Delagarza waded through the rows, like a man delving into a labyrinth. He warned his companions not to touch anything, and not to speak to anyone. Cooke almost knocked over a pile of some obsolete system called USB, which earned him the glares of the two or three customers around them.
He passed the labyrinth and reached a counter where a twenty-something ganger was watching a porno in his wristband. His face was lit by the orange halo of a reg-suit hood, and his piercings shone as if on fire. It was hard to tell if he was doing more than watching since the pile of fake fur covering his body hid his hands pretty well. The kid barely gave Delagarza a second glance before asking:
“Yeah?”
“Hey there, Cronos, it’s Delagarza. How ya’ doing?”
That got the kid to raise his eyes. Behind them, Krieger snorted at the mention of the ganger’s chosen nickname.
“Delagarza? Long time no see, bad hombre, you. You here to see Nanny Kayoko?”
“Not today,” Delagarza said, making a vague gesture to Krieger and Cooke. “We’re here on business. Gonna need to use one of your backstage rooms.”
“Shit,” Cronos said with a grin, “that’s some heavy business right there. Are your buddies on the level?”
“Yes, but they’ll be waiting right here,” Delagarza said. Then, he turned to Krieger and said, “I’m gonna need that Shota-M now. Be back in a bit.”
“Just one second,” Krieger said, her voice low and dangerous. “I’m not to be away from the device at any time. What’re you planning to do with it?”
“Um, something that’ll get the job done, and will get the Shota-M open for you,” Delagarza said, “but is also kinda illegal.”
“More illegal than this?” asked Krieger with an expansive gesture.
“Yup.”
She caught Delagarza’s implied meaning from his innocent expression. “Ah,” she said, “I see. Well then, I’m still going in with you.”
“You okay with it?” Delagarza asked. Cooke looked at them both like they had suddenly sprouted horns.
“I’m not going to arrest you for doing the job we hired you to do,” said Krieger, the very image of rationality.
Delagarza nodded. It was a simple risk-reward equation, and he was glad to have judged it correctly. Whatever was inside the Shota-M, the enforcers cared about it enough to skip the law (to be honest, they did that a lot). Since Krieger agreed to get into Taiga Town, it was an implicit agreement for Delagarza to…do what he had to do. Even breaking this law.
“That settles it, then,” said Delagarza. He had no doubts the woman would keep her word. After all, being complicit to company-patented code tampering and not stopping it midway made her as guilty as he would be.
Cronos added Delagarza and Krieger’s wristband codes to his own and cleared them to security. When they stepped backstage, the automated sentry gun scanned them with its laser and let them pass without turning them to slag.
“Seems like it’s you and me, bad hombre,” Cronos told Cooke behind Delagarza. “You into balloon poppin’ videos?”
“What?” Cooke asked with a tremor in his voice.
Delagarza chuckled.
He entered a tiny workroom, cooled by a pair of nitrogen tanks in a corner. There was a workbench surrounded by mag-proofed tools and old-school monitors, along with several power sources. The walls didn’t show it, but Delagarza knew they were loaded with anti-listening devices. It was as private as it got without being SA personnel.
“Krieger, hand me the Shota-M,” Delagarza told the enforcer the second she stepped inside.
This was a critical part of the process. Once she handed him the computer, she’d be complicit.
“You sure you know what you’re doing?” Krieger asked. “If you break it, it’s my ass on the line.”
“I’ve done this before,” Delagarza told her with an impish smile.
“You’re shameless,” Krieger told him. She returned a tentative grin and handed him the computer.
Delagarza set to work immediately. He used the tools to dismantle the black shell of the computer and connected its entrails to the monitors and other diagnostic tools. After that, he identified the miniature mag-bombs installed near the CPU and rerouted them away. This took him an hour.
Another hour went by as he deactivated sub-systems and tricked others into thinking it was all going well. Several times, he had to swipe pearls of sweat away from his forehead. The extra moisture evaporated and froze on his gloves.
After all was said and done, he sent a sliver of energy to the naked Shota-M and turned it on. The CPU loaded its data to a virtual machine (brand software of Kayoko Inc) and from there, Delagarza slowly introduced command lines to the OS.
“What are you doing?” Krieger asked over his shoulder.
“Taking a look,” he told her. “Through this virtual machine, we can risk a glance inside the computer and see any data not encrypted without risking a hard drive wipe by corporate protocols.”
Breaking encryption would be harder, and it would take Delagarza weeks, if not months, of constant work with custom tools and hardware. But if they were lucky, whatever was inside wasn’t encrypted, and Delagarza would save himself all that arduous and expensive headache.
Krieger sighed and went to sit in a corner.
It took Delagarza four hours before he reached the single non-encrypted file that wasn’t part of the Shota-M original software.
A single executable, tiny in size. Judging by the hard drive editing history, there was a group of files hidden by expensive, third-party encryption that he couldn’t access. The tiny .exe was all he’d get today.
It could be a trap, he thought. A virus to dissuade prying eyes. Well, that was what the virtual machine was there for, and why he’d gone to all the trouble of coming to Taiga Town. He double-checked that all connections to the CPU were secure and then ran the program.
Half a second later, the monitor showed him a single image.
What? Delagarza thought. It made no sense. He was seeing a fractal, one of those geometric shapes generated by computers, a cluster of colors and figures generated by an algorithm. It was shaped in the vague form of a bird mid-flight.
He blinked. Had the image moved? Yeah, tiny parts of it changed and shifted. So, a video.
Perhaps it’s encrypted, one of those new methods—
He tried to reach for the keyboard and close the program, but his hand didn’t move. In fact, he couldn’t avert his eyes from the screen.
Something was wrong. His head burned, a sudden fever more powerful than anything he ever felt. Stars blared around his vision.
Delagarza screamed, a raspy, involuntary whine that splattered the glass with foamy saliva. His legs buckled from underneath him, his arms swiped the monitor against the floor.
The last image he saw was Krieger standing above him, surprise and recognition mixed in her eyes in equal parts. She kicked the monitor without looking at it, breaking the screen.
“Shit,” Krieger said, a faint echo that Delagarza barely heard. “That’s a memetic virus the asshole just stumbled upon.”
Then the convulsions started.
10
CHAPTER TEN
CLARKE
Only two men remained in the conference room, the others long gone after round upon unending round of questions and declarations of loyalty and service. To Clarke, it seemed like Julia, Pascari, hell, even the Captain, believed Antonov’s promises of justice and revenge.
Had the world gone insane?
“You’ll start a war,” Clarke warned Antonov, as he floated up to the EIF leader. “And get millions killed. First of all, the EIF.”
“That’s your professional assessment?” Antonov asked.
“Just common sense!” Clarke said. “You’ll race an SA fleet? And fight a planetary garrison? Even if you don’t get the EIF all killed by then, even if you somehow rescue Reiner’s kid, what then?”