Emergence (Fox Meridian Book 5) (12 page)

Confused and a little alarmed, Charlie put a call through to Fox and got an immediate ‘no connection’ indicator. She queried her VA.

‘All internet connectivity via the autocab’s repeater is currently offline,’ the infomorph told her.

‘That’s not possible. That’s why these things have repeaters, so that passengers can always get access.’

‘All internet connectivity–’

‘I heard you.’

The cab turned, heading west again. Charlie blanched. From here, heading west, there was only one place the cab could be taking her. She pulled up a virtual keyboard and began to type a text message. ‘I want you to scan for networks outside the cab,’ she told her VA. ‘There’s an arcology coming up on the right, so we might get a link from that. As soon as you get something, you’ll send this message.
As soon
. You probably won’t have long. Tag it with our geolocation.’

‘Of course, Miss Iberson,’ the VA replied. Charlie had never named the software, never let it call her by her first name. If it got this right, maybe she would get to know it better.

~~~

‘I have a message from Miss Iberson,’ Kit said into Fox’s head. ‘It is marked urgent.’

‘Probably wants us to know why she’s late,’ Fox replied, opening the message.

Fox. In autocab at attached location, heading west. Kidnapped. Help. Charlie.

‘Not an excuse,’ Kit said.

‘Damn good excuse. What’s west of that location?’

‘The Brooklyn Sprawl.’

‘I want rapid response units out there hunting for her ten minutes ago. Tell Pythia to get her ass over here. She can pick me up from the roof. Get the Palladium AIs hunting for a cab in the Sprawl. And forward this to Helen, FYI.’ Aloud, Fox said, ‘Charlie’s in trouble. I’m going to deal with it.’

‘Just got the message,’ Helen replied. ‘Think this is Minotaur again?’

‘The new firewalls slammed the door on him pretty hard last night, and Terri did say he might try something extreme to compensate.’

‘Keep me up to date.’

Fox headed for the door. ‘As soon as I know what’s going on, you will.’

~~~

The cab came to a stop in the middle of what had once been a fairly large crossroads. According to the map in Charlie’s head, they were on the junction of Rockaway and Cross Bay boulevards, but she doubted many people who had known the area when the streets had had names would have recognised the place. The car died, its lights shutting down and plunging Charlie into near-total darkness. No streetlights, no moon…

In the semi-ruined buildings around her, she could make out a few dim lights as her eyes adjusted to the dark. Those gave her no cheer at all. She knew there were good people in the Sprawl, the ones just trying to stay alive amid the ruins. She also knew that there were plenty of others who would view a rich woman, from their point of view anyway, in a micro-dress and heels as a surprise present. The best she could hope for was to be robbed.

The cab’s doors had unlocked when it shut down. She had heard them so she was sure that she could get out and start walking. That seemed like a fairly dumb idea. The car was no longer lit up, but it was still larger than she was and easier to spot. Of course, anything Fox sent out would be competing to find her before sprawlers did and the cab was easy to spot. With the doors unlocked, it also provided no protection at all.

She was still trying to decide what to do when she heard something, some noise, from outside. Slipping to the floor of the cab, flattening herself against the mercifully clean carpeting, Charlie held her breath and listened. She heard words, just snatches. ‘Cab,’ ‘doing here,’ ‘see anyone?’ Oh, Charlie hoped to God that they thought the cab was empty. ‘Take a look.’ Charlie was just thinking a lot of expletives she dared not say out loud when the door jerked open. She looked up into the rough face of a very large man in scruffy but serviceable clothes. He was holding an old baseball bat which had more than a few notches in it and developing a grin that said, ‘well just look what I’ve found.’

And then there was a lot of sound and light. The roar of vectored-thrust engines and the blaze of some sort of searchlight first. Then a voice, very loud and with the flat timbre of an infomorph. ‘This vehicle is under the protection of Palladium Security Solutions. Back away from the vehicle. I am authorised to employ force in the protection of this vehicle and its passenger.’

‘Shit!’ That was the sprawler with the bat. Charlie figured he could see whatever was out there and whatever it was, it had Bat Guy bolting away in a hurry.

More light flooded in from the other side of the cab and Charlie pushed herself up until she could just see out of the window. Something sleek, black, and big was coming to a landing outside the cab’s door. She had no idea whether it was armed, but if it was not, she would have been
really
surprised.

‘Please remain within the vehicle, Miss Iberson,’ the amplified voice said. ‘Miss Meridian will be here in sixty-eight seconds.’

The absurdity of the exact time measurement under the circumstances hit Charlie right in the funny bone. She started giggling, knowing she sounded just a little hysterical, but unable to stop, and she was still laughing when, sixty-eight seconds later, Fox marched down the rear ramp of Pythia’s transport and headed for the cab.

‘I’m glad to see you’re in good humour over being kidnapped,’ Fox said. The only immediate response she got was more giggling. ‘Do I need to get a sedative?’

‘No,’ Charlie forced out. With tears streaming down her face, she managed to get up onto her knees and looked over at Fox. ‘I was scared out of my head, and then… then the robot killing machine said… said you’d be here in sixty-eight… seconds.’

‘Hilarious. Come on, we’ll get you into Pythia. I want you out of harm’s way while we get this wrapped up.’ Fox looked up at the RRU hovering above them. ‘Stay on watch. I’m going to have this cab hauled in for analysis.’

‘Yes, Miss Meridian.’

‘Bernard, isn’t it?’

‘Yes, Miss Meridian.’

‘Good work, Bernard.’

‘The killbot is called Bernard?’ Charlie asked as Fox steered her toward the back of the vertol.

‘The AI is called Bernard. The killbot is a rapid response unit, RRU, and there’s one stationed on the roof of my house. The AIs cycle through them and Marie gives them a name every time she finds a new one.’

‘Well, I owe Bernard and his friend, and you, a lot for this one. Seriously, sexual favours, spots on the show where I’m nice, anything.’

Fox laughed. ‘I can get sexual favours from another source. Um… There is one thing you could maybe do. It’s not exactly for me, but it would make me happy…’

~~~

‘You’re staying at the tower,’ Fox said, ‘until we leave for Japan.’

Sakura frowned. ‘I was planning to go home. It’s quite secure and–’

‘And Minotaur has already managed to circumvent commercial firewalls to gain control of an autocab. That is
not
easy. They’re semi-autonomous with good security. I’ve got techs going over it, but my guess is he trashed the driver AI and set up a fixed-path program to the Sprawl. He couldn’t guarantee connectivity in there, so he rigged it. And if he can do something like that, he might well be able to breach your home security. We think he’s done it before.’

‘Oh… But–’

‘Listen to her, Nishi,’ Iberson said. ‘This guy is dangerous. It’s not like the suite at MarTech tower is exactly a hardship to live in either.’

‘It’s not home,’ Sakura said, sighing, ‘but no, it’s no hardship either.’

Fox nodded. ‘I suggest we migrate your PA to a server in the tower and then shut down your house entirely. You can’t hack something that’s powered down. Then you hole up in the tower and let us deal with Minotaur.’

‘It could be worse.’

‘Yeah, you could be locked in your house by a psychotic hacker.’

14
^th
January.

‘That was
amazing
!’ If anyone had any doubts about Marie’s enthusiasm, the way she was bouncing on her seat should have clarified the matter. ‘I could never go to any of your previous gigs and I was
so
disappointed to miss out on the tickets this time and… Wow, I can’t thank you enough.’

‘Thank Miss Meridian,’ Nishi Sakura replied, smiling in what looked like a truly genuine manner. ‘She saved Charlie. A couple of tickets and some backstage passes don’t quite cover that debt.’

‘I didn’t ask for backstage passes,’ Fox said. ‘Nor did I ask for VIP seats. Take a little credit.’

Sakura shrugged. ‘We usually have a couple of VIP seats free on the last night of a run. It was easier to get those than something on the main floor and backstage passes are not a problem when your security company’s top detective can vouch for the recipients. And anyway, I don’t get to talk to
real
fans that often.’

‘Isn’t Charlie a fan?’ Marie asked, looking at the chat show host who was sitting beside Sakura in the back of the armoured limo Fox had arranged to transport everyone.

‘More of a muse.’

‘There is more fire in her eyes when she’s sitting beside you,’ Sam said.

Iberson managed to force a scowl, though her cheeks were colouring a little. ‘I’m an ice-cold bitch from the nether regions of Hell, and don’t you forget it.’

Sam’s lips twitched. ‘Yes, ma’am.’ Iberson had been sitting in the VIP box beside Marie for the last couple of hours and Sam had a
very
good sense for people.

In turn, Iberson narrowed her eyes. ‘You must make a fucking fortune, pun intended, doing what you do.’

‘I don’t go hungry.’

‘Did
you
manage to watch any of the show tonight, Miss Meridian?’ Sakura asked.

‘More than last night. Minotaur didn’t even make the attempt tonight, which has me a
tiny
bit worried.’ Fox frowned and then shrugged. ‘He’ll try something else. Maybe another attempt in Washington.’

‘And you’re worried about
my
show tonight,’ Iberson said, ‘or you wouldn’t be tagging along.’

‘Not to mention transporting us there in a tank,’ Sakura added.

‘Armoured personnel carrier at the most,’ Fox corrected. ‘Though I admit that this thing has enough defence systems that you could probably drive it over a battlefield without worrying, it’s not quite a tank. Anyway, we drop Sam and Marie off at home, then we go on to Athena. Our techs talked to their techs. Everyone’s prepared.’

‘You’re worried about our safety too?’ Sam asked.

‘I doubt he’ll go there, but it was an excuse to watch Marie geek out some more.’

Marie let out a squeak. ‘I am not– Okay, I am, but the show was…’

‘Amazing?’

‘Pearlescent.’

‘If you can say that again in the morning,’ Sakura said, ‘I’ll consider it a success. I never judge a production by people’s first impressions.’

‘Well, Fox can tell you if I’m still raving about it in the morning.’ Marie beamed. ‘I will be.’

~~~

‘You were right,’ the tech in Athena’s control room stated, his tone unworried. ‘We’ve got an ongoing DDoS attack. Pretty big one. Multiple approaches too. This guy really wants to shut us down.’

Fox looked at him, a balding man in his mid-sixties, if she had to guess. ‘You don’t seem worried.’

‘Not. When this place was put together and started multicasting, we had some pretty major issues with a couple of extreme masculist groups. The network’s pretty over-engineered as far as handling distributed denial of service. We’ve got flow control from the three ISPs we use as well as internally. We’ve got some really sweet MarTech switches with infomorph traffic management. We’ve got more infomorphs watching for more complex attacks.’

‘This guy
is
good…’

‘This guy is good. True. He’s soaking up bandwidth, just nowhere
near
enough to cause problems.’ He pointed toward a display. ‘When that figure goes above ninety per cent, I’ll start worrying.’

Fox looked: the numerals were coloured yellow and showed seventy-two per cent. The graph beside the numerals indicated a fairly steady level which had ramped up from about twenty per cent at the start of the show. Three more graphs indicated the traffic through each service provider. ‘Is that saying most of this is trying to come through MarTech’s pipe?’

‘Sure is. That
does
have me a little worried. If he manages to get the same level through the other two feeds, we might have an issue.’

Fox nodded. Inside her head, she said, ‘Get in touch with our network ops people. See if they have any leads on this.’

‘I have already contacted them,’ Kit replied. ‘The attack is
much
larger than it appears, but they are starting to counter it quite effectively.’

The network traffic graph
did
seem to be easing back toward normal, but one of the others was edging upward now. ‘Our NOC is getting a handle on it,’ Fox said. ‘Hopefully they’ll have it locked down before that second one catches up.’

The tech sniffed. ‘Hope so.’

16
^th
January.

‘The attack sequence on Athena was sophisticated and massive,’ Jackson said. ‘Clearly highly orchestrated too, given that the individual hosts had to be communicating to spike traffic on the other provider networks as we blocked the traffic on ours.’

‘We’ve already worked out he’s a pretty good hacker,’ Fox pointed out. She was in her home office, and Jackson was in
his
home office. It was a pattern: the rest of the Palladium board members were in virtual attendance from home too.

Jackson’s image nodded. ‘Agreed. We’ve had ten attempts to breach the security in the last twenty-eight hours. We think he’s probing vulnerabilities. So far he has not discovered any we don’t know about already.’

‘Any idea what he’s trying to gain access to?’

‘Oh, we do indeed. Internal security camera feeds. Apparently, Mister Minotaur likes to watch.’

Fox decided laughing was inappropriate. ‘A phrase I never thought I’d ever hear Jackson Martins say.’