by Tarah Benner
“Fine,” I groan. “I won’t tell Tripp. So what is it?”
Porter’s expression turns deadly serious. “Magnolia Barnes, this information does not leave this room.”
“Yeah, I got it.”
“It’s one hundred percent off the record.”
“All right!”
Porter takes a deep breath. “We’re not just looking for one person who’s responsible.”
I wait for him to elaborate, but Porter is sure taking his sweet-ass time.
“Hacking the bots is one thing, but stealing Sergeant Wyatt’s neural data is a whole other ball of wax. That is much more alarming.”
“More alarming than hacking a bunch of seven-foot-tall bulletproof bots?”
“Yes.” Porter lowers his voice to barely above a whisper. “BlumBot’s security is second to none — as close to unhackable as it gets. That’s one of the reasons Mr. Van de Graaf wanted to acquire the company. We’ve even used some of their techniques to strengthen other entities under our umbrella.”
“Including the Space Force?”
“Including the Space Force.”
I turn that over in my head for a moment. “But if there was a double agent inside BlumBot . . . couldn’t he or she have hacked the Space Force?”
“It doesn’t work like that,” says Porter. “The Space Force data is kept siloed on private servers that only high-ranking officers can access. Only someone inside the organization could have compromised its data.”
“So what are you saying?”
Porter raises his eyebrows so high that they are in danger of disappearing into his hairline. “We’re not just looking for one double agent,” he whispers. “This was a coordinated effort between the Space Force and BlumBot International.”
By the time I leave Tripp’s office, I feel as though my brain is on the verge of a total meltdown.
I knew whatever Porter had to say was going to be juicy, but I had no idea just how juicy. I recorded the entire conversation on my Optix, but suddenly I’m wondering if I should have.
Maverick Enterprises invented that technology. If someone on the inside is dirty, who knows what else they have access to?
One thing’s for sure: I have to tell Jonah what I know. This piece of information won’t change what he thinks of me, but I still want to tell him. I haven’t known Jonah that long, but I feel as though I can trust him.
Jonah was shattered when he thought I might be working as a spy. You can’t fake that kind of a letdown.
I also know that I can’t hold on to this information. Sooner or later, someone outside the Space Force is going to figure out that I’ve been skating by on a fake identity. And if that someone is working for the hackers, it won’t take them long to figure out why a journalist was posing as a member of the Space Force.
I don’t have enough information to put all the pieces together, but that might not stop the double agent from thinking I’m too dangerous to keep around.
I’m so distracted by my conversation with Porter that I take a wrong turn on the way to the barracks. I went the back way to avoid running into Tripp. As terrible as I feel about blowing him off, I don’t think I can stomach lying to him about what I know.
I turn down another hallway to zigzag over to Sector Q, but when I round the corner, a searing pain shoots through my scalp.
Someone has me by the hair.
I stumble back onto my heels and try to scream bloody murder, but my attacker jams something soft in my mouth.
I suck in a burst of air on instinct and inhale something sickly sweet. I gag, trying to expel whatever I just breathed in, but already my brain is swimming in fog.
I stumble. My limbs feel extremely heavy, and darkness is pressing in along the edges of my vision.
I have the fleeting thought that Porter will say something to Tripp before unconsciousness overtakes me and I float into the black abyss.
31
Maggie
When I come to, I’m lying on the cold hard ground. My body is bent at an awkward angle, and my head is resting on my right shoulder.
I straighten my torso and try to push myself into an upright position, but my hands are bound together.
I groan and try to move to my feet, but my ankles are bound, too. There’s something wet and cottony in my mouth.
When I realize that I’ve been bound and gagged, my misery morphs into rapid panic. I’m lying in a dark room on cold black tile. I’m shivering so violently that my whole body aches, and I don’t remember how I got here.
I try taking deep breaths to steady myself, but the gag just pulls tighter at the corners of my mouth. I can feel the saliva pooling in the back of my throat, and I have a fleeting worry that I might drown in my own spit.
Instead of succumbing to my fear, I look around and try to pick out some details that might tell me where I am. I don’t recognize my surroundings. The walls are stark and untreated.
There’s some heavy equipment that I don’t recognize and what look like odd geometric scaffoldings that span outward rather than up. At the moment they’re collapsed like dried-up dead spiders, but I have a feeling they’re used for exterior maintenance on the space station.
I can’t see more than a few yards in any direction. The only light is emanating from a keypad to my right and a single emergency-exit sign. The keypad is positioned in front of an airlock. I can tell from the reflective tape stuck all around the door.
Scaffoldings, airlock . . . I must be in a staging zone for the maintenance bots.
Sure enough, when I twist my body around, I can just make out the outline of a dozen or so bots standing like statues along the wall behind me. They aren’t made up to look like humans. Their bodies are mazes of metal fragments, and their eyes are empty sockets.
I have no idea how long I’ve been here — only that the place is deserted. The maintenance scheduled for oh two hundred was cancelled in light of the bot attacks. Who knows how long it will be before anyone wanders in.
The person who brought me here must have some high-level clearance. Otherwise he never would have been able to bypass security. Whoever it is must have wanted to keep me quiet — or at least keep me from telling Jonah.
Tilting my head onto my shoulder, I try to wake my Optix to see if I can get a ping out. Nothing happens. I try to activate it by command. Still nothing.
I groan around my gag. The bastard must have stolen my Optix so that I couldn’t make contact.
I’m starting to panic in earnest. My heart is thumping so hard that I can hear the blood thumping in my temples, and it seems to require an enormous effort to breathe. I’m covered head to toe with goosebumps, and the numbness spreading through my extremities only adds to my distress.
That’s when it hits me that no one knows where I am. I never returned to the barracks last night, I ran away from Tripp without so much as “goodbye,” and Jonah probably thinks I’m preparing to turn myself in. Porter was the last person to see me alive, but he’d probably prefer never to see me again.
Forcing down a sudden kick of despair, I cast around for something I can use to saw through my zip ties. None of the scaffoldings have any sharp edges, and neither do the bots. I know there have to be tools nearby. I just need to find them before my captor returns.
Lying back on the cold ground, I plant my feet and push myself across the floor. I slide easily across the slick black tile, though I have no idea if I’m headed in the right direction.
I’m about halfway across the room when a low male voice crackles through the darkness.
“Don’t bother. There’s nowhere here for you to run.”
I freeze, my heart performing a series of wild gymnastics as I cast around for the source of the voice. It’s too dark to see much of anything, but the voice couldn’t have been more than twenty feet away.
“Magnolia Barnes, New Jersey native, floundering young reporter . . .”
A sudden jolt of irritation manages to crowd out a little of my fear. I
am not floundering, and I resent whoever’s making that assessment.
“Usually writes under the pseudonym Layla Jones — the pretty little girl next door.”
My blood is boiling. The stranger’s voice isn’t getting any louder, which means he’s hiding somewhere in the shadows.
Coward. He isn’t man enough to come say this crap to my face.
“Barnes, Barnes, Barnes . . .” he muses, as though my name is a lyric that’s escaping him. “Now that is a familiar name. Though, fortunately for you, also a very common one.”
At those words, every muscle in my body tightens.
“Your father was a journalist, too — was he not? I’m rather surprised you use his name at all . . . I’m sure it must make finding work more difficult, being the daughter of a lunatic who went after one of the most powerful men in the country . . .”
I make an involuntary noise of protest, straining at my zip ties until the plastic cuts into my skin. If my hands were free, I’d choke the bastard.
“I remember reading about your father in The Journal,” he muses. “Years ago. A one-hit wonder who wanted more. So he wrote another book, and the whole world found out what he was — a hack . . . a fraud.”
I squirm and thrash against my restraints. I’m going to kill him.
“What’s it like being the daughter of such a spectacular embarrassment?” he asks. “Is that why you’re so desperate for a story? Why you won’t mind your own goddamned business?”
I stop moving. This is exactly what he wants — to get me so worked up that I exhaust myself struggling. I need to conserve my strength and find a way to get the hell out of here.
“It must have made it that much worse when you realized that you would always be a failure, too. You’d never be able to atone for his mistakes.”
I grit my teeth so hard that I think my molars might crack. He’s baiting me. That’s it.
Nobody knows what happened with my dad’s second book — least of all me. My mother refuses to talk about it, but it’s the book that pushed Dad over the edge.
He swears up and down that his reporting was accurate. To this day he insists that the politician paid to cover up his crimes.
I believe he thinks that. My dad isn’t a liar, though paranoia can be a symptom of his disorder. I’ve spent my entire adult life convincing myself that he’s not crazy, but it doesn’t really matter to anyone but me.
“You’re a journalist, Maggie,” says the man. “It would be so easy for you to learn the truth. Why haven’t you done it after all these years? You could have cleared your father’s name.”
I try to swallow, but the gag is making it impossible. I can hardly breathe.
“Instead you decided to go poking into places where you do not belong. If you’d just minded your own business, you wouldn’t be here right now. You could have kept writing Layla Jones pieces for the rest of your life. Who knows? Maybe you could have become a real journalist.”
I stop struggling and try to control my rapid breathing. He’s getting around to why he captured me in the first place. Maybe I’ll finally learn who this psycho is.
“But you had to go digging, didn’t you? Just like Sergeant Wyatt.”
I freeze.
“He has turned out to be much more trouble than he’s worth. I’m the one who recruited him, you know. I saw the work he did while he was deployed. I knew I needed someone with his lethality to program the bots, so I had his old captain bring him in for the job.”
My mind is racing. This guy has been watching us very closely. He must know that Jonah figured out that his data had been stolen. That means Jonah is in danger, too.
“I anticipated that Wyatt might cause a scene if he ever put two and two together. Well, it doesn’t matter. He was discharged from the army for a personality disorder . . . I figured he would be easy to discredit. But then he developed an interest in you, and I discovered that you were also pretending to be someone you were not.”
He sighs. “I’d hoped I wouldn’t have to kill you. It would have been so much easier just to send you back to Earth — a traitor without a platform to do any real damage. But then you had to go talk to that little rat, Porter, and I knew you’d learned too much.”
At those words, my muscles seize. My lungs are burning from working so hard, and I feel as though my heart might beat its way out of my chest.
I’m going to die. He’s going to kill me, and no one will ever know why.
“Now you won’t just be a traitor . . . You’ll be the one responsible for killing all those innocent people. Who’s to say it wasn’t you who stole all that motor-memory data? You infiltrated the Space Force, earned Sergeant Wyatt’s trust, stole his SPIDER data to use on the bots, and then killed yourself. Clean and simple.”
My heart is pounding. My lungs are burning. The window for me to escape is closing fast.
I look around. I can just barely make out a faint glimmer of white light fanning out from under the door. That must be the exit that connects this area to the rest of the colony. If I could only reach the door, I might have a chance to escape.
But my frantic train of thought is interrupted by the soft clunk of footsteps to my right. I turn.
It’s still too dark to see his face, but I recognize the man’s plain black boots. They’re Space Force standard issue, and they’re attached to a body in uniform.
I squint. He’s got patches that say he’s some kind of officer, but in my panicked haze, I can’t remember what the insignias mean.
The top half of his face is hidden in shadow, but there’s something about him that’s vaguely familiar.
The next thing I know, his hands are on my ankles. I feel a sudden release of pressure as he cuts the zip ties holding them together.
A shiver of excitement shoots up my spine. I can move my legs. I’m only a few yards from the door. This might be my only chance.
The man hauls me to my feet, half marching, half dragging me across the room.
He can’t be relocating me for any good reason. He’s taking me somewhere to kill me.
I fake a stumble, and I feel the man’s grip on my arm loosen. I yank it away in one rough motion and make a break for the door.
I propel myself forward as fast as my legs will carry me. It’s awkward running with my hands bound in front of me, but I just head straight for the door. Deafening footsteps thunder behind me, and I know before it’s over that I’m not going to make it.
The man seizes me roughly by the hair, and I choke on my gag as a few curls separate from my scalp. He gives my hair a violent tug, and I fall backward into his chest.
I struggle to right myself and squirm out of his grip, but he shoves me forward, and I hit the ground. I cry as my nose smacks into the tile, but I can’t even hear myself scream.
A sudden burst of agony starfishes out from my ribcage — a boot. The bastard kicked me!
I moan in pain, and he kicks me again. This time, I feel a burst of heat somewhere in my kidney. It rolls out in a tidal wave of pain, and I have to fight the urge to throw up.
I can’t move. I can’t breathe. I can only fight through my hot angry tears of pain.
I recoil at the feeling of hands on my shoulders, but he tugs at my skin and flips me over. I groan. My eyes are still flooded with tears, but I blink them back. Lieutenant Buford swims into view.
His face is sweaty, and his hair is mussed, but it is definitely Buford. His eyes are shining with a kind of manic desperation, and his usually smooth friendly face is contorted with rage.
He bends down to bind my ankles, and I aim a kick at his horrible shiny face. I miss. He seizes my ankle, and I try another desperate kick.
At this point, Buford seems to lose all patience. He doesn’t care if he hurts me. He wants to see me dead.
He throws his body over my knee to lock my leg in place, and I scream as all his weight slams down on the joint.
I jerk and thrash beneath his body, but Buford strikes me across the face with
something hard and solid. The pain reverberates to the back of my skull, and the entire room shifts on its axis.
I blink. The room does not right itself. I can see the wavering outline of the bots — tall metal soldiers waiting in the wings. They look like the dead with their empty eye sockets, and I can feel myself slipping away.
I flail around in one last fight, thrashing like a headless fish. Buford wants me to roll over and die, but I will not go quietly.
I scream as loud as I can around the gag, but the sound disappears into the folds of cloth.
The last thing I remember is Buford hovering over me.
His face is shining with perspiration. He thinks he’s won. And then everything goes dark.
32
Maggie
I come to with the feeling that I’ve been buried alive under an avalanche of rocks. My head is throbbing as if it has its own heartbeat, and my spine is bent at an awkward angle. I can taste dried blood in the corners of my mouth, and I’m sitting in near total darkness.
I shift to the right and bang my head against the wall. It’s too dark to immediately tell where I am — only that the space is small and not well ventilated. It smells new.
Slowly, the events of the past couple hours come floating back to me. I was kidnapped on my way back to the barracks, and the man holding me hostage is Lieutenant Buford.
Buford.
Just thinking of him gives me a sickening jolt of rage. The man has been working above me in the Space Force for the past three weeks. He brought Jonah here to use as a pawn in his scheme, and he was involved in hacking the bots.
I’m still not sure how he’s connected to all of this, but at the moment I have more pressing problems.
For one thing, I’m still gagged. The wad of fabric in my mouth is soaked with spit, and my wrists and ankles are bound.
I shift onto my left side and feel along the wall. There’s a strip of something slick beneath me that could be reflective tape.
Am I in a storage zone? Some compartment in the maintenance sector where they keep the bots? I can’t tell.