Chapter 12
Chapter Twelve
Zadie braced her back against the concrete base of the relay tower and scanned the area, rifle in her hands.
It had been less than twenty-four hours since they’d hacked into Hyperion, and in that time, things had been tense.
Not just because the team had shifted from casual, not sure what was next—to mission-focused.
But something had changed in Gideon, and Zadie didn’t know why. When they’d gone to bed, he reached for her, and she gave into the moment. Caved to what felt like his need to lose himself in her. Maybe she was selfish to take it, because she’d needed him too.
Not that there was a distance between them. However, something was obviously bugging Gideon, and the first chance she got, she was going to find out what.
"Can I do anything?" Zadie asked.
"Not yet." He was three feet to her left, crouched against the concrete with his laptop balanced on his knees and a tangle of cables coiled beside him.
The node sat twelve feet above them, mounted on the steel arm of a BC Hydro substation forty minutes east of the valley.
Same kind of infrastructure Gideon had been dismantling when she'd found him—weatherproof casing, industrial mounting bracket, hidden in plain sight among the transformers and junction boxes that nobody looked at twice.
Only this time, they weren't here to destroy it. They were here to listen.
"Comms check," Neve said through the earpiece. Her voice was low and even. The same operational tone she used on every mission. The same voice that kept the team steady, alert, and alive.
"Coulter here. West tree line. In position."
"Scout here. At the Ridge. Eyes on the access road and the north perimeter."
"Wynn here. Ravine. Set up behind the boulder formation, fifty meters south."
"Zadie here. Base of the tower with Gideon."
Silence.
Zadie tapped him on the shoulder.
He glanced up and glared at her with a narrowed stare before going back to his computer.
"Gideon," Neve said. "Comms check."
He let out a long breath. "Gideon here. With Zadie.
" He pulled a cable from the bundle and handed it to Zadie.
"I need you to run this from the laptop to the junction box on the east side of the base.
There's a service panel behind the access cover.
Two bolts—both probably rusted. Inside, you'll find a row of fiber terminations.
Third from the left. That's the live feed. Got it?"
"Copy that." She took the cable and moved around the base.
The access cover was exactly where he said it would be—a dull gray panel the size of a binder, bolted to the concrete with hardware that hadn't been touched in years.
She pulled the multi-tool from her vest and worked the first bolt.
Rust flaked under the wrench head, and she had to lean into it using both hands before it gave.
"Opening now," she said.
The second bolt broke free more easily. She pulled the panel and set it on the ground. Inside, a row of fiber optic terminations glowed faintly in the morning light. Tiny pinpricks of green light, each one carrying a sliver of ORACLE's nervous system through the mountains.
A burst of adrenaline shot through her veins.
She didn’t know if it was dealing with the tech that excited her.
Or that she had a gun slung over her shoulder, and danger lurked in the shadows.
Both concepts were the reason she’d stayed in the military.
She didn’t have a death wish. She didn’t enjoy getting shot at.
But she had a thing for the rush.
She scanned the area before finding the proper fiber termination. Seating the connector, she felt the click, pressing it firmly.
"Connected," she said. "You should have signal."
"Looking for it now," Gideon’s voice came across comms in a low, controlled tone. "I'm in the stream. Starting the cipher monitor now."
She moved back around to his position and crouched beside him.
The laptop displayed four sections. In the upper left was the network traffic.
Next to that came the cipher regeneration data.
The system behavior logs in the lower left, and the lower right had been left blank.
That would populate once enough data had accumulated to begin pattern analysis.
"How long until you have enough to read the pattern?" Wynn asked over comms.
"Depends on traffic volume. Where it is in the cycle. And how close it is to wanting to regenerate." He tapped a few keys. "I need to watch enough cycles to map the variables. It could be twenty minutes. It could be four hours. I won’t know until I see some data."
"We’ve gotten good at waiting," Wynn said.
"Eyes sharp everyone," Neve commanded.
The substation hummed like a beehive. High-voltage lines stretched overhead, supported by lattice towers that disappeared into the overcast sky.
The air smelled like dense fog and wet pine.
A chain-link fence topped with barbed wire surrounded the compound, and Scout had cut a section on the north side an hour before dawn to give them entry.
They'd parked the vehicles a kilometer out and hiked in through timber dense enough to swallow sound.
Zadie settled against the concrete, hands tight around her weapon, and watched Gideon work. His fingers moved across the keyboard with precision, but every few seconds his eyes lifted, and he checked his surroundings before looking back to the screen.
She’d watch him do that they day Isaac and his men had come for him.
"We’ve got your back," she said.
"I know that."
"You've checked the fence line four times in the last two minutes."
He sucked in a breath, holding it for a few seconds before blowing it out like he was in the middle of a panic attack.
"We don’t know when Isaac flagged me during the attack.
But he was the one who started that soft scan.
He could have had another split AI system holding in the background, watching you. "
"It’s possible, but I buried those credentials, and right now, that has nothing to do with this. We don’t have to worry about that until we create the handshake between the software and the hardware."
"I’ve been messing with the telemetry system for two months. Tossing bad data points at it before I got bored with that, and Isaac and my old team got better at finding me faster."
"Is that when you resorted to disabling nodes?"
"At first I tried connecting into the routers so I could disable the feeds. But Isaac’s a lot smarter than I thought he was.
" Gideon tapped the keyboard. "He’s also had access to my credentials long before I got fired.
" He lifted his gaze, scanning the fence line again.
"Every minute we're connected to this node, we're visible. The AI may not flag us immediately, and it might not even see us as a threat. More likely as a node not functioning properly. But if Isaac is actively hunting inside the system for new threats, he’d look at something like this as a moving target. "
"But you set it up to look like a faulty wire."
"If someone breached my system and I identified them, the first thing I'd do is set a trap.
Custom tripwires tuned to their methods.
I'd make the net so tight they couldn't touch the system without me knowing exactly where they were. This one node having a shit fit. It’s old.
And at first glance, it would appear to be circuit issues. But that would make me paranoid."
"You built this system. Isaac inherited it. There's a difference between the architect and the tenant."
"He helped with the blueprint. He asked questions. He’s not stupid."
She placed her hand on his forearm. "We planned for this. We practiced. And we're not alone out here."
He exhaled through his nose and turned back to the screen. The cipher data scrolled, and fast. Regeneration events logged as timestamps with variable intervals, each one driven by a unique combination of network factors. Things were happening, and it wouldn’t take as long as she feared.
"There's something else," he said.
"I’m listening."
"I should have expected the human assist during the hack. I worked with the AI designers. I know its limitations, and I put this entire operation at risk."
"Even if we’d thought about the human element, we couldn’t have predicted what he’d do, or how he’d do it."
"Maybe. But I knew the AI blind spots, and so did my team. So did Isaac." Gideon directed his gaze back to the screen and tapped on the keyboard again. "He’s doing exactly what I'd do. That means, I should be three steps ahead of him, and I'm not."
"We got the credentials in. You got us to this node.
And right now, you're reading data that Isaac doesn't know you're reading.
" She leaned forward, sticking her face in front of his sightline.
"They don't know about me. Even if he finds fingerprints in the system, Isaac can't trace them to a ghost."
He reached out and cupped her cheek. "That’s true." He smiled.
"You two are disgustingly cute," Scout muttered through the comms. "But I can’t take any more of this."
"Then don’t listen in to other people’s private conversations." Zadie squared her shoulders, readjusted her grip on her weapon, and did a scan.
"Kind of hard not to," Coulter replied. "But it’s keeping me occupied, so feel free to chatter on."
"Aren’t you funny." It’s not that she’d forgotten the comms were stuck in her ear, she was just more focused on Gideon’s emotions.
"First pattern showing," Gideon said quietly.
"What does that mean, exactly?" Neve asked.
"Means we should be out of here in somewhere between a half hour and an hour." Gideon lifted his gaze. "Unless the traffic pattern slows down."
Zadie understood how data transmitted. While it was one continuous stream, there were spikes and lulls. An hour could double. Or even triple depending on weather, or even usage patterns in the area that had nothing to do with the specific node.
The only thing they could do was wait.