Hack and Pray
“Your boy’s coming apart at the seams,” Liz said. The chair had settled close to the floor, wheels scissoring apart from each other, legrests moving forward. She folded Nadine’s new clothes and packed them neatly into a garish suitcase, a hideous hot-pink thing with a GG logo on the front.
Safan had brought her an old-style smartphone with a flat touchscreen display open to a clothing site and told her to pick out an assortment. She fumbled with the crude interface for a while before she managed to put together a collection that would, a lifetime ago, have lasted her for a week without laundry, then Safan sent Carlos to collect them. He’d come back with the clothes and the suitcase. “Fake,” he said, grinning beneath a new pair of aviator sunglasses. The knife whirled in his fingers. “Not a great fake, but a good fake, Just the thing for someone out glamping.”
Now Nadine was dressed in the first change of clothes she’d had in days, a light, skintight black shirt with cutouts for her shoulders that ended just above her midriff and a long pair of slinky black jeans tucked into black leather cowboy boots with shiny metal tips. Liz examined her critically, pronounced herself satisfied, and set about packing the rest of her new clothes into the awful knockoff designer suitcase. “It’s not really me,” Nadine complained.
“That’s the point,” Liz explained patiently. “That plus a wig plus this and you won’t look like a fugitive who’s still technically wanted, even if there’s some debate about her guilt.” She tossed Nadine a thing that looked like a cross between a surgical mask and a bit of impressionist art gone wrong, two elastic ear loops and a triangle of filter fabric printed with blocky black squares and brightly colored lines that reminded Nadine of what happened when a video call went bad.
“What’s this?”
“Latest thing in automated facial recognition evasion. Adversarial input. Confuses the newest machine learning systems. They’re getting better at seeing past dazzle makeup. High-performance facial recognition is one of Terracone’s things. That shit scrawled all over the mask makes facial recognition think you’re someone else.”
“Who?”
“That one? Someone named Heather Monterey. Ex-girlfriend of the programmer who designed it.”
Nadine stared at her. “You’re shitting me.”
“I assure you, I am not.” Liz zipped up the suitcase. “Mask serves two functions. Confusing facial recognition’s only one of them.”
“What’s the other?”
“Helps keep you from dying. Central Texas is a high-risk neo-parainfluenza zone.”
“Fuck me.”
“Ah, were I fifty years younger,” Liz sighed. “Still, place you’re going, not too likely you’ll meet anyone, least not anyone who isn’t part of Terracone, and they’re all vaccinated.” She lifted the suitcase onto its wheels. Some hidden clockwork mechanism in her chair whirred as the wheels pulled back together. It rose, resettling into its normal configuration. “Almost ready to head out.” She glided through the door. Nadine followed her. The suitcase raised a small shaft tipped with a tiny glass camera, then trundled along behind Nadine.
They joined the others in the office. “—leave 0800 tomorrow,” Safan was saying. “Ah, Elizabeth, Melody. We load out tonight. Jake, you’re in the engine with Parker. Melody, you and Carlos are in the trailer, the rest of you in the van with me and Elizabeth. Eight and a half hours to Amos City. Andy, Benjamin, Jake, Parker, you gear up when we arrive. Ninety minutes for Melody to do her part, then we trigger the alarm, you ride in to save the day, grab the data, get out, done.” He patted a compact white box beside the projector. “Just one detail.”
“What’s that?” Carlos said.
“Gotta disable your implants.”
“Now that’s some bullshit,” Benjamin said.
“Our adversaries have deployed a weapon that can hijack implants,” Safan said, “make you see and hear things that aren’t there. External access will be disabled until we secure the data.”
“Let’s get this done,” Liz said. “Who first?”
Safan rose. “Do it.”
One by one, the others sat in front of the white box. Liz tapped a keyboard on top, a rod with a coiled loop on the end extended, a light blinked. “I’ll re-enable network access and over-the-air updates after we’re done.” Finally, she turned to Nadine. “You’ve already disabled your implant.”
Nadine closed her eyes. Takeru’s voice in her head, the shriek of the drill, the awful grinding… She swallowed and nodded.
“Okay, that’s that, then,” Liz said.
“What about you?” Nadine said. “Are you going with us?”
“Yes. I’ll be with Safan. I could do what I need to do from here, if everything works perfectly, but I don’t want to take a chance on latency or interrupted comms.”
“Don’t you need to disable your implant?”
“Oh, hon.” Liz touched the black plastic lump on the side of her head. “I got my first hardware before Neuralink was even a glimmer in that Martian guy’s eye. Electrodes inserted manually, very hack-and-pray. I’ve added some upgrades over the years, some my own design, but nothing Terracone’s best and brightest can get anywhere near. All bespoke. And I have never allowed remote firmware upgrades.”
“Oh.”
Later that night, as they made ready for their last night in the sleeping bags atop tattered slabs of foam in the disused office, Jake turned to Nadine. A muscle jumped in his face. “Something you should know,” he said. “I did some digging.”
“Yeah?”
“Your boy Carlos, he was dishonorably discharged from the Marines. Some kinda operation in Latvia, his unit killed some civilians. Shot them in the head, he helped cover it up.”
“Fuck,” Nadine said softly.
“Yeah. Don’t turn your back on him.”
Nadine slept little that night. She stared into the darkness, heart thumping, mouth dry. Anna? she sent into the claustrophobic void. Are you there? Anna, I am so afraid. If you were here, would you think less of me for that? I want you to be proud of me.
The darkness made no reply.
Morning came quickly. After a tepid shower and a bland breakfast from a foil pouch, Nadine found Carlos climbing into the cab of an enormous white Ford electric truck towing a long, retro-looking rounded silver trailer with dark-tinted windows. He aimed his smile in her direction. “Morning, ma’am!” he called. “We’re ready to move out.”
“That’s our ride?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Liz wheeled up beside her. “It’s mine. Try not to get it banged up.”
“Why aren’t you taking it?”
“Because the two of you are a lot more believable setting off on a camping adventure through central Texas.”
“Liz?”
“Yes?”
“Thank you. For all of this.”
Liz patted her arm. “No need to thank me, hon. Your money’s thanks enough.”
“Still, thank you.”
The Ford had a large cab with plush, comfortable seats. It even had a proper back seat, not one of the little shelves most pickups had if they had anything at all. A set of oversized fuzzy dice in hot pink dangled from the rearview display, each dot a small black Playboy bunny.
Nadine’s new suitcase followed her to the truck. Carlos slung it in the back seat next to a new but far less tacky suitcase in drab, reasonable shades of brown and gray. He pulled out of the parking lot under manual control, then poked at the touchscreen display, surprisingly small in a cheap plastic frame covered with fake chrome flash. “I feel half-blind without my implant,” he grumbled. “Doing everything the old-fashioned way.” The truck plotted a route and dinged to announce the self-driving had kicked in. “Gonna feel weird, not talking to you through the implant.”
“So how do we talk?” Nadine said.
Carlos pulled a flat package from his pocket that reminded Nadine of the peel-apart pouches hospitals used to sterilize scalpels. “Old school.”
“What is it?” Nadine said.
“Transduction receiver, subvocal mike.” He tore open the package. Two small objects slid out onto his palm, one a flat crescent a bit smaller than Nadine’s little finger, the other round. “Peel off the backing, that starts the battery. Stick this one behind your ear, this one on your throat. Five hundred meter range direct, extendable with active amplifiers or the mesh transceivers you’ll be carrying.”
“How long does the battery last?”
“Six hours.”
“Is that enough?”
Carlos laughed. “Ma’am, if we’re still there six hours from go, we ain’t comin’ back.”
“Ask you a question?”
“Sure thing.”
“Why’d you leave the Marines?”
His face hardened. “That’s a long story, and one you don’t want to hear. Short version, I was helped out the door to protect the careers of a coupla COs had no business being in the Corps in the first place.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
“That make you mad?”
“I got over it.” He glanced across the cab at her. “Suggest you lie back and get some sleep if you can. You look like you could use it.”
They stopped to recharge three times along the drive. On the third stop, Carlos handed Nadine a burger and a cup of coffee. “Gettin’ close,” he said.
Nadine stretched and rubbed the crick from her neck. “Thanks.” She dug the burger from the bag, chewed and swallowed mechanically.
“Nervous?”
Nadine turned the question over in her mind, trying the word on the way she might try on a dress she found at a thrift shop even though she knew it was three sizes too large. “No,” she said finally.
Carlos looked at her for a long moment. “Heard stories about you.”
“What kind of stories?”
“You’re a stone cold killer. Wouldn’t guess it just looking at you, Nadine Jiang. Is the thing about the dirty bombs true?”
“No.” Nadine took a bite from her sandwich. “Would it matter if it were?”
“I’m not a Marine any more, but I still take my oath seriously. So when I’m offered a job helping a wanted terrorist do a snatch and grab at a defense contractor, you gotta understand it raises certain questions for me.”
“You know what we’re after?”
“Data.”
“Yeah. More than that, data that proves I’m not who the cops say I am.”
The truck pinged as the charging umbilical detached itself. “The thing with the ogre, that for real?”
“Yeah.”
“He didn’t look so good.”
“He doesn’t have to worry about it any more.”
“Dead?”
“Yeah.”
“You do that?”
“Me and Jake, yeah.”
“How you feel about that?”
“He tried to kill me first.”
Carlos nodded. “Impressive, going up against an ogre. Especially an ogre in body armor. How’d you do it?”
Nadine finished her burger, stuffed the wadded wrapper in the bag. “Does it matter?”
“Just trying to get a handle on you. Make sure you won’t crack under stress is all.”
“I can handle myself.”
The appraising look came back. “Yeah,” he said after a while. “Yeah, I imagine you can.”
At last, the truck’s navigation dinged. “You have reached your destination,” it announced in a sultry voice with a faint Midwestern drawl. Carlos took over manual control and steered the van into a small and, as near as Nadine could tell, deserted campground. Trees closed around them and, north of them, the black fingers of large towers, neatly arranged in a grid, dark against the gathering gloom.
“Go time.” Carlos fished a paper strip from his pocket, tore it open, peeled the backing off the comm link, pressed the mike and receiver to his skin. “Gear up.”
“Where are the others?”
“About three klicks north northeast, waiting for the call. Your entry point is about a kilometer north of here.”
Nadine peeled the waxy white paper from the two bits of gear Carlos had given her to expose the adhesive. She pressed the larger one against the bone at the back of her ear and the other on her throat. “Can you hear me?”
“Loud and clear,” Carlos said, voice buzzing oddly in her head. “Here.” He passed her a long tube of black plastic embossed with a stylized ADS logo. “Mesh transceivers. Same deal. Peel and stick about every hundred meters or so.”
“Where will you be?”
“In the trailer. Got a full suite of comms and sensor gear back there. Elizabeth has the best toys. Let’s get you dressed.”
Nadine climbed from the truck, earth damp and loamy beneath her feet. Around her, scent of pine needles and decaying leaves. Carlos opened the door on the sleek aluminum trailer. A platform extended itself from the opening with a whirr and lowered to the ground. Nadine stepped up into a tidy, luxurious space, efficiently laid out: small refrigerator, tiny stove with cabinets above, long table crowded with monitors. A hallway led to a spacious bedroom in the back. “Man could get used to private service,” Carlos said. “You’ll want to wear something warm.”
“It’s muggy out.”
He flipped on the radiant grin, turned it off again. “Took the liberty of getting you a sweater, ma’am. Chiller in your IR suit will make you glad to have it.” He tossed her a fuzzy black sweater with a thin red stripe, then tore open a dull green sealed pouch with “ir cntrmsr 1pc dispos dod lic#15172324-2” printed across it. Inside was a long silver poncho-looking thing and a small silver gas canister with a complicated-looking valve on the narrow end.
Nadine pulled the sweater over her head. It smelled of thrift stores, an indeterminate musty odor mixed with damp cardboard. Carlos showed her how to fit the poncho. “The hood goes up, and this panel goes over your face,” he explained. “Chiller gas goes in this pocket here. When you get down in the tunnels, connect this tube, twist this bit, and break it off. You’ll hear a hiss. Don’t do it before you get to the tunnels. The gas’ll keep the material from warming up with your body heat, automatically regulates so you’ll be around background temperature to IR cameras. You can wear the gloves if you want, but most likely the sensors in the tunnel won’t register your hands. They’re looking for anything that’s warm and bigger’n a rat.” He pressed a large, heavy key with a round stem into her hand. “This unlatches the cover down to the tunnel. Liz show you how to connect the tap?”
“Yes.”
“Here.” He handed it to her, a box of blue plastic with leads for a passive fiber optic tap dangling from the front, flat switch on the back.
Jake’s voice grated in her ear, oddly distorted by its trip through bone. “Test, test, test. Melody, you hear me?”
“Yeah,” she said.
“Good. Comms link is up. You know what to do?”
“Yeah. Heading out now.” Nadine slapped the magazine into Safan’s small, heavy pistol, worked the slide like he’d shown her, tucked it in her waistband at the small of her back the way she’d seen Jake do. She folded the poncho over her arm, gas cylinder surprisingly dense in its pocket, and stepped out into the muggy heat of evening.
A buzzing sound followed her out, low, not loud, like flies nudging around the remnants of a picnic on a lazy summer day. She looked back and saw them, six of them, glossy black bodies easy to miss if you weren’t paying attention. Her guardian angels, each carrying a core of agony and death.
Nadine set off across the small, sad campground toward Amos City, named after the young nephew of a state senator who also owned several construction firms and an architectural office, and had vast sums of money that couldn’t leave the Federation of Free States. The walk wasn’t hard or unpleasant, and except for the steady insectile buzz of the drones, she could almost pretend she was alone, and not about to do something potentially terminal in its recklessness.
The receiver behind her ear buzzed. “You hear me?” Carlos’s disembodied voice said.
“Yeah.”
“Okay. With the antenna and repeater I have in the trailer, you’ll be able to talk to me and Jake and the rest until you get to the tunnels. Once you get down there, things get a little tricky. You’ll need to remember to drop mesh nodes or we’ll lose touch with you, and I won’t be able to guide the drones after you. How you doing so far?”
“Why does everyone keep asking me that? I’m fine.”
“Good. Path you’re on meets up with a service road fifty meters to your left.”
“Got it.” Nadine changed direction. The dirt beneath her feet gave way to gravel.
“Curves around a hundred and fifty meters ahead of you, ends at a bunch of Dumpsters. There’s a gate and a road. See it?”
“Yeah.”
“Follow the road for about half a kilometer, then turn left.”
“Right.” Nadine adjusted the silver suit over her arm. Beads of sweat rolled down her skin beneath the sweater. “Hey Jake, you there?”
A click, felt more than heard, then Jake’s voice buzzing through her skull. “Yeah.”
“You ready to roll?”
“Soon as we get the alarm.”
“I guess that means it’s all on me, then.”
“Yeah, I guess it does.”
She found the gate, two long triangles of tubular metal, yellow paint just starting to peel, mounted in bits of pipe on each side of the gravel road. A chain with a combination padlock held them together in the middle of the gravel road. On the other side, a flat slab of black asphalt, almost entirely pristine, dense grass and a handful of young trees on each side. In the distance, the still towers of Amos City beckoned.
“Hell of a thing,” Nadine muttered, half to Jake and half to herself, as she headed toward the towers of a city without people, winged death in her wake. “I almost didn’t go to that dance party.”
“Say again?” Carlos said.
“Nothing.”
“Eyes open. I don’t see any drones around except the ones I’m driving, but stay frosty.”
At Carlos’s promised half-kilometer, the flat asphalt road ended at a T-junction, a flat ribbon of wide concrete highway off to the left and right. Nadine turned left, where the silent towers waited.
Amos City reminded her of a setmaker’s prop, built at one to one scale, something designed to look like a city without being a city. The road, sidewalks, and even the mounts for the street lights were all cast from a single piece of concrete, regular lines slicing across the roadway where the segments joined together. Around it, nothing but bare dirt—no trees, no flowers, no sign of life. It looked to her as if someone had scraped the ground flat and then dropped the road and its sidewalk out of the sky—which was, she realized, very nearly what had happened.
After ten minutes of walking, she came to the first of the towers. They were all identical, crisp rectangles jutting up toward the heavens, story after story bristling with identical balconies, all painted the same off-white with the same blue metal rails. Windows gleamed in the late afternoon sun. Between the towers, no lawns or gardens, just parking garages and bare brown earth. No cars moved, no people leaned over the rails or walked along the sidewalks with her. Soon the towers closed around her, silent as tombstones. “This place gives me the creeps,” Nadine said.
“Sometimes money finds its own expression,” Jake said. “Like water flowing through a canyon, only the walls are laws and regulations. It follows the path of least resistance and leaves the landscape altered behind it.”
“Closest I’ve heard you get to philosophical,” Nadine said.
“Okay, intersection ahead of you,” Carlos cut in. “You want the southeast corner.”
Nadine crossed the road, following the painted lines of a crosswalk. Turn signals sat dark on poles at each corner. “I’m here.”
“Should be a steel door at your feet.”
Nadine looked down. A square hatch of silver metal, stamped with a no-skid pattern. “Yeah.”
“Use the key. Suit up. Shouldn’t be a perimeter alarm on the access door.”
“Shouldn’t be?”
“Always gotta expect the unexpected.”
“What if there is?”
“Then they’ll probably send someone to investigate.”
“And if they do?”
Grating laughter buzzed in her skull. “That’s why I’m here.”
Nadine shrugged into the silver poncho thing. Concealed ties in the waist cinched it tight. A separate part, connected in the back, covered her legs in two baggy silver tubes, with more ties at her ankles. She pressed the gas cylinder onto a short tube that projected from the pocket. As soon as she twisted the knob, it snapped off in her hand. A hiss, and the inside of the poncho grew cold.
She knelt to fit the lock-like thing into the access hatch. It resisted her efforts to turn it. Swearing, she leaned her weight against it. The key turned with a metallic scrape. She heaved the hatch open. A simple metal ladder, painted light gray, descended into darkness. “I’ve spent way too much of my life lately climbing down dark tunnels,” Nadine grumbled.
“Leave the hatch open,” Carlos’s voice said. “Stick one of the mesh nodes to the inside lip right at the surface, and another one to the wall at the foot of the ladder.”
“Fine.” Nadine popped open the plastic tube. A band of plastic bubble wrap lay coiled inside. As she pulled the end, a bubble tore off, depositing a gleaming black thing in her hand. She peeled the paper off the back, exposing a tacky adhesive. “Won’t they find these?”
“They slag themselves when the battery runs out,” Carlos said. “Little solvent capsule inside. Don’t leave much behind.”
“Nice. You army people think of everything, don’t you?”
“Marines, ma’am, and yes, we try.”
Nadine stuck the thing right at the edge of the tunnel, level with the street. “Here goes nothing.” She swung a leg over the edge and climbed down into darkness.
The tunnel was small enough she couldn’t stand without bending over. Concrete tubes about as wide as her hand ran down both side walls. A much larger hump, awkwardly shaped, ran straight down the center of the floor. With a low buzz, the six tiny drones dove down the tunnel after her. “You be able to steer those things?” Nadine said.
“Yes, ma’am. Active IR, passive IR, and ultrasound.”
“All that?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
The square of late afternoon light receded quickly. Nadine shuffled along the tunnel in an awkward crouch, one hand on the wall, feet forced by the hump in the floor into a narrow channel. “Okay, I’m going to send the swarm about ten meters ahead of you,” Carlos said. “I’ll guide you through the turns.”
Darkness closed around her, as absolute as the bottom of a cage. Blind, Nadine felt her way along, concrete cool and slightly rough beneath her hand. “You’re doing fine,” Carlos said. “Can you go a little faster?”
“Only if you want me to twist an ankle.”
“Don’t even joke about that,” Jake said.
“Signal’s getting a little weak,” Carlos said.
Eyes closed, Nadine fished around until she found the end of the roll, pulled off another bubble.She nearly dropped the thing before she was able to peel the backing off. She pressed it firmly against the tunnel wall, ran her fingers over it to make sure it stuck. “Good,” Carlos said. “It’s working.”
Step by step, inch by inch, Nadine fumbled her way along through black so deep she didn’t even have a name for it, so deep she could feel the weight of it pressing against her, until it stole her memory of what light used to be. She followed Carlos’s voice, counted the notches in the broomstick with her left hand, mind repeating the directions over and over, making sure they all agreed. The chiller gas hissed through the tubes in her poncho, as loud as the end of the world. She heard the steady low housefly buzz of the drones, smelled the dank air of the lightless tunnel. Carlos’s voice guided her along, through turn after turn, until it seemed that she’d always been here, that the world outside this black lifeless maze had never been anything more than some distant dream.
“You’re getting close,” Carlos said an eternity later. “Tunnel on your right, then sixty meters on. I’m pulling back the drones.”
Nadine crawled over the hump down the tunnel’s center and reached out for the wall. She stumbled, shoulder catching painfully on the edge of the opening to the next tunnel. “Goddamn it,” she swore. The drones buzzed by her face.
“You okay?” Carlos’s voice managed to carry concern, fizzing through her head.
“Yeah. How far?”
“Not far at all. You’re almost to the foot of the building. According to the blueprints, there’s a junction box at—”
“Ow!” Nadine ran directly into a concrete wall directly in her path.
“What happened?” Jake’s voice, harsh and grating.
“Hang on. There’s something…” Nadine felt her way across the tunnel. Her questing fingers found a ladder, ascending the wall that entirely sealed the tunnel. “Did I make a wrong turn?”
“No,” Carlos said. “You’re right where you’re supposed to be.”
“No, I’m not. There’s a wall.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean there’s a wall! Fuck!” Nadine beat her palms against the concrete. “There’s a fucking wall right through the fucking tunnel!”
“Hang on. I’m moving the drones up.”
Nadine knelt, pounding her fists against the wall as if trying to bash her way through. “Fuck! Fuck!”
“She’s right,” Carlos said. “Ultrasonics shows blank wall. No junction box, no fiber optics, just wall.”
“Then you aren’t in the right place,” Jake said.
“We’re in the right place,” Carlos said. “There’s no alarm junction here. Service tunnel is walled off. There’s supposed to be another fifteen meters of tunnel, but nothing. It’s not there.”
“Okay, think,” Nadine said. “We can fix this.” She shivered in the parka, sweat cold on her skin. “Where am I?”
“You’re right by the edge of the building. Data Storage Systems and Services.”
“But where?”
“East side of the building, fifteen meters out.”
Nadine squeezed her eyes shut in the black, calling up the blueprint in her memory. “What’s at the top of this ladder?”
“I don’t know,” Carlos said. “Um…according to the site plan, just ground.”
“What happens if I climb up there?”
“Twenty kinds of shit is what happens,” Jake said. “They have drones, perimeter alarms, armed security, the whole lot. You won’t get five meters.”
“Any doors? Any way in?”
“Not on that side of the building, ma’am,” Carlos said. “Wouldn’t matter anyway. They’ll all be locked and alarmed. Cameras, too.”
“Time for Plan B,” Jake said.
“What’s Plan B?”
“Don’t know yet. Still thinkin’ it through. Right now I’m leaning toward smashing this truck through the front door and shooting our way in.”
“You’re not serious.”
“I’m a little serious. We are well and truly fucked right now.”
Nadine traced the blueprints over and over in her mind. “Melody,” Jake said, “pull back. You can’t do any good down there.”
“Let me think.”
“I’m serious. Pull back. If there’s no alarm panel, there’s nothing for you to do. Pull back.”
“I said let me think!” Nadine slumped to the ground, her back to the unexpected wall. “I remember some round things in the back. What are they?”
“Auxiliary power,” Carlos said. “They’ve got primary power from the grid, backup power in big-ass batteries, generators for emergency power. What are you thinking?”
“Liz, are you there?” Nadine said.
“I’m here, hon.”
“You still have a way into Terracone’s network, right? If the alarm goes off, you can stop them from knowing?”
“If the alarm goes off, local police will know. Without the patch, I can’t prevent that.”
“But you can stop Terracone from knowing?”
“What good will that do if local authorities know?” Liz said.
“Humor me.”
“Yes, I can stop Terracone from getting the alert.”
“Get ready to do that.”
“What are you going to do?”
“Save our asses.” Under her breath, she added, “Carlos, I sure hope you’re watching out for me.” She fumbled the heavy key from the pocket beneath the poncho, then felt around along the low ceiling, fingertips seeking the latch. After five tries, she unlocked the access hatch. Evening light streamed around her, blinding her, as she pushed it open. She blinked, dazzled. The swarm buzzed past her into the open air, tiny mechanical wasps bearing their lethal payload.