by Aaron Crash
Chapter 1: Meltdown
SHE CROSSED THE BAR toward me with the lithe strides of a stalking tigress. Candlelight cast her face in shadow, but her eyes glowed with an emerald radiance that drew me to her like a barbed-wire lariat. Musical chimes tinkled against my ears with every step she took, and I wanted her the same way a man lost in the desert wanted water.
The good news was that she looked like she was just as thirsty for me as I was for her.
She didn’t say a word when she reached me. She tilted her head back and eased forward until our lips almost touched. Her breath smelled like honeysuckle and cinnamon, and the heat of it wrapped my brain in a warm, moist fog that made it all but impossible to think about anything but her.
I leaned forward to kiss her, and our lips met with an explosion of pain that dragged me out of the best damned dream I’d had in months. It took me a few seconds to realize why my lips hurt so bad.
It was the gun barrel a very unpleasant man had shoved into my mouth.
“You Knight?” the hulking shadow that loomed over my bed asked. He had to be close to seven feet tall and seemed almost as wide. A shaft of light through my open window fell across his heavily tattooed gun hand. The pistol was still pressed up against my lips, and my eyes crossed when I tried to focus on it, but I didn’t need to see any details to know it was big enough to turn my head into extra-chunky salsa if I made a wrong move.
I considered trying to convince the shadow he had the wrong apartment, but that seemed like a bad plan. If he’d wanted me dead, he wouldn’t have woken me up to seal the deal.
“That’s me,” I said and did my best not to flinch as my lips scraped across the gun’s muzzle.
Neither of us moved for what must have been a thousand years. Finally, the gun moved a few feet away from my mouth, but its bore remained centered on my head. Still, I considered that progress.
“Gotta job for you,” he said. “Get dressed.”
“I don’t know—”
“This is a one-time offer, and it expires when I get pissed off.” The man’s gruff voice told me we were very close to that expiration. “You do this, you get a billion dollars. You fuck it up, or you lay there in bed like a slug for a few more minutes, and I’ll introduce you to one of Mr. Shooty’s bullet friends.”
He tipped the gun’s muzzle up so I could stare down the bottomless black well of its barrel.
I scrambled out of my warm, comfy bed and onto the cold hardwood floor like an electric eel had just tried to climb up my ass. The freezing shock of the wood against the soles of my feet filled me with the sudden urge to empty my bladder, but there was no time for that. I grabbed the black sweatpants and matching T-shirt that I’d dropped on the floor before climbing into bed a few hours ago and practically dove into them.
“I’ll need my laptop,” I said as I tried to reach past the big dude to collect my bag off the dresser behind him.
“No.” He blocked my arm with his massive body. “We’ve got everything you need at the job.”
I wanted to explain to him that there was no way he knew what I needed. That laptop was loaded with tools I’d built or modified over a decade of security work. Asking me to do my job without that laptop would be like asking a carpenter to build a house without his hands.
“You don’t understand,” I tried to explain, but the big boy was having none of it. He abandoned the shadows for the rectangle of milky moonlight that spilled through my bedroom window and shoved his pistol into my ribs hard enough to leave a bruise.
But the gun wasn’t what freaked me out.
The shadow man was a straight-up monster. His enormous head was as bald as a newborn’s ass, with a brow so heavy it looked like you could break bricks on it. His beady eyes perched above a spade-shaped nose lined with whorls and ridges of flesh, and a pair of cracked tusks jutted from the corners of a gruesome, lipless mouth.
To top it all off, the dude was a puke shade of green and smelled about the same.
“We were told you were the best, and that is why I came for you,” he said, his carefully enunciated words at odds with his bestial appearance. “But you have reached the limits of my patience, and I am about to move on to our second choice.”
“After I kill you.”
If I’d had any doubts about his willingness to put me in the ground, they vanished after one quick glance into his eyes. I didn’t know what had happened to this guy, but whatever nightmare accident had wrecked his face left him looking like a Lord-of-the-Rings-style orc straight out of central casting. He also looked like he might eat me after he shot me in the face.
“Lead on,” I said. I’d spent more than my fair share of time in the gym, because if you spend all day pecking at a keyboard, you have to do something or you’ll turn into a wad of sugar cookie dough. But I had no illusions that my sparring matches and weight lifting would stand a chance against this legit monster. I was sure he wasn’t actually an orc, but he still looked as big and mean as one of Tolkien’s bad boys.
“Don’t try anything stupid,” he said and waved the pistol’s muzzle toward the door.
I followed his directions and kept my hands well away from my sides as I left my bedroom. I didn’t have a weapon, but I didn’t want the orc lookalike behind me to think that I did and get antsy.
Besides, there was an upside to all this. If I pulled off the job they’d kidnapped me for, I’d be a billionaire.
I kept that thought locked firmly at the front of my mind as we left my apartment. The orc steered me toward the elevator and made his gun vanish as soon as we entered the car. He didn’t so much as glance in my direction for the rest of the trip.
“Can I at least know what corp wanted me so bad they sent you to shanghai me?” I asked between floors twelve and eleven. “I don’t usually go on a first date without knowing a name.”
He mulled the question over until we hit the eighth floor and then said something that scared me even more than his ugly mug.
“Inkolana Syndicate,” he said, as if deciding it didn’t matter whether I knew who’d hired me.
Well, that explained the guns and money. The Inkolana Syndicate had more of both than they knew what to do with, and they weren’t afraid to use either of them to get what they wanted. And what they wanted was usually a bigger slice of the drug business and for their enemies in various world governments to disappear into deep, dark holes.
But what the hell would the world’s scariest cartel need with a hacker?
I asked that question when we hit the ground floor, but the orc just grunted and clapped an oversized hand on my shoulder. He steered me through the lobby and out to the sidewalk where a black sedan waited for us. My kidnapper shoved me into the back seat, then slid in next to me without another word.
I scrambled to the other side of the car before he could smash me under his bulk. The dude didn’t have much respect for personal space.
The sedan’s suspension groaned in protest as the monster settled into position beside me, and the engine protested mightily as the driver slammed it into drive and punched the accelerator. We glided through the streets of downtown Dallas, and the lack of foot traffic and Uber drivers told me I’d been taken in the dead hours of the night between the time when the barflies buzzed away from their booze halls and when the early risers dragged their sorry asses off to their slavery in corporate hellholes.
“Put this on,” the cartel thug said. He slapped a burlap sack against my gut, and I grunted in surprise. My blood ran cold as I raised the hood to get a better look at it. The coarse brown cloth was exactly the sort of thing you’d put over someone’s head before you put a bullet through the back of their skull.
“I never touched an Inkolana system,” I argued in a desperate effort to save my life. Maybe they thought I’d hacked them and they were taking me somewhere to torture me for a few days before they shot me. A vivid image of my naked, mutilated corpse lying in a ditch with the bloody bag over my shattered head bullied its way into m
y thoughts.
“It’s for your safety,” the orc said. “You don’t need to know where we’re going to do your damned job.”
The argument made enough sense to put my paranoid dread at ease, and I yanked the bag down over my head. The loose weave of the burlap made it possible to see light and shadow, but I couldn’t make out any details.
We cruised along for a while longer but never hit highway speeds. That told me we’d never left downtown, but not much else. Dallas had exploded in size over the past couple of decades, and its downtown was littered with massive skyscrapers. There was no way for me to tell which underground parking garage we pulled into, and I hoped the cartel would feel the same way.
The car stopped, my kidnapper dragged me out of it, and a few seconds later we were inside an elevator. A few seconds after that we were zipping up so fast my stomach tried to convince me we were on a roller coaster. It was hard to smell anything but the rich, musty scent of the burlap in front of my nose, but I picked up a harsh antiseptic smell that only got stronger as the elevator went higher. It reminded me of a hospital or a doctor’s office. Something medicinal.
Why would they bring me to a hospital? Did they want me to hack into its systems and assassinate someone during an operation? I’d seen a movie with that plot once, and the whole thing had seemed stupid to me. There was almost no reason for a hacker to come on site to do a job like that.
The elevator’s doors dinged open after several minutes, and the orc muscled me out of the elevator. He waited for a few seconds, then yanked the hood off my head and shoved it into one of his jacket’s pockets.
I blinked and struggled to adjust my eyes to the harsh light. Everything around me was polished white that gleamed with a sterile perfection. There were no pictures on the walls, no carpet on the floor, not even the thin black grid of tiles. It looked as if the whole place had been molded from a single block of white acrylic.
The orc snatched my right arm in his iron grip and almost yanked me off my feet as he hauled me forward. I took a deep, surprised breath, and my nose burned from the chemical reek of cleaning agents and raw alcohol in the air. A faint bubbling noise grew louder over the slap of my soles against the smooth floor. It reminded me of an aquarium’s oxygenating pump.
Where the fuck was I?
We rounded a corner and came into a square white room about thirty feet on a side. The only furniture was a simple black desk with a fancy office chair made of so much chrome and leather it looked like it belonged in the private room of a strip club. My babysitter hauled me over to the chair and tossed me into it. He spun my seat around to face the desk with a hearty shove and slapped his hands down on the chair’s back.
“This is your workstation,” he said. “We need you to stop an attack on our system.”
“What system?” I asked. The more information I had, the better equipped I’d be to deal with whatever enemy they’d put me up against. “And what kind of attack?”
“This is the system,” the big boy said, and the white wall in front of me vanished to reveal an enormous aquarium that looked like it was at least as big as the room that held my workstation.
A sinister black manifold hovered above the surface of the yellowish fluid that filled the tank, and thick, wire-wrapped cables descended from the multitude of bulbous nodules that dotted its surface. Those artificial umbilical cords drooped into the thick fluid, where they were each connected to a brain.
A whole bunch of brains.
The lumps of gray matter were surrounded by status lights that mostly glowed amber. Whatever the cartel had to deal with, it looked like it had already taken a toll on their vat of brains.
“I’m a coder, not a biologist,” I said. Something about this place creeped me out, and I did not want to get stuck messing around with a swimming pool filled with dead heads. “And I don’t think anyone can fix brains after they’ve been scooped out of their skulls, so I’ll just mosey on back home—”
I didn’t get halfway out of the chair before the orc slapped his enormous hands onto my shoulders like a raptor putting the death grip on a rabbit. He pressed me back into my seat so hard its springs squealed, and I was sure a couple of my vertebrae had been crushed to powder. The cartel freak shoved my chair forward to pin my legs under the desk so I couldn’t try that little stunt again.
“This is a coding problem,” the enormous monster declared. He reached past me to tap the mirror-smooth surface of the white desk he’d trapped me against. His cologne, a surprisingly delicate but somehow musky scent, flooded my nostrils.
“Hey, what’s that you’re wearing?” I asked. “It reminds me of my grandma’s bathroom—”
The cartel’s muscle squeezed my right shoulder so hard I was sure he’d crippled me for life.
“Shut. Up,” he said in a voice like a concrete mixer’s growl.
I recognized a network diagram before the holographic display the hit man had triggered could fully render. Pulses of red light swarmed through the digital schematic and collected at critical junctures like widowmaker blood clots headed for a soon-to-be-dead-man’s heart. If those red blips broke through whatever defenses had held them back so far, the network’s central cores would be shredded into packets and downloaded in the blink of an eye.
“Wow, someone really, really does not like you guys,” I said as I leaned in for a better look at the mess I’d been kidnapped to fix. It was a truly impressive clusterfuck, of the kind I’d never seen in the wild. “This is a DDOS, but not the script kiddie variety. They’re flooding your ports, but I’ve never seen a traffic pattern like this. Looks like a pair of adversarial AIs are running the actual attack. Could be Russian, most definitely military grade. This might be too big of a job for one hacker to handle. I need to call in a few allies to help me lock this down.”
“You will stop the attack,” the orc thug said and gave me a firm pat on my bruised shoulder. “And we will give you one billion dollars. You. Alone.”
“Sounds good,” I said, frustrated by his response. People with money always thought more money could solve any problem the universe laid in their path. Sometimes that was true, but sometimes even the best hackers needed some help. I knew just the right folks to carve this problem up and serve it to the cartel on a platter, but I also knew Mr. Orc Face wouldn’t let me invite my friends over to play ball. Frustrated, I lashed out. “Can I get a pony, too? I’ve never been to Disneyland. Throw in a chartered flight to the happiest place on earth and hire some strippers to give me a concierge tour of Mickey’s Secret Playground while you’re at it.”
The orc cleared his throat and doors opened at the corners of the room. Four more heavies who’d all come from the same factory as my kidnapper entered, and the doors slid closed behind them. They watched me like a pack of ravenous wolves ready to rip into their prey the moment their alpha gave the word.
Maybe if I survived this, I’d remember not to run my mouth around people who could kill me without losing a wink of sleep.
Oh, who am I kidding? I hated getting pushed around, and I doubted I’d ever sit still while a pack of steroid junkies yanked my chain.
“Mr. Clay Knight,” the big man said from behind me. His voice was as tight as a choke chain around a lunging pit bull’s throat. “This is not a joke or a hoax. We brought you here because our people have heard you are the best when it comes to defending against attacks such as the one we are experiencing. When you stop the attack on my employer’s network, I will give you the access code to a numbered offshore account that contains one billion dollars. With that amount of money, you can purchase your own herd of pony-riding strippers.”
“What if I can’t do it?” I asked. “Whoever’s behind this came loaded for bear. They aren’t just hammering your network; they’re flattening a whole chunk of the internet to get you. It’s the digital equivalent of carpet bombing, and even someone as good as I am can’t just make that go away.”
“If you cannot resolve this issue in a timely fa
shion, I am authorized to terminate your employment,” the orc boy said in a tone tinged with dark glee. “Believe me when I say that termination will be an extremely painful process for you.”
That threat did wonders to clarify my thoughts.
“How long do I have before you start hacking pieces off my body?” I asked. My eyes had already roamed across the schematic to identify the most endangered parts of the network and the attack vectors aimed at their digital skulls.
The incoming hack was impressive, but I spied a glimmer of hope. It would be hard as hell, but I could isolate the weakened nodes and rebuild their defenses in an hour or two. That would hold off the bulk of the attacks that converged on a set of storage and processing nodes at the center of the network. Then another two, maybe three, hours, and I’d turn the denial of service right back on the assholes behind it.
“You must stop the attack before the raiders can reach the secured storage nodes,” he said. “Our IT staff believe that will happen within the next thirty minutes.”
“That’s not enough time,” I said after I’d caught my breath from that gut punch of a deadline. My thoughts raced as I analyzed the hack again and tried to come up with a defense I could implement in the very narrow window I’d been given.
The bad guys had gone all brute force and launched the internet equivalent of a nuclear strike at the cartel’s brain machine. I could build a bunker inside the network that would protect the critical nodes while I looked for a solution. “I’ll have to take part of your network down and redirect all the attack traffic to a honeypot to figure out a defense.”
“No,” the thug said. “The system must remain operational. Our investors have entrusted us with critical functions for their businesses. We cannot restrict access to our system for any reason.”