Code Breakers Complete Series: Books 1-4 (50 page)

“That’s my girl,” Robertson said as he injected the yellow solution into her arm.

Petal bent over at the waist, threw up instantly, splashing a thick black and green liquid to the floor, and catching the corner of Robertson’s lab coat. “I’m sorry.” She tried to stand upright but fell back on the bed. The room spun and her stomach muscles tightened with cramp.

“It’s fine,” Robertson said. “I wondered if that might happen. It’s the recombine solution ejecting the remaining NanoStems. I’ll get you a bucket.”

Petal slumped forward on the edge of the bed, trying to hold back the shivers that racked her body as she continued to heave up the thick sludge. But despite it all, she could feel her head lighten, the haze burning away, leaving everything clear behind. Her thoughts sped up, became sharper.

Robertson returned with a bucket and a hand-held vacuum device. He cleaned up the place and sat with Petal until she stopped heaving. “While you were sleeping,” Robertson said. “You kept asking for Gerry. Is that your friend who found you in the desert?”

Petal shook her head, wiped the viscous liquid from her lips.

“No. How do I explain Gerry? He’s one of the good guys. He saved City Earth from Seca and this crazy AI. It was a mad ride.”

For the next thirty minutes while Petal waited for her stomach to settle she brought Robertson up to speed with her various exploits over the years and ultimately what had happened at Cemprom. She told him about Gabe and Enna and how Gabe had set her free from the Red Widows.

“We need to make contact with them,” Robertson said. “If we’re going into battle we could use allies, and given what they’ve done for you, I feel we owe them some backup and support. I’d hate for them to get caught in the middle of all this.”

“Knowing them like I do, they’re already in the middle and up to their chest in trouble.” She laughed, but underneath she worried about them. Wondered if the Red Widows had realised it was Gabe who had set her free. Had his cover been blown? And what of Enna and Gerry?

“Right then, we’ve got no time to lose. Let’s go meet with the others and see if we can’t take out that damned satellite,” Robertson said.

“I could get to like you.” Petal smiled, liking his affirmative attitude. “But know that all my friends kind of end up a bit bloody and mentally damaged.”

“Hmm, I think it’ll be worth it.”

Jimmy Robertson hopped off the bed, led Petal out of the medical room. “Once the satellite is down, we can get our systems online. If there’s a network out there, we’ll be able to pick it up,” Robertson said as they walked down the myriad grey corridors. “Maybe you’ll be able to find your friends soon.”

“You know the Meshwork is run by one of the servers, right?” Petal said.

“It’s how we initially found Elliot, but since we lost contact with you, we’ve been unable to find our way out of our domain. The satellite doesn’t just control the drones. It also dampens data traffic. It’s why we have to be careful with what we do.”

“Can’t you blast it out of orbit with a rocket?” Petal said.

Robertson scrunched his face. “That would indeed be easier, but they have a whole bunch of countermeasures, early-warning systems. And we’d betray our location before the missile could even reach it. And let’s face it, if we had that kind of capability, I would have used it myself to blast their station into outer-space.”

“But this laser doohickey will work, right?”

“I hope so, but the software isn’t quite right. Like the stealth software wasn’t right on the sub. But then I saw what you did with the code. It’s quite incredible really.”

Petal shrugged, blushed a little. “I had some good teachers.”

“Let’s hope they taught you about EM pulse waves and laser-plasma fields.”

“Don’t worry Doc. If it’s a computer problem, I’m sure we’ll fix it.”

He gave her arm a little squeeze, increased his pace, clearly eager to get going. He had a lot of time to make up it seemed.

When they arrived at the double glass doors to the LEMP lab, she saw Vickers in his fatigues standing at a metal rail looking down into a deep, wide shaft. Sasha and two other military types were standing next to him on his right. To his left stood a group of five lab-coat-wearing scientists.

As soon as they caught sight of her and Robertson everyone turned to greet them. Vickers marched forward and opened the doors to let them in. His face had softened since Petal had last seen him dragging Sasha away from the sub.

“Are you sure about this, Doc?” Vickers said to Robertson.

“You don’t have to worry about me, General. Now let’s do this. It’s time The Family had something to worry about.”

Vickers smiled and clapped him on the shoulder.

“That’s more like it, old man.”

***

Petal entered the commands into the LEMP’s targeting computer as requested by Robertson. She could feel the tension in the air. The silence was heavy with it.

She worked next to Sasha and the Doc. All three, in sync, checked, and double-checked the coding was correct, that the trajectory and firing routines were bug free.

The laser system was actually made from ten small laser generators feeding into a single super-laser generating a beam of over three-hundred-petawatts of power. One direct hit on the satellite should, in theory, knock it out of action. And it’d be so quick, a matter of nano seconds, that it would hit them before they even knew it, bypassing their countermeasures.

“I’m done,” Petal said. She ran her code through the compiler, error-free. “We ought to simulate it, though.”

“Agreed. Running a simulation now,” Sasha said who remained busy at her holoscreen. Robertson likewise continued to check through the various routines and sub-routines, making sure that the power capacitors were synchronised and regulated to each individual generator.

The device was designed such that a high-powered laser fired from the generator would create a plasma cloud of highly concentrated electromagnetic radiation around The Family’s spy and communications satellite. The EM field would overload the various logic boards within the satellite, frying its chips, rendering it useless.

If it worked correctly, it would knock out The Family’s capability to observe and monitor the lands and seas around the Dome, and as Petal suspected, would remove the suppression from the Meshwork. She knew that it wasn’t an issue of the backbone server being offline. The entire point of that machine was that it never went offline. Therefore, access to the Meshwork had been supressed.

While the others prepared the final pieces of software, Petal examined the stream of data to and from the satellite, using Criborg’s snooper system.

An encryption layer secured the data coming from the satellite. It was clever, but she eventually managed to get past it using an algorithm taught to her by Gabe. She realised that all access to the Meshwork was being bypassed and routed to a dumb virtual server running within the satellite itself, creating a kind of feedback loop acting not unlike the way she could hold code and AIs within herself. And despite the encryption on the stream being relative easy to get past, access to any of the satellite’s systems were impenetrable, even for her considerable skills. It wasn’t just good programming it was something else entirely. The systems weren’t visible. It was as if they were hidden somewhere else entirely, a system within a system.

One of the benefits of taking out the satellite and getting the Meshwork back up was that she should be able to re-establish a connection with Gerry and the others.

She felt light-headed at the thought of speaking with him again. In a few hours, she might be able to communicate with him for the first time since it all went down at Cemprom. Her stomach knotted thinking about it. She didn’t really know what to say. She knew her feelings had changed towards him, but was that the same with him too? How much had he changed since being taken away by The Family? For a few seconds she dwelled on a terrible realisation that he might not want anything to do with her, that he might be one of them now. One of The Family.

Vickers paced across the metal grating circling the round graphene-coated laser projection generators. His steps rang out like ticks of a clock.

Petal looked up at him, gave him a glare. He checked himself, stopped pacing. He gripped the metal rail, tuning his knuckles white.

“Dude, chill out,” Petal said, trying to ease the man’s tension. It was putting everyone else on edge.

“If this doesn’t work, we’re not going to be in good shape,” he said through a tight mouth, his teeth clenched.

“I thought you were the one eager to get up to the surface?” Petal raised an eyebrow.

“How dare you!”

“Put a cap on it, General, we’ll get there.” Petal would have normally given a cheeky grin to show that she was messing around, but considering his face was puce and puffed like an inflated plum with his own self-importance, she stared him down.

Robertson interjected before Vickers could launch a tirade. “Can we all please keep our minds on the job at hand?”

“We’ve got about twenty minutes until the satellite’s over us, Doc. You’ll excuse for me being a little tense. It’s not like we can trust this—”

Now Robertson fumed, his nostrils flaring as he stormed over and squared up to the General. “You will not disparage her, goddamn it. If I say she’s to be trusted you take my damned word on it, you understand?”

Petal couldn’t but help smirk and feel good inside. She could get used to someone having her back like that.

Vickers pointed at Robertson, his face ready to explode, but the older scientist to his credit refused to be intimidated, stood his ground. Vickers eventually dropped his accusing finger, took a deep breath. “I’m sorry, okay. I’m nervous about this.” He turned to Petal. “No offence intended, it’s just we don’t get many visitors here. It’s been a while since we’ve had to trust an outsider.”

“It’s okay, General. I understand,” she said, trying to keep the peace. She turned away and walked over to Sasha who stood in open-mouthed shock.

“How’s it all coming along?” Petal said to her, keeping her voice low.

“Oh, erm, I’m nearly finished. The simulation’s fine. No issues so far. The power couplings are good to go. Everything seems ready at this end.” Sasha closed down her holoscreen and walked around the metal gantry, leaning against the rails.

Robertson came over, inspected the data on Petal’s holoscreen.

“I’m impressed,” he said to the both of them. “You fixed the power load-balance algorithm.”

Petal curtsied dramatically. “You’re welcome.”

“The sim ran fine,” Sasha said. “We’re ready, I think.”

Robertson stepped back, regarded the cylinders in the middle of the room. He then looked up through the tunnel that bored up to the surface, his gaze tracing the thick glass tube with the central laser diode running up through the middle of the cylinder.

At the top of the tunnel, a good twenty metres high was a focusing lens that made the charged photons into a narrow and directional beam.

“Let’s switch on the power, and see how she runs,” Robertson said. He quickly gestured across his holoscreen, and the fusion reactors below the compound came online.

Petal felt a rumble through the metal gantry as the reactor filled the capacitors with power.

Everyone gripped the rail, as if they would be thrown to the floor, but it was more the tension and anticipation of this weapon finally coming online.

The ten surrounding smaller lasers, housed in ceramic-like cylinders and circling the main laser glowed red. As Robertson routed the power from the capacitors under the gantry, their bright red lights, dimmed by a smoked-glass protection screen, shone into the central laser.

Like a great light bulb filament, the centre of the main laser glowed a dull orange colour.

Although protected behind inches of Plexiglas, Petal’s stomach grew tight and knotty with nerves. So much power a few feet away.

“Everything seems fine,” Robertson said after a few minutes of checking the levels on his screen. The system seemed to be stable and ticking over nicely. “The power balance is self-regulating efficiently. We’re up to two-hundred-fifty-petawatts. We’ll be ready in three minutes.”

Robertson looked at the General, who in turn stared at his own screen. The military leader nodded, seemed satisfied.

In the middle of the gantry, where everyone gathered, a graphical representation of the satellite’s position moved across the space in a holographic three-dimensional display.

“This is so cool,” Petal said in a whisper.

“I know, right?” Sasha replied. Both girls stood next to each other, stared into that great destructive tube, waiting for the laser to fire.

“The satellite will be in firing range in T-3 minutes. Is she ready to go?” Vickers asked.

Everyone looked at Robertson then, all waiting for his go-ahead. He licked his lips, rubbed a slightly trembling hand across his forehead. “I guess this is it then.”

He started the countdown. It ticked down on all the screens. The rumbling from the energy source grew stronger and the smaller lasers glowed brighter. The super-laser tube hummed, and everyone stepped back.

“We’re at full power,” Robertson said.

“I think we should all move out,” Vickers said. “Not that I don’t trust you, Doc, of course. But just in case.”

Robertson agreed. He ushered everyone from the laser chamber. The heavy doors slammed shut behind Vickers. They filled up the corridor outside, gathered around the observation screens. Robertson took his slate, and watched the numbers tick down. Petal could feel her heart beat against her chest.

“Here we go,” Robertson said. “Ten, nine, eight, seven.”

Petal found herself mouthing the final seconds, as her hands tensed into tight fists, her heart beating in rhythm with the countdown.

“Five, four, three, two, one.”

Chapter 25

Petal stalked the corridor, waited for the results of the LEMP attack. Robertson had gone into the lab with Vickers to check the system. They insisted everyone else stay outside, just in case. She swung her leg back and forth, tapping against the corridor’s wall. There was a buzz about the Criborg compound. Every person, like her, waited with baited breath.