“Hi Cosette, it’s me.”

“Who is me?”

“It’s Athan. How’s it going?”

She paused to place a hot sigh uncomfortably in my ear. “Well the second I got your call I got a cold chill and a premonition of doom, so it could be better. But enough about me. Let’s talk you. I know this isn’t a social call, because you don’t do those. I get a call from an unlisted number, and I think, oh no, it’s Athan.”

“Wow. You really…uh…bottle this stuff up, don’t you? Make me out to be a real villain.”

“Can’t imagine why. I’m not heartless, you know. Tower calls to chat sometimes, I find myself actually looking forward to talking to him. Usually because it ends in beers. Moon sometimes has business or questions. Hell, Jack even offers to help with my work.”

“Oh. Well. I guess we could get a drink together sometime, if you’d like?”

“I’ll consider it if you’re still alive after whatever it is you’re calling about. What did you break this time, Athan? An XPCA facility? A secret military weapon? Some high-ranking official somewhere? If you need a regenerator for one of your friends again, I told you, that was a one-time deal in exchange for full disclosure on your little act, and even then you saw fit to feed me some bullshit story about powers vanishing.”

I held my head in my hands, the comms in my ear continuing to yell at me while I waited for her tirade to end. If she ever wondered why I never called to chat, this was it.

“So? What is it then?” she finished. “Statistically speaking, someone’s dying to know.”

I looked around me at the dimly-lit metal walls of the disused storeroom, XPCA guards walking past the window at regular intervals. I was hiding behind an upturned desk in the dark.

“Uh. Nothing! Kinda.”

“Man, that’s an awful word.”

“I’m actually calling for your benefit. I’m doing that thing you always keep telling me to do.”

“What, not get into trouble?” she scoffed.

“Err, no. The other one. Tell you about it when I’m going to.”

“Surely you’re kidding.” Her voice even had a tone of amusement in it.

“Uh, nope.”

She fidgeted on the line for a moment. “You know, I tell you that so that hopefully you would call me and I could tell you to do that other thing I always keep telling you to do.”

“What, not get into trouble?” I echoed.

“Yes. For fuck’s sake, a thousand times, yes. What the hell are you getting into now, Athan? What more mess could you possibly have the motive to create? What messes even do you have left to make? Or are you going to reprise one of your former masterpieces?”

“Uh. Nothing that bad. Just…a little breaking and entering.”

“Of a live nuke reactor? No, a max-security prison? Wait, is it Fort Knox?”

“No. Just an XPCA facility. New Mexico.”

I watched a guard pace past the window again, his boots clanking in the metal hallway. I remembered similar rooms and hallways when I was here before. I lived here for a time bookmarking Talon’s death. Not anywhere I ever thought I’d come back to. The extended interrogations had kind of taken the joy out of the place for me.

Meanwhile Cosette was trying to set a new world record for longest, slowest sigh ever transmitted over the ‘net. As her breath finally ran out the sigh ended with a groan and a very defeated sounding puh.

“You okay over there?” I asked.

“Oh I’m just wondering if I have brain damage. Because there has to be some reason I keep putting up with your shit, Chariot.”

“It’s because I’m adorable.”

“And yet I’d kill you and adopt a puppy in a heartbeat. Look, why are you planning to break and enter a secure XPCA facility? If there’s data you need that badly, can’t you just, oh I don’t know, ask?”

“No,” I said, turning serious now. “Look, when Dragon attacked me, he said that the device he wanted being in XPCA hands meant it was ‘as good as his’.”

“Because he thinks he can just kill and break through anything in his way probably.”

“Yeah that’s what I thought, too. And then we looked into it. And I can’t tell you how I know this part, but there’s a lot of personnel shifts going on seem more directed than usual. It’s not just the usual mess of people being constantly reassigned and relocated. Too many corrupt and incompetent people are lining up too well, all above and below the device.”

“So I know you just said you can’t but how do you know this?”

“Cosette, c’mon.”

“Well it’s kind of important for me believing what you say. I haven’t exactly pulled the records, but from what I’m seeing it looks like same ol’ bureaucratic bullshit as ever.”

“Sorry. Really can’t reveal my sources. And that’s why I’m calling to tell you it’s happening rather than asking questions or seeking proper channels.”

“Mmm,” she mused, and I could vaguely hear the thunk-thunk of her boots propping up on her desk. “Basically you think there’s people in Dragon’s pocket.”

“He’s very good. He’s very dangerous. But he’s not that good. I’ve never beaten him, but I’ve hurt him, I’ve given him pause. He’s not utterly beyond to me. And I’m just one guy, not a whole organization. He shouldn’t have been this successful or have a shot at cracking a base all by himself, but he is, and we all know he will. I think he’s always had help.”

“So you don’t want to make waves because you don’t want to tip anyone off.”

“Yeah, exactly. I’m not gonna blow anything up this time, just sneak in and check a little data.”

Which was kind of a lie. We were gonna steal a crapton of it. But the blowing up part was true, at least, I intended for it to be so.

She spent a long time quietly chewing on my words before speaking. “Can you do it without getting caught?”

“Yeah. Should be fine.”

“So you, for once, are honestly just calling to let me know what’s up?”

“Pretty much,” I said.

Her voice sounded defeated, but with the same competent seriousness I always attributed to her. “If it weren’t happening, I wouldn’t believe it. And I absolutely shouldn’t be saying this, but I think it’s a fair indicator of just how low you’ve dragged my standards, but…thank you, I think?”

“No problem. Any time.”

“No. Not anytime. Do not break into secure facilities any time. Bad Chariot–“

“It’s nice having such a sharp CO. I’m gonna go now.”

“Get caught and I’m disavowing any knowledge of this and pushing to have you killed.”

“Love you too. Chat soon. Beer sometime, maybe.”

“Yeah. I’m gonna have one now. Don’t get anyone killed. The paperwork is a bitch.”

She hung up on me and I was back alone in the dark. With Tem. So pretty alone.

The infiltration had been going great until a while ago. Tem and I could walk into the base without any problem. We could get to the half of the base we weren’t allowed in without any problem, thanks to her powers. And if we were willing to employ any of a variety of potentially-destructive techniques, we could have gotten through the server door without a problem. But I really didn’t want to blow up chunks of the base, and AEGIS and Lia had both come up empty on quick solutions, and so I was waiting in the dark here. Just waiting.

After like twenty minutes of it, AEGIS had me go out and dump a skimmer program onto the door lock, so that if it did get used, she could get instant access. And she was cracking away at the door in her own way, a ‘brute force attack’ she called it, even the name of which did not seem like her operational wheelhouse.

And obviously it wasn’t. Because I’d now been sitting here for two hours, all the tension and adrenaline in my body turned to aching. I’d taken to counting how long before the guard patrol walked past the door’s window and found it every four minutes almost exactly. And then how many times it was the same guard before a different went by. So far, the shift had only changed on me once, but I was sure if I stayed another six hours, I could witness the miracle again. Really gave me something to look forward to other than my ass being asleep.

“Yeah, this isn’t the part of espionage they glorify in the movies,” Lia murmured on comms, sounding sleepy and bored as I felt. “How’d talking to Cosette go?”

“Better than expected.”

“She’s not gonna have you killed?”

“Nope.”

“Oh. Good,” she said.

The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.

And then more drawn-out, boring silence.

“Hey, can I get an update?” Lia asked.

“I’m sitting in a dark room with Tem in a wheelchair,” I said, trying to sound as irritated as possible.

“Not you, dumbnuts,” Lia chuckled. “AEGIS. Yo. Hello. AEGIS.”

“What…?” AEGIS answered.

“Update us. It’s been two hours, girl.”

“Oh. Sorry. Just…working on this thing…”

“Yeah she’s gone,” Lia sighed. “Well I’m gonna make some cocoa. Want any Athan?”

“Har, har,” I said.

“Oh, wait!” AEGIS said suddenly. “Someone just went in! I have their badge creds. Thank you, thank you, thank you…” I heard her typing, even over comms. “…Lieutenant Hanson. You glorious bastard of a man. Now finish whatever you’re doing in there so Athan can get in and we can go home.”

“Oh good,” Lia yawned. “Well, that’s probably enough time to make cocoa. I’ll leave my earpiece in, yell if anything exciting happens.”

I’d hoped the waiting was at an end after that, but it was still most of an hour before Lieutenant Hanson — whom I grew to loathe over the ticking seconds — finished whatever work he had in there and stopped being in the data center. I stretched and heard my back popping way too much.

“Ready to go, Tem?” I asked.

She nodded from where she sat in her chair behind the desk with me, and as I grabbed the handles to her chair, both of us melted into invisibility. The guard had just gone past our storage room, so for once I didn’t have to wait.

We glided silent and invisible through empty hallways, Tem’s chair solid in my hands despite the brain-bending awkwardness of feeling but not being able to see it. Every time I looked down and felt like it should be there, I felt a little primal confusion, a tiny jolt of panic like I’d misplaced her somehow. It felt like I kept it up I’d get motion sick or something so I tried to just focus on walking instead. We turned another few corners, the path familiar now that I’d made the trip back and forth twice, and within a minute we were standing outside the damn door which had been such a pain in my ass.

Literally. Hard metal floor for two hours.

“Okay, swipe your mobile and you should be in,” AEGIS voice came in an unnecessary whisper. Wasn’t like the guards could hear her in my ear, but I appreciated the sentiment.

I held my mobile up against the scanner and it beeped green, releasing the door with a heavy-sounding ka-chunk. I pushed inside and found the cold, recirculated air immediately stinging at my face and throat.

“Okay, we just need any server that’s part of the main cluster,” AEGIS whispered. “There’s only four clusters in there, I can’t tell if they’re physically separated or not, just get the rider on any of them and I can tell if it’s the right one.”

“Should have given him more riders,” Lia commented. “No reason not to bug all four clusters if we worked this hard to get access.”

“Hindsight is twenty-twenty,” AEGIS agreed. “But at least if we need to come back, we’ve got the door this time at least.”

While they chattered, I was plugging a discrete device into the nearest server. The device didn’t have a standard port, but something similar, designed to fit into a standard port without being one.

When it plugged in, the server would try to read it, fail, and assume an error, which prevented any of their security precautions from going off at an unauthorized device suddenly being added. However, it still tried to read it, which meant the firmware — the code of the physical device itself — was still engaged. This opened a disconnect between how much of the device the firmware saw, and how much it reported seeing to the software, and that tiny gap let us get a foot in the door. It let us interface with the insecure firmware alone without an alert, and once we modified that, we could load the device like a normal drive, outside of any precautions they had.

It was something that might have once gone completely over my head before I’d spent so long with Whitney. I still wasn’t a programmer, even a little bit, but hardware, software, firmware, and the differences and points at which they talked, those were something I’d grown familiar with. And apparently, those gaps were a nice target for any system you had physical access to hack.

“Bingo,” AEGIS said. “First try.”

“We good?” I confirmed, barely breathing into the comms.

“We good. Get yourself home. Thanks for waiting so patiently.”

On a hunch, I waited for a few seconds, and then almost four minutes to the time I’d entered, watched the guard stroll by outside. My time hadn’t been completely wasted, watching them stroll circles, at least.

I steered Tem into the less-secure area, decloaked, and then walked out of the building without a care, the other XPCA ignoring me completely, except at times to stare at the malnourished girl or wheelchair I was pushing.

“Jesus, it’s insane,” AEGIS commented in the same distracted air as before. “This can’t be right.”

“Why would it be wrong?” Lia asked.

“Because it can’t be right.”

“Well not to tell you how to do your job sweetie, but you’re being a pretty shoddy AI if that’s the kind of logic you’re running on,” Lia laughed.

“FYI, my logic happens to be…!” she argued, her voice trailing off again “…is…totally…”

I smiled at the gate guard and gave him a small wave when I passed. Just an ordinary XPCA bloke taking his cripple out for a walk. Nothing to see here, buddy.

“Very convincing,” Lia said.

“Okay, I’m focusing here,” AEGIS snapped. “I’m backtracing all these orders to find their points of origin. We know a couple of people specifically mentioned by Karu. We have an E-6 here who’s been reassigned because of a gap made by shifting four others into a new ops unit which looks like it was made for no reason at all. The colonel who put together that group…delegated assignment into it to a major…the same major is the one who overrode the original E-6’s CO’s recommendation of who to send and picked someone else instead, so our boy would move into his place. Hmm, but then that same colonel made two other similar units in the past month. Were all twelve people slotted there under his machination?”

“Okay, I get it,” Lia said. “You can continue to think in quiet.”

“Think in quiet?” AEGIS asked, a little late and a little distracted.

“Yes. The opposite of talk out loud. Do what you need to, girl.”

“Well, chasing down what I have so far, I’ve found two sources already who’ve been corroborated at least in triplicate. There’s more but I’m still working. One’s…a nobody basically, in the records office. I bet it’s useful that he can clean a lot of books. I’ll see what files he’s accessed and see if there’s any holes there. The other one’s a civilian contractor liaison. I have no idea what that means, except that maybe Dragon’s money is getting channeled through the commercial sector before getting here.”

“Jesus,” I murmured. “AEGIS you sound like you’re having fun over there.”

“It’s like checking three million mazes to see what set of moves sorts all of them at once,” she said with no small amount of boasting in her voice. “So, y’know. I’m pretty awesome.”

“I dunno about your records bookworm, but I can look up the civilian liaison,” Lia said. “Is he DoD large or small?”

“Large.”

“Nice. I’m pretty sure I have something on each of the big companies. I’ll see what I can dig up. Send me what you have on him–oh, you already did. Please and thank you.”

“Found another guy, also civilian contracts. Sending him too.”

“You know, I hope the source isn’t in business,” Lia said, and I could hear her typing too.

“Does it hurt your vision of the American dream?” I laughed.

“No. For one, it makes AEGIS less useful at hacking because she’s an XPCA AI, not a corporate one. But two, they just tend to give more of an arse than the average enlisted. Even your secretaries and security at an F-five-hundred company tend to be overachievers or aspirants. It’s a culture of shark-eat-shark, and that means people are always on the lookout for backstabbing, if not espionage. Just makes things harder.”

“Sounds lovely,” AEGIS commented.

“Yeah, my thoughts exactly,” I agreed. We were a good distance from the base now, and I turned down a sidestreet to get to a nice dumpster-filled alley where Rito could pick us up without issue.

“Not that the DoD isn’t serious about security,” Lia continued, doing her thing where her mouth moved while she worked. The exact opposite of AEGIS, I realized, with amusement. “There’s just a lot higher concentration of people who don’t care in the military, especially when you get to the boring cushy jobs. Military is a lot more ‘move up or settle down’, and business is more ‘move up or get out’. In some parts, not everywhere, obviously. In my experience. I’m just blabbing.”

“We’ve noticed,” I said, realizing I was now standing in the room with the two of them. I blinked a few times to get adjusted to the relative dark of being indoors again, and I swear Tem involuntarily lit the room up a little brighter out of the same reflex. “Uh. Hi. So how are we doing?”

“If you excuse the roughness of it, I have taken the liberty of making a visualization,” AEGIS commented, greeting me with a warm smile and handing me a tablet. I looked at it and saw…

Well, something approximating a drunk spider’s web. Lots and lots of lines connecting little points. And then lots more lines.

“These,” she said, tapping on the holo to zoom in a little “are the backtraced sources so far. And it looks like maybe sixty percent of them or so are legitimate.” As she spoke, the majority of the lines turned a lighter shade of grey, still leaving a mess of connected lines everywhere. Just less of one.

“And of those, I think some are manipulated and the person who it looks like is behind the orders actually isn’t. People calling in favors to get someone else to do something not-quite on the books or the like. So those might be false sources and I’ll cull them for now.” Again, more points and lines faded away.

The mess was beginning to look a lot less messy. In fact, if I turned it upside down, it looked kind of like a tree. Well, several trees, growing into each other. But definitely a few places where things were radiating outwards from. I frowned and tapped on one of the roots. A little popup informed me that this was one of the contractor liaisons I’d heard so much about. His profile data whizzed by under my fingertips. He’d worked with a lot of companies, most I’d heard of even. The big contracting firms that seemed to do everything. NexTech. Ur-Horizon. Vanguardian.

I stopped the scrolling at an unexpected name and frowned. I tapped over to another of the tree-stem guys and scrolled through his list. Big companies. Some overlap. The same name again.

“See something?” AEGIS asked, looking at my eyes more than my hands. I nodded and blew up and then tapped the entry in the list, and then did the same for the other.

“Huh. Well there’s a lot of overlap,” she said.

“No…I think we should check this out first.”

“Why?” She cocked her head at me like I was a questioning child. Which, compared to her and her connections and light-speed thinking, I probably basically was. But I had a feeling about this which I was certain was worth something. “What makes them worth investigating more than any other?”

“What are we investigating?” Karu asked, walking into the room. “Oh, greetings Ashton, I did not know you had returned. You are well?”

“My ass hurts. We have several lists of companies where Dragon’s money might be coming from, and I have a hunch.”

“Which hunch?” she asked, sidling up next to me and drawing a brief stink-eye from AEGIS, who proceeded to sidle up on my equal and opposite side.

“These guys,” I said, tapping the holo again for her benefit.

She took a step back and scratched her chin. “Hmm. IkaCo.”

“You know them?” Lia asked.

“Most know them, though perhaps not by name as they are more a parent company than anything. I have had personal dealings with their CEO on occasion, as he is a powerful, illustrious man, and it is exactly those with whom I was intended to bump shoulders in my upbringing, as it were. Though I have met the leadership of most of these companies, to be honest.”

“Then let’s try to leverage that and see what we can find out,” I said. “One foot in the door is all we need to plant another rider on another server, right?”

Karu gave a bemused chuckle. “I doubt very much that you will have the same level of access to their operations as you do the XPCA’s. Yet there is some merit there. It is…hmm.”

“What?” AEGIS asked.

“Well. I know who to ask. It is, however a matter of asking him which is the difficulty. Such things in the business world are never done as a simple favor,” Karu confessed, and right away I knew who she was talking about.

I reached out and gave her shoulder a squeeze. “We’re stopping Dragon, remember? This is for a better tomorrow.”

“Quoting tombstones at me still? All of this for your dead girl?”

“For everyone, Karu.”

She gave me a lame smile and a sigh. “Very well. Let me prepare myself and then I shall take the plunge. For your sense of everyone tomorrow.”

She ran her fingers through her hair, growing in, but still very short, gave me one more smile, and then left the room again just as she entered; brisque and seemingly disconnected from everyone in it but me.

“What was that all about?” Lia asked me, her eyebrows arched.

“That…was what Karu looks like when she’s making a big life-altering decision,” I shrugged. “She’s going to go reunite with her old man.”

“Idris Irenside?” AEGIS asked. “The senator?”

“Yeah,” I said, shaking my head. “I’m glad she’s doing it. But honestly, I don’t see any way this isn’t going to end so badly.”

I listened to Karu’s boots clicking down the hallway until they faded into the sound of keys being tapped all around me, one form of data extraction bleeding into the next. Hacking was great of course, but at some point, you needed a personal touch, a contact, some face-to-face in order to get at the truly personal data, and that was what we needed right now. We needed Karu, and she needed to talk to her old man.

I’d help as much as I could, but in the end, this was all going to be on her. I hoped she’d be okay with it.

I listened to the keystrokes for a minute more, just thinking about the data we had and the data we needed, and all the difference that difference made.

She’d be fine, I thought. She had to be. Or else we might all be in a whole lot of shit.