Chapter 30
Talon and I headed to Dreswick’s fish market.
We’d each relented and taken another dose of bionanites.
Those, coupled with an extra day of rest, had eased our injuries, so we could move with manageable levels of pain.
We walked rather than drove so as to not draw attention, and we wore Dreswick disguises: beards and glasses that made our eyes look like someone else’s on camera feeds.
Beards were common in Dreswick. I never kept one because it’d hold onto splatters of battery acid, making the acid harder to wash off, thus making the burns linger even longer.
As for the glasses, Andra had gotten ahold of the high-tech lenses, stuck them in old frames, and—according to her—they had been used hundreds of times.
They were weird—whenever I looked at Talon, I saw him, but he had someone else’s eyes.
We carried small blasters but hoped we wouldn’t need them, because that would mean our covers were blown, and we had a fight on our hands.
It was a two-mile walk from Andra’s place to the market, and the heat made my face itch when I started to sweat under the beard.
We planned our excursion to hit the market at the supper hour so we could get lost in the crowd.
Dreswick wasn’t exactly a big place—there were maybe ten thousand of us down here.
Heck, even though I was an orphan, I’d probably crossed paths with my biological parents in the streets dozens of times throughout my life and never had a clue.
Grandmother had said my mother was likely a whore and my father was probably a sucker factory worker; except she worded it a lot nicer.
There weren’t many career choices for a guy with my bloodline.
“You know, aside from the heat and the pollution, it’s not so bad here,” Talon said.
“You were born in Aberdeen. If you’d been born here, you wouldn’t even notice it,” I said.
“Maybe, probably. But Aberdeen isn’t so great. They’re still running the terraformers there monthly, which causes these torrential downpours and flash floods. The gutters fill so fast that entire cars can be washed away.”
I frowned, not remembering that. “News never shows that.”
“Not the news down here,” he said. “The news is completely different depending on where you live,” he said. “But yeah, those rains are what raises the river levels so high at times.”
“I always assumed all that water came from the mountains farther north,” I said.
He shook his head. “Those mountains are drier than an enforcer’s hooch. Heck, the moons have more water than the mountains.”
When he mentioned the moons, it brought back a memory. “You mentioned to Kynan about another mission on the moon. What was that?”
He eyed me before answering. “Guess it doesn’t matter now.
Since I’ve got Lu , I’m his voice to the other resistance groups—the ones outside this system.
You’d be surprised how many are out there.
Once a year, several of us meet at Starhaven Station—that’s a space station in the Tau Virelli system. ”
“And you said you weren’t in the resistance. Sounds like you’re neck-deep,” I said.
“I don’t believe in it like Kynan did. To me, it’s a job, and it’s been pretty lucrative being a courier. Guess I need to find myself a new gig.” He chuckled dryly. “That’s assuming we’ve got a snowball’s chance in hell surviving the big mission.”
We turned the corner and both clamped our mouths shut.
Before us, the fish market loomed bright and busy.
My body tensed, and I tried to force my muscles to relax as we strolled across the street and to the market’s main entrance.
It was bustling inside, with workers from all the factories and plants on their lunch breaks.
I recognized a few from Powerworks, as well as several regulars who got off work the same time as Nolan and I and also ate at the market.
We strolled down a center row, looking like we were trying to decide where to eat.
There’s a hijacked amp, up ahead and forty feet on your right. She’s at the ramen bar.
Byte appeared before me, pointing at the woman.
“Got one,” I said quietly. “Woman in green at the ramen bar.”
“I see her.”
We headed that direction.
“Cal! Hey, Cal!”
Without thinking, I turned to see Miho at his counter, waving me over.
“I thought you’d gone and gotten yourself disappeared!
” he said. When I stiffened, not moving, he frowned in confusion, then in disappointment.
“Oh, sorry, thought you was someone else. You know what they say: everyone’s got a twin out there. ”
I tilted my head rather than say anything since my voice was still Cal’s, and I didn’t need to cast doubt.
It hurt not letting Miho see that I was still alive.
His food was never the best, but it was cheap and didn’t give me food poisoning.
I’d been eating at his dump for as long as I could remember.
When I was just a punk kid, he’d give me a rock-hard toffee bite.
He once told me he’d been orphaned when his father was killed in a grease fire, and he had to take over the family’s food stand when he was just fourteen.
Times had been rough, and that Grandmother—the one before mine—had shown kindness to him, eating there even though he could tell she didn’t like what he made.
I kept walking. I hoped to be able to talk to Miho again, but it was probably for the best that I didn’t. People around me didn’t seem to fare well.
“She’s leaving,” Talon whispered.
“Damn it.” The plan was to sit at the table within range of her local signal. Now, we’d have to do it while following her, which could make us look obvious if it took Byte very long. “Byte, can you take control of her control chip—get her to take a seat somewhere?”
Taking control of a biological host without their permission is against my nature.
“Of course it is,” I muttered.
Talon was watching me, and I gave him a small shake of my head.
At least the woman was walking at a slow pace, which made us tailing her not so obvious. She was likely programmed to patrol the market, searching for any resistance members.
We slowly closed the distance. Twenty feet. Fifteen feet. Ten feet. I was getting nervous.
At eight feet, Byte spoke. I have split her signal from all the network noise. I’m patching in the Nullzilla 2.0 code now.
The woman jerked to a stop, seizing as if she were epileptic, then was calm. She looked from side to side, at her hands, then around the market. Terror made her eyes wide. “It’s real. It’s real.” Then she screamed the most bloodcurdling scream I’d ever heard.
We hurried back to Andra’s apartment to find it filled with people.
She was waiting at the door for us. “Well?”
“Nullzilla 2.0 works,” I said.
She raised a closed fist. “Yes! It’s nice when things go right for us for a change. I tethered all five AVs to the same system for Byte, and I’ve confirmed there are no tracking tags on the black AV, so our transportation is ready.”
“Good,” I said.
“But once drones lock on, there’s nothing we can do,” she added.
“Of course,” I said.
“What’s up with the tea party?” Talon asked.
Andra glanced at the group milling around. “Oh, this is our army.”
“All eleven, huh,” I said.
She smiled and nodded, then began pointing out our new team members.
“This is Tommy, Susita, Dale, and Nina, all from the Crawl; and this is Haig, Vera, Jess, Mitch, and Woni from Dreswick’s west side; and this is Ron and Frankie from the terraforming plant out of town.
Everyone, this is Talon and Cal. I have them briefed on the plan already. They’re in.”
Some waved or gestured, others muttered a greeting.
They ranged in ages from late teens to early fifties, and hopefully they were all up for the most dangerous mission of their lives.
But I was never going to remember their names.
I recognized a few of the faces from the west side—that was the area of my apartment, so I was sure we’d been on the sidewalks at the same time more than once.
“Really?” Talon seemed surprised. “Because if I was just coming in and you told me the mission, I’d turn around and run the opposite way as fast as I could.”
“We see what’s happening out there,” Woni (I think) said. “We know that if we don’t do anything, the enforcers are going to clear out every last low-towner, and I’m not going to let them do that if I can prevent it.”
“Besides, in the last week, our friends and families have disappeared. Key mentioned that the plan includes freeing them. If we can get any of them back, we sure as hell will,” Mitch said.
“It won’t be easy,” Andra said. “But if we can get Cal to Softbiotics’ computer core, we’ll not only be able to identify where they’re holding everyone, but we’ll also be able to knock their systems offline for good.”
“We’ll get you to the computer core; you get us our families back,” Susita said.
Talon raised a brow at Andra. “Are you sure you told them the full plan? Because it’s not an easy plan; it’s damn near impossible.”
“The plan’s simple,” Haig said. “We go in at midnight to cut down the number of guards. We enter Softbiotics HQ dressed like enforcers, false credentials in hand, courtesy of Key. And we’ll go under the guise of running a drill.
Key and you”—he pointed to me—“hack the building’s security.
We’re all the muscle to fend off any enforcers or drones that try to keep us from reaching the top floor.
We get you to the top, and you hack their central computer, find out where they’re keeping everyone, and then blow the computer, which will cripple Softbiotics for a good, long time. Sound about right?”
“You’re missing the part where Cal connects me to their comm system, and I broadcast the company’s dirty little secrets.” Andra smiled. “That’ll hit the stockholders the hardest.”
“Like I said, as plans go, it’s simple,” Haig said. “But the devil’s in the details, and it sounds like the devil’s coming along with us on this one.”
An alarm sounded from Andra’s computer cage, and she rushed to her computer. “It’s okay. It’s a proximity alert. It looks like three security patrols have entered the block, but they’re pulling up at the apartment building across the street from this one. It hasn’t been raided yet.”
“Neither has this one,” Talon pointed out.
Andra’s jaw tightened. “I’ve been tracking their schedule. At the rate they’ve been moving, they’ll hit this building this time tomorrow.”
I swallowed back the surge of anxiety. “That means we don’t have any more time. We need to move tonight.”