Chapter 2 #2
He continued to study Praline and her new customers. The mud might be real, but the clothes were too clean. Too crisp. And both men sat too rigidly while trying to appear casual.
The taller one let his gaze move across the room, and when it landed on Gideon, he nodded.
Gideon did the only thing that made sense. He nodded back, then he closed his laptop and tucked it into his bag.
Time to leave.
But first, he scarfed down the last of his eggs and finished his coffee because he’d paid for them. Standing, he slung his backpack over one shoulder and walked to the hostess station.
"You leaving, sugar?" Praline handed him his bill.
"Yes ma’am." He handed enough cash to cover the meal with a five-dollar tip. That was plenty. Maybe too much.
Canadian guilt.
"Why, thank you." She smiled. "One second." She turned and opened the cupboard that housed the baked goods. She put something in a small baggie. "A little something to enjoy after lunch." She moved out from the station and tucked it into his pack.
He stiffened.
"You come back real soon," she said. "And bring that girlfriend of yours. Coffee will be on the house."
"I appreciate that." He gripped the shoulder straps and headed out the door, trying not to think too hard about the kind gesture. When he’d walked out of Hyperion two months ago, he’d had zero trust in anyone or anything. Still didn’t.
But he knew there were still good people in the world. There had to be. And maybe Praline, as annoying as she could be, was one of them.
He glanced over his shoulder one last time at the diner that refused to advertise its name.
Mouse & Munch.
He laughed. It hadn’t been the worst few days.
His boots crunched over the pavement as he headed out of the parking lot, onto the street, and toward the access road to the hydro transmission relay station.
By car, it was eight minutes, but his vehicle was miles away.
He picked up the pace, even though he’d left the diner four minutes ahead of schedule.
As he’d learned in the military, shit happened, and he was prepared for the worst of it.
Or so he hoped.
As he walked, he did what he always did when he had some time to kill, which was a lot lately.
He thought about Hopper. Her sense of humor. Her intelligence. Her kindness. The way she just always knew what to say, even though she had no idea that her words meant so much.
They played combat video games, killing each other for fun, and boy was it a hell of a ride. Best time he’d had with a woman in years, and the irony that he’d never met her, didn’t even know what she looked like, wasn’t lost on him.
Someday, when he took his life back, he hoped to tell her how much she’d helped him through this time in his life.
He continued at a good clip. The trees were dense enough to give cover, and the light came through them in long grey shafts that meant dawn was closing in.
Gideon moved through the landscape the way he'd learned to move through things these last two months. Not too fast he missed what was happening around him, but not so slow he failed to register everything.
He padded through mud on the access road. Silent on wet ground, solid on rock, broken in enough that his feet didn't have opinions about them anymore.
He listened to the timber and to the wind whistling through the top branches. A raven squawked somewhere to his left. The distant low hum of the transmission lines had become music, leading him toward the prize.
An ICHOR, or a field node. A piece of hardware that housed part of the telemetry pipeline. Taking it off-line would blind Finch and whatever operation he was running. Gideon picked nodes that wouldn’t stop the flow, just reroute and slowdown. He wanted Hyperion to have to react. Play defense.
While he systematically destroyed what he’d built.
He stopped at the tree line and crouched.
The relay station sat on a cleared rectangle of land about the size of a hockey rink. It was ringed with chain-link, which was topped with barbed wire. The main building was low and utilitarian.
Two transmission towers rose behind it. The secondary—the one he needed—was set back and to the right, and he knew exactly where the node was mounted on it because he'd been the one to specify the mounting location.
He watched the station for ten minutes. The guard rotation was the same as yesterday—a single vehicle making a slow circuit of the perimeter every twenty-two minutes, the camera on the northwest corner still tracking the same blind arc it had been tracking yesterday, the whole operation running with the predictability of infrastructure that had never expected to be anyone's target.
He waited for the vehicle to complete its circuit and disappear around the far side of the building.
He took off running, keeping his body low until he got to the fence. Not his favorite part of the journey. It took him twelve seconds to climb it and land on the other side.
But he didn’t stop moving. Breathing labored, he kept his eyes focused on the base of the secondary tower. His heart raced. It all reminded him that no matter how many pushups he did while living in the forest, he wasn't military anymore.
He reached the base of the tower and crouched behind the equipment housing and let his lungs fill with the crisp mountain air. It was cold going in, which was odd because it burned pushing out.
The hub was above him. He could see the weatherproof casing on the arm. It was grey and indistinguishable from the standard monitoring equipment surrounding it. That had been the point.
He thought about the day he'd reviewed the installation photos. A crew from Hyperion's field team, all of them thinking they were running telecom redundancy checks, which they were. The secrecy of it all made sense. They were dealing with soldiers. Their lives. It had to be protected.
Gideon had watched the timestamps roll in on his monitor in Vancouver, verifying the placement and logging the confirmation personally. It had felt damn fucking good. In some ways, it still did.
He still didn’t know what Finch was up to.
If he opened his mouth now, his signature on that NDA wouldn’t destroy him.
It would cage him. He couldn't let that happen.
He had no idea when he'd feel he'd done enough sabotage.
When Finch would have suffered enough for kicking Gideon to the curb.
He only knew that it would have to end before it ended him.
After that, Gideon had no idea what his life would look like. Maybe he'd stay living off grid. It wasn't all that bad.
Except for the lack of gaming… and Hopper. He missed Hopper.
He reached up and opened the housing. Pulling the toolkit from the side pocket of his backpack, he got to work performing a soft shutdown. He needed the system logs to be seen as a failure event. Not something suspicious.
He had eleven minutes before the guard vehicle came back around. Mistakes were not an option. He was four minutes in when he glanced up and saw a shadow move, low and slow, on the substation roof.
His breathing hitched, yet his hands persisted in their task of covertly disabling the node.
The shadow crept forward, then went still. There was only one thing it could be, and that was a human.
He adjusted his position slightly, putting the tower strut between himself and the roofline.
The shadow made a distinct movement and, like magic, transformed into a body. Not a full one, but he could see someone make a hand gesture.
Shit.
Gideon eased around to the other side and peered through the opening in the tower.
Another person hid behind a small shed to the east of the man on the roof. And one more just northwest of that position in the brush.
And slightly off to the south, there was one behind all of them, rifle in hand. He assumed they all had weapons, but this one showed theirs.
Four hostiles. Armed. Coming for him and his only option was to run north, across open land, jump the fence, and pick up the trails on the other side of the access road. His chances weren’t good.
He might as well finish the job before they either captured him or killed him. Too bad this wasn’t a primary hub where he could do some real damage.
He finished reprogramming the node from the inside using his small tablet, timing it to go offline in eighteen minutes. Theoretically, that would have given him enough time to find a spot, open his laptop, and pull data as it hit the node. At least, that’s what he was hoping.
But it wasn’t going to happen today.
Snagging his pack, he pulled out his handgun. Wasn’t really going to help much in this situation, but he wasn’t giving up either. He took a deep breath. Getting caught was something he’d always expected. He just didn’t think it would be like this.
Preparing to run, he stuck his head out from behind the strut, just so he could see the angles.
Pop. Pop.
First two shots came from the roof.
Pop.
A groan. A crash. And then a thud.
Gideon stole a glance toward the building, and the man who’d been on the roof was now on the ground. Legs bent in an odd direction. Arms sprawled wide. Blood seeping into the ground.
Two more rounds. A brief pause, then another three rounds.
Gideon didn't know their origin, though, he could no longer assume they were all aimed at him. It didn’t make sense, but he also wasn't about to stand around figuring it out.
He now had another option. The substation was thirty meters out.
He could sprint for it. Dodge the bullets.
Maybe. And if he reached it, the fence was close, and the cover was solid enough to give him a shot.
Now or never. He held his weapon to the side of his thigh and took off running, zig-zagging, his backpack tight against his spine.
The first shot hit metal just past him.
The second one hit flesh. But not his.
"You fucking asshole," a man shouted.
Another shot fired just as Gideon flattened his back against the substation. He peered around the corner. One of his attackers lay flat on his back, motionless.
More shots fired. This time in rapid succession and again, not in his direction.
"You’re gonna die, bitch." One of the men rose, weapon aimed, back to Gideon, and marched toward the furthest shadow.
Pop. Pop. Pop.
"Come out you coward," the man yelled.
A single shot rang out from behind the building. The bullet hit the man’s shoulder. He jerked and then fired another round as if it were nothing.
Gideon had done a tour, but he’d never killed anyone. He inched further out from behind the substation and raised his weapon. Shooting a man in the back seemed unfair. But whoever this man was shooting at had saved Gideon’s life.
Gideon held his breath. He narrowed one eye, took aim, and fired.
The man grunted and twisted his body as the bullet tore through his lower left side of his back.
Not exactly where Gideon was aiming, but this wasn’t his strong suit.
The gunman turned and actually smiled as blood dripped from his mouth. "You’re going to pay for that."
Pop!
Gideon inched back as the man jerked to a stop, eyes wide, and then fell forward, face down, with a thud.
"Jesus," Gideon muttered.
A figure raced from behind the building. A woman carrying a weapon. She kicked the gun from the man on the ground, reached down, and pressed her fingers against his neck.
Gideon held his weapon steady. "Who the fuck are you?" he asked as he tried to decide whether she'd just saved his life or whether she was simply the last one standing.
"We’ll talk about that after we get out of here." She pointed towards the sky.
He didn’t shift his gaze, but in the distance, he could hear the faint roar of a chopper.
"We need to go, now." She stood there, showing her palms, rifle slung over her shoulder.
"I’m not going anywhere with you."
Two months he'd been out here alone. Pulling nodes.
Sleeping in the dirt. Telling himself that dismantling the system one piece at a time was justice.
But the man lying face down in the gravel had taken three bullets and smiled through every one of them.
Gideon's solo war of yanking hardware and tossing bad data would never be enough.
Not against that. Not against whatever had turned a human body into something that didn't flinch when it bled.
This woman had just put that man down. And Gideon couldn't even hit where he'd aimed.
"Gideon—"
"How do you know my name."
"Darwin Oswald sent me."
"You've got to be fucking kidding me." Gideon's grip tightened on the weapon.
Two months of anger—at Finch, at Hyperion, at the man who'd stood in a hallway and let security walk Gideon to the elevator without saying a word.
He'd aimed every ugly thought he had at Darwin since that day.
Built an entire story around it. The mentor who abandoned him. The friend who chose silence.
But Darwin had sent someone. Sent her armed and trained and ready to fight the kind of men Gideon didn't fully understand yet. That wasn't the move of a man who'd thrown Gideon away. That was the move of a man who'd been fighting a different war and needed him back.
"Yeah, sorry. He works for Hyperion, and I have no desire to—"
"You must not watch the news," she said. "He’s no longer there, and if we don’t leave, more men like this one will start dropping from the helicopter and we won’t stand a chance because they’ve all been enhanced." She cocked her head. "Trust me when I say we got lucky this time."
"Enhanced?" His brain ran through a million possibilities, and he didn’t like a single one. "I’ve got a vehicle sixteen miles south—"
"You're going to have to ditch it. I've got a side by side less than a mile. Let’s go."
He glanced over his shoulder. The chopper was coming in low and fast. "Lead the way." Of all the people Gideon thought he’d seen again from Hyperion, Darwin wasn’t one of them.