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“Heads up.” It was all I could send to warn Bendigo. I figured he’d have his hands full with whatever was going on outside my head, and didn’t need any more.
Once I’d done that, I dived for the node. If I could isolate it, I could block whatever response it was supposed to trigger.
Even as I thought it, I saw the node’s shell brighten, and then it began to pulse, and tiny wriggles of lightning raced away from it in all directions. Well, scratch that idea. I watched as the node pulsed brighter, and then more brightly still, and I suddenly realized I didn’t want to be inside my head when that thing went off... unless I could get close enough to stop it doing whatever it was about to do.
As fast as thought, a wall grew out of the ground, bricks patchworking together to hide the node’s shell, and not a door, or gate in sight. I wondered if the wall would have to come down for the node to do whatever it was building up for, and if I had any chance of taking it apart in time. A half-dozen fire worms, all with Bastien’s face, pulled themselves out of the bricks, and I decided ‘no’.
I got out of there, retreating to the relative shelter of my implant, and sealing it as tight as I could. I even took a poke at Bendigo’s intrusion point, and found myself wearing a bracelet of thorns, and a matching necklace, for my trouble.
“Tell me why I shouldn’t.” Bendigo’s voice, menacingly soft, inside my head.
“Because I’m trying to save your life,” I whispered, my words coming out on a whimper of pain.
He must have believed me, because the thorns disappeared, even though the thornless vines stayed, laced around my wrists and throat. I opened my eyes, and found myself lying on the floor, the corridor lights strobing yellow and red, in a way that made me feel sick.
“That must have been some battle,” Bendigo said, offering me his hand.
“You triggered a warning system,” I said, and he rolled his eyes.
“Now, tell me something I don’t know.”
“Maybe the dogs won’t be as friendly next time they see us?” It was a guess, but then, so was the next thing I said, “And I think we’re going to have some real bad company, real soon.”
Bendigo’s lips thinned, and, instead of waiting for me to take his hand, he reached down and dragged me to my feet by my shirt collar. He didn’t let go, either, but kept dragging, pulling me through the hole he’d made where the door had been, making me wonder just how many security protocols he’d triggered.
He didn’t wait for me to look, but half pushed, half hurled me toward the bank of computers standing in the center of the room.
“Whoa! There is no way—”
I heard the sound of the Blazer coming on-line, and felt a tightness coil through my throat. How the hell he was doing that through my implant, I didn’t know... but I wanted to. I really did—because then I could stop it, reverse it, and see how the sonuvabitch liked it when it happened to him.
“Find a way,” Bendigo ordered, “or you won’t be breathing much longer.”
As if to prove a point, the constriction in my throat eased. I wondered what the bracelets did, and pain lanced across my wrists, spiking up into my hand, and down along my arm. It was gone as quickly as it had come, and I wasn’t curious any more. I was in enough pain from where the tentacle had ‘bitten’ me in the code battle, and my shoulder ached at the same points I’d detached my simulacrum’s arm to stop the poison from reaching my head. I didn’t need any more hurt, today... or ever, now I thought about it.
I went back into my head, and took a peek into the computer-scape beyond the implant. What I saw made me both relieved and had my heart sinking to my toes. The good news was that I was no longer attached to the system I’d been in before, which meant that the security protocols weren’t going to reach me in here. I sure as shit wished Bendigo had dragged me in here sooner. That way I’d never have needed to touch his stuff in my head.
“Maybe I like it this way.”
Well, that was just downright nasty.
And Bendigo laughed, even though not a skerrick of sound touched my ears.
“Get on with it.”
So, I did.
The bad news was that there was nothing beyond my implant. Oh, there was Bendigo’s implant, but no way was I going there. No need, which put paid to the sense of self-satisfaction I’d felt from his head. Suck on that, you big banana.
“We’ll see who’s doing the sucking at the end of the day,” he replied, and I was pretty sure I wasn’t going to like what he meant.
I crossed my fingers that Mack would find me before the mission was over, that he hadn’t believed a word of Bendigo’s bullshit, and was already on his way.
“Keep praying,” was followed by a sharp slap upside the head. “Better yet. Focus on what you need to be doing, before I decide you’re not able to help me anymore.”
I focused, pulling my jack from the pocket I’d stuffed it into, earlier, and plugging it into my head. What I needed, now, was a port, cos the only way I was getting into this system was if I hard-lined it. I opened my eyes, realizing I’d closed them to go looking at the computer landscape. This time, I had a really good look at what was in the room in front of me.
A bank of computers, tall computers, or, rather, tall banks of computers, because, if I wasn’t mistaken, each of the clear-fronted drawers stacked in this interconnected framework of towers contained a computer in its own right. I looked up and down the row. The question was: how did I access them? And, if I accessed one, would I be able to get into all the rest, or was one, or all of them separated from the rest?
It sure was dark in here.
“What happened to the lights?” I asked.
“You’re assuming there were lights to start with.”
Ah, well that explained it. Silly me. I used the glow from the computer banks to find something that I might be able to plug into, a port, a keyboard, anything, and found the towers ran around the edge of the room and had a hollow in the center. There was a gap wide enough to walk through, and a computer terminal tucked in behind the tower wall.
Very cool. Now, all I had to do was get into the system, download what we came for, and—
Movement caught at the corner of my eye, and I stepped back into the gap.
“What are you doing here?”
I knew that voice.
“Bastien?”
“Bastien?” Bendigo, in my head. “Here?”
“Bastien,” the Ghoul confirmed, “in the flesh. Why don’t you come in and say hello?”
I remembered Bastien. I’d watched him reduce an Odyssey agent to a shivering mess of snot and tears. There was no way in Hades I wanted to go and say hello to him, no way I wanted to get anywhere close to him. If I hadn’t known Bendigo was on the other side of the towers, that Bendigo wasn’t going to let me leave until I had the data, that Bendigo was coming...
Bendigo was coming.
And I was blocking his path to the Ghoul.
And there was no point in me trying to back out of the space I was in, because Bendigo was almost at the entrance, and he needed me in here.
Dammit!
“Sure,” I said, and moved forward, then, “Why don’t you turn on the lights?”
“Lights? But I like it in the dark,” Ghoul said, moving to where I could see him. He looked exactly like the Ghoul-clones we’d encountered in the corridor, except sane. Beyond that, though...
The man had let his fangs show, and his eyes gleamed an oddly luminescent shade of yellow. The latter explained the lack of light in the server room. The former... I watched as Bastien ran his tongue over the tips of his fangs, before retracting them from view. He caught the look on my face, and smiled.
It was not comforting, and I flinched as he reached out and laid a hand on my arm.
“It’s been a while since I saw you,” he said, faux-longing and real possession lacing his words. “Where did you go?”
I swallowed fear and bile.
“Mack had business, elsewhere.”
His grip tightened, and I wondered if he’d augmented his muscle structure while playing with the regeneration process. And maybe his reflexes. Inside my head, Bendigo’s interest sharpened.
“I’ll deal with Bastien,” he said. “You need to get that data. Siphon it to the ship.”
The ship? How was I supposed to do that?
And then I knew. Bastien stuck a second link in my head, one that let me upload whatever I could find to the ship.
“We’ll sort through it, later,” he said. “We’re running out of time.”
And he moved into the space behind me.
I don’t know what I expected, but it wasn’t to have Bastien swing me hard into Bendigo’s chest, just before he took a dive for the floor, and vanished beneath the work station. Nor was it to have Bendigo shove me aside so hard I slammed into the front of the tower wall, as he followed the Ghoul under the work station and out of sight.
“Fantastic,” I muttered, pushing myself upright, and hoping I hadn’t broken anything in the systems I needed to access. Leaving Bendigo to his pursuit, I crossed over to the terminal, plugged in the jack, and set to work.
It didn’t take me very long to work out that I wasn’t going to be able to password my way into the system, in which case, I decided I might as well go wireless. I unplugged the jack, and stowed it back in its pouch, before pulling off my pack and rummaging inside it. I pulled out the contents and laid them on the desk in front of the monitor, using the glow of the screen for light so I could see what each one was. When I’d found the data-mines, and the tiny lamp designed to be worn on my head, I set to work.
Once I had one of the data-mines attached to the terminal, I opened one of the tower drawers, and stuck another one to the computer inside. I had five mines in all—each one of them capable of transmitting whatever data they found to the implant in my head, and each one wirelessly connected to a point behind Rohan’s firewall and defense system that meant someone would have to hardwire their way in, in order to break through the wall, in order to turn the broadcast off. Which meant they would need my head. Which I wasn’t going to give them.
“Bet you didn’t see this one coming,” I muttered, linking to the data-mine on the terminal, and then finding myself a corner inside that circle of towers, where I couldn’t be seen from the entry to Bastien’s little nest.
I was pretty sure there’d be something coming to deal with Bendigo’s breach, and I wanted to see it, before it saw me. I pulled the Blazer Bendigo had given me, checked the cartridge and the charge, and then set it to broad beam. That way I didn’t have to be so precise when I was firing, which was good, because what I was going to do next was going to make aiming difficult.
I thought about disappearing down the hole Bendigo had chased Bastien into, and that gave me another idea. Bastien wasn’t going anywhere... and neither was Bendigo. If either of those rats thought they were getting away with the kind of work that had gone on here, then they had another think coming. I sent a worm into the system, and then dragged out another hacking program and set it to work against the password. While the computers duked it out, I took a look at the link connecting me to Bendigo’s ship.
It gave me access to storage, and that was it. I sighed. You’da thought the man didn’t trust me. The idea made me smile. That didn’t bother me. I wasn’t feeling particularly trustworthy, anyhow. Hacking my way past the restraints he’d had put on the link was child’s play compared to hacking into any of Bastien’s networks, I found the ship’s comms systems, no problem, and resisted the urge to go for a romp through it.
I only needed it to do three things: duplicate, store a copy, and broadcast—and that meant broadcasting everything I downloaded. To everyone in range. Mack was gonna love this. Once I’d gotten access to what I needed, I locked everyone else out of the system, and changed the override codes. Not even Bendigo himself was going to be able to break into it in time to stop what I was sending it from being sent right back out again. His boat was going to be squawking like a parrot with its tail struck in a grinder.
I made a small tweak to the settings, and grinned.
Now, his drop-ship was going to be squawking just as loud.
Suck. On. That.
As soon as I had the comms lines secure, I put the data-mines to work. Those things were going to find every file and program they were able, and they were going to bundle them and shunt them through the gateway in my head so fast, I’d have a goodly chance of downloading Bastien’s life’s work inside the next millennium or so. The only thing I had to do, now, was...
I armed the data-mines so that they would lock down the computers, and fry the operator interface, the minute someone either tried to stop the data leak from the operator console, or if they tried to destroy or remove any of the mines, or their counterparts. I also set a subsidiary program working that would send a decryption worm to seek out and decrypt the files already sent, the minute my hacking program broke through the password protection.
After that, the only thing left to do was to make sure I got my head out of Bastien’s reach. I was pretty sure the Ghoul would have a back door into his system, one that he could access from anywhere he was located, regardless of what was going on—and, if that was the case, the man was going to notice what was happening.
While I’d have liked to think the Ghoul wouldn’t have a clue how to stop me, I didn’t want to be that naïve. Bastien the Ghoul had his entire future and fortune tied up in the data I was ripping out of his hardware, and it wasn’t something he was going to let go, lightly. I wasn’t about to bet my head that the Ghoul wouldn’t take the simplest option of stopping the leak—and I wanted my head to stay exactly where it was.
Before I left, I tweaked the programming in each mine so that it would seek out the next available computer drive, hack its way into it, and then download it in exactly the same way it had downloaded the last one—the data would flow through my head, and up to Bendigo’s ship, and then it would be duplicated, stored and broadcast on the widest bandwidth possible. And neither Bendigo, nor Bastien, were going to be very happy with me when they found out about it.
The thing was, Bastien would likely find out first, but I might keep what was happening from Bendigo long enough for him to get me out of the complex. Maybe. If he came back. If the Ghoul didn’t best him in the tunnels beneath this sector... and that was something else I wanted to do—
The computer duel ended, and I found myself connected to Bastien’s system, his security protocols, defenses, and the map of the complex, he’d hidden under this one. It was another complex that didn’t appear on either Bendigo’s maps, or the security maps I’d hacked out of the outer periphery.
Fuck it all.
I noted where the cameras were, and linked into the feed, trying very hard to ignore the sound of something moving in the corridor outside the server room—the server room with the busted door, courtesy of Bendigo. Who’d left me. Alone... In the dark.
Yeah. Thanks a lot boss.
First things first. I figured I had a bit of time before whatever was out there worked up enough courage to come through the door, and then a tiny bit more, before it came far enough around the towers to find the gap. I didn’t know how much time I had before Bastien, or Bendigo, came back up out of the floor, but that, at least, was one thing I could figure out ahead of time.
I hooked into the security cameras and flicked through the feed. This took a lot less time than it might have if I’d been scrolling through the feed by hand. I sent the computer a picture of Bendigo, and asked it to do two things: find him on the camera footage, and find him in the database. Both results came back inside a heartbeat.
The first revelation was that Bendigo was in fact Bastien, just like he’d said—and just like he’d said, he wasn’t Bastien Gaetani, also known as Bastien the Ghoul. He was Bastien Gavrille, also known as Bastien the Provider... and there wasn’t much he didn’t provide; Odyssey had been very right to target him, and Mack had been duped big time. The Ghoul’s records on the Provider were very thorough, although I doubted they were complete. I sent them out with the rest of the data.
It took the computer just a little bit longer to find him on the footage, and I blessed whatever facial recognition software the Ghoul had installed. It was fast, accurate, and the lack of ambient light didn’t affect it.
He might be a nasty piece of work, but he valued good security, which made me wonder why there wasn’t some sort of extra protection on his little bolt-hole between the towers. Surely he hadn’t relied on noticing someone coming, before it was too late to reach his escape tunnel?
I mean, surely... Why hadn’t he had something in place to stop things reaching him in here?
And, as swiftly as that, the computer landscape shifted, and showed me that he had. I activated it, and wondered why it hadn’t been up and running when I’d stepped into the gap between the computer stacks. I should have been fried, electrical web like that. It’s not like Bendigo’s entrance had been silent; Bastien would have known someone was on their way.
I pulled the footage the computer had found onto the screen before me, watched as Bendigo put Bastien down for good—and then watched as Bastien rose from the floor, the holes Bendigo had gouged in his body sealing over, the blood coagulating, and the scabs flaking away as I stared.
And then Bendigo put three rounds into Bastien’s head, and then two more into his throat, before pulling the man’s implant from inside his skull, crushing it, and setting Bastien’s body alight with the Blazer’s incendiary rounds.
“Man, you must really hate that guy,” I muttered, as I watched Bendigo turn and trot away.
I assumed he was heading back toward the escape tunnel, and did a quick scan of the security footage to make sure there was nothing else down there with him. Nothing showed, so I contented myself with keeping half a mind on the feed showing Bendigo jogging back through the complex, and the other half on trying to work out why Bastien hadn’t had his secondary security up and running before I’d gone into his domain.
It took me far too long to remember that Bastien had been the one doing the experimenting with regeneration, which meant he probably didn’t have the recuperative powers I’d seen in the Ghoul Bendigo had just put down and away.
“Fuck,” I said, turning, remembering that Bastien had designed his security protocols, so he could probably turn them off, realizing that Bastien would have turned them off only if he’d known we were coming, and remembering that Bastien had clones. Why hadn’t Bendigo told me Bastien had reached the stage of human trials? Goddamnit! Why hadn’t I realized it for myself?
After all, the evidence had been right there in front of me: the Ghoul-packs in the outer ring, Nude Bastien in the inner periphery’s defense program, Bastien Copy in this room. I wondered what kind of Bastien I was facing, now, as he stepped through the gap—the gap that should have been blocked by a field of electricity.
“Hi,” I managed, noting that his eyes had lost their yellow glow, that there were no fangs showing behind his lips.
“Hi,” he replied, and propped an elbow against the nearest computer tower. “What are you doing to my files?”
“Your files?”
“My files,” he said, and the files were highlighted in my head—not the files that were ripping past in a virtual data flood to the stars, but the files in the system I’d finally gained access to.
I took a quick peek at the sub-routine that was generating the decryption algorithm to send after into the outward flow, saw it was nearing completion, and stalled.
“Oh. Those files.”
Noticing Bendigo’s progress through the complex below, I moved a little away from the terminal, willing Bastien to follow me, to ignore the bolt-hole in the floor. This time, he obliged, his gaze tracking my movement, as he straightened and slid a half-step into the space with me.
It wasn’t exactly how I’d planned it would go. I backed up a step further, feeling fear grab a tighter hold on my innards.
“What about those files?” I managed.
“I’d like them back.”
“Back where?”
“How about back from wherever you’re sending them? Back inside my system. Just! Back!”
He closed the space between us in a surge of movement, and I realized this wasn’t Bastien the Ghoul—the extra two sets of legs, and the segmented lower body that followed an otherwise normal human form were a dead give-away. So were the hands that broke free of the lab coat he’d been wearing over his torso, and the quickly elongating fangs.
I blocked his first grab, and ducked into the gap I’d been sitting in before, but that was as far as I got. This Bastien had long arms, and a stronger grip, and pincers on that second set of arms that he wasn’t averse to using to extend his grip through cloth and flesh and into muscle. The first one lodged in my chest, just below the breast line, and the second one went through just below the rib cage.
I choked down two screams, and tried to bring the Blazer to bear. The Ghoul-Monster was laughing as he pinned one hand high against the computer tower and wrapped his other hand around my throat. There was no turning the Blazer toward him, once he’d pinned it between our bodies.
“So,” he said, his face an inch from my own, “the files.”
I couldn’t help but look him in the eye, even if the only thing I wanted to do was look past him to see what Bendigo was doing; I’d lost my boss on the security feeds, and he’d been close to reaching the entrance he and Bastien had used to disappear.
Please, hurry, I thought, knowing my relief at seeing Bendigo would be very short-lived, especially once he discovered what I’d been doing with his precious files.
“And what is that?”
I should have been terrified at hearing him, but I figured that could come later. For now, the sight of the thick, slightly curved blade he’d been carrying coming over Bastien’s shoulder and plunging into the clone’s chest was all I wanted in all the worlds over.
