could blink them away, his optical implants cleared his vision for him. His military-grade mods and the drakeskin’s capabilities were the only things allowing him to hang on.
Unfortunately, there was precious little to hold onto. He’d wedged the fingers of one hand into the almost nonexistent indentation where the car’s door met its frame. His other was splayed against the rounded edge where the train’s sidewall curved into its roof. Both feet were balanced on the curved bump housing the car’s superconducting electromagnets.
The SmartCarbyne lattice woven throughout his body that reinforced bones, strengthened muscles, and protected organs also had military-grade picosensors that ran along the axons of his neural circuitry. They functioned as supplemental nodes and signal boosters, enhancing his already well-honed pilot's reflexes far beyond the human norm. These allowed Micah to maintain his balance while the maglev rocketed toward the warehouse district.
The ionic threads woven into the drakeskin suit helped, too. Tiny organogel strands surfaced the palms of his gloves and the soles of his boots. The short nanofibers had electrostatic properties that allowed the wearer to cling to a smooth surface like a limpet to a rock.
The maglev went around a curve, and he sucked in a breath as he felt his balance shift. He shifted his center mass to compensate, then did so again as the train came out of the curve. The train began to slow as it approached the upspin end of a trainyard, and Micah braced to dismount.
As the doors of the car behind him slid open and his quarry exited, Micah released a cloud of colloid audio chaff to mask his movements. He pushed off from the car’s SC electromagnet casing and landed on the maglev’s platform in a controlled roll to prevent vibration from telegraphing his presence.
Reaching into a utility pocket, he freed a surveillance microdrone, waited until the drug lord and his bodyguards walked past, and set the drone to float silently in their wake. Micah could just make out the shadowed silhouettes of warehouses ahead of them.
They’re headed for their meet, he told Jonathan. I’m going to follow along.
He activated his flight suit’s magnetic field generator, drawing the colloid cloud around him like an invisible, soundproofed shell.
Micah kept to the shadows, not wanting to rely too much on the drakeskin’s capabilities, in case they were running countermeasures he’d not detected, but no one gave any indication they suspected they were being followed.
The warehouse they led him to was on the trainyard’s downspin side. Row upon row of maglev boxcars were parked here, rounded rectangular forms casting long shadows in the torus’s twilight, their holds filled with ore awaiting shipment.
Micah spared a glance through Mercer’s transparent dome at the dark, inner ring more than a kilometer and a half away, and then consulted the time stamp on his overlay. He still had a good three hours before the inner ring’s complex mirror system reconfigured from its nighttime state to bring sunrise to the torus.
Plenty of time to snag a drug lord and bug out.
Micah had the surveillance microdrone halt just inside the warehouse’s entrance as he performed a passive scan for electronic tripwires and other digital countersurveillance that might alert the drug lord that he had been followed.
He loosed a second surveillance microdrone and had it circle the perimeter of the building for external monitoring devices, but came up empty. Setting the second drone to monitor the far side of the warehouse, Micah moved into the shadows between two buildings across the street that had seen better days. He crouched behind a collection of pipes that ran alongside one of the buildings, his eyes glued to the warehouse door across the street.
The feeds from the stealth recon microdrones now occupied two quadrants of his overlay, their images reduced so as not to impede his view of the street, should anyone else show up to join the party.
Only two sentries had been on duty when the group Micah followed had arrived. The first was sloppy, clearly bored with his duty. His rifle was a modified design with a short barrel, and rather than holding it at the ready, the sentry had it slung crosswise, his hands occupied lighting a stem stick. Micah figured this guy was depending on the warehouse’s systems to warn him of a breach.
The other was more problematic. Unlike her partner, this one seemed new to the role, if a bit jumpy. She appeared equally disinterested in both her employer and the Akkadian, opting instead to peer into the dark cavern of unlit warehouse stretching before her.
She had lousy trigger discipline. Micah zoomed the feed from the microdrone to a closeup of her hand, and watched as she kept up a nervous pattern. Her finger slid over the trigger, then down the stock to press-test the SC batt’s strength indicator before returning her finger to the trigger once more. He’d need to time her dispatch carefully, else he risked her getting off a wild shot that could alert the drug lord and his bodyguards to Micah’s presence.
He’d seen all he needed. He took in a deep breath, prepared to rise—
A shift in the air currents was the only thing that warned him he was no longer alone. Letting out his breath on a slow exhale and ensuring his heartbeat remained steady, he reached for the carbyne nano-edged blade strapped to his calf.
He froze as he felt the bite of a different blade
against his neck.
DEAD MAN’S BLUFF
Leah Harris’s Office, CID
Montpelier, Ceriba
Harper stayed behind in Addy’s office while Gabe swept the programmer’s work area for evidence, and Addy had the body moved to medical for an autopsy.
Harper had gladly left the removal of the body and the physical investigation to them. She was more effective—and far more comfortable—with data anyway. As an analyst, information was her domain.
Bonus, it doesn’t involve blood or bodily fluids.
Once the room had been swept and the body transferred, Harper moved in, hard-linking with Leah’s data port for better access. She’d been rifling through material for the past two hours. She was drowning in data, and yet she’d only scratched the surface.
She’d just decided to ask Gabe to requisition some additional help when a voice sounded over the team net.
{Hey, Harper? Anything I can do to help?} The ID attached to the voice indicated it belonged to Katie Hyer. {I tried reaching Agent Alvarez, but he and the captain both have their comms set to ‘busy’. Can you use a hand?}
Harper jumped on the offer, knowing neither Gabe nor Addy would mind. Katie Hyer was part of TF Blue, so she was automatically read in on the situation.
Besides, there was something creepy about sitting all alone in a dead woman’s office, and the chief could code a mean LockPik. Maybe she could help figure this out.
{I’d appreciate that, actually. Let me send you my location.}
She pushed a map of the Center to Katie, and then instructed the security kiosk to clear the chief warrant’s token for immediate entry into Rufus’s corridors.
Ten minutes later, she heard a running conversation outside Harris’s office door, and realized Dave, the glitchy SI, had found Hyer.
“Would the chief warrant like to try a macchiato?”
“No!” Harper jumped out into the hallway before Katie had a chance to respond.
The other woman gave her a funny look, and Harper’s eyes widened in a silent ‘just go along with it’ message that thankfully, Katie understood.
“Very well, then. Have a nice day.”
Have a nice day? Buddy, that flew out the window the minute you glitched and your programmer turned up dead….
Harper pushed Katie into Leah Harris’s office and then activated the ‘Police Line—Do Not Cross’ holographic stanchions Gabe had given her in case she ended up having to deal with curious visitors. She turned to face Katie. The woman looked at her as if she had a few nanofilaments loose upstairs.
“Wanna tell me what that was all about?”
Harper pushed away from the door. “I think that SI’s base code has been altered, and I think the Center’s lead programmer had something to do with it.”
“Well, why don’t you just confront her with it, then?”
Harper grimaced. “Kind of hard to do when we just found her body.”
“She’s dead?”
“Uh huh.” Harper looked around uncomfortably. “And we’re standing in her office.”
Instead of mirroring her slightly freaked-out feelings, an intrigued look crossed the chief’s face.
“Cool. So, what’s the plan, and where do we start?”
Harper waved to the hard-link at the room’s lone desk. “I’ve been going through the secured user data server the CID assigned to Leah. There’s something interesting inside, and it wasn’t there earlier today—I checked.”
The chief wandered over to the desk. “What is it?”
“A ghost drive. Far’s I can tell, it appeared right after she died. I think Leah Harris had a dead man’s switch.”
“A what?” Katie’s head whipped around.
“You heard me.”
Harper dragged a second chair up to the holodisplay. Gesturing for the chief to sit, she jacked back into the port and pulled up the secured data partition.
“Check it out. This is the network sector the Center automatically allocated to Leah when she was first hired, five years ago.”
She waved a hand, and ‘wayback’ images began to populate on the screen, snapshots of the CID’s network servers from one, three, and five years ago. She compared them to a snapshot of the current volume.
Highlighting an icon tucked in with the rest of Leah’s work files, she said, “See there? That volume’s data cache isn’t listed anywhere in the past five years. It just suddenly appeared…” Harper checked the server’s recent activity log, “two hours and forty-seven minutes ago.”
The chief stared, speculation in her eyes. “Why do you think it’s a dead man’s switch?”
“The timing. Take a look. Addy’s already uploaded her preliminary findings on the autopsy she’s doing. Time of death occurred a little after oh-seven hundred this morning. Two hours, twenty-four minutes ago, to be exact.”
The chief looked thoughtful.
“The one thing I can’t figure out is, why the gap?” Harper continued. “I mean, there’s almost ten minutes between time of death and when the volume suddenly appears. I suppose there might be a timed-delay thing, but I have no idea why—”
She broke off as a stunned awareness crossed the chief’s features.
“Well, I’ll be a plasma pissin’ pulsar,” Katie breathed. “I think…oh, wow. Yeah, that tracks.” The chief warrant began to nod, eyes blinking rapidly as she thought through whatever revelation had suddenly hit her. “If I’m right,” she said slowly, “there’s a good reason why there’s a ten-minute gap, give or take, between time of death and the dead man’s switch.”
She turned to the hard-link and began accessing data at a rapid rate. Streams of text and images of the human brain flew past, faster than Harper could follow.
Finally, after a few minutes, the chief grunted. “There,” she said, enlarging one of the reports she’d pulled.
The file was a medical document on the web-like neural lattice that connected a person’s consciousness to their embedded wire. The implant interfaced with critical spaces in the brain: information inputs at dendrites, data outputs at synaptic terminals. This was how people connected to local networks and communicated mentally with one another.
The file on the holoscreen showed what happened to the fine mesh of carbyne nanofloss embedded in the brain at the time of death. The lattice underwent a state of rapid decay once neural function ceased.
“So Leah’s switch must have been tied to a sensor in her lattice,” Harper murmured. “The sensor would have triggered an alarm when the woman’s neural activity dropped to zero.”
“Activating the dead man’s switch, yeah,” Katie nodded. “But it didn’t do anything when it first detected the decay of your vic’s neural lattice. It purposely delayed the seven to ten minutes it took for all brain activity to cease. Until there was no hope for resuscitation.”
Harper blinked at the morbid imagery that evoked. “How did you know about the ten minute gap thing?”
“I overheard Doc Moran telling Gabe about it once. The delay you mentioned was what reminded me of it. The explanation tracks with what we’re seeing here.”
The chief tugged absently at a jewel-encrusted earlobe. The blue stone twinkled in the office’s light. “So you think Leah might’ve left something on this ghost drive that’ll lead us to the Akkadians who stole those vials?”
“Let’s find out.”
Harper brought the ghost drive forward on the holoscreen and they began scrolling through its holographic quantum register, sifting through its data hierarchy.
It took a while to coax information out of the volume of files the drive held, but after a few intense minutes of work, Katie sat back with a grin.
“Found something!”
What she had discovered were the meticulous records Leah kept of every interaction she had with the people who had hired her to steal the vials, but the feeds appeared untraceable.
Harper forwarded the information to Blue’s headquarters to study anyway, in the hope they m
ight see something she and Katie missed.
“Well.” Harper sat back, frowning at the holo in front of her. “That was a bit of a dead end. And we still don’t have any information on which vials she actually stole.”
Katie shot her a curious look. “You said that SI of yours is acting up. Could she have hidden the information inside his base code?”
Harper opened up the SI file she’d flagged earlier. “Only one way to find out.”
Pages of source code began scrolling past. The more she saw, the more she couldn’t help but marvel at the deceased woman’s skills.
“Pity her ethics weren’t as strong as her ability to code,” she remarked. “We could’ve used someone like this.”
Katie sat up. “Hang on, did you see that?”
Harper scrolled back until a section that looked different from the rest caught her eye. “You mean this?”
Katie pointed to a section of code that was commented out, a method used by programmers to temporarily disable the code so that a remark or explanation could be inserted. “Yeah, that, right there.” The chief warrant leaned forward. “But that notation makes no sense. It’s like—”
“Like the commented section is encrypted?” Harper felt a stirring of anticipation. Maybe they were finally onto something.
“Yeah,” Katie agreed. Her eyes narrowed. “Now all we need to do is crack it.”
“If this ghost drive is any indication of how Leah Harris’s mind worked, I’m betting it won’t be a simple cipher.”
“We have to start somewhere, though,” Katie pointed out.
While the chief ran the commented section through standard decryption algorithms, Harper’s mind drifted back to her discovery of the dead man's switch.
“I wonder….”
She reached out to Addy once more, relieved when the doctor answered.
{Does the CID keep copies of employees’ DNA sequences in their medical records, by chance?}
{Yes. Why do you ask?}
Harper made a noncommittal sound. {I'm not entirely certain yet, but it's possible Leah used her own DNA to encrypt something.}
The Chiral Protocol – A Military Science Fiction Thriller: Biogenesis War Book 2 (The Biogenesis War) Page 12