Locus jacked in, and found himself sitting in the pilot's seat in a fighter jet. The runway straight ahead was a lattice of pale cyan light against a colorless void. Skyscrapers of pure data rose by degrees to either side, subdivided into rectangles that flickered with stock prices and advertisements for pornography simstims.
The aircraft was cold and dark. By rote memory, Locus began the startup procedures. The crown of cranial electrodes on his physical body simulated the physical sensation of setting the switches. When he pushed the battery switch, the other switches and annunciators began to glow with neon green backlights. Generator one, generator two, fuel shutoff to open, engine master to on. He pushed and held the starter down until the engine began to spool up with a high-pitched hiss.
The needles began to rise. The instrument console was of an ancient style, designed before the invention of the computer. It was what his master taught him to fly. Before he died, the kindly old man had a soft voice and infinite patience. Unfortunately he was also a religious nutjob. He claimed that there was an ancient war between two empires that involved fighter jets powered by magic. That was completely ridiculous, of course. Street sorcerers were useful to have on a crew, but there was never a time when mere magic could be used to create the same power as a boatload of burning kerosene.
As the engine heated up, Locus continued down his memorized checklist. Anti-skid system activated, rudder trim to neutral, aileron servos to norm, speed brake retracted. He slipped on his fur-lined leather helmet, complete with brass-rimmed goggles, a virtual artifact that his master swore was traditional garb for pilots. Finally, he strapped the oxygen mask across his mouth and set the green oxygen switch to on.
Satisfied, he released the parking brake and slid the throttle forward to takeoff power. The cyan gridlines began to slip backward with increasing speed. He watched the airspeed as it slowly increased. It always seemed to take a very long time, rolling forward faster and faster as the engine roared. The fighter jet was very heavy and the wings were relatively small, so it required over one hundred knots of airspeed to create positive G-force. When Locus pulled back on the stick, the nose felt heavy. He slapped the landing gear lever up as the cyberspace runway fell away.
Pointing the nose directly up, Locus slammed the throttle forward to full afterburner, and ascended like a rocket into neon light pollution. The sprawling city of data and logic slowly shrank in the semi-circle of rearview mirrors overhead. In just a few more moments he was soaring at over fifty thousand feet. He pulled hard on the stick, inverting the craft, and then rolled upright. Even at his lofty height, massive towers of corporate data dominated the horizon.
A quick scan of the horizon revealed his target. At heading two-seven-zero, standing over a hundred thousand feet tall, the central tower of the KB/CA Biomedical Corporation loomed like a crimson shadow. As he flew closer, Locus began to make out the intrusion countermeasures electronics. Slashed with glowing red crosses, the self-healing magenta ice was clearly military-grade stuff.
The radar was silent, which meant the airspace was clear. The company must place a great deal of faith in their ice. Without fighter jets patrolling the cyberspace near their data tower, they would be completely dependent on the local Tacticals. While the City of Saint Ingrid Tacticals were generally retired military fighter pilots (and therefore dangerous), they generally took at least five or six minutes to respond to alarms. They also tended to use non-lethal network tracer missiles. If you took a hit, then you might need to skip town. On the other hand, corporate security missiles could liquify your brain.
Locus began to execute the weapon system activation checklists. Green annunciator lights flashed on the wings of a small fighter jet-shaped display in the center of the instrument console. He set the trigger to control the outer missile on the right wing, brought the corporate tower directly into the center of his gunsight, and pulled the trigger. The missile rocketed off the rail and lanced out toward the crimson ice.
Nobody remembers the name of the first cowboys who discovered that fighter jets could be used as a tool for hacking the matrix. It had been hundreds of years at least. Locus was deeply unsatisfied with his master's explanation of the phenomenon. The old man had claimed that when you jack in, your soul partially enters a place called the Elemental Plane of Dreams. There was also a sort of luck goddess named Titania that for some reason blessed fighter jets with good luck. It was all superstitious nonsense, of course, but Locus was forced to admit that his master had been extremely lucky in his long career as a hacker.
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The missile struck the tower with a colorless flash. Like frost growing on the canopy of a fighter jet in a freezing cloud, the crystalline mother-of-pearl icebreaker began to grow. Even though Locus preferred the cheap and outrageously effective icebreakers designed by youth gangs from the streets of Saint Vaska, this particular icebreaker had been furnished by his client. Locus quickly decided it was a damn good icebreaker, because the red crosses of corporate ice began to rip apart faster than they could heal.
He activated the inside missile on the left wing, brought the festering data-chasm into the center of his gunsight, and pulled the trigger. The missile, a huge bomb-like tube with oversized fins, detached and immediately began to fall. The engine ignited, and after a few seconds it was flying fast enough to recover the lost altitude as it raced toward the target in a long arc. Locus slammed the stick to the right and pulled hard on the stick, a high-G turn to line up parallel to the tower.
The second missile struck the riven data, then his coms light began to blink.
He activated the coms. "Locus here, the virus has been delivered."
Brief static, followed by a low-pitched, masculine voice. "Sweets is broadcasting her nervous system data to your deck. She will be your diver. I want you to cover her ass as she goes through the atrium."
"Affirmative."
The physical deck featured a trigger to force his consciousness back into this simulation if anything appeared in the sensor-fusion. Locus configured the auto-pilot on the fighter jet to hold the current altitude and heading. Then, he flipped to the second feed.
He immediately experienced that unfamiliar feeling of the air rushing between her legs, the way her breasts bounced slightly as she ran. She was completely nude, her skin a layer of liquid crystal chameleon, invisible in the darkness. Her vision was enhanced with low-light cybernetics, so the pitch-black interior of the hospital records office appeared bathed in faint light. She moved with inhuman speed, silent and graceful as a cat.
Pale moonlight filtered through open windows in the hallway just ahead. As she sprinted past the windows, she looked up into the tree-filled atrium. Locus flipped back out to his deck, took screenshots of her vision every twenty frames, then visually verified all nine images. An image recognition system activated, isolating shapes that were too subtle for the human eye to see. The system immediately identified the dark silhouette of a pot-bellied security guard on the fourth floor, almost invisible beyond the foliage canopy.
He flipped back. "Sweets, this is Locus. Security guard, fourth floor, I don't think he saw you."
She did not reply.
Locus flipped back to his fighter jet, and then took a look around. The sky was quiet, but he had drifted far away from the KB/CA Biomedical Corporation. He rolled upside-down and pulled up into a split-S maneuver, which perfectly reversed his direction. Then he flipped again. Sweets descended a staircase into a huge empty room filled with heavy vault doors. She stalked forward toward the third door and pulled gently on the handle. The virus had done its job, and the vault slid open effortlessly.
It felt like a routine run. Nothing fancy. There was no glory in it, but it was the type of job that paid the bills.
She made a beeline for a very specific sub-vault: W-Z 1295 A.E.B. He felt her press one finger against her left clavicle, which caused her chest cavity to open slightly. Within was a sealed tube, which contained the birth certificate for one Julia Webb. Locus did not doubt that the woman was a complete fiction, however the virus modified the corporate database to add medical records and a digital copy of the birth certificate. The physical document in the vault would corroborate the digital record.
Sweets began to fish through the records. Her enhanced vision began to isolate images of fingerprints. She held up her own fingers, searching for fingerprints of similar size. Shortly after, the thumb and fingers on one hand began to feel very hot. After a few seconds, she began rubbing her fingers over the new birth certificate. At that moment Locus realized that this was not just a routine run. Full-body chameleon should have been a red flag, but biosignal mimic prosthetics were absolutely a red flag. This woman was capable of very high-level espionage, undoubtedly packing military-grade prosthetics, and backed either by a state or by one of the mega-corporations.
But which corporation? he wondered.
Everything else was clinical. She planted the birth certificate, closed the vault, and snuck out of the building. Meanwhile, Locus flipped back and forth between Sweets and his fighter jet. The scars on the corporate ice were beginning to self-heal, and the virus would modify the downstream logs. Nobody would know that the ice had been dysfunctional for a few minutes. There were no alarms from the tower, and no Tacticals chasing him with full riot lights.
"Locus, this is Woodsman. Sweets just left the building."
Locus set the throttle to descent power. He pointed his nose down at the runway in the distance, framed with red and green lights. It was one of their traditions. Fighter pilots always needed to land after their missions, and hackers always needed to land after a successful run. Perhaps it was a superstition, but Locus didn't care to find out.