Chapter 10
Viktor Garris entered Roman Voss’s office.
He disliked coming here. Roman was a brat who seemed to think people ran worlds from behind a desk.
Probably because his mother was no different—only she had a bigger desk being on the Softbiotics board of directors.
People like them never thought of the generals and enforcers who carried out their visions.
Viktor would let Roman continue to believe in the fantasy that his family had clung to for generations, while Viktor and his ilk were the real sources of change in the universe.
Roman didn’t even look up when Viktor took a seat. The younger man was completely absorbed in whatever work he was doing at his computer.
Can you kill him from here? Viktor thought to his amp while keeping a perfectly businesslike manner.
The most effective way to kill someone from a distance is to shoot them. However, there are twenty-six other options available in this room. Would you like me to list them?
Not right now.
Roman glanced up finally. “It’s about time.”
“I came as soon as I received your message,” he replied without missing a beat.
“Have you located the amp?” Roman asked.
“We have a high confidence that he returned to the original colony after he met with the woman. She didn’t break before she died, unfortunately. Somehow, she managed to remove her amp without dying immediately. Otherwise, we would’ve hacked that to find out what we needed.”
Roman cocked his head. “Someone from Dreswick with an amp? I didn’t realize there were any of those still around.”
“There aren’t anymore.”
Roman waved him off. “Well, you need to narrow it down more than that. Just a little over an hour ago, I found a glitch on the amp-link, and I think it’s the rogue amp. I mean, the glitch was just caught by the scanners, so it has to be it. Nothing else besides amps access the amp-link, right?”
Since Viktor assumed Roman’s question was rhetorical, he didn’t bother answering.
Sure enough, Roman answered himself. “Yes, it must be the prototype. It has firewalls that aren’t a Softbiotics design, and there shouldn’t be any non-Softbiotics amps on TerraSoft-11.
We’re too far from the space-link. And since the firewalls are different, I couldn’t attach any tracking tags to it, which means that I’m unfortunately dependent on you to track it. ”
“Unfortunately,” Viktor echoed dryly.
Roman rubbed his hands together. “But just because it has good firewalls doesn’t mean I can’t get to it, and that’s exactly what I’m going to do.
My amp helped me design an attack that I can launch the moment it pings the amp-link for data.
That attack should knock it offline, so I’ll then be able to track it, so all you have to do is have a team bring it back to me. ”
“You mean the amp, or the man with the amp?” Viktor clarified.
Roman’s expression acted like the question was preposterous. “Why would I need the host? It’s the amp I need.”
Surprising, since Viktor was curious as to how an amp could be implanted into an adult.
But evidently, Roman was less interested in that part.
Fortunately, only needing the amp made it easy.
“Tell me when you fire the attack. I’ll have my teams ready.
” In fact, he already had a team based in the Crawl on standby, and they’d already spotted the target once.