The recreation centre was exactly as I remembered it. This time, I walked past the simulators, and went into the one cubicle that would let me into the dark web. As I logged into it, I laid down extra defenses in the implant, and hoped the wolves hadn’t hidden themselves a back door. Tens hadn’t had a lot of time to check since I’d come out of stasis.
He’d recalibrated, wiped and reloaded, but there were ways, and they’d had time. I marked down a thorough check-up, or total replacement as something I’d have to get done in the future. By the time I was sure I’d done everything I could do to keep intruders out of my head, the terminal was waiting.
“Well, here goes.”
I went straight into the Underweb, laying a false trail before I surfaced from it to check the official expanse of net. It wasn’t hard to find where the wolf servers were, but getting into them was an entirely different matter. They were well-defended, sure, but that wasn’t the main problem. Most of those protections I’d covered in retrieval training… most. I made another note to go back and study the new ones.
What made the defenses particularly hard to penetrate was the language. Just like the vespis and arach, the wolves used their own tongue to code in. I could understand some of it, but not all. Dammit. Since when had no one made a computer equivalent to Galbas?
I needed to find the wolf terms for ‘Shady Marie’ and ‘Mackenzie Star’… and maybe work backwards from there—and that’s when I struck gold.
The wolves’ client hadn’t been a wolf. In searching for the translation, I came across a communication that linked a Shadow Wolf contact point with both words. That sucker was in Galbas. Fan-fucking-tastic! With nothing better to do, I back-tracked it to one of the most well-armed firewalls I’d ever seen.
The message had bounced through several systems, some of which had better protections than others, but none of which provided a real challenge… and then I hit the wall. Literally. A firewall like none I remembered seeing before it, despite a vague sense of familiarity. There was no way I was going to bull my way through that without taking a good look at who owned it.
Switching away from the message trail, I backed up, trying to I.D. the system that owned it, and then maybe a physical location.
“Oh. Hells. No….”
That came out a lot louder than I expected, and I looked around, before realizing I was in a cubicle. Good thing. Even so, I listened, relaxing only when I heard nothing from the resource centre outside. I was alone in here, but still…
I reached back and locked the cubicle door, thinking I should have done that before. I remembered Depredides—and the memory was like being shoved into a cold bath. Arach, Ghoul, Bendigo, and Blaedergil, aside, the company guarding Depredides security was one of the most effective—and vicious—I’d ever encountered, either before, or since.
I didn’t want to go up against them, again. Especially not with Mack and Tens out of commission, since that had been who’d gotten me out last time… them and Delight… and Pritchard… Oh, well hot-toasted crap on a stick! We might have a bigger problem than we’d thought—and I might just need to talk to Odyssey, because it might be a problem we shared.
I didn’t like it, but that was where the trail led. I was going to have to talk to Abby about this… but not before I’d done a bit more research. I pulled what I could from the legitimate web, and then sank beneath it, and into the chaotic world that was the intergalactic Dark Web.
Illegitimate servers, criminal minds, and the darkest of dark dealings were the order of the day, down here. Not that there was much ‘day’. I’d gotten an eyeful the last time I’d searched. This time, I got a whole lot more.
My stomach started a low-level churn, and my skin crawled. I scraped off trackers and tracers, cut viral hooks, and spun a half-dozen guard programs to walk with me through corridors of code that were looking for every advantage they could garner.
Whispers of the wolves, led me to somewhere with a lot more order. I passed unhindered, but every detail of my presence was noted and logged. I could see the programs pulling the information away from the shell I’d constructed, and wondered how long it would take them to break through.
Not long, as it turned out. The first attack came from the side, a virus that speared through the shell and hooked onto it, sending out tentacles that created a tracery of cracks through my disguise, and nothing I could do would patch it in time. I threw a second shield just before the first one burst around me, and hoped I’d been fast enough.
Not wanting to think about what would happen if I got hit a second time, or hit with something nastier, I ran—which, in computer terms means I began to pull out of the system. The orderly ambush site receded quickly enough, and I was about to surface in my implant, when it snapped back around me, sucking my mind right back to where I’d started.
Well, crap. That was a clever trick. I wondered how I was going to get out of it, and I was very glad the ship was isolated from the research centre, and that this terminal was isolated inside the research centre, itself. The Stars knew what sort of tracing program they’d put on me, and I sure as shit didn’t want the Shady’s location discovered by wolf forces.
Given I was just a little bit stuck, I decided it wouldn’t hurt to take a look around and see exactly who owned this section of the dark. Abby dropping in beside me was not something I’d thought I’d see in a million years.
“My, you’ve got yourself in a bit of a pickle, here, haven’t you?” she said, her net presence turning and using a spray can to paint a door on the wall beside us. “How about I take you home?”
Sounded good to me.
I looped my virtual arm through hers, as she reached for the handle.
“Is this how you met Tens?” I wondered as she opened the door and led me through.
Her arm tightened on mine, and she lifted me through darkness and out into the well-lit streets of the upper web.
“Wouldn’t you like to know?” she asked, wiggling her eyebrows, and then she slapped me on the ass, and vanished. “Time you got back.”
I caught sight of two wolf constructs sliding up out of the pavement, and agreed. This time, it was easy to pull back to the terminal, unplug and shut down. With any luck, that, and the terminal’s Tens-created defenses would be enough to end the pursuit. That, and the fact I powered it down and unplugged it, so it was nothing more than a dead-weight of circuitry and disconnect.
How in all the worlds had Abby found me?
I checked my implant, and discovered she wasn’t in my head, that the buffer between the research centre and the rest of the ship still held. Well, that was interesting. She had, however, said I needed to get back, and that meant she’d had to come looking for me—and that meant she hadn’t sent anybody to fetch me… I wished I’d thought to bring my blaster with me, tried to work out where the nearest one was located.
It was a relief to discover I didn’t need it when I came out of the cubicle.
Abby had sent a crewman, but she hadn’t been able to get to me through the locked door of the cubicle. She must have gone back out of the research centre to talk to Abs, and then come back in to wait. She was standing opposite the cubicle door, in plain sight, talking to me before the door was fully open.
“Abby sent me,” she said, and I recognized one of the kitchen staffers I’d asked Abs to wake up. “She says you’re needed in the post-shift briefing.
The post-shift briefing?
I hadn’t thought I’d been gone that long.
“You’d be surprised,” Abby said, then added, “Good work, by the way. You tracked the first comm back to Sharovan.”
Sharovan?
“The security company that grabbed you the last time you visited Depredides.”
Oh. I never had caught their name.
“So that’s the plan? We head to Depredides and chase down the lead?”
“While Case gets the Marie into hiding, and keeps the crew safe. Mack
won’t thank us if his people come to harm, while he’s away.”
Away. Well, that was one way to put it. We had to get Mack back.
“We will, Cutter. Just as soon as we find out who’s controlling the contract. Now, are you ready?”
And I discovered that Abby had had the crewman walk me to the conference room while she’d been talking to me.
“Ma’am?” the girl was saying, her face creased by worry. The worry was replaced by relief when she saw me blink. “We’re here, Ma’am.”
I wanted to tell her I was no way known a ‘Ma’am’ and didn’t deserve the title, but I couldn’t.
“Thank you…” I managed, and then realized I didn’t know her name.
“Hella.”
“Thank you, Hella. I appreciate your help.”
“Are you ready?” Abby asked, and I shook my head.
“I’m never ready for stuff like this,” I told her, and she snorted.
“Then let’s get this crazy show on the road,” she said, and opened the door.
I stepped through and discovered Abs had taken me to the back of the conference room. I remembered this. Last time I’d been here, I’d been interviewed by a Star Shadow Hunt Master and proven I was part of his pack… at least temporarily. This occasion couldn’t have been more different.
I mean, I was still the centre of attention, but me being there wasn’t actually important.
“Where’s Mack?” came one question, followed quickly by “Yeah, what did you do to him?”
I stared at the joker in the middle row, and he grinned. I glared, and the grin faded.
“Looks like we’re in the shit, again,” he muttered, and the woman next to him leaned in close.
“Nope, just you, but you should be used to that, cos…”
“…only the depth varies,” he finished. “Yeah, yeah. Very funny.”
I decided that was as good a place to start as any.
“No,” I said, and everyone looked at me. “He’s right. We’re all in the shit, again. I’ll do my best to explain what kind of shit, how deep, and what we’ve got planned to try and get you out of it.”
By the time I was done, they were silent—and all sense of humor had vanished from their faces.
“I want off the boat,” someone said. “If I’m not part of the crew, I’m clear, right?”
A low murmur greeted this, and then stopped when I shook my head.
“They know who’s on this ship. They have a crew manifest.”
I waited until the cussing and cries of disbelief had died down, and then explained.
“Every station we’ve stopped at. Every planet. Every orbital. It’s law that Mack gives a full crew manifest. Your names are out there. Even if you leave, you’ll still be a target. This contract was made with a specific point of time in mind. Everyone on the boat since that time is included on the contract.”
This was met with whispers of disbelief, and murmurs of dismay—and then someone asked the question I’d been waiting on.
“What point in time?”
I shrugged.
“I don’t know, but I do know that it has something to do with Depredides.”
The response to that was unexpected.
“But we only went there once!”
Abby’s voice came over the intercom, and I remembered that she was hooked into the ship’s systems.
“Once? Are you sure?”
The crew members exchanged looks, and then nodded.
“Check the log, but once is all I can recall, too.”
“Yeah, me too.”
“And me.”
I listened to the chorus of agreement and my heart sank.
Just the once, huh? And I bet I knew when…
“We went to fetch you.”
Yup, that would be it.
That comment had come from Doc.
The crew went still, and turned towards me. Every single one of them wanting to know what I’d done.
“Then it’s my fault,” I said. “I tried to hack their net.”
Someone snickered. Someone else snorted. A murmur of ‘idiot’ floated from the centre of the room, and then Doc silenced them all.
“Mack didn’t have to go fetch you,” he said. “Nor did Tens, or Delight, or Pritchard.”
My heart fell further. Delight and Pritchard. Well, fuck. But Doc wasn’t finished.
He looked around at the crew.
“Matter of fact,” he said. “I don’t think there are many of us he hasn’t pulled out a pile that’s been our own making, at one time or another.”
“Yeah…” answered him from a distant corner of the room. “You’re not alone, Cutter. I was facing a firing squad.”
Another round of muttering followed, but the general tone was the same. Mack had done some pretty crazy things for his crew, and they all owed him. It made Tens’s long-ago comment about Mack picking up strays take on a very solid kind of sense. The man really did pick up strays. This boat was full of them.
“Well, now we have that settled,” Abby said, her crisp, clear tones cutting through the babble. “I believe you all understand why you need to lay low while Cutter and I go and sort this out.”
“And rescue Mack,” came from the crowd.
“And rescue Mack,” Abby confirmed, and continued, “and Tens, and Rohan.”
She paused, and then gave a melodramatic sigh.
“Oh, fine. We’ll rescue Delight and Pritchard, as well, but only if we really must.”
This brought quiet laughter, since they all knew how awkward things got with Delight, and me and Mack. The whole Odyssey debacle was a well-known tale amongst them. I held up my hand.
“Case is in charge while me and Abby are away. She knows where to fly you to give you half a chance of staying safe.” I scanned the room, and was relieved to find Abby had woken up the Supply Master. “And Stepyan is her 2IC. Any trouble from any of you, and he’s the one you’ll be answering to.”
It was almost satisfying to see them turn briefly to glance at Stepyan, and then hurriedly face the front, again. For his part, Step just touched a forefinger to his brow, and flicked it outwards. I didn’t know where Mack had found him, but I figured the Marie was in safe hands with him backing Case. I glanced at the pilot, and she nodded, a faint smile playing along her lips.
Tension eased inside me.
It was good to see she was okay with having Steppy as back-up. I’d just picked the man most likely to crack heads when it was needed. I’d seen the way the crew deferred to him in Stores, and figured I could do worse.
“Nice,” Abby said, in the privacy of my skull. “Put the two assassins in charge. There’s no way that could go wrong.”
I felt my eyes widen, and realized I hadn’t let the last breath out. Abby giggled.
“Don’t sweat it, Cutter. You’ve pretty much picked the only two Mack would have trusted the Marie to, with the amount of command crew he’s about to be down.”
I had?
Oh, Stars above.
I hadn’t realized just how close the wall our backs really were.
“Well, now you know,” Abby said.
I closed my eyes, took a deep breath, and opened them, again.
“Dismissed,” I said. “You guys have the hard part.”
I paused, watching as they froze and stared at me.
“Sure,” I said. “You have to keep the Shady Marie in tip-top shape, or Mack’s going to have the hides of every one of you. Me? I just have to go fetch him.”
And they laughed, like they had a lot on their minds, and were just being polite.
“Nice,” Abby said. “Way to put the fear of God into them.”
Which, in a way, was exactly what I’d intended.
I didn’t know how long I was going to be away, and I wanted the Marie to be there when I got Mack back.
“Come on,” Abby said. “You’ve got a call to make. I’ll stand
by with Case on the chance there’s a contract involved.”
14—The Depredides Lead
Abby was right, even though I couldn’t immediately remember why I would have a call to make, and why Odyssey would even be involved. It all became clear enough when Case joined me on the way to the bridge.
“So,” she said, “are you going to see if there’s a contract for Delight’s retrieval?”
I hadn’t thought of that—only of checking the possibility Delight and Pritchard might need to be warned. It hadn’t occurred to me that there’d be work in it for us. It made sense, though. And Mack would love the irony.
Running my mind back over the meeting, reminded me why I should have thought of it. As far as I knew, Odyssey might not even know Delight and Pritchard were at risk—or be able to pinpoint why. They might have known about Delight’s part in rescuing me from Sharovan’s headquarters on Depredides—especially since Delight had tried to teleport me off the Shady Marie straight after—but they might not know where any particular threat on that agent came from.
Heaven’s knew, but that girl had pissed off an awful lot of folk—probably every time she turned around. Knowing the source of a threat had value.
The Depredides incident had occurred just before Mack had offered me a job—except he hadn’t been; he’d just been buying me time for Odyssey to cool its heels. I shivered, brushing the memory away. There wasn’t a lot I wanted to remember about my time in Odyssey’s employ—I’d spent most of it trying to get out from under them, and they hadn’t appreciated the effort.
“Well, too bad for them,” I said, and realized we’d reached the control room.
Case laid a hand on my arm as we stepped through the door.
“Are you all right for this?” she asked, and I looked at her.
“Do I have a choice?” I asked, but my voice was brittle with tension.
Her smile was brief and quick, and she turned and headed over to her usual seat.
“No. Get on with it.”
I got. Was standing behind Mack’s console when the call went through.
“Odyssey, this is the Shady Marie.”
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