Chapter 18
Josh DeGuilian rolled out of bed and stumbled to the window. Sweat rapidly chilled his skin.
Tonight’s dream fragments had him running down a thickly forested mountainside, pursued by a crash of hunters and a baying of genetically engineered tracking dogs known as hellhounds.
He couldn’t tell if it was a real memory from one of the personality constructs in his head or an invented image from his own fractured mind.
“Water?” Soleil’s voice came from the doorway as she padded in on bare feet, carrying a full glass. The moonlight highlighted her naked form.
“Thanks.” He took the glass. “Sorry I woke you again.”
Concern etched her face. “You need a break.”
The selfish parts of him wanted to escape with her to some frontier planet, but the rest of him knew trouble would follow. “There’s too much to do. The hounds are on our trail.”
Her expression became more calculating. “How close?”
He shouldn’t have said anything. Jumpers didn’t do nuanced risk evaluation. Soleil was better than most, but she was still a Jumper. Problems — such as rescuing Brenner’s friend Haseem — were for handling now, not waiting in the shadows for the most effective shot.
“The CPS has finally come up with an effective counter to the first version of the data hydraworm.” He searched for concepts she’d follow, or she’d zone out. “We’re still ahead, but their specialists are getting better at, er, shield generation and flux-trail tracing.”
She smiled briefly. “Thank you for using terms I understand.” Her smile faded. “Probably patterning your attack vectors, too.” She gave him a sidelong glance. “We need to finalize our exit plan to move on. So does Tuzan.”
Josh looked out at the sodden, sullen city. “He won’t talk about it.” He turned to catch her eye. “Will you leave your school? The kids? Haseem? The Jumpers?”
A frown settled on her face. “No easy answers, are there?” She cupped the side of his face gently. “But I would never leave without you.”
She’d unearthed his hidden fear and, in Jumper fashion, dealt with it directly. He caught her hand with his and pulled her close. “I love you.”
“You’re my hope.” She leaned more of her weight against him.
He stood with her for a long moment, inhaling the scent of her, marveling at his unparalleled luck to have her in his life again.
She took the glass from him and sipped. “Has the escape network been seeing an upsurge in Jumper passengers?”
“Yes. More active Minder Corps staff, too. We’re running low on robust IDs.
The CPS’s new security hardening has all government agencies looking to do the same.
Our original methods will eventually stop working.
We’re working on alternatives.” Without IDs that cleared routine checks, the end-point relocation part of their escape network would fail. “Why do you ask?”
“I’m hearing rumors of Jumpers being sent after political targets instead of jackers, crew, or pirate clan.
And even worse, being sent after other Jumpers.
” She blew out a frustrated breath. “When I first joined, Jumper Command didn’t bother to keep stats on unauthorized absentees because they were so rare.
But that was years ago. Before it became obvious that we all got waster’s disease.
So if Jumpers are self-retiring…” She brushed her hand against her cybernetic thigh.
Military-supplied synthskin never quite looked human. “Most of us aren’t suited to skulking.”
More than height, biometal bones, and detectable cybernetics made Jumpers hard to hide.
Those who passed training and survived the implants learned to take initiative and do what was right.
As far as he was concerned, those were their best qualities.
But Soleil was correct. They made lousy skulkers and even worse spies.
He brushed a stray lock of hair off her face. “The net is full of rumors about havens for minders. Maybe Jumpers need one, too.”
“No place would be safe.” Her expression turned bleak. “We’d be the legendary cyborg menace come to life. The Concordance military would send AI autoships with planet-busters to obliterate us.”
“Like you said, no easy answers.” He took the glass back from her and drained it. “Since I’m up, I’m raiding the cold box for leftovers.”
“There’s plenty, since you forgot to eat dinner.” She kissed him and patted his butt. “I’m going back to bed.”
The taste of her was still on his lips as he watched her pull up the covers and stretch out. He envied her the ability to sleep anywhere, anytime. The various personality overlays in his head all had useful skills, but that wasn’t one of them.
He slipped into a robe, then went into the kitchen to forage.
The customized percomp on the counter taunted him with the fact that it was two in the bloody morning. Time slipped away by the second, and he still needed to do so much.
The recent raids across Mabingion and a dozen other planets suggested CPS leadership was finally making better use of their most neglected resource — experienced finders and forecasters.
One of the unexpected knock-on effects from the first releases of health data had been a rise in the number of blackmarket clones and reverses of CPS minder drugs.
Pharmas had decades of hard-won expertise in protecting their precious data from each other and would-be cloners and thieves. The CPS was playing catch-up.
In the meantime, their ham-handed response was to start enforcing zero tolerance for Minder Corps staff who weren’t taking their so-called enhancement drugs.
That drove even more active-duty minders to terminate their contracts with the CPS in the only way possible, by disappearing.
Ridderth housed the third-largest CPS base in the galaxy.
Plenty of crews and jackers were willing to help minders get out, for a stiff price.
He, Soleil, and Tuzan had designed their pay-what-you-can network with care. It was more effective and secure than most, but they were bursting at the seams. Each new node increased their chances of bad luck or betrayal.
The CPS had also improved its monitoring of the intergalactic net for topics and trends of interest. More importantly, he and Tuzan strongly suspected the CPS had improved their data mining of galactic net search queries.
Increased CPS micro-targeting of media companies such as Novo G and journalists such as Tapio and Charrascos was just the tip of the iceberg. With its countless black-box budgets, the agency could afford to track and analyze a galaxy’s worth of patterns.
Doing so was fifty kinds of illegal, but the Concordance’s civilian government had to catch the CPS at it first. Then decide whether or not they cared.
He’d already redesigned his code drifts to avoid hitching rides on top-traffic or curiosity-bait phrases in the popular languages.
Unfortunately, it slowed down assembly of the algos that published or replicated the data of interest. He left them running because they still worked and gave the CPS more rabbits to chase.
Meanwhile, the latest hydraworm version he and Tuzan released yesterday, paired with the new data sourcing service, used a different architecture altogether. So far, so good, but sixteen standard hours of operation wasn’t much of a test.
For now, Tuzan’s crypto skills put the new hydraworm far ahead of CPS security ice breakers, but Josh knew it wouldn’t hold. Once truly heinous secrets got out, the CPS would get dead serious about stopping the leaks. He suspected the secrets would be heavy. He could almost feel them coming.
Or maybe that was his unruly sifter talent, sensing the haze of violent impulses from people in Ridderth.
A riot was brewing, like the one five years ago that ripped Soleil from him and nearly killed them both.
He hadn’t known back then that he even had a sifter talent, but the rising tension felt hauntingly familiar.
Their best hope with the hydraworm was to daylight the damning data faster than the CPS could obliterate the messenger.
He and Tuzan might be galaxy-class at stealthy system cracking and data manipulation, but they were only two people.
Once the pain got too great, the CPS had thousands of experts to throw at them.
Just as he was eating his last bite of savory custard, his percomp chimed with a unique tune. Tuzan kept odd hours. He had bad dreams, too.
He touched the percomp. “Heyo.”
He wouldn’t have trusted ordinary comms, but Tuzan had designed their closed net and hardware using techniques that even Josh didn’t understand.
A holo sprang to life, showing Tuzan wearing a high-collared black shirt. “Want to see a clone?”
Josh raised an eyebrow. “Define clone.”
“See for yourself.”
Another holo appeared, this one a recording tagged with a time code from several hours ago. A nondescript, mixed-ethno man in a pub, leaning against the wall, partially hidden in shadow. Shoulders hunched, head down.
A woman’s voice came from somewhere out of view. “Steal a custom, high-tech explosives package or two from your last construction gig, did ya’?” The tone was heavy with skepticism.
The man looked up with just his eyes, making him look like a turtle.
“I know more about demolition than any construction company on the planet.” The man’s noticeable Nordic accent clipped the English syllables.
“Tell me your target, I’ll tell you how to bring it down.
” His smile turned sly, his eyes bright.
“Everyone has enemies. Want to see them burn?”
A shock of recognition pulsed through Josh. The man in the holo was a Kameleon. A top-secret, reconfigurable spy for the CPS, as he’d once been.
The man’s personality overlay was one often used on Josh. He’d named it the bomber, but he only had remnants and echoes. The man in the holo had the full-blown persona. It was like looking in a distorted mirror.
From what he gathered in reading Davidro’s journals, the overlay was popular among Kameleon handlers. Very paranoid, very lethal, weirdly loyal, and zero compunction regarding targets or methods.
Josh muted the recording’s audio. “If he’s active, he’s got an onboard processor that records everything he sees and hears.”
“Yeah, we know.” The pub holo faded. “Ayasha sent him after one of our decoys.” Josh had used the bomber overlay remnants to help design the meandering trails and dead ends that deflected would-be intruders. He hadn’t anticipated an active Kameleon with the bomber overlay. The universe liked irony.
Tuzan shook his head. “Eerie seeing your mannerisms and attitude magnified like that.”
“Agreed.” Josh pulled up his robe’s hood against the sudden chill. “How did he find our trail?”
“From what Ayasha could pick out of his fractured mind, he’s tracking leads from a finder. The CPS always thinks the priority threat is a minder uprising. He dangled the wrong bait.”
“Maybe. The bomber knows conspiracies, and he’s got an eye for people with secrets. He might have been confirming what our operation isn’t doing.”
“You have a point.” Tuzan frowned. “It means we’re in the CPS’s nets, even if they can’t pick us out of a data stream yet.” His frown deepened as the silence lengthened. “We should talk about spindown on our terms.”
“Yes.” Relief washed over Josh. He’d been afraid he’d have to force the issue at the cost of their friendship. “Contingencies, too.”
Tears welled in Tuzan’s eyes. “My sister wanted to save them all.”
Josh regretted not being there in person to hug him. Tuzan’s scary minder talents meant people shied away from him, and the man thrived on touch. “I’m selfish. I just want to save the people I love, and the people they love.”
“Maybe we can’t stop the bloody Legacy from killing millions.” Tuzan’s shoulders squared. “But we can try.”
“I have some ideas,” said Josh cautiously. He didn’t want to push too hard.
“Ideas?” Tuzan laughed. “You already have plans within plans and backups of the backups. Let’s hear them.”