Dodge City Knights

by Aaron Crash

  “Let’s see what we’ve got here.” I scrolled through the open ports. Port eighty-eight? That was probably a security camera. This could be interesting.

  I accessed the open port, and a janky webcam interface of a type I’d never seen before opened in my terminal window. Someone had overlaid a crusty low-res sandstone texture across the whole thing and added an ugly drop shadow to make the words and text-entry boxes look like they’d been carved into the fake rock.

  “How very late twentieth-century GeoCities of you,” I grumbled.

  One of the first things you learn as a hacker is that people are terrible about their own security. I typed “admin” and “password” into the appropriate boxes and tapped the enter key.

  The interface flickered for a moment, and then a red ACCESS DENIED message flashed across the screen.

  I changed the user name to “Admin” and tried again.

  “Bingo,” I whispered as a green ACCEPTED banner flashed and the sandstone blew away with a surprisingly realistic animation. Static flickered on the terminal’s screen, but my monitor held a black square where I’d expected the video feed to appear. I wondered for a moment if I’d stumbled onto an ancient and forgotten security camera tucked away in an old basement storeroom. That wouldn’t do me any good at all. I needed to see some faces or at least some populated background scene to narrow down the attackers’ location.

  The camera’s terminal window fuzzed out into gray and black static that slowly resolved itself into a recognizable image. The ambient lighting in the camera room was dim, and the walls looked like they were made from blocks of stone. The perspective seemed strange, and shadows stretched and shrank across the wall. It took me a few moments to realize the camera wasn’t aimed at a wall. It was pointed up to the ceiling.

  Apparently, I was not going to catch the break I so badly needed.

  The faint scent of cinnamon and other spices I couldn’t identify wafted through the clean room on a hot breeze. Other scents—hot wax, the faint sulfurous aroma of a spent match, and the warm, thick smell of honey—filled the room in a perfumed cloud.

  “Check the doors,” the orc who’d kidnapped me barked, and one of the overgrown muscle men hustled out of the room with his gun drawn.

  “I’m going to need a raise if this gets shooty,” I said to the orc. “Hazard pay.”

  “If there’s shooting, you’ll probably be the first one to catch a bullet,” he responded. “For now, concentrate on fixing the problem.”

  “Wow,” I said. “You’re a fucking peach.”

  I dragged the camera’s window up to the left corner of the holographic display and focused on the terminal window through which I’d launched my attack.

  I might not have found anything useful through the camera’s naked port, but I was inside their network now. That gave me the opening I needed to crush them.

  I set up a quick script to grab the attacks the bad people sent at DECS and boomerang them straight back to their source. That flurry of attacks would overload the camera’s connection. If there was a god in heaven, that downed node would spread its pain to the rest of the network and melt the enemy attack into digital goo.

  “Ready or not,” I said as I executed the attack command. “Here I fucking come.”

  A high-pitched scream ripped through the room. The muscle boys ducked for cover and trained their weapons on the door their buddy had recently headed through. The chief orc clapped a hand on my shoulder as he positioned himself between my seat and the doorway.

  “Keep working,” he said. He might not have liked me, but he put himself right in the path of any bullets that might head my way, and he did it without hesitation. “You will not die until your deadline is reached. You have my word.”

  The other two gunmen took that as their key to put their bodies in the same path. They were assholes, but they were assholes with the dedication to lay down their lives in the line of duty. I had to respect that.

  Especially when that duty was to keep my fat out of the fire.

  The redirected assault pounded against the attackers’ network, but that did not stop the raiders already inside the DECS system. Kezakazek and the other unauthorized users were clawing their way closer and closer to the main data cores at the heart of the network. If they reached their target, they’d suck DECS dry in no time.

  “And that’ll be the end of me,” I grumbled. “Not gonna happen today.”

  I reached into my bag of dirty black hacker tricks and tapped into a zombie botnet I’d had on the back burner for a couple of years now. A quick-and-dirty script added all three thousand computers in that botnet to the attack on the raiders’ system, and a warm, happy feeling spread through my chest as I watched billions of port requests slam into my target like a swarm of torpedoes into the hull of a defenseless cargo ship.

  “Are you there?” a woman’s voice whispered from the holographic display. “Lord Rathokhetra, is that you?”

  A shadow obscured the webcam’s view for a moment, and then a woman’s blurred face appeared on the hijacked terminal’s display. Her eyes were the same vivid emerald green as those I’d seen in my dream just before the orc nightmare had so rudely shoved his pistol into my mouth. The spicy perfume I’d smelled earlier intensified and tickled my nostrils with its exotic mystery. Just like in my dream, those eyes melted my brain and made it almost impossible for me to think about anything else.

  “Who are you?” I whispered back. My babysitters hadn’t noticed this new weirdness yet, but I didn’t want to draw their attention from whatever had happened outside the clean room. “You need to stop this attack on DECS, like, immediately. These guys aren’t your run-of-the-mill corporate security goons. This is a cartel network. They will kill you if you don’t knock it off.”

  While I thought it was an extremely generous gesture on my part to warn this chick off her attack against the worst people I’d ever met, it was not an entirely selfless move. If I talked her into shutting down her system, I’d get out of this alive.

  “Cartel?” she asked, and another scream caused her to look over her shoulder. Had the orc’s friends already found her hideout? Shit, I needed to finish this before the hitman killed all the enemy hackers and denied me my bounty. Before I could plead with the mystery woman on the monitor to knock it off, she turned back to the camera. Her face was still out of focus, but there was something else wrong with its outline. Her head had a strange shape, and she seemed to have horns on top of it. “You mean the Raiders Guild?”

  “What are you even...” I let the words die out. This hacker was clearly insane. She’d never see the sense of what I’d told her. I would just shut her down the old-fashioned way.

  I’d kept the port scan running the whole time, and it kicked up some delightful bounty. The barrage of attacks I’d launched had overloaded the enemy system’s defenses and knocked more ports open. My AI reported that several of these were network storage devices, a couple were routers, and the rest were a rat’s nest of general-purpose computers.

  “You have to complete the ritual, Lord Rathokhetra,” the woman pleaded with me. She pulled back from the camera as some noise attracted her attention, then stared back at me with those mesmerizing eyes. “Please. The dungeon raiders are killing us all!”

  The static cleared for a moment, and mystery girl’s face was in full focus for the first time. My heart skipped a beat at my first glimpse of the enemy hacker.

  Her eyes were far too large and burned with an emerald intensity that made the hairs on the back of my neck stand at attention. Three tawny stripes of short, sleek fur swept back from each of her plump cheeks like a tiger’s stripes. Her nose had an upturned tip that was a vivid pink, and her lips were full and blood red. And those things on top of her head weren’t horns; they were pointed ears covered in fur the same color as the stripes on her cheeks. Her skin was a deep bronze that seemed to glow with vitality.

  I didn’t know how it was possible for my dream girl to have intrude
d on my job, and I didn’t care. I wanted her to survive this. I wanted to meet her when all this was over. We could retire to a nice tropical island somewhere without acid rain and bedbugs. Hell, I’d even take the bedbugs if she was part of the package deal.

  “Is this some kind of joke?” I choked out. That got the orc’s attention.

  “You have eight minutes left, hacker,” he spat. There’d been no further screams, so he’d turned back into an asshole.

  “This is no joke,” the cat girl whispered. She had hunkered down so close to the monitor her face was lost in shadows. She reached forward to wrap her hands around either side of the device as if she were trying to clasp my cheeks. “We need you, Lord Rathokhetra. Awaken from your slumber and save us!”

  Her eyes burned into me, and I felt a desire to save her from whatever the hell was happening to her. There was something about the woman that plucked at my heartstrings, despite the fact that we were on opposite sides of this fight.

  “Are you Kezakazek?” I blurted out.

  “No!” she exclaimed, her face twisted with shock. “Kezakazek is leading the attack on your tomb! She is the one killing your faithful wahket.”

  That wasn’t at all what I’d expected. Maybe we weren’t enemies in this battle after all. Maybe we were both getting dicked over by this rogue band of hackers. Even if the cat girl was nuts, she might have information I could use.

  And I really, really wanted to save her.

  “How do I complete the ritual?” I asked.

  “You must open your Ark, my lord,” she whispered. “But hurry, there is little time.”

  I launched a search for file names or directories with “Ark” in the name and crossed my fingers. My heart pounded in my chest as the seconds ticked away. If I followed this lunatic cat girl’s advice and it failed, I was a dead man.

  Directories scrolled up my screen, and my heart caught between beats as I read the list of directory names.

  ***Ark of Arukanaten

  ***Ark of Baasrek

  ***Ark of Inkolana

  ***Ark of Panakaneket

  ***Ark of Rathokhetra

  ***Ark of Thet

  She’d called me Rathokhetra, so that must be the one I needed. My fingers flew over the custom keyboard as I dove into the directory. I wanted so badly to peek at the Ark of Inkolana, but there was no time for that. Maybe there’d be a few seconds to slip in a backdoor for later.

  There was only a single file in the Ark of Rathokhetra directory: Ritual.exe.

  “Well, that’s a pretty fucking obvious trap,” I grumbled. The safe thing to do was scan it down to the subatomic level, but there wasn’t time.

  Fuck it. You only live once.

  I executed the ritual.

  The hologram flickered and jittered like a monitor tuned to a scrambled network channel. The smell of cinnamon flooded my nostrils and filled my head with visions of a strange desert land.

  “Yes!” the cat girl cried, and her voice was so clear and pure I whipped around in my chair to see if she’d appeared behind me.

  A progress message flashed across the terminal.

  ***50% complete......

  ***60% complete......

  ***70% complete......

  ***Ritual.exe terminated. Out of memory exception.

  “You have to be fucking kidding me,” I snarled.

  “Three minutes, keyboard cowboy,” the orc said. He and his pals had returned to their positions in the clean room, and all of them looked ready to shoot me full of holes.

  Out of memory? Fuck that. I had access to a system with memory to spare.

  I held my breath and copied Ritual.exe over to DECS.

  It took less than ten seconds to copy the file into a temporary directory on the system I was supposed to save. For all I knew, I was about to trigger a virus of truly epic proportions.

  And I didn’t care.

  If it let me save this woman, I’d take the risk.

  I offered up a silent prayer and then executed Ritual.exe.

  An explosion of gibberish covered the holographic display, and an eerie chorus of harps burst from the sound system. The smell of incense grew so thick in the air that I half-believed I saw wisps of smoke curl up from the tiled floor around me.

  “What did you do?” the orc kidnapper barked. “What have you fucking done?”

  “I’m saving your ass!” I shouted over the harps as they swelled to a crescendo.

  The characters on the terminal transformed from scrambled ASCII nonsense to pictograms that glowed with golden light.

  No, not pictograms.

  Hieroglyphics.

  My eyes drooped as the strength fled my limbs. My heart thudded slower and slower, and my blood grew cold in my veins. The golden glow faded from the glyphs, leaving behind what looked like dead, gray stone.

  “He comes to us!” the cat girl shouted, her voice ecstatic.

  And then a gunshot punched through the harps’ wails, and the world went black.

  Continue reading to find out what happens with Clay. Get it here: Dungeon Bringer 1.

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  Dedication

  FOR MARC AND MAHESH and all their help with Australia and India. I owe them beers.

  Copyright

  Dodge City Knights is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictit
iously. Any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2019 by Aaron Crash and Shadow Alley Press, Inc.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, email the publisher, subject line “Attention: Permissions Coordinator,” at the email address below.

  JStrode@ShadowAlleyPress.com

  About the Author

  Aaron Crash writes adrenaline-fueled odysseys into the extreme regions of speculative fiction. If you're looking for cyborg vampires or jellyfish centaurs, you've come to the right place. He is the co-author of the War God’s Mantle series (Shadow Alley Press) and other over-the-top sci-fi/fantasy novels. He’s been an Amazon All-Star and his books have broken into Amazon’s Top 100. When he’s not wrestling the word dragons, he mountain bikes, kills pixels dead, and has been known to watch a movie or three. He lives in Colorado where he does devilish things. Sign up for his mailing list at www.ShadowAlleyPress.com/Aaron-Crash/.

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