Chapter 17
Chapter Seventeen
Zadie rolled her shoulders and stretched her fingers over the keyboard.
They'd been at the terminal for fourteen minutes.
Fourteen intense minutes of inputting activation keys, waiting for handshakes, and watching checkpoints authenticate one at a time while the server racks behind her hummed loud enough to cause deafness.
The hub was a concrete box with no windows and one door. A ventilation unit on the roof rattled every thirty seconds like it was coughing up a lung. Two rows of server racks lined the walls, blinking green in the dim light. The air was warm, stale, and tasted like dust.
Gideon had hard-wired his laptop directly into the mainframe at the terminal station along the back wall, and she'd been staring at the same screen for so long her eyes burned.
"Third checkpoint," Gideon said from behind her. His hand rested on the back of her chair. "Watch the stamp."
The line on her screen flickered.
"Holy shit," she said.
"You're inside ORACLE's core, and it only took eighty-two seconds. Nice job."
"This is fucking amazing," she whispered as she scanned the code. It was sheer brilliance. "You created this."
"I built the architecture. I didn’t write it all. I had really good programmers for that."
"You’re too modest." Her heart pulsed in uneven spikes.
"You're in the permission tree," he said. "Go left at the third branch. That's the administrative partition."
"I see it." The architecture was a programmer’s dream. She'd spent six hours memorizing this map, and now that she was in it, she never wanted to leave. Her fingers flew over the keyboard.
"Burn clock started the second AEGIS stamped us," Gideon said. "How long is the fuse?"
"Based on the sweep data, we've got eleven minutes and change before the log sweep cycles back and flags the first credentials." She pulled up the credential shell from the portable drive and positioned it beside the live data stream.
"Go for it."
She dove in. The live encryption keys populated on her screen.
They were dynamic, unique to this moment, and generated by the system at the exact instant of access.
She'd never seen them before, and she'd never see them again.
She copied the first key set into the shell framework.
"Seated. Running interrogation check." She held her breath.
"It’s clean. "First key injected and moving to permission tokens. "
"The tokens sit under the authentication header, third tier down."
"Got them. Interjected and continuing."
"Two down. Four to go."
The ventilation unit rattled overhead. The server racks hummed. Gideon’s breathing came in choppy pants. It all kept her calm.
"No movement on the access road. No air traffic," Neve said.
"Copy that," Zadie murmured out of habit.
She found the third key set. Her rhythm was building, and the muscle memory of code work took over.
"Seven minutes on the burn," Gideon said.
"Fourth key found. Dropping it into the shell and running…what the fuck?"
Zadie's hands froze over the keyboard.
"What is it?" Gideon leaned closer.
"The fourth key didn't seat." She pulled up the error log. "AEGIS is requesting a secondary authentication on this partition. A verification layer that wasn't in any of the traffic data we studied."
"That's not possible. We mapped every checkpoint."
"Well, there's a new one." She scrolled through the request parameters. "It's asking for a time-stamped credential verification against the original authentication."
"That's a trap." Gideon slapped a fist into his palm. "Isaac must have added a manual verification node. If you answer the challenge with the original credentials, AEGIS logs a second stamp. That accelerates the sweep cycle."
"Are you sure?" She scanned the screen.
He pointed to the line in the code. "It could cut the fuse in half. Maybe more."
"So, instead of seven minutes, I might have three." Her breath hitched. Sweat beaded at her hairline. "Can I route around it?"
"Not without leaving the partition entirely and re-entering through a different branch. That costs you ninety seconds, minimum."
She stared at the challenge request blinking on her screen. The system wanted proof, like a border guard who'd already checked her passport but decided to check it twice.
"What if I spoof the timestamp?" she said. "Feed the checkpoint a cached copy of the original authentication with a current timestamp, like an echo. The sweep cycle might not register it as a second event."
"It could work," he said. "But if AEGIS reads it as a duplicate instead of an echo, it flags immediately. Instant alert."
"What's the probability?"
"I don't know. Isaac's code is unpredictable. That's the whole problem."
"Best guess."
"Seventy-thirty in our favor."
"I'll take those odds." She quickly wrote the spoof and cached authentication, formatting it to mirror the original handshake. Her fingers moved faster than her thoughts, which was fine because her thoughts were trying to calculate survival odds, and her fingers only cared about syntax.
She deployed the echo.
The checkpoint processed. The progress bar blinked green.
"It worked."
"Yeah, but we still lost time," Gideon reminded her.
But she focused on the fifth key. The progress bar seemed slower, but it still took. "One more key, and then I build the backdoor."
"You've got this."
She pulled the sixth and final encryption key from the deepest layer of the administrative partition.
This one was different. Heavier, more complex, wrapped in a secondary encryption layer that she had to peel before she could access the raw data.
Her fingers slowed. Precision mattered more here than speed.
One miskeyed character, and the shell would reject the injection, and she'd have to restart the final sequence.
"Single vehicle moving down the access road," Scout said. "Tinted windows like before."
"How long until they reach the hub?" Neve asked.
"Less than ten minutes," Scout said.
Zadie listened, but she kept her focus on the code flashing on the screen.
"Any other vehicles?" Coulter asked.
"Can’t see any, but that doesn’t mean they’re not coming."
"Everyone hold position. Scout, keep tracking," Neve said.
Zadie peeled the encryption layer. The raw key data populated on her screen. She copied it into the shell then hit the integration command.
The progress bar barely moved.
"Come on," she whispered.
"Second vehicle on the access road," Scout said. "Same profile. One minute behind the first."
"Gideon, how much time is left on the burn clock?" Zadie couldn't take her eyes off the progress bar while her heart lodged in her throat like a frog croaking.
"Not exactly sure what that echo did to us, so somewhere between two and four minutes."
The progress bar hit seventy percent and barely continued to tick upward.
"First vehicle pulled off the road," Scout said. "Three hundred meters south. Four men in tactical gear exiting now."
The bar hit seventy-four percent…seventy-six percent.
"Second vehicle stopping behind the first. Three more men," Scout said.
"Shit," Gideon muttered.
"They're moving fast and heavily armed," Scout continued. "Sprinting for the tree line."
"Everyone, engage at your discretion," Neve said. "Protect the hub."
Gideon’s fingers curled around Zadie’s shoulders. "It shouldn’t be this slow. How’s the conn—"
"I checked it three times. It’s strong."
Pop! Bang!
Zadie flinched. Her hand jerked, and the laptop vibrated as the shots echoed through the valley.
She swallowed, keeping her gaze focused on the status bar. Ninety-eight percent…
"Sixth key is in," she said letting out a long breath and wiggling her fingers. "Building the backdoor now."
This was the part she couldn't rehearse.
No matter how much Gideon could show her of what he knew of ORACLE, creating a permanent access point woven into its core architecture that would survive system updates, security sweeps, and anything Isaac or Finch threw at it needed to be invisible, durable, and bleed into the system like it belonged.
And it had to be done before the burn clock hit zero.
Or enhanced soldiers kicked down the door.
Her fingers pounded on the keys. She wrote the framework she and Gideon had designed together and made adjustments in real time to the architecture she'd just mapped from the inside.
"One through the south perimeter," Coulter said. "He's fast and heading for the east side of the building."
"I see him," Neve said. "Engaging."
The walls of the hub structure dampened the sound of the gunfire but couldn't kill it. Each burst vibrated through the concrete floor and into the soles of Zadie's boots.
"Wynn, he's coming your direction," Neve said. "East wall."
"I've got him." Wynn's voice was calm.
Zadie split her focus between comms and typing. Gideon stood behind her, hands on rifle.
"Shit," Wynn said, followed by a groan.
"Talk to me," Neve ordered.
"Grazed in the left arm. It's manageable, just need to take cover and treat it."
"I’ve got you covered," Scout said. "Do it now."
"On it."
Zadie sucked in a deep breath.
"You’re doing great," Gideon whispered. "You got this."
The code blurred, and she blinked hard to clear her vision. Her ribs throbbed. So did her knee, but none of that mattered. The backdoor was sixty percent built.
"Two more at the south fence," Scout said. "I don’t know if I can hold position."
"Coulter, fall back to the east wall," Neve said. "Tighten the perimeter around the hub."
"Copy."
Zadie wrote as fast as she could. Her fingers hammered the keys in a rhythm that had nothing to do with music and everything to do with survival.
The floor kicked beneath her chair and vibrated like it was a rocket ready to take off. Her teeth slammed together, and her fingers jumped off the keyboard. Debris peppered her back as pieces of the ceiling crashed into the server rack.
"What the fuck was that?" Gideon spun toward the door.
"Granade" Coulter said over comms.