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Breaking into the wireless system only took me so far. I could see the connections I needed to make, but there was at least one other layer of protection between them and me. Jacking directly into the door controls helped me get past that, so I could find the feeds to the security system. Whether or not I’d retain that access when I jacked back out, was another question.
I guessed I’d know the answer as soon as I had to go through the door—since, no way known, did I have a lead long enough to stay connected and get through the maze of labs on the map I had. And speaking of maps...
I let the programs in the implant work the programs behind the locking mechanism, and dug deeper into the security coding.
“Oh, yeah, baby,” I muttered, when I found another map for the complex that was just a little more detailed than what I had... Actually, it was a lot more detailed.
“What?” Bendigo wanted to know.
“This,” I said, and sent it to his in-the-head contact address.
“Well, well, well,” he said, and I realized I’d made a mistake, because, in making contact with his implant, I’d activated the intrusion program he’d had waiting in his.
“Goddamnit!” I said, as I felt him access my implant. “Will you keep your sticky fingers out of my head?”
I felt him pause.
“You make it hard to concentrate,” I added, hoping this—and knowing he could get in—would keep him out while I ran the mission.
I felt him withdraw, knew he’d left the access in place, and that my days of implant privacy were numbered. I hoped Rohan had the sense to block the link between us, even as I wished he wouldn’t. The first would keep him safe from discovery by Bendigo, but the second would let me know when he made it safely off-planet.
“I’m not going without you,” came swiftly into my head, and then I felt him moving through the implant. I can’t describe it, only that things felt... different, after his presence passed. Taking a closer look, I saw he’d left Bendigo’s access point intact, but added an internal layer of security to individual processes inside my head. “It’ll make it harder for him to read you. I’ll check back in an hour.”
And he was gone, sealing the link between us as he went.
I missed him immediately, but felt better about Bendigo linking in. With the two of us connected, the mission would go easier than it might have, otherwise. Even so, it was a surprise to hear Bendigo’s voice in my head.
“You done, yet?”
“Yeah.”
I linked him into the security feed, almost glad to have the connection between us. Almost. I was still getting rid of it just as soon as I could.
“Well, shit,” Bendigo said, and the security feed from the lab behind the door flashed in my implant.
I obeyed the summons, checking out what was on it. Least I could do was make sure I knew what was behind the door.
“Door Number One,” I muttered, and looked.
There was no lab behind the door. I looked at Bendigo.
“Is there a Door Number Two?”
A quick flick through the security feeds and the map showed there wasn’t.
Damn.
“Do I get a gun?”
“You shoot me, and you won’t get out of here alive.”
I knew that; I’d seen what was on the other side of the door. I’d also seen what was coming at us from the other end of the corridor we were standing in. It was either go back and face the green gas in the airlock, or stay here and maybe get eaten, or go through the door... and maybe get eaten. I held out my hand, flicking my fingers to demand a weapon.
“And your point is?”
No way was I letting him know I wouldn’t shoot him for sure. Let the man sweat it out a little. Besides, if he pissed me off any more, I just might shoot him, and I wasn’t particular about where. Man didn’t have to be facing me if I deemed him a greater threat than the five Ghoul-clones waiting on the other side of the door... or anything else we might meet.
Before he had a chance to try and read my head, I opened the door, and unjacked from the keypad.
I’d been hoping the security feeds would stay live, because it would make it easier to spot roving guards. And they did. I’d also been hoping I’d retain my access to the rest of the system. I didn’t.
Damn. To get anywhere close to what we came for, I’d have to jack in, again—and, if I wanted to get into the heart of the system, I’d have to do it from the server room; the short stint at the door hadn’t shown me a way to reach the nerve-center of the complex, no matter how successful I’d been about getting into the security periphery.
Bendigo swore as the doors parted, but he passed me the Blazer he’d been carrying, and unclipped the second one from his chest harness. I didn’t bother saying thank you. I figured he could deal with the Ghoul waiting for us, while I took out the ones coming up the corridor.
As experiments in cloning went, they looked perfect, but that was as far as the semblance stretched. I’m not sure what had gone wrong in their nutrient mix, but something sure as shit had, because Ghoul had been feral, but not as feral as these guys. I backed up to Bendigo, moving with him through the door, but firing down the corridor as we went.
I managed to take one down, before I closed the door. I’d have been happy with that, except I hit three and watched the wounds start to seal back over. I’d put three shots into the one I finally put down. In its head. Where things just shouldn’t grow back.
And then I locked the door behind us, changing the access code, just in case the critters knew it. Not such a stupid assumption, I realized, the program alerting me as they punched in the original code. Interesting. I wondered if these were the guards for this part of the complex, if they, too, had access to the security feeds and the map.
“When you’re ready!”
Bendigo’s voice had that choked quality that told me he was in difficulties. It jolted me out of my ponderings, and back into the fight. I turned so that he could back up to the door, and I was beside him. Instead of putting our backs flat to the wall, we angled out from each other.
“Three in the head,” I told him. “It don’t grow back.”
He gave a short, sharp bark of laughter, but he did as I advised. Fast. I’d just moved to my second target, when he finished off his fourth. Man was a killing machine.
“And you’d do well to remember that.”
Not something I wanted to hear in my head—especially as it meant I’d forgotten to keep my thoughts behind the partitions Rohan had built inside the implant. I caught myself about to check on the boy, when Bendigo sent an image of the two maps we had.
He’d overlaid the one he’d had, with the one I’d hacked, showing the changes, and then he shuffled his portion of the map across the top of the second, until the two matched exactly. Somehow, he’d only managed to get a third of what he’d needed, and his third started about a kilometer away from the corridors and rooms where we’d come in.
Great. Just great. I hated to think of just how many Ghoul clones were in these corridors, and kicked myself for not trying to work that out. If the original Ghoul was as much of a control freak as he had to have been to pull this whole operation together, then he had to have a way of tracking them, maybe even of shutting them all down, if they went feral.
Looking at them, I figured he was probably a bit late for that. These things were plenty feral enough to warrant putting down. I wondered why I hadn’t seen them on the first visit.
“This way,” Bendigo said, and took a step forward.
I followed, doing a rapid scan of the bodies on the floor. It would be just our luck to have the damn things come back to life just when we were in grab range. When none of them showed signs of moving, I did a rapid scan of the security shell files, hoping to find some way of telling where the rest of them were, since six seemed to be the standard size of a hunting pack.
Hunting pack, the term had come from nowhere, but it fit. Finding where the rest of them were turned out to be as simple as tapping into a block of code linked to both the map and the security feeds, which was when I realized just how much trouble we were really in. There were six packs—and they were all linked.
“Hold up.” I took a short detour over to the nearest corpse, and nudged my boot through the shattered remnants of its skull.
Fortunately, the Blazer had made a big enough hole to cause the rest of the skull to fracture, but the skin held everything together, and it didn’t take me long to realize I was going to have to get my hands dirty.
“I need gloves,” I said, and Bendigo crouched down beside me.
“Keep watch, and tell me what you need. I’ll do the looking.”
He might not have gloves for me, but he was wearing his own. I sent him what I’d found in the system, and then added, “Does it have an implant?”
“Gotcha,” he said, and pulled a heavy-bladed knife from his belt.
I stood up, and turned away, doing a sweep of both the security feeds and the map as I did so. If I was right, these things were linked mind-to-mind, meaning they could hunt as a pack. A single pack. One made up of six units of six, each pin-point aware of where each of the other units were, and maybe even what they were facing.
I contemplated trying to hook into the sub-network of their minds, but I didn’t know what counter-intrusion software might have been included in their heads. There was no way of telling from what I could find in the security net, itself, and I doubted I had time to fight a cyber-battle and run the mission.
I heard Bendigo crack his way into the skull, and tried to ignore the wet, meaty sounds that followed.
“Found it,” he said, sending the image of it to my mind.
He was wiping off shattered brain matter, when I looked, and I felt my stomach rise to my throat. Swallowing it down, I watched as he turned the thing in his hands, trying to identify how primitive it might be, but I couldn’t.
“No idea,” I said, and he dropped it into a pouch at his belt, as he closed down the visual link between us.
I’d been watching the Ghoul-clone locations on the map, noting the patterns as they moved through the complex.
“They’re coming.”
“Can we avoid them?”
“We can try.”
I sent him the map with the dotted clusters of each Ghoul pack moving through it, and heard him swear. He was up on his feet in seconds, bouncing past me in a quick jog, as he brought the Blazer to bear.
“Switch to incendiary,” he said, and shoved the information into my head.
I switched. I hadn’t known the Blazer had an incendiary option, but then I hadn’t had much call to use one. With one more glance back at the Ghoul-clone corpses, I trotted after Bendigo, admiring his focus.
Man might not know if I’d shoot him, or not, but he wasn’t letting it bother him.
“That’s because I can out-shoot you,” came back quick and confident.
Damn, and double damn!
And I heard Bendigo’s chuckle in my skull, although not a sound escaped him out in the corridor.
After that, neither of us were thinking about each other—except, maybe, Bendigo, whose thoughts made it clear his only concern was to get me to the main server room so I could download the files and wipe the mainframe before Odyssey could find it. There was no way in all the stars above, he wanted that corporation getting its hands on what was stored there.
I wondered how he could be so sure, but then realized we were passing doors that led to rooms, and that those rooms were linked to other corridors, and that the Ghoul packs were slowly closing.
“Hold up,” I said, and Bendigo slowed.
“Fixing our back trail,” I added, and he stopped.
“Hurry.”
I turned, so I could see the corridor behind us, and moved so that our backs were touching. His was tense, and with good reason, but I didn’t let that reason distract me from what I had to do. I ran my head through the security system, and locked down each and every door, changing the access codes—which was when it occurred to me that I should probably check for a master code, and change that, as well. That way, if Ghoul had made clones that had a higher degree of functionality, they’d have trouble helping their little pack-minded friends.
“Done,” I said, just as the sound of heavy boots told me the yellow dots tracking the closest Ghoul pack were one hundred per cent accurate.
Bendigo started firing. I heard a staccato beat of threes, each with a pause between them, each punctuated by a heavy thud, followed by the smell of burning flesh, and the sound of screams. The Blazer sounded slightly different firing incendiaries.
“Those work better,” he said, “I’ll try doubles with the next lot. You ready?”
And I realized he’d been leaning against me, that I’d braced, and would probably fall over if he moved. I stepped away from him, just as his weight shifted forward. I turned, again, to follow in his wake, and we jogged down a few side-turns, passing several more doors.
The map said they led to larger spaces beyond, but it hadn’t labelled them, and we hadn’t reached the edge of Bendigo’s map. I wondered what lay behind each door, but there was no way of knowing without opening them, and we didn’t have time for that.
“Labs or living quarters,” Bendigo said, and I realized I’d have to get out of the habit of thinking inside the space we shared.
“How are you doing that?” I asked, and he snickered.
“Boy couldn’t wall off the part of the implant I was already in—not without letting me know he’d been.”
Oh. Well, that wasn’t comforting, but Bendigo was still moving, and we’d almost reached the edge of his map. I wondered what we’d find when we got there.
“Labs.”
“Will you stop that?”
And I could feel him smiling.
“Nope.”
While I wanted to crush the smugness right out of his tone... and maybe his head as well, there wasn’t time. The fourth pack was moving in.
“Can it get through those doors?” Bendigo wanted to know.
“No, but it can work its way ’round via the corridors,” I told him, highlighting the path the Ghoul-clones would have to take.
“Can you get us into the sanctum.”
It was the first time I’d heard him call it that, and I hesitated. Bendigo gave an impatient sigh, and ‘his’ section of the map flashed. Oh. Right.
The section surrounding the server control center.
“Sure,” I said, feeling dumb as shit.
