part0029

Jason held up a hand as Go approached the apartment. After the bright sun, the hallway interior seemed dark and cool. The driver made a sour face and leaned closer to the door. “They’re arguing.”

Go rolled his neck. “Yeah, I hear. I didn’t expect Ash to take it well.”

“She’s resetting expectations.”

“As in unemployment ?” The driver flashed a mischievous smile.

“Nah. We need him for now.”

“For now.” Jason made a point of turning the knob loudly an extra time before pushing the door open. “Good news!”

They hovered near the door while he closed it—again with a little extra oomph —and then cut left into the kitchen. Go kept his back to the living room, where the voices had dropped to whispers. He opened the refrigerator. “Is this beer really as bad as you’re making out to be, love?”

Shoes whispered across the floor, and he caught her perfume without turning. “It’s saltier than I like.”

When Go turned to offer her another beer, he caught Ash glowering at her back. The bald man’s pale head was flush. Go held the bottle up for the smaller man to see. “What about you, mate? Care for some local flavor?”

The bald man sneered. “No.”

Jason set the ADPAX on the countertop, then pushed the box with the earpieces across to Rosario. “They’re configured with your old accounts. I set up some new defense software, and I’ve wiped our prints from the Grid for the last fifteen hours.”

Rosario took one of the earpieces out, and when Jason shook his head, handed that to Ash. She placed the other earpiece over her ear. “I didn’t lose any data.”

“I’ve been backing everything up.” The driver tapped his glossy hacking device.

She tilted her head. “I don’t remember asking you to do that.”

“I’m proactive. We don’t have anything to hide from each other, do we?”

After a long breath, her eyes shot to Go. “I guess not. We’re all in on this case, right?”

Go twisted the lid off the bottle. “There’s not a job out there right now offering what this job does. Or did. What’s the point of continuing on without a contract?”

“Let’s call it an investment. Can we count on you?”

All eyes were on Go as he took a swig. The drink was salty, but it was also tart. That was something he needed at the moment. “I’m already invested. At some point, we’re going to have to accept this was a bad call and walk away.”

She returned to the settee and plopped down. “Whoever’s behind all of this just attacked us. You need any more proof that the threat is too big for RPC to ignore?”

“That assumes this new version of the company wants to see the research through.”

“New investors wouldn’t step in unless they thought they could make their money back.”

Go found his way back to his seat on the sofa. “Could be they just want to liquidate everything and sell off the existing technology. That’s a safer bet. Lots of these investor types come in and gut companies for a quick profit.”

“That’s chickenshit corporate raider capital investment behavior.”

“Could be that’s who this investor is.”

“How would you know that, love?”

Rosario smiled. “Because I know people in the investment world. There are safer bets with more valuable assets. I asked around.”

“All right.” Go glanced at Ash and Jason. “You two fellas all in?”

They stared at each other coolly, then nodded.

Everyone was invested, even without any way of knowing that they would ever see a penny for all of their work. It was dangerously close to faith-based operations, something Go loathed. But even if RPC was liquidated, there was something for him to gain. From Noelle. “Let’s get into it then.”

Once more, the giant display flashed to life. Jason sank onto the sofa at Go’s side. “I’ve already started a hard probe of the Grid for any trace of these attackers.”

The display showed an abstracted view of the Newcastle network topology. There were hierarchies—the planetary intake from the giant web of external Grid feeds, most of which were handled through continuous message buoys running from one planet or station to another. Below that were the city Grids. Then there was the Puerta de Oeste Grid. Details filled green boxes beneath each layer: timestamps, origins, destinations, content types, and keywords.

Rosario squinted at the display. “What’d you find?”

Jason shook his head. “Nothing. At least not yet.”

Ash snorted. “You’re running the wrong queries. What packages have you tried?”

“Zone Cross, Packet Crack, Scuba3, ReverseRef—all the standard ones. And some home-brew.”

“Then you did them wrong.”

“Or these hackers are good.” Jason turned to Rosario, jaw clenched. “I think we’ve seen enough to know that these people know what they’re doing.”

Rosario pushed up from the settee. “I put out my own inquiries—checking for chatter in the Lancers networks that I frequent. I asked about any major Lancer teams known to be moving around or taking themselves off the market in the last few months. I haven’t heard anything back yet, either.”

Ash took his leather jacket off and laid it on the coffee table. He stretched his back, revealing shoulder holsters and semiautomatic pistols. “Well, whoever they are, these guys don’t move in the circles I know about.”

Which meant they weren’t criminals. Or maybe they weren’t the sort of criminals Ash associated with.

Go closed his eyes. “It’s too unlikely.”

A familiar groan from Ash wasn’t enough to break Go’s concentration, so the systems expert clomped around the room. “Well, at least we’ve got you to figure it all out.”

“I’d rather we all figure it out together.” Go tried to segment the data, to see connections that he had missed before. “We got a small company working on something revolutionary and disruptive, yeah? And they have a very narrow market. Government. Probably United Nations. Probably the Intelligence Bureau. Agreed?”

Off to his left, Rosario sighed. “Yes.”

“And we have data leaks. Maybe it’s someone inside the company trying to sabotage everything, or maybe it’s an external group trying to steal the technology for a bigger corporation or even a metacorporation. Either way, whoever’s behind this is an expert hacker. That’s not someone common, yeah? A small enough list that we should be able to run through with a little effort.” Go glanced at Ash and Jason. “Is that all right?”

Ash rolled his eyes. “You’re doing a great job repeating what we’ve already said.”

Jason shook his head patiently. “You’re right, Go. Do you have something in mind?”

Go rubbed his knuckles, feeling the slight bit of tenderness and swelling that remained. “I’m thinking it’s impossible to completely cover all of your tracks. These queries you ran, wouldn’t a hacker like this expect those? You erase those pieces of data, and you defeat those queries, yeah?”

“Yes. But once you’ve wiped out that data, there’s nothing really left. Different queries aren’t going to change that.”

“What about backtracking? For someone to take this job, there had to be an offer somewhere. The Lancers jobs are all logged and those logs are open to any Lancer, yeah?”

Jason nodded. “What if the job is listed somewhere other than Newcastle? We wouldn’t see them on the local Grid.”

“But if the person putting the offer out there was local…?”

“We could—?” The driver turned to Ash.

The bald man shrugged. “Sure, we could go through the outbound traffic logs. We’d have to hack the Grid uplink system.”

Go tried to keep his calm despite the other man’s negativity. “That’s possible, yeah?”

“I’ve done it before, but there’s not going to be anything there.”

“How about you give it a try?”

Rosario opened her mouth to say something, but Ash held up a hand. “Sure. I’ll give it a look.”

Go twisted around to get Rosario’s attention. “Can you work with him to figure out how far back all these problems at RPC go? It would be before they advertised the job. We still have all the data they gave us, yeah?”

She stared off into space for a second. “No data loss. I’ll figure out the starting point. And I can work this same angle through the Lancers network.”

“Does that include all of the data on this new version of the company?”

“Everything they made available to us. So, everything but the name of these secret investors.”

“Care to send me a copy of that, love?”

A second later, Go’s earpiece chimed: She had sent him a link to a packet. He downloaded it. “A lot of the better Lancers have been working in the frontier colonies. Might want to factor in the extra time to get a message out that far and back.”

“We’ll calculate based on the longest round-trip from Newcastle.”

“That gives us a starting point, yeah? And what we’re looking for—it has to be more than a couple of ace hackers. They’ll need some muscle, maybe a second-story type. Figure a team of five to eight, some of them with Class IV licenses.”

Rosario’s eyes jumped to Ash. “Mercenaries?”

Go caught the other man’s reaction: a hungry smile. “Bad idea not to assume the worst, love. There’s big money at stake, yeah? Whoever hired these people is serious. They’re attacking the Grid. That’s going to draw attention.”

Ash laughed. “From the constables? These clowns couldn’t find—”

“Careful now.” The corner of Go’s lips ticked up in an ambiguous smile. “Might be they already know something more than you give them credit for.”

The systems expert ran his thumbs under the straps of his shoulder holsters. “We’ll run the queries.”

Go relaxed slightly. “Well, you wanted me invested. There it is.”

Rosario waved for Ash to follow her into the kitchen, and Jason settled deep into the sofa, focus distant. Go listened to the chatter from the other room for a minute, then turned his attention to the data Rosario had sent on the new iteration of RPC.

The principals were still in place: Christopher, the Chos, Richard Paulson. Michelle Cortez had been let go, as had the last technician. It looked like they would be offered contract positions. Although Michelle seemed more than capable of landing another job, Go figured she would hang around. She came across as insecure, and she seemed to have latched on to Lilly.

If someone were trying to break the company, the obvious solution seemed to be a bigger data leak. It was possible that the layered security that was in place hadn’t been enough to prevent such a leak. But it also seemed possible that the leaks were actually meant to bring the company down. If RPC really was the most advanced of the OMI research teams, it made sense to keep them around and to snatch their product once it was complete.

Which made the ultimate customer a prime suspect in the theft. Keep the lead researchers running, let rival researchers catch up and thus apply pressure to keep the lead team moving forward, and in the end spread the solution wide. With multiple solutions, it became a buyer’s market.

That answered the question of who would benefit: the buyer.

Go turned his attention to the mystery investors. There was absolutely nothing available on them. Breaking the company up and forcing it to restructure had put Harry Cho in a precarious position. His shares were hardly worth mentioning, so to stay involved, he’d been forced into a loan.

If RPC ended up liquidated at pennies on the dollar, he would be ruined.

They would all be ruined, but Christopher would at least have something, which would almost certainly go to Noelle.

Harry Cho? Destitute.

So why would he be the leaker?

Jealous spouses did crazy things. Revenge made people stupid.

But it didn’t add up for Harry to self-destruct. If his role really was critical at this point, just walking away would have been revenge.

The mystery investors. That was the key. The investment was risky, and no one seemed to have a clue where the investors had come from. That made it very unlikely they were attached in some way to the principals.

Which came back to the most likely scenario: The mysterious customer was also the mysterious investor.

It had to be the Bureau, but that line of investigation required more resources.

Jason straightened. “I’ve been thinking about what you said about the Lancers job logs.”

Go closed the RPC data file. “Yeah? You find something?”

“I’ve been poking around. I figure there might be a way to search the local logs. What if people we’re looking for were here all along?”

“That’s possible.”

Jason leaned closer. “It’s funny—you showed up on Newcastle not too long after Rosario started looking for someone with your skills.”

“I’ve been making my way around the colonies.”

“Laying low. I know. But she said you never had any problems landing jobs. She was worried you might already have something lined up by the time she found you.”

“I don’t like going long without pay.”

The driver bowed his head, then nodded. “Those images and videos I recovered for you? The ones you asked me to do some enhancements on?”

“Are those related to…” Jason pressed the palms of his hands against his thighs. “There was a job in the Lancer network logs. It had only been up for a few days, but it disappeared shortly after you arrived. It was interesting, because the person advertising the job is the wife of Christopher Rackers.”

Go’s heart skipped a beat. “Are you asking if those images you recovered are somehow tied to this RPC job?”

“I— No. I guess not. I guess I was just…curious.”

“That’s our job, yeah? Being curious?”

“I guess so.” The driver winked. “I might have some more questions for you. Later.”

Go waited until the other man had left the room before exhaling. The questions—the insinuations—were hitting too close to home.

Noelle’s contract wasn’t worth the risk. Go needed to bail on it. Then again, he wasn’t actually being paid at the moment, not by anybody. There wasn’t any harm leaving the job out there. So long as he didn’t actually sabotage RPC himself, there might just be a windfall to failure.

Even thinking that bothered him, but he was even more bothered by all the twists and lies creating such a hopeless situation. People like Noelle and Christopher and the Chos were so caught up in the pursuit of wealth that they seemed to have forfeited their humanity. And while they struggled to stab each other in the back, little people like Pardis had to sell themselves to put food on the table.

It left Go feeling sick and dirty. He needed to talk to Pardis, to know that she was all right.