Chapter 18
Chapter Eighteen
Gideon stared down the barrel of his own rifle at the man holding the woman he loved. A fact he couldn’t deny. He loved Zadie, and there was no way in hell he was letting Isaac, or Hyperion, take her from him.
Gideon’s heart pounded in his chest. His lungs burned every time he tried to suck in oxygen. His right eye twitched.
This was not how things were going to end. Not if he had anything to say about it.
Isaac hadn't changed in the last two months. He had the same bulky frame. Same angular jaw. Same sharp eyes that always looked like they were running calculations three steps ahead of the conversation. But the way he'd disarmed Zadie and pinned her against his body—that was new.
"I said put it down." Isaac pressed the barrel deeper into Zadie's side.
Firmly pressing her lips together, she cocked her head and narrowed her eyes. Zadie wasn’t the kind of woman Gideon would ever want to piss off. Enhanced or not, when she broke free, Isaac was going to pay a price for this.
"I’m not going to ask again," Isaac said.
Gideon set the rifle on the ground.
"Kick it toward me."
He pressed his toe against the metal and gave it a good shove. The rifle skidded across pine needles and disappeared under a deadfall.
Isaac’s breathing was rapid but appeared controlled. His pupils had dilated. A vein in his temple pulsed with a rhythm that Gideon shouldn’t be able to see, much less time.
"VKR-1 or did you roll the dice with TITAN?" Gideon asked, keeping his gaze on Zadie. Her fingers curled tight around Isaac’s forearm.
"You always think you have all the answers," Isaac said.
"If you’re taking TITAN, then you know as well as I do that Darwin abandoned it because it was unstable. The side effects come on fast, and it’ll kill you faster than—"
"I’m not stupid." Isaac tightened his grip on Zadie.
She groaned.
"Where’s Darwin?" Isaac asked.
"I wouldn’t know." The sound of gunfire continued to echo across the valley. A couple of pops. A pause. A few more a second or two later. They came from all directions. Isaac’s team had done a good job of locating and keeping everyone separate, but he hadn’t killed anyone, yet.
Maybe that had been the plan. Who knew with Isaac.
Gideon’s objective was to monopolize Isaac’s focus and concoct a scheme for their escape, with the hard drive’s preservation being paramount.
"I haven’t seen him since the day I was fired. "
"I don’t believe you," Isaac said. "Where’d you find this one and her friends?"
"Dark web." Gideon had never been the best at lying. Poker had always been out of the question. But things changed when a psychopath wedged a gun into the side of the woman he loved more than life itself. "I needed help making sure Finch lost a few bucks, and they answered."
"Right." For a second. Isaac shifted his gaze left then right. "I’m going to need you to take out the earpiece."
Gideon reached up and pulled the earpiece free. He held it between his fingers.
"You too, sweetheart."
Zadie did the same.
"Now both of you drop them and step on them."
Gideon did as instructed and crushed it under his boot.
Isaac heeled hers into the ground.
The gunfire from the compound was still audible. Some loud pops, others muffled by timber and terrain. But they’d heard the exchange, and knew Zadie and Gideon’s comms were down.
That was something.
"So, tell me, Gideon," Isaac started. "What exactly did you do in there?"
"Why would I do that?"
Isaac jabbed his weapon hard into Zadie’s gut.
She doubled over and moaned.
"Leave her alone." Gideon took one step forward, hands in the air.
"I take it you went poking around inside ORACLE? Found yourself a way in and got something important. Or did some damage to the system," Isaac said. "Whatever it is, I need to know." He jerked his chin. "Computer in the bag?"
"You know ORACLE is impossible to breach."
"Improbable, not impossible. And that doesn’t mean you didn’t pull something," Isaac said. "Or plant something. Now, let’s find out exactly what that was." He waved his weapon. "Open your bag slowly, and pull out the electronics."
Gideon shrugged the backpack off one shoulder, then the other. Crouching, he set it on the pine needles.
"Open the laptop, and fire it up."
"Why?"
"Because I want to see what you've been doing.
" Isaac's mouth tightened into a firm line.
"You spent two months throwing bad data at my network. I found that amusing. Then you started pulling nodes offline, and I found that annoying. Now, you’re at SYN-7, possibly breaching my system with some random hacker?
" He laughed. "That’s amusing in a different way. "
"Why?" Gideon asked.
"Just the fact that the great Gideon Rhodes needed tech support." Isaac snorted at his own joke.
"Tech support who carries a sidearm and knows how to use a rifle." Zadie smiled with pride.
"I don't care who the fuck you are," Isaac said. "I care what you two clowns did. Open the damn laptop." He gripped Zaddie’s braid and yanked.
"That hurt," she managed.
Gideon unzipped the backpack and pulled out the laptop. He opened it on the ground between them, screen tilting up in the gray light. The last session was still active with his architecture notes, the monitoring scripts, the credential mapping he'd used to guide Zadie through ORACLE's core.
"Walk me through it," Isaac said.
"Let her go first."
"No."
"She's not part of this. She's not part of anything. This is between you and me."
"I agree. But she stays exactly where she is until I see what's on that screen." The barrel moved from her side to her temple. "Walk me through it, or I pull this trigger and then you walk me through it anyway."
"Tell him," she said, her tone hard.
Either they were both going to die, and Isaac figured it out, or Isaac was going to die, and it didn’t matter.
Gideon hoped for the latter. "Fine." He might as well brag. Only, these weren’t his bragging rights, but Zaddie’s.
"This is how we got the AI's attention." He tapped the screen. "It wasn’t that hard, really. I built the damn thing, and that one over there is a master hacker. Even if I hadn’t handed her the architecture and annoyed the AI, she would’ve gotten in all on her own. "
Isaac leaned forward. His eyes shifted left and right finally widening. "Jesus," he muttered.
"It’s stunning, wouldn’t you agree?" Gideon went on.
"It catalogued, classified, and pursued.
It deployed shadow servers. Rerouted data.
Built a behavioral profile of the attacker.
" He scrolled through the code. "But you already knew that, because you were sitting in the command seat.
You overrode the tracking parameters manually. "
"I was better than your AI that day." Isaac actually puffed out his chest.
"You were faster. That's not the same thing." Gideon pulled up the monitoring scripts. "After we tapped a live hub and read the cipher's regeneration cycle—variable intervals driven by network conditions. I mapped enough cycles to predict the activation window."
"That’s what you were doing at the node," Isaac said. "And that brought you here for a handshake."
"Activated within the cipher window." Gideon let out a breath.
"What did you do inside the core?" Isaac asked.
"Looked around. Pulled some data. Nothing you won't find in the access logs." Gideon scrolled to the credential mapping.
Isaac crouched. His knee touched the ground. The hand with the gun shifted—still pointed at Zadie's head, but the angle had changed.
"This is my architecture," Isaac said. "You mapped my system."
"It was never yours." Gideon looked up from the screen. "You stole AEGIS from the military. You made a shitty copy . You bolted it onto the backbone I designed and patched the cracks with code that a second-year student would be embarrassed by. You didn't build anything, you just wrote a wrapper."
The vein in Isaac's temple throbbed faster. "I improved it."
"You broke it. The authentication cycling is inconsistent.
The verification checkpoints are unreliable.
The randomization pattern is so thin that a traffic analysis could crack it in a day.
" Gideon kept his voice as level as he could when his pulse was higher than it ever had been.
"I found six vulnerabilities in the first twenty minutes inside the core. "
"Those were traps."
"One was a trap. Two of them were actual flaws that you don't know about because you don't understand the architecture well enough to see them." Gideon tilted the laptop toward Isaac. "Here. Let me show you."
Like the fool he was, Isaac leaned in.
His elbow dropped another inch. The barrel of the gun drifted away from Zadie's temple and pointed toward the ground. His free hand reached for the laptop, fingers stretching toward the trackpad.
Zadie drove her elbow backward into Isaac's solar plexus. The compound made him strong, but it didn't harden his organs. His breath exploded out of him, and his gun hand jerked sideways. Zadie ripped free of his grip and threw herself to the left.
Gideon slammed the laptop shut on Isaac's fingers.
He groaned. His hand wrenched free, and the gun flew from his grip, tumbling into the brush. He staggered backward, hunched, curling his crushed fingers against his chest.
Gideon lunged for the gun. His fingers found pine needles, dirt, a root, everything but the weapon. He scrambled forward on his hands and knees.
Isaac recovered faster than any human should. He straightened, reached behind his back, and pulled a knife from a sheath mounted on his belt.
Gideon got to his feet and faced him.
Zadie inched closer, but Isaac spun, swinging the knife in her direction, missing her by an inch as she stumbled backward, landing on her ass.