Hello, Vertok, First typed into their encrypted datalink.
Don’t be an ass. Jrill typed back. Are we ready to begin?
Ready, Freddy. Just waiting on your security login.
Login: malavertok307#b. Password: EarthIsAGlothole.
Classy, First typed back. And your biometrics mapping?
Uploading now.
A hyper-resolution 3-D scan file of Jrill’s face and claw pads appeared in First’s download queue. By itself, it was useless, but coupled with a mirroring hack First had commissioned that would, in theory, trick the security system into believing the data was being uploaded from one of its own integrated scanners in real time, it became the final key she needed to breach the ship’s own triple-redundant employee verification protocols.
It wouldn’t be the only gatekeeper First had to fool, but it was the biggest and toughest one. She smiled with a great deal of satisfaction when it all went as planned and a whole new menu of icons and permissions opened up on the display in front of her. With a song in her heart, First opened the encrypted link to CC everyone on the team.
We’re online. Stand by for phase two.
The next two days were a sleep-deprived blur of activity as First alternated between the churn of drilling through firewalls without setting off all sorts of alarms and deadfalls and making the rounds in restaurants and on the gaming floors so she was seen adequately enough not to arouse suspicion.
Honestly, First appreciated the mental break from the constant do-or-die pressure of sitting at her deck for hours on end. The food here, she had to admit, was absolutely sensational, and with a personal line of credit of a million Assembly scripts, she didn’t need to worry about splurging on herself. Loritt would just throw it all on the company expense account and get a huge tax deduction at the end of the cycle anyway.
The casino floor was another matter altogether.
“C’mon!” she shouted among a chorus of sympathetic Awwws as her four-rock tumble was turned away entirely by the house’s weak barrier. Peaks and Valleys was a Grenic game that had caught on with the rest of the galaxy at large, played on a somewhat accelerated time frame, naturally.
First picked it out of the huge catalog of table games because she thought it would be fun to learn to play with Quarried Themselves when she got home, but it had quickly turned into a minor obsession.
It was the fourth roll she’d lost consecutively. She shouldn’t care—it wasn’t her money—but this was getting personal. Someone saddled up next to her as the valley man returned her rocks with a small broom. “Rotten run of luck, Duchess,” Hashin said.
“I’m flattered you noticed, Mr. Dul’kit,” she replied, then turned her back on the table and took a step away. “I’m playing with one hand tied behind my back.”
Hashin cocked his head. “How so?”
“I’ve been expressly prohibited by our mutual friend from using any predictive algorithms.”
“Because that’s cheating and you’d be tossed.”
“How is it cheating if I wrote the program?”
“A novel argument,” Hashin said. “Remind me to have you thoroughly searched before any coworker-bonding game nights.”
First smirked. “Seems counter to the spirit of the thing, doesn’t it?” She looked around, slightly disoriented. “What time is it, anyway? There’s no damned clocks anywhere in here, and they make us check our handhelds at the entry to the module.”
“It was seven larims past when I left my cabin, maybe half a larim ago.”
“Shit,” First said. “I’ve been down here almost three hours. My little army has to be done compiling for the final assault by now. I should get back to my cabin. Join me in a larim? I could use another set of eyes. I’ve got five displays running, and it’s all a bit much. You’re the only other one on the team with the crypto experience.”
“A predinner rendezvous, Duchess Harrington?” Hashin asked with feigned shock. “How scandalous.”
First shrugged. “What happens on Change Your Luck stays on Change Your Luck. Mostly because we’re keeping her when it’s over.”
Hashin bowed. “It’s a date. Your cabin in a larim.” The crowd reabsorbed him just as suddenly as he’d appeared. First really had to figure out how he did that one of these days. The sleep-deprivation headache was coming back. First needed caffeine, alcohol, or both in short order.
She posted up at a chair at the expansive wraparound bar that served as the hub of this gaming floor and waited for one of the beleaguered bartenders to work their way over to her. She had a larim to kill and wasn’t in a huge rush, so she leaned back in her seat, set the menu to English, and tried to find a drink that would provide a buzz without killing her outright.
“Can I buy you a drink?” a masculine voice asked from behind her.
She turned around to shoot the intruder down like she was defending sovereign airspace, but the words froze in her throat as her eyes fell on a familiar face.
“Actually,” Eagle Independence said, “I think you owe me one.”
“Caleb!” First blurted out before her jaw could bite down on the name. “I mean, Eagle…”
“First,” Eagle said.
First pushed her palm down in a “Be quiet!” gesture. “Lady Harrington.”
“Ah, moving up in the galaxy, I see.”
“You can’t be here, Eagle.”
“I most certainly can. We have a show tonight in the auditorium module.”
“Cancel it.”
“No way, babe. They already paid. A lot. The show must go on.”
“Eagle.” First squeezed his wrist. “Please, listen to what I’m saying. There’s not going to be a show tonight. You’re not feeling well. Your voice gave out. Beast Mode ate a battery. Whatever. Cancel the show and get on your tour bus and get clear of here.”
“The bus you ejected me out of as a prelude to stealing it, you mean? Never did get to thank-you for that.”
“Who do you think arranged to have it ‘donated’ back to you?” First slapped her chest. “That politician who showed up to party in your bus a couple of months ago wasn’t a coincidence.”
“And the tentacle monster that appeared backstage with the all-access passes I gave you, I suppose that was just a coincidence.”
First cleared her throat. “Oh, so you’ve met Bilge.”
“Yeah, two stops ago. It was a little alarming at first, but he’s a really nice guy in spite of appearances. Great taste in alien tunes. Hired him on as our new manager. We’re using some of his recommendations as mood music while we write our new album.”
“You really fired your old manager like I told you to?”
“Fat lot of good that did us,” Eagle said. “Who do you think had all the contacts with the venues and event bookers? We’ve been wallowing around in the vacuum for weeks. We’re just dumb-ass kids from Michigan. We don’t have any idea what we’re doing out here. This is the first big gig we landed on our own, and as long as we’ve got a stage under us, we’re going to play on it.”
“You’re not hearing me,” First said. “I’m here on my own big gig. There’s. Not. Going. To. Be. A. Stage.”
A penny of doubt left on Eagle’s mental tracks derailed his building tirade train. “You’re here to steal this whole damned ship, aren’t you?”
“Repossess,” First corrected.
“Fuck,” Eagle said. “You’re really moving up in the galaxy.”
“Only if a big stupid lug stays out of my way.” First expected him to get angry, to get in her face and make a scene. Something, anything to give her an excuse to call security over to remove “the help” accosting her. But there was no anger in his face, only embarrassment.
An insidious thing, privilege. Not three days on this ship just pretending to be a duchess, wrapped in the dress and pomp of royalty, and she already expected to be treated like one. Then it was First’s turn to feel ashamed.
“Look,” she said quietly. “We’re both just dumb kids
from nowhere. You Michigan, me Proxima.”
“Proxima?” Eagle said. “Damn. That’s a real armpit.”
“Oh, for fuck’s sake. I’m trying to be macro with you here, so don’t push it. Okay?”
Eagle grimaced. “What the hell does ‘macro’ mean?”
First’s face dropped into her hands. “I don’t even know. I’m losing it out here. I’m trying to level with you, be straight, real, honest, got it?”
“Tubular.” Eagle waved his thumb and pinkie finger.
“The fuck?”
“I don’t know, it was a 1980s thing.”
First’s hands clenched. “Can we meet in the middle here, please? Somewhere in, I don’t know, the twenty-two hundreds?”
“Sorry.”
“It’s fine. Just get clear of here as soon as you can. Things might get weird.”
Eagle spread his arms and motioned to their surroundings. “We’re on a space casino the size of a small city, surrounded by tens of thousands of aliens and cyborgs. How much weirder can it get?”
“Trust me, it’s all relative,” First said tiredly. “I’m trying to help you, Caleb. I shouldn’t even be telling you this.”
“Why not?”
“OpSec. You could blab to someone and blow the whole job.”
Eagle held up two fingers like a Boy Scout. “My lips are sealed, promise. But we’re sticking it out. Worst case, we get paid for a blown show. If we bolt, we’re in breach of contract and get squat.”
First sighed and leaned in to kiss him on the cheek. “Evelyn,” she said. “My real name is Evelyn. But I have to go. Be careful.”
He reeled back from the kiss as if had been a punch. “You, too,” he said, awkwardly leaning against the bar, staying as far from her as he could without breaking his own spine. “Evelyn.”
She got up and made her way to the entrance. On a whim, she glanced back and saw Eagle rubbing his cheek where she’d kissed him.
CHAPTER 26
By the time First made it back to her cabin, Hashin was already there, as was Loritt, much to her surprise.
First kicked off her shoes. “Thought we weren’t supposed to bunch together.”
“You haven’t checked in for the last day. I grew concerned.”
“We’re fine.” First plopped down in front of her monitors. “Just takes a long time for the programs to compile ahead of these attacks. We only get one shot at each layer.”
“And this is the last layer?”
“Yep, the final firewall. Pierce this and I can go straight into the source code and tinker with the probability algorithms on every game in this place, except the physical table games, obvs.”
“Obvs,” Loritt repeated. “May we proceed?”
“Slow is fast,” First said as she reprioritized several of her apps and ghosts to align the shape of her attack with the outline of the last firewall her sniffers had gamed out and reported back. When she’d finished, a big red RUN icon appeared on her central display. “Okay, we’re ready. Boss, would you care to do the honors?”
Loritt stepped forward. “Don’t mind if I do.”
With a press of the button, he unleashed a full-scale electronic assault. The battle played out at the speed of light, except inside a handful of quantum processing nodes, where it played out even faster. Just shy of two million credits’ worth of the finest villains Junktion’s /backnet/ could program went to war against the best security system any amount of money could buy.
But the hackers on Junktion had several advantages. First, they were cutting-edge creatives who, like starving artists everywhere, were willing to work for pennies for exposure and to build their portfolios chasing a huge payday down the road. Second, the people programming the defenses had grown complacent in their unassailability. They were so confident in the battlements they’d designed, they’d long ago stopped probing them for weaknesses.
Deep inside the Change Your Luck’s mainframe, mimic programs wearing faked name badges and stolen uniforms walked straight past incredulous door guards. Ghost programs launched a DDoS attack that tied up the firewall’s lines of communication within itself. Grifter programs played three-cup-style sleights of hand with the isolated and disoriented remnants, while the mimics egged them on to give the deception credibility.
There was no countdown timer or progress bar updating the percentage completed. That shit was for the movies. In the blink of a human eye, the battle was over. Many bots, ghosts, and mimics had been corrupted or even deleted in the process, but there would be no cemetery on a hill overlooking the beaches for them.
The big red button on her center display disappeared, and a whole new user interface and menu lists rolled out across her entire system.
“We’re in,” First said with the smooth pride and overconfidence of youth. “I have full access to their core gaming systems.” First dug through the brand-new array of menus opening before her like an oyster until the pearl presented itself.
“There it is,” she said in a hushed voice as she opened the prompt. “I’m about to change all y’all’s luck. For the worse.”
With a keystroke, First injected her customized probability algorithm that would turn her perfect pearl black.
Except … it didn’t. Instead, it started glowing. First like a night-light, then like a lighthouse.
“What the fuck?” First’s fingers raced across the keyboard and the virtual interface in a desperate attempt to ascertain what the hell was going on. “No. No, no, no, no…”
“What’s wrong?” Hashin said.
“I’m … I don’t know,” First said. “That’s not possible.”
“What’s not possible?” Loritt demanded.
First swallowed her pride, hard, before working up the gumption to answer. “Something went wrong in the execution file. I flipped a negative to a positive, forgot to carry a one, divided by zero, I don’t know right now.”
“And?” Loritt said, the manufacturer’s tolerances of his patience straining under a brutal pressure test.
* * *
The first beneficiary of First’s cyberattack misfire had sat unmoving at two holo-spinner machines for the last eight larims, taking no breaks for food or to relieve herself as she diligently drained both the ship’s complimentary booze and her philandering wife’s bank accounts while filling her lungs with a string of cigars that represented nothing more noble than a slow, noncommittal suicide.
Tenalphin Zangal had been a starlet in a life that seemed to have ended an epoch ago. She’d been voted three times to have the four sexiest legs in any five systems. She’d fallen hard for her talent agent, and they’d both ridden the wave of her beauty into the stars and beyond.
But like all bright lights, she’d eventually faded, and her wife’s wandering eyes had fixated on another. Tenalphin resolved before their divorce became official to do as much damage to her former agent and spouse’s savings as possible. And where better in the galaxy to do so than on a two-week casino cruise?
Therefore, ironically, it was with a rising sense of dread and disappointment that Tenalphin realized after three consecutive pulls on two different machines that she’d hit on a once-in-a-lifetime winning streak.
“Figures,” she mumbled as the holo-spinner hit a fourth escalating jackpot and deposited a half million credits and change into their joint account.
* * *
Jrill’s eyes went wide as the chaos spread across her security monitors. Whatever was happening wasn’t a riot, not exactly, but she’d be hard-pressed to describe the difference. Beings flooded into the gaming floors, desperate to claim any open machine. Fistfights between utterly unprepared people started to break out over who’d staked the claim first.
If she were honest, their plan for this job had always seemed a little shaky and ill-defined to her, but she was sure it didn’t include patrons fighting over the right to stay seated. Jrill opened the team’s encrypted link to check in for an update.
Uh, guys? The floor is filli
ng up like a Gomeltic before a hibernation cycle. What’s the deal?
* * *
Hashin saw Jrill’s message on one of the side monitors. “Jrill wants to know what’s going on.”
“She’s not alone in that.” Loritt tapped his foot impatiently. “Well, First? An update?”
“The probabilities skewed the wrong way. They’re not losing like they’re supposed to be,” First said. “They’re winning. Every time.”
“So they’re not going anywhere.”
“Nope.”
“And our cover is blown,” Hashin said.
“Yep,” First answered.
“That’s bad.”
“I’m locking down the core,” First said. “They won’t be able to shut it down or make any changes until they get through the firewall I’m installing.”
“How long will that take?” Hashin asked.
“Half a larim if they’re clever. A couple if they’re not.”
“Forget radio silence,” Loritt said. “Get everyone on the scrambled com. Right now. We need to improvise and do it fast.”
Cursing herself and still digging through her memory trying to figure out what went wrong, it took First a couple of minutes to get everyone conferenced in on their emergency microburst coms channel. If things had gone to plan, they never would’ve used them. But now that the plan had been decisively thrown out the window …
“What the kark is going on?” Sheer said from her position on the gaming floor nearest to the engineering section at the aft end of the ship. “I’ve won the last six hands in a row, and everyone around me has, too. It’s like a feeding frenzy down here.”
“Confirmed,” Fenax said, floating at their position near the command module. “I am seeing an exodus of patrons from their cabins toward the gaming modules, which runs counter to the plan as I understood it.”
“You understood the plan correctly, Fenax,” Loritt said. “We’ve hit a snag. Our hacker inserted her virus successfully, but it had the opposite effect of what we intended. So instead of revolting and leaving, the population of this ship is glued to their seats. And the operators are aware something is very wrong.”
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