Chapter 11
Jason burst out of the shipping container and immediately slipped on the sprinkler-slick ground and fell heavily on his side.
Mud splashed as he scrambled up and ran blindly on.
Literally blindly, because his lenses were still connected to the Collective’s chat program, and all they showed was blackness.
If he looked behind him, he’d see the receding, spotlit judges’ bench, but ahead was nothingness.
“Disconnect lenses!” he gasped, and his vision cleared.
He squinted in the sudden light. He was standing directly inside one of the floodlights that dotted the yard, his body edged in harsh illumination.
He leaped out of the circle of light and began to run, keeping to the darkness as much as possible.
His body screamed at him to run faster. Where didn’t matter, only that he put distance between himself and the shipping container where the phone lay abandoned, drawing Huntsman like a beacon.
He found that he was sprinting toward the commercial hyperloop station, and the urgent need animating his body shifted from run to hide.
If he could get under cover before Huntsman arrived, the assassin would have no way of knowing where he’d gone.
If he kept running without a plan, the odds were that Huntsman would find another way to track him.
He pounded up the back steps, but the station door was locked, so he shifted to a nearby window, heaved desperately, and almost fell through when it gave suddenly.
Scrambling inside, he slammed the window down, latched it, then checked again to make sure it was really locked.
Finally, he took a breath and turned around.
He was in a dark space filled with desks and office clutter.
It was deserted, which was good, because there was no one to call the cops, but also bad, because there was no one to call the cops.
And he was still too exposed. But there must be a route down into the hyperloop launch area somewhere in the building.
He turned to make a final check of the window lock and froze.
Silhouetted against a floodlight, a tall hooded figure paced toward the station.
Its shape was concealed by a long black trench coat, and faint reflections like eyes glimmered under its hood—too many eyes.
Jason thought instantly of the spider, and nausea welled.
But the spider avatar was just an advertisement for the real danger this man represented, and that Jason could see clearly in the sleek shape of the sound-suppressed pistol held low in one hand.
He dropped to the carpet, holding his breath, and army-crawled across the floor until he reached a stairwell leading up, then took the stairs two at a time on his hands and feet.
The stairwell opened to another set of offices.
He lunged into one and slipped under the desk.
Wrapping his arms around his legs, he waited.
His ears strained for a sound, but all he could hear was his own ragged breath. He had no way of knowing where Huntsman was or if Huntsman knew where he was. The uncertainty was torture. His whole being craved information, some data to work with, to plan, to decide, to act.
His lenses lit up, and after a shocked, disoriented moment, he realized he was seeing through Huntsman’s eyes.
The assassin walked unhurriedly toward the station house.
Jason could see the pistol as an unfocused blur at the bottom edge of his vision, held down and ready.
The view swayed left and right as Huntsman checked the shadows between the floodlights, but he mostly looked down and ahead.
Suddenly his vision was bathed in green, then blue, and then it became high-contrast black and white with edges enhanced and outlined.
It was immediately clear what Huntsman was looking at: Jason’s muddy footsteps in the dirt, leading directly to the station house.
Well, phreak.
So that was what Jason had seen under his hood: multiple sensors feeding night vision, thermal, and who knew what else to Huntsman’s lenses.
And he was sending this feed to Jason’s phone.
Was it a taunt, so Jason would understand the inevitability of his death, so he could watch it coming?
Or was it to scare him into making a mistake?
Should he stay, or should he run?
He began to subvocalize a command to disconnect so he could see the real world again, then thought better of it. Hands shaking, he reached up and physically popped the lens out of his right eye, then closed his left. His stomach dropped as he saw a trail of mud leading right to his hiding place.
Definitely run.
Kicking off his mud-laden shoes, he rolled out from under the desk and scurried down the hall.
Darkened offices called to him, promising safety, but he couldn’t risk hiding now: He had to get out, find light, people, civilization, some place where a hooded, cloaked, pistol-wielding assassin would draw notice and hopefully a cop or ten.
On the feed, Huntsman’s arm and pistol were leveled at the window he’d come in by.
There was a distant but sharp click as the gun bucked, and a musical tinkle as the glass showered downward.
It was strange hearing the sounds from downstairs while seeing the action that made them in front of his face.
“Ghost,” came a whisper in his ear, and he jumped, but it wasn’t the hiss of Huntsman.
“Sprite?” he whispered back. His heart skipped a few beats as it tried to leap in hope and fall in dismay at the same time. Was she here as friend or foe?
“How’s your contingency plan going?” Her voice was laced with sarcasm, and his heart dropped.
She’d made it clear she had a plan for self-preservation, and any plan for her safety would not include helping him.
It might include helping catch him. That would certainly put her in MorDread’s good graces.
But she went on, “I can’t stop him directly, but I’ll do my best to help you survive this. ”
“Phreak,” Jason gasped. “Oh, phreak, thank you.”
“You need to be more careful,” she said. “Your lenses went into search mode when you got too far from your phone. If Huntsman had looked, he could’ve found them.”
“Guess I’m a little too busy running for my life to stop and think,” Jason said. Huntsman was climbing in the window now, draping an edge of his trench coat on the sill to shield himself from the broken glass.
“Good thing I found you first,” Sprite said. “I’m talking to you through his phone, but he doesn’t know because he’s not looking for intruders. That, and I’m hiding the connection. I’m a way better phreaker than he is.”
“Glad to hear it,” Jason said, jogging down the hall. He tried one door, then another, but they all led to offices. “So I can see him; how does that help me?”
“You know where he is, so find an exit where he isn’t.”
“Think I’m not trying?” He threw open another door.
Another hallway, more offices. There had to be another stairwell down.
He tried a door he’d passed the first time, opening it to find a large room filled with banks of terminals.
The control center. And—his heart leaped—an Exit sign cast a dim green light at the far back.
He hurried toward the emergency door beneath it but paused as he reached it.
On the door’s push bar, block letters declared: Alarm Will Sound.
He imagined shoving through the door, triggering the alarm, and Huntsman leaping into action, knowing he was in an emergency stairwell down.
Did he have enough of a head start to risk drawing Huntsman’s attention?
On the feed, Huntsman was looking at Jason’s shoes, abandoned under the desk. He looked up and around, and his gaze focused on the floor, on a much smaller but still visible trail of mud droplets. He started to move again, following.
Jason looked down through his bifurcated vision at his mud-splattered clothes.
For a moment he had the urge to strip naked, but in that exact instant, Huntsman’s vision shifted so the walls and doorways were a cold blue while the computer terminals inside glowed yellow or orange.
Thermal optics. Jason’s body heat would show up bright red, clothes or no clothes. “Sprite!” he choked.
Her voice was purposeful. “Got an idea. Gimme a sec.”
He didn’t have a sec. Huntsman’s vision was back in high-contrast black and white, and Jason could only stare, frozen, as the assassin followed the mud marks right up to the control-room door .
. . and past it. Down the hall and around the corner he went, still following splatters of mud, splatters Jason had never dropped.
“How are you doing that?” Jason asked.
“I took over his feed. I’ve got this nifty open-source viscous liquid simulator.
Dribble a bit in, and instant mud.” Jason could actually see the mud fading into existence.
If Huntsman looked carefully, he’d be able to tell it existed only in his smartspace, but he was too intent on finding Jason.
“Now,” Sprite said, “double back and get out of there.”
But Jason was still staring at Huntsman’s feed. He had just opened a door to a stairwell leading down, the stairwell Jason had been trying to find earlier. A red sign declared: Hyperloop Loading Zone. “Can you get him into a hyperloop pod?”
“Um. Yes? But—”
“Do it,” Jason said, loping to a terminal. A quick stab of its touch screen woke it and brought up the login. He pressed his thumb to the biometric square on the screen. The system beeped and flashed red, its way of shaking its head.
“What are you doing?” Sprite asked.
“Hang on.” The system would lock after a certain number of attempts.
The question was, how many? Three? No, this was just a shipping hub, not some spy agency.
Ten? More likely. Twenty? He needed to know.
“Sprite, can you find out how many login attempts trigger a lockout at commercial terminals that connect to TransNet?”
There was a long silence. Jason held his breath, ready to turn and run. But Sprite had already shown she was a very good phreaker. She could get him the info.
Sure enough, her next words were “Twenty-five.”
“Thanks.” And damn. He had to work fast. In his bifurcated vision, Huntsman was already at the bottom of the stairs, eyeing a trail of “mud” that led to the curved airlock door of the hyperloop tube.
Jason pressed his thumb on the biometric square again and got another headshake.
Two attempts. He did it again. Three attempts. Four. Five. Six.
Huntsman slowed as he approached the tube door.
It was open, and so was the shipping pod within.
Jason could see through the wide doors to the plastic-wrapped pallets inside.
The pod was only half full, its loading abandoned when the union workers ended the evening shift, and the pallets made spaces and pockets of shadow inside where someone could be hiding.
Huntsman had his gun up now and was flipping quickly through his optics. Each step was careful, quiet.
Nineteen login attempts. Twenty. Twenty-one. Huntsman was right at the door now, leaning around the corner. Sprite’s mud trail led into the back recesses of the pod.
Twenty-four attempts. One remaining.
“I was going to say,” Sprite said as Huntsman stepped into the pod, “but I can’t lock him in.”
“Leave that to me.” Jason pressed his thumb to the screen for the twenty-fifth time.
The terminal flashed red and stayed red. Remain In Place appeared on the screen in capital letters.
In the pod, Huntsman whirled, but he was too late to stop the door from sliding shut.
May the RNG gods bless Andrew Norman for his paranoia!
He had designed the hierarchical Nets with security as their top priority, and the weak link in any system was human users, so that was where Norman’s paranoia was focused.
One failed login attempt was an accident; three was suspicious; twenty-five was criminal.
It probably meant that someone was trying to hack the biometric scanner, and if they were doing it from an official terminal, that meant they’d infiltrated the building.
So Norman had designed the system to respond by locking down not only the terminal under attack but everything it controlled until law enforcement could arrive.
“Clever!” Sprite said.
Jason felt a little glow. It was good to know—and know Sprite knew—that he wasn’t totally helpless. What he’d just done was the very essence of hacking: If you knew how a system worked, you could make it work for you, even when it was trying to stop you.
“Ooh,” Sprite said, “he’s mad.” Huntsman was throwing himself against the door. Suddenly he stopped and crouched in what seemed like apprehension. And then the view blurred and flipped upside down.
“What was that?” Jason asked.
Sprite’s voice was equal parts shock and glee. “I—I think the hyperloop fired!”
Jason doubled over with a shout of laughter.
He hadn’t expected the lockdown to launch the hyperloop, but when the launch tube had been sealed, its pressure would have automatically been matched to the almost nil pressure of the main hyperloop tube.
At that point the system had no choice but to launch or risk catastrophic decompression.
Huntsman’s view was upside down, pinned against the pallets in the back of the pod by the acceleration, which was far harsher in a shipping pod than in passenger pods. “Can you connect me to him by voice?” he managed. “Before he’s out of range?”
Sprite was laughing herself, a bubbly giggle, and she could barely get out, “One sec. Okay, you’re on.”
“Hi, little spider,” Jason said. “Have fun in Chicago, or wherever you end up. Oh, and remember to breathe slowly. You should have enough air for the trip.”
“You little—” Huntsman began, but whatever epithet he’d been about to bestow was cut off, and Jason’s lens displayed a floating phone with a question mark on its screen. Connection lost.
“That,” he said, “worked out even better than I hoped. Did I say thank you yet?”
Silence. He remembered that Sprite had been talking to him through Huntsman’s now out-of-range phone. She was gone.