Irreconcilable Differences, page 24
“Ask Blondie,” she says. “She's the one with the concrete intel.”
Look into the back seat. “Kari?”
Kari sighs, and looks at me crossly. “The covert bunker is in Topeka. Underneath old Forbes Field. It was built in a fallout shelter from the Cold War. My understanding was that it was lab space and a data center, mostly. The actual ops department ran on a sleeper cell arrangement.”
“So you've never been there, I take it,” I ask her.
She shakes her head. “No. They didn't give us plant tours, no. Just a special, hardware coded transceiver. They'd call up, tell us to set the transceiver's code settings and plug in. Sometimes they'd log in, and sometimes they wouldn't.”
“So how do you know anything about their base at all, Kari?” I ask. I try to be gentle. I do. I know Micki likes Kari. Hell, Kari's taken all this remarkably well. Of course, she was disarmed by the time she knew.
Kari rolls her eyes. “Don't you know anything about us, Carrier Agent? Our drivers' memories bleed into ours, the same way yours and Micki's bleed into each other.”
Look away from her. I've driven tech-ninjas before. She glances at me.
“What?” she demands.
“Nothing. Never mind,” I tell her.
Kari smiles. Not a nice smile, either. Too much tooth, not enough soul. “Existential problems, little copy?”
Shake my head. “Fuck off, Kari.” Turn away from her. Some people. No gratitude. But, she is right. It's not a pleasant thought to imagine little bits of Real Rachel, as legitimately her as … well … me, sinking into the minds of the tech-ninjas I've used. I'm starting to be glad for the short lives most tech-ninjas enjoy. And understand the reasons why.
“So we're going out here to hit a bunker under a former airport on memory bleed,” I say, mostly to Rachel.
Rachel points her head to Kari and Ed. “They told us where to look. But y'know, I didn't waste my whole evening. McGee and I did dig up building plans. There are some interesting discrepancies. Lot of work's getting done there on the sneaky in the last couple years. No obvious increase in square meters showing up on the satellite photos, though, so probably some underground levels being added. This was your idea, you know.”
“I remember, I remember,” I tell her. “Who owns this place?”
“The whole airport grounds were bought from the city toward the end of the energy crisis. No fuel, no planes, remember?” she says.
“So much for fighting for cheap oil, I guess,” I mutter.
Rachel laughs a bit. “Oh, cheap oil was never the reason. Anyway, the holding company is a pretty obvious front. Its ownership goes into the deep black, and even McGee and I couldn't track it all the way down without flashing some Interpol ID and throwing our weight around. Which isn't exactly procedure for a covert op.”
“Duh.” Blink again. Micki? Or me? Why can't I tell?
Rachel eyes me. “Getting snarky in your old age, aren't you?”
Shrug at her. “You're a bad influence, probably.”
“Anyway. Real simple. We walk in, flash badges, for what that's worth, force entry if we need to, and search the place. If we need a warrant, we get it retroactively, but we shouldn't. Probable cause. Operating on behalf of a company ordered destroyed.”
Micki butts in. “Retroactive warrant? What's the point of requiring a warrant, if you can get one whenever you need it after the fact?”
Rachel shrugs. “Simple. If we're wrong, we go to jail for trespassing, and illegal search.”
Micki sighs and flops back in the seat. “Y'know, just once I'd like to do a job with you guys that didn't have the risk of going to jail. I mean, for Pete's sake, this is the same as being in the gang.”
Rachel laughs softly. “All about the perspective, Micki.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning jail sounds pretty damn good when you've been shot at for a while. It sounds safe. Dull, but safe.”
“Or when you've been in camp, too,” Micki says it softly. Gently.
Rachel keeps her eyes on the road. “Sure. That too.” She shrugs a little. Glances over at Micki. And smiles, of all things. “Bet you were expecting something else from me.”
Micki nods a little.
Rachel looks back at the road. “Can't live in the past. I always said that. I finally believe it. Moved on.”
“Is that why you divorced Director Neil?”
Rachel nods a little. Then snorts. “Mini-me talks too much.”
Micki rolls her eyes. “You have no idea.”
I give Micki a big, fat raspberry in the gestalt.
Chapter 34
Log in on Micki's deck. Mission up. Stretch a little. It's nice to be in a gestalt without hiding for a change. “It's Rae. I'm in,” I say, out of habit. Nobody else is around yet to hear me, but I'm not waiting long. I give the deck Environment, Identity and Icon information. Just think it. Finally, I look like me in Micki's deck. Icon I used at infowar school. High and tight muscle girl in body armor. I look like I stepped out of a video game. It will do.
Micki's right behind me. “Hotwire. In.” She's tense. I can feel it in the gestalt. She's her usual black leather ninja self. She looks me over. “Okay.”
“Didn't want to run into myself in here,” I explain, briefly.
Gestalt request from KMcGee@lunchrat.com. Micki answers it, and McGee's here with us. Iconwise, he's a duplicate of me, except that his hair isn't blond, and he's a guy. And the Interpol World-and-Sword emblem is plastered over his chest plate. He's still a moment. Probably telling his EII ice how to map us. He feels a little uncomfortable, like when you're taking off your clothes with one person, when you really wanted their friend. Alcohol helps that, if memory serves. “I'm in,” he announces.
“Hey, McGee,” I say.
McGee nods. “Rae. Micki.”
“Hotwire while we're online, McGee. Not Micki. Not Kid. Hotwire. Okay?”
McGee rolls his eyes. We can all feel it in the gestalt. “Yeah, yeah. Hacker names. I remember.” He grins a little. “Mine was Wizard, back in the day.”
Micki blinks at that. Shock radiates from her over the gestalt.
McGee chuckles. “What, you think good IT people grow on trees, HottyWire?”
Micki just shakes her head. “I guess not. I thought former military or something.”
McGee shakes his head. “Nope. I came in from the cold, just like you. And lookit me, I came out just fine.” He goes serious. “Okay, enough screwing around. Let's get the tech-ninjas and Rachel online, and get to work.”
He flicks out three context connections. Kari. Ed. Their tech-ninja firmware responds almost identically, and I've seen it before. No surprises.
Real Rachel's. I'm almost afraid to touch. Afraid … I don't know. That it will suck me in, that I won't be able to tell where she begins and I end. That I might like it too much. Or that I'll see how far I've fallen. But I haven't got time to be afraid. So I dive into her context, and wrap it around myself. Look out through her eyes. Again. “Hey, you,” I say.
“Yeah, me,” she answers. “You want something?” It's not a gestalt connection. She can't feel what I feel, and I'm protected from her the same way.
“Just looking around the old homestead. Used to live here, you know?” Yeah, but it's like going to the house you grew up in after your parents are gone. Nothing's quite the same.
“No shit. Now shut up and let me work here,” she snaps.
Pull back from her context. “They're logged in,” I say, just in case anyone missed it. Pull up the mission intel Rachel and Kari provided. Crunch out the map. Map out a way in. Flash it to the three of them.
Micki logs into the City of Topeka's net. Points The Lady's firewall breaker at their firewall, and slips in when when she has the crypto keys. Flips through the police surveillance networks, until she gets to Forbes Field. She copies a few minutes of their search pattern images, then interrupts their feed with her own, and feeds the same data back to the police department's monitoring station. Nobody here but us tumbleweeds. “Surveillance is handled,” she says.
“Good work, kid. Let's go,” Rachel says. They slip out of the car, and jog, leapfrogging from cover to cover, to the base of the tower.
“Can't reach the internal surveillance net, though. It's hard-walled off. No outside net connections I can find,” Micki adds. “Same for the door locks. Might be wireless inside, but the bunker's a fucking Faraday cage, so I can't touch it. And stop calling me kid.”
“Understood,” Rachel says. “We'll have to do this the old-fashioned way.” Switch to her context. She walks up to the door. Tries it. It's locked. She gets into her bag and pulls out about an arm's length of 50-gram-per-meter det-tape and a micro-initiator. She glues the tape to the seam between the door and the wall. Programs the initiator through the neurowires in her palm. Four and a half seconds. Same as a hand grenade. Flickers a final message to the initiator, and runs.
The det-tape goes off with a high frequency crack, and the shaped charge shears through the edge of the door. Simple. Straightforward. Old school. Very me.
“That was subtle,” Kari says, on the com-net.
“Move up. We're going in,” Rachel says, and ducks through the door, rifle ready. Ed follows her with his K50. Fans out to one side. Kari next. She fans out to the other side, and we lose connection from them.
“Fuck,” Micki says.
“Yeah, I see it,” McGee says. “We're going to have to go in with them. Kind of figured.”
“Gonna lose my link to the surveillance network if I do,” Micki says.
“On it,” Mcgee says, and connects two Penguini wireless bridges together. We get out of the car and follow the same path toward the door that the others took. McGee pauses to epoxy one Penguini to the outside of the door frame, feed the fiber through the door, and epoxy the other one to the inside. “Problem solved.”
“Can't believe you guys use those things too,” Micki mutters.
“Hey, they work, and they're cheap. Dunno what the boss has been telling you about our budgets, but she's probably lying,” McGee comes back. Ed, Kari, and Rachel's contexts pop back into our view about then.
“Cut the chatter, you guys. And map the networks in here. I want internal surveillance and door lock control, and I want it last week some time.”
“On it,” McGee says. “I'll get the locks.”
“I'll get surveillance,” Micki says. McGee and Micki duck out two different directions to hunt down a network jack. Micki finds one first. Plugs in. Scans what's on it with her ice. Rachel, Kari, and Ed cover us. “Okay. I'm going to do a passive connect,” Micki says over the gestalt. “Rae? Hook me up.”
Open the floodgates, and let Micki go deep. Feel her connect to the network. Feel the hair on the back of her neck. My neck. The neck. Feel it rise. Something tickling at me, at the edges of what I can see, like knowing there's a sniper watching, without knowing where. “Are you getting that, Mick?” I whisper to her in the gestalt.
“Just some low level noise, looks like from here. Old as this building's wire is, I'm not surprised.” But she's uneasy. I can feel it. “I think that's what it is, anyway. Watch yourself, though. Just in case.”
“Through to the door lock controls,” McGee announces. “Knock, and it shall be opened for you.”Does everyone who works with me wind up talking like that?
“Great,” Rachel says. “Hotwire?”
“Working on surveillance, still.” She gets to work. Finds the surveillance network. “Well, nice of them to label it. Huh. Doesn't look secured.” She dives into the net and looks over the various camera outputs. “Pretty standard … old gear … okay, cams in this room are blocked. Go when you're ready, Boss.”
Rachel looks at her heads-up display. “Map says there's a level right below us. Systems room, it's labeled.”
Kari nods. “Yeah. I remember that. Everything important is downstairs.” She shrugs. “Let's go.”
“Hotwire. McGee. Check the surveillance system. This level, and the level under us. Anyone home?”
Micki rifles through the security cams. Frowns. “Fuck. I don't know. This room and the one below us are clean, but all the doors off this room, all I get is packetized garbage. Probably a switch barfing somewhere.”
Rachel nods. “Doesn't sound like those rooms are being used, then, does it?”
Micki shakes her head. “Wouldn't think.”
Shiver.
“What?” Micki says.
“Feels like ants crawling over me. This line noise is starting to bug me, I guess.”
“Get used to it, city girl. Nets like this aren't always clean and crisp,” Micki says.
Like rushing air. White noise, where you can, if you think about it, hear all kinds of things. Voices. Names. Whispers in nightmares, voices I can almost hear, breath I can almost feel.
McGee interrupts. Thankfully. “Got the locks on the stairway fire doors. Let's motor.”
“Lock the doors behind us,” I say. “And lock every door on this level except the ones we're going through.”
Rachel glances toward Micki. “Something eating you, Rae?”
Look at her slowly, in the corner of Micki's field of vision. “Healthy dose of paranoia, maybe,” I reply.
Rachel nods. “Fair 'nough,” she says. “Just don't go overboard with it.” She turns to McGee. “Do it like Mini-Me says. Kari, Ed, with me.” Rachel takes point. Kari takes left flank, and Ed takes right. Cover to cover, doorway to doorway. Rachel reaches the stair door and tries the handle. As promised, it's unlocked. Watch her context as she shoulders the door open, and sweeps the stairwell with the muzzle of her rifle. Nothing.
“McGee, Hotwire, move up,” she says, through the comnet.
Micki rummages in the bag Rachel gave her and plugs another penguini into the jack in the wall. McGee does the same on his. We move up behind Kari and Ed.
“Okay,” Rachel says. “Ed. With me. Kari, you stay here with the plugheads, and cover our backs.”
Kari nods.
Ed and Rachel disappear down the stairway. McGee holds the door open, so we don't lose wireless to them.
“Hotwire. Check surveillance again. Anything on level two?” Rachel asks.
“Negative,” Micki replies. “Looks clear.”
“The word is 'no', kid. This ain't the movies,” Rachel says.
“Whatever,” Micki says. “Nothing moving, no heat sources. Which is kinda weird for a data center. Air-conditioned closets, maybe? I don't know.”
Kari looks back at Micki a moment and disappears through the door.
“Gonna lose net here in a sec,” Micki says, and we follow Kari down the stairs, and once again, we're abruptly net-blind.
“No worries,” Ed says. “Wall jacks.”
When we emerge from the stairwell, we can see that he's right.
“I could get to like these shades, y'know,” Micki says.
“Talk to Haskell. Maybe he'll let you keep 'em,” Rachel says. “When he gets out of the clinic from all those broken bones. Dunno, though. He might be a bit sore.”
“He was shooting at me,” Micki says. “You get what you get.”
Chapter 35
Micki's right about the shades. They're plugged into one of her jacks. High speed vision. Clean, despite the darkness. Fast. Sharp. “Keep your eyes open just the same, Mick. They lie to you less,” I tell her, as she plugs into the wall jack Ed is standing by. Kari closes the stair door.
“Locking,” McGee says. The door's bolt slides shut audibly.
Rachel and Kari move forward, and look around. Cut to her context and look out through her eyes.
“Okay, we're in the systems room, so … where are the systems?” she asks, finally.
Flick from her eyes to Micki's, to Kari's, to Ed's. Perspective. Massive piping. Tanks. Compressed air cylinders, maybe. No, some kind of fuel. They're tied to a rack of fuel cells. The rusting hulks of diesel generators finally give it away. “You're looking at them. Remember what this place was. These are the systems. HVAC. Internal air. Water. Fuel. Filtration. Every system you need to survive nuclear fallout, so you can go die of starvation and disease after the fact.”
Rachel snorts at me. “Ease down on the 'tude, Rae.”
“I'm right.”
“I put up with enough of that shit two years ago,” Rachel snaps. “Don't need reruns. Make yourself useful. Go over the plans and figure out where they put the data center.”
Ed looks over the room, and walks to the other end, between the two diesel generators. Runs his hand over a battered door marked “spares.” Feels along the door jam a moment, and smiles crookedly.
“Give it up. Ed. It's just a closet,” Rachel says.
Ed looks at her, then back at the door. He steps back. Takes a deep breath. Glance at his context. His bio-readouts are changing, fast. Max stim. His blood pressure spikes, and he sequences his muscles into maximum strength mode. “Wait, Ed. You can't…” I say, but it's too late. His foot lashes out to hit the door dead center. The door buckles. He grabs the doorknob and heaves it toward the hinges, and the door folds.
“Crap ina hat,” Micki says softly.
Kari smiles at Micki, very slightly. A proud little smile.
Ed looks down. “Stairs. Down. Air moving through the door. Smelled it.”
Rachel joins him and looks down. “Yeah. You're right.” She sniffs the air. “Fresh, too. There's something down there, all right. And it's got ventilation to the outside.”
Ed smiles.
Rachel cuts him off, sharply. “And anyone down there knows we're coming. You notice anything else important, you tell me before you tear the door off its hinges. Got it?”
Ed nods. All business.
Rachel takes one breath, and her voice is sharp on the comnet again. “Get surveillance on whatever's down there, McGee. Hotwire. No excuses. We're flying blind, and I don't like it.”
“Welcome to my world,” I tell her.
“Fuck,” Micki says, after a few minutes. “This static is ridiculous. It's like this place took a lightning hit and half the switches are burnt, and they're all jabbering. Except that they're jabbering in IP instead of just noise.”
