Opposition Shift
Page 11
“I’m gonna dump you here for a while,” she said. “Glitch can fill you in on everything going down in the datascape on our end. I’ll come back with food,” she added, at the slightly skeptical look Hayden threw her.
Truth be told, he was still half expecting to be shot in the back, but now it seemed less likely to come from the resistance and more likely to come from Laine the longer he thought about it. It helped a bit to know that even Lunatic 8 herself was a former corporate slinger. She'd been hollowed out, but the resistance had been able to wrangle enough resources and augments to bring her back online. Perhaps there wasn’t as much stigma attached to a label like "company man" here as he had expected.
After a few more words, spoken quietly, with Glitch, Una headed out the same door they had entered through. Hayden heard her exchange another quiet word with the man guarding the entrance as he closed the door behind them. Soon all he could hear was the low hum of busy men and women as everyone in the room went back to their various tasks, the brief pause for the famous slinger now over.
All his fame spent in about a minute, and now he was old news. Such was the way of the underworld.
Hayden grabbed an empty chair from a nearby table and pulled it near Glitch.
“Cable’s on the fritz,” Glitch said, fiddling with the thick wire he’d been pulling from his neck when they entered. "Gotta be careful about how we purchase and transport non-local gear, so your mega-corps don't get wise to our tech needs. Takes weeks to get new ones, so we make do as long as we can."
Glitch set about putting a replacement needle into the base of the cable, swapping it out for one that looked more than a little worn out.
It wasn’t the sort of thing Hayden had ever bothered fixing himself. In the Union, he’d simply requisition a new one. Before that, during his street slinging years, he’d buy one himself, or trade something for it. Perhaps a service done in the datascape if he was well and truly broke, which was how he’d spent a good deal of his teens before he’d developed the skill and the connections to get by. He had little doubt that Nibiru could fix it, and Glitch seemed to be just as good, doing something that involved a soldering iron with an impossibly skinny tip that Hayden tried to pay attention to, just in case he needed the trick for himself.
He’d brought his own equipment, his mobile rig, and all the fixings, but if he used it for these people as constantly as he had for the Union in the past week, it might only be a matter of time before the wear and tear affected his performance.
Watching Glitch work, Hayden began to wonder if the resistance even had more than one MassNet throne and if Lunatic 8, or 8 as the locals called her, had the monopoly on its use. Perhaps that was what she had envisioned for him, to take her place when she was too worn out to knuckle up to the endless threats. It seemed unlikely they'd have two, considering how patchwork this operation was turning out to be, as the basement bootlegger workshop was certainly a far cry from Overdog's mission deck back at HQ.
The man was so absorbed in his work that Hayden wasn’t expecting his voice when it came, with Glitch looking up at him while his hands stayed busy.
“What’s this about for you?” the man asked, and though his voice was cheerful, the question felt weighted, almost confrontational. Like he was being tested.
Hayden felt his forehead wrinkle, thinking the answer was obvious. “To help,” he said. “However I can. It’s bothered me for a while, the way that Union Americana, all the mega-corps really, keep their thumbs pressing down on the developing nations, but seeing it at that marketplace was different. I've never been that close to it, street level, I mean. You can’t really hear civilians screaming from the datascape.”
Glitch made a sound that Hayden took for agreement.
“There are some things," Glitch drummed his fingers on the tabletop, “That a big paycheck just doesn’t make any better, doesn’t make worth it. Some voices can't be silenced with gold.”
Unsure of how exactly to follow that up, Hayden kept silent. He wasn’t quite sure he’d read the guy correctly as a run of the mill slinger, one among several in the room. He was obviously fairly high up within the hierarchy, at least as far as the slingers went, and he spoke with a sort of enthusiasm that Hayden wanted to admire despite having learned long ago that such enthusiasm without some sort of temperance would just lead to getting killed. He voiced none of this, and settled for a nod of agreement, trying to project just how much he agreed with his face rather than his voice. For most slingers, words weren’t exactly a strong suit unless they were in the code itself, and Hayden was no exception.
“It’s important that you understand something, company man. The Akiaten, the resistance, we’d still be doing this without you,” he said, nodding at the resistance members scattered throughout the room, either chatting with each other or engaged in focused silence while they worked at their various tasks. “These are our islands, our people, and we’ll do whatever we can to keep them ours and not in some corporation’s pocket. People like you help, sure, but you can’t delude yourself into thinking it all comes down to you, that you’re the end game.
“The Akiaten don’t need some white dude from the Union to win this thing, but every set of hands and eyes bent to the task helps, and we aren't so proud that we wouldn't take advantage of people like you and 8. You want to be an ally, that’s good because with Hayden Cole on our side we’re all the stronger, but this is Manila, leave that Western savior shit at the door.”
Hayden gave another cautious nod. “Got it,” he said. There was no argument there and he already knew the truth of the man’s words. He knew he could make a difference, but without him there, he had no doubt that the Akiaten would still have the same drive to keep fighting. Perhaps so even without Lunatic 8. They might lose without the two foreign slingers, but there would be no passive surrender, in the streets, or, based on his estimation of the Akiaten slinger thus far, in the datascape.
“I’m not trying to be an asshole,” Glitch amended, his tone warming as he attempted a slinger's awkward smile and spread his hands wide. “Just making sure you don’t end up with some kind of hero complex. Because that happens. Had a bit of one myself, honestly. Most of these guys are either from the jungle or the slums outside city center, and this neon future is still a bit alien to them.
“I’m from city center, grew up cyber and earned my jacks same as you. I have a connection to the pulse, I hear the fireflies whispering, but I'm different enough from the others that I was an outsider too, for a while. Slingers are a breed apart, even here.”
“The way of the code,” Hayden answered, experiencing a sudden kinship with the Akiaten slinger, and found himself reminded of the street kid he'd burned at the start of this whole fiasco.
He watched the man working for a few moments before he found the nerve to speak again. “Didn’t figure you guys would have so many places in the city.”
“Have our fair share outside of it, too. Our shooters never know when they’ll need a place to hole up. We have to hit and run, of course, can't do stand-up fights without civilians getting stuck in the middle. With all the chaos in the city lately, especially now that E-Bloc is ramping up their military presence thanks to the Union and that blonde demon of yours, the outlying houses have had the bulk of the traffic. It’s harder to set up all the tech so far out in the slums, which sucks because outside city center it’s all pretty much slums. We can always get it going when we need to, but sometimes it takes more time than we have.”
Hayden chuckled grimly, “Yeah, they have a hard enough time keeping things running in Operations at Americana’s HQ. I imagine it’s easier with just a few slingers. More work, but less people to screw up and less screw ups to keep track of.”
Glitch snorted in derision. “Good to have another optimist on the team,” he said, before looking down at the cable he’d spent the past few minutes tinkering with. “You have your rig, I see?”
In response, Hayden pulled his bag from where it hung
from one long strap over his right shoulder and held in his lap instead.
“Good,” Glitch said, a smile spreading over his face. “I’ve been dreading doing this without proper back-up. Eight fixed up a virus program to go along with some stolen key-codes our other boys brought in. I’m thinking it’ll make for a good slash and burn on the government offices, the ones E-Bloc has already paid off. If we don't start punishing our elected officials and the bureaucrats for selling our country to the highest bidder, then it won't matter how many corporate goons we bury, there’ll always be more to take their place.”
He kept talking and Hayden, in his head, took notes as he started prepping his own rig and going over the mission package Glitch handed over on a small external drive. It was an excellent plan, more thought out than he would have expected from a resistance whose guerilla tactics seemed to be about shock just as much as effectiveness.
Of course, it wasn’t as though they hadn’t pulled off stealth operations before. Their attack on the HQ had to have been engineered for at least a week in advance and yet none of their agents or techs had seen any indication of it in the code or on the streets. He wondered just how much of that Glitch had been behind.
The script they needed to run was already prepped, but Hayden had more questions.
“Is Lunatic 8 even here?”
“She’s got her throne set up in a more secure location. They move her around more than anyone else. She's like a nuke that woman, one of our most powerful weapons and yet also the main target for most of the enemy offensives. That safe house where you met Una? Yeah, that was supposed to be a hit on 8.” Glitch nodded at the rig in Hayden's lap. “If we don’t see her in there, it doesn't mean she isn't with us. If we get into a pinch, she’ll pull us out, unless she's crashed out.”
“And if she is crashed?”
Glitch grinned. “Then we don’t fuck up.”
CodeSource felt like home when he dropped in, and though he'd only been out of the datascape for a day or so even that level of separation from his realm of choice had been making him cagey, more than he'd realized. In stressful situations, one wanted comfort, familiarity, and though Una's embrace had been a hell of a good thing, there was no substitute for the code.
He’d been half hoping for MassNet, but he knew that thrones were rare things, even in the heart of the Union such tools were uncommon. E-Bloc used a cheaper model, which was how they could field so many slingers in MassNet all at once, but high-end operators like Hayden or his Asia Prime rival Sun rode the code astride the best that money could buy.
There was only one in the Americana HQ now, two before the attack on the original headquarters. There had only been time to dismantle and ship out one in the time allotted to the evacuation, the other they had been forced to destroy.
Glitch told him there were three in the resistance, only one of which was currently functioning and that belonged, undoubtedly, to Lunatic 8.
Hayden wondered to himself if they'd stolen it from E-Bloc. If the madwoman was using an inferior throne, what might she be capable of in one of the top of the line models. He shuddered at the idea, her chaotic presence in the datascape still a threatening concept even if he was supposed to be her ally now.
They worked in CodeSource, the two of them moving together through the columns of data as they constructed their mission programs and prepared their route through the wires. That was what Hayden saw during his trance, a cascading flow of information that built a picture of events in his mind, as opposed to the more immediate and tactile experience of slicing in MassNet.
That was perhaps his greatest weakness in the code, that he didn’t have quite the imagination of some other slingers, especially the likes of Lunatic 8. He needed the hallucination of MassNet to function at his best, and though he was still one of the top slingers in the world inside CodeSource, he had long known it was not his realm of choice.
After weeks of monotonous grid searches and digital mapmaking in the careful searching for the energy source in the nexus, he was glad to be doing something constructive, something real, with results he would be able to see. He was no longer biding time while he and Nibiru came to a decision—he was acting.
It was a comfort in some ways, despite the danger, to be working towards a tangible goal for a purpose that felt aligned with the personal values that he had so recently discovered in himself. He was smart enough too, to realize that this was a test of sorts. Glitch would want to see what he could do, that he could carry out the task he’d decided on, the plan he and Lunatic 8 had devised.
Call him cocky, but Hayden was already anticipating a victory to brag about. This was a slicing job with a specific endgame, and while it was a rush to battle in MassNet, he'd started to feel of late more like a digital gladiator than a mission-oriented professional and it felt damn good to have a solid target. So much of Hayden's work with the Union in the last few years had been, really, an elaborate and deadly game of 'keep away' with outside slingers and corporate enemies attempting to harass the Union's interests. Hayden Cole was back on the offensive, and it was time to show these people who they'd brought into the fold.
He spent the first few moments within following Glitch’s lead, it was the polite thing to do. He could no doubt find his own way. Amateur slingers didn’t start out with resources such as maps and insider information about an opposing system, and he hadn’t gotten to where he was without learning to work around such roadblocks, but working around them took time they didn’t have. He might achieve eventual success, but he would look like a showoff in the meantime, and he thought better of such a sophomoric approach. They knew him, no reason to overcompensate. So Hayden stuck with Glitch, following the other slinger along his chosen route to the closest government offices, accessed by way of security cams and the tech of surrounding businesses. They infiltrated where they could and watched where they couldn’t, looking for better windows in the code, and eventually, they found one.
Lunatic 8 had certainly scouted the datascape and planned quite the route. While long and winding, it allowed the slingers to move their signatures through various municipal hard systems without spending any time on E-Bloc, Prime, or Union wires.
Given how much the clandestine conflict had escalated since the beginning that was saying something, as the corporate operators had deployed a significant amount of surveillance tech throughout the Manila mega-city.
Color me impressed, Hayden sent to Glitch, knowing the words would be visible through his HUD, code twisting in the background, even in CodeSource.
8 is like water, company man, Glitch replied, if there’s a way in she'll find it and make it seem perfectly natural.
They moved forward as one, into the guts of the government’s infrastructure, their signatures passing through the firewalls while masquerading as data dumps from the municipal grid.
While the path was laid out for them, it reminded Hayden of the obstacle challenge based video games he'd played as a child. As their signatures moved through the wires, they had to circumnavigate the various lock and dam systems that managed the flow of information in and out of the government's network.
Hayden discovered very quickly that it was all about timing, being able to move with both stealth and speed in moments where packets of information were being uploaded by the hard systems into the network. They were moving through a complex series of protocols, and one misstep would reveal them to any latent security measures or alert any slingers who might be monitoring the system and searching for just these sorts of intrusion attempts.
The system meltdown protocols were easily layered into the system once they were in. Hayden was impressed with Lunatic 8's craftsmanship regarding the immaculate program she'd prepared.
The more he worked with it, he began to realize that this hard system hack was something of a baseline in all her work, and he wondered if that was why the fractured slinger was capable of affecting so much of the baseline code when she unleashed her full power in the datasc
ape. With the program already prepared, it was only a matter of Glitch and Hayden weaving the code back around it to hide anything that might cause alarm.
It would have been outrageous, even for a developing nation in a low-grade region, for any government network, not to have at least one slinger on staff to keep a look out for such threats. But if anyone was watching now, they weren’t alarmed, as the slingers were thus far successfully slicing through the hard systems without giving away their position, their signatures indistinguishable from the ebb and flow of day-to-day routine information.
Hayden knew just how to work his way through the code without causing ripples, and watching Glitch, he could tell that the man knew all the same moves.
It was tricky, moving through the datascape in a way that didn’t leave a visible mark. Often, such a thing was impossible, which was why slingers assaulting a network took such circuitous routes.
They had set up self-deleting backdoor programs and left them in their wake so that as they made their exit they could bring down even more of the various hard systems and network nodes.
Hayden imagined it as if they were secretly tunneling underground through enemy territory, and once they'd completed the hack they'd further ruin the landscape by collapsing the tunnel behind them on their way out.
It was a righteous hack indeed, and Hayden could see why the resistance slingers wanted help.
Patience was not generally a quality among slingers who were fresh to the game and without it this mission would have been compromised from the start.
Alright, Glitch sent as the slinger's passed through the final data portal and found themselves in proximity to the government's mainframe, We're in position.
Hayden took a moment to observe the mainframe from his vantage point, the slinger's signature parked carefully on a bureaucrat’s desktop rig.