Long Haul Ch. 04

He popped open the backplate, reached over to his desk for a data cable, and then, eyes bulged, cried out, "What the hell is this?!"

Wren walked around next to him and peered in. "From the sound of it, I'm guessing that this is the problem."

"This isn't my hardware!"

Wren licked her lips, and looked back behind him. The engineer had moved into the big space, the big office, and his terminal probably had the access she needed. She was close. It was working. The plan was working. She just needed a window.

She said, "So, what you're telling me is, someone stole your hardware, and right now they're probably out there, somewhere, poring over your work and finding all the little loopholes in it?"

"Fuck," he screeched. "Maybe!?"

She leaned over his shoulder, very close, and whispered, "I don't give a fuck what they did with it. Fix it."

"What kind of talentless hack did this?"

Wren bristled. It was a good thing her smoked glasses hid her eyes, because he would have seen the flash of anger in her expression. To cover, she stood up and backed away, waiting for the rising bile to settle. "I paid more money for this than you'll see in a lifetime, so stop asking questions that don't help and start fixing it!"

He put the data cable back on his desk. It was useless, because she'd removed the port it had come with and swapped it out with another, older, open source port she was more familiar with. She hated working with proprietary garbage, unless it was her own proprietary garbage. It occurred to her, as she stood there radiating an intense amount of bureaucratic fury, that she was being kind of a hypocrite, but she brushed that aside.

After a bit of rooting around, he produced another data cable, and Wren gulped again. Much harder. Somehow, she hadn't anticipated this. He hooked the cable between his personal display and the data port she'd installed. Wren turned to look at Bonnie, who'd been shadowing her, and gave a tight shake of her head just as the background of Wren's custom OS loaded on the engineer's display.

Like any self-respecting DIY code monkey making something she never expected anyone else to see, Wren had named her operating system after herself. At the time, she'd thought it was hilarious.

"Wren?" he said, blinking in confusion before turning toward her with a look of fury.

"Rumbled," Wren said.

"I should have known you'd—"

Wren held out the briefcase toward Bonnie, and pressed a release on the handle. Bonnie grabbed it and the main part of the case slid free, with some false fascia falling away to reveal Bonnie's smart CAR, while Wren drew her pink pistol from within the wrapping of her dress, took aim, and fired.

She missed, because Wren wasn't a very good shot, but she looked super badass doing it, and gave herself a gold star for effort.

"Wren?!" the engineer cried, as he dove over his desk.

The backspray from her errant non-newtonian fluid projectile misted over her, and some of it got on her tongue. It tasted horrible. How had she not known how bad it tasted? It was non-toxic, but still.

Bonnie moved out into the atrium, CAR braced tightly against her shoulder, eyes racing from vantage to vantage. Wren couldn't see what she was doing, but the short, cutting bursts she fired rattled Wren's teeth. Instead of pursuing the engineer, though, Wren went over to a section of the wall she'd seen out of the corner of her eye and punched an emergency alarm. Heavy doors slammed shut above and below them, locking them in place.

"Well," she said, "that went about as well as it could have."

"Two dead downstairs," Bonnie called, over her shoulder. "One guard, and I think one of these other eggheads. Had some kind of weapon. Gonna check upstairs."

Wren gave her a tight nod, and stalked around the desk. The engineer had crawled back under it, and was kicking and clawing at the floor to try and get away from her. Wren took off her smoked glasses, hung them in the v neck of her dress, and squatted in front of him casually. She said, "I can't believe you remember me."

"Remember you?" he screeched. "You... But... we..."

Wren shook her head. "We what? Met that one time?"

"Is this about the DBX thing?" His voice quivered, and he kept staring at her gun. He probably hadn't realized it was non-lethal, which was just fine by her.

"What thing?"

"When I took you down," he said, brow knitting in anger. "When I beat you, last time."

"What are you talking about?"

His jaw went slack, but his eyes were tight. "We're... We've been... We've got that... rivalry."

"We're not rivals," Wren said, laughing.

"Yes we are! We're fifty-one and twenty-eight in ranked matches."

Wren did math. "We've fought seventy-nine times?" Then she said, "I'm the fifty-one, right?" Deep, deep in her memories, ages ago, she remembered a message she'd gotten that had said, 'Finally got u back'. "What do you mean, you should have known. What should you have known?"

"That you'd come for me," he said, as he moved out from under the desk, got to his feet, and backed away slowly.

"We talked, once, for five fucking minutes," Wren said, "and you thought that constituted some kind of... bond?"

His eyes flicked up, and then back down again like he'd realized he'd given something away.

"What's up there?"

"Nothing."

Wren raised the pistol again, this time using both hands to steady her aim like Bonnie had shown her, and he shrank. "It was me, alright? I'm the one who's been reverse engineering your scanner!"

"My scanner?" Wren cried. "You... What did you..." She could feel the heat on her face.

He still shied away from the barrel, but he seemed to be getting more agitated by the second. "We've fought so many times. How could you have not known it was me?!"

"I think we have very different memories of the last time I was here," she said.

"I made it better," he snarled.

Wren didn't like the way he said it, so she shot him. The projectile hit him in the chest, below the shoulder but above the lungs, and he spun around as he dropped to the floor. It was a clean hit, and she was proud of herself, but she was still tasting the backspray and it was not pleasant.

"Ahhhh," he cried, as he rolled around on the floor, clutching his chest. "You shot me!"

Scuffling on the floor behind her. Wren half turned to find Bonnie approaching, and looking grim. "You brought down some kind of blast shielding," she said, "or maybe an airlock. It's helping us now, but it's gonna be a problem later." She looked insanely hot with that rifle cradled in her arms, pointed nearly straight down.

She nodded. "For all we know, they put that in to stop these idiots from building some dumb bot that ran rampant through the rest of the station."

"It's a synthetic soldi—"

Wren cut him off by shooting him in the leg, and he mewled.

"Oh stop it," she said. "It doesn't hurt that bad." She knew this because she'd shot herself once out of curiosity, and not at all because it had gone off by accident.

While the engineer reached down and tentatively pressed his fingers to the spot on his thigh, Wren sat down at his desk and started combing through data records. He held up his fingers, coated in the viscous remains of her projectile, and rubbed them together. "What the hell is this? What did you shoot me with?"

"I don't know," Wren said, "but I bet it won't be long until you start trying to reverse engineer that too! I mean, my scanner?"

"You did the same thing to my—"

He cut off in a squeak as Wren leveled her gun at him again, without looking away from the display. "The difference," she said, tightly, "is that I..."

"You did know that was his bot," Bonnie said, chuckling.

"Shut up," Wren groaned. "I didn't know it was this whole thing!"

The engineer tried to get to his feet, and Wren took a metaphorical-but-luxurious bath in the schadenfreude. It looked like his leg was really hurting. It would be bruised at best, which she was fine with, but any bruising that successfully discouraged him from continuing to test her patience was worth its weight in tungsten. Once he was up on his feet, hobbling around, she was tempted to shoot him again, just on principle, but she was struggling to find what she needed. There would be time for fun later, but for the moment she needed to play into his expectations.

"Where are the plans for my scanner?"

The engineer barked a laugh, which sounded strained. "Deleting it won't do you any good."

"Why not?" It was easy to fake rage at that.

He had an ugly smile as he hobbled toward the desk. "After I cracked it, and wow, Wren, I have to say that I'm embarrassed for you. Brute force? How gauche."

Wren moved her chair back and out of the way, glaring at him as he moved around his digital workspace, and brought up a layered series of three dimensional schematics. She pushed him out of the way and stared at them, feigning examining them while she figured out where the drawings were located.

But definitely also figuring out how he'd made her scanner so much smaller.

"You're too late," he said, haughtily.

Wren had her fingers poised over the display, to start looking for the other plans she wanted, and paused. "Why are you being so cryptic?"

He puffed up, and his smug smirk was nearly intolerable. "Because," he said, "I insisted that we share the design with every corporation with a net worth above five hundred billion. It's out there. This is out there. You're done."

She turned, eyes flashing, and drew her gun again.

"NoNoNoNo—"

It was incredibly, incredibly satisfying when she shot him in the other thigh, and he collapsed with a high pitched, whiney scream. Then, for good measure, she waited until he stopped wobbling around so much and shot him right in the forehead. His head rocked back, bounced off the floor, and then he was silent.

Bonnie said, "唔, 果然不是番茄酱的滋味" Mm, that does not taste like ketchup.

Wren stuck her tongue at her. She turned back to the display, ready to start phase two of her plan, and paused when Bonnie put a hand on her shoulder.

"I'm sorry he copied your thing," Bonnie said, then recoiled when Wren turned to her and smiled.

"No, this is good. Better, actually." Wren backed out of the scanner layout, and found the root file structure where Jyi Bao, a materials processing company, kept its proprietary designs, which included processing, smelting and refining equipment for a variety of advanced metals and polymers. "I probably should have given Jackson the plans for mine anyway, and now I have no reason not to. Hell, I'll give him both! This one is a bit more space efficient, but you need some more sophisticated hardware to do it. The beauty of mine was that I used readily available hardware."

Bonnie said, "Computer stuff, computer stuff, computer stuff, " and sliced her hand through the air over her head.

Wren groaned, hooked her p-comm unit into the engineer's work desk, and used it to establish a secure channel to the Daedalus. From there, the Daedalus fed the incoming data to a quantum communication system Jackson had unearthed from somewhere, that was probably worth more than all of those designs combined and whose twin was buried somewhere in the bowels of Cheng Shih.

The designs were huge. Massive files. Each of them taking up multiple exaabytes. The secure channel to the Daedalus was the limiting factor in the chain, and Wren scratched her chin in thought. Originally, like, originally originally, her plan had allowed for making some kind of grand final stand. Butch and Sundance, which definitely made her Sundance because good lord Bonnie was looking good in that suit.

Not escaping was no longer an option: for many reasons, not least of which because Bonnie was walking around, arms about to burst through the sleeves, and she was getting really thirsty. They needed to survive so they could have sex. It was imperative.

Bonnie herself came hustling back into the room, expression grim, and Wren put her game face back on.

"I don't know how much longer those doors are going to hold. I tied up or incapacitated all the other nerds in this place—"

"Hey," Wren said.

"—but," Bonnie continued, as if the interruption hadn't happened at all, "I think some of the people on the other side of those doors are starting to get curious. I get the impression that everyone ran for the hills when you set off that alarm, and now we're probably just waiting for one chief security officer or another to wake up and get here before they start trying to breach."

"And the doors?" Wren asked.

"Fucking monsters. I know you were improvising, and hitting that alarm was the right call at the time, but I have no fucking idea how we're getting through them. In fact, I'm pretty sure we're not. As I recall, you kind of suck as a hacker."

Wren stuck her tongue out at her girlfriend, but Bonnie just smirked.

"If I'm reading the alarm panel right, Rajeesh here is the senior designer on site, and he's the only one who can disable the alarm from the inside. With him out cold, it's just a matter of which of the four opens their door first."

"Mmmhmm," Wren said, thoughtfully.

"Jyi Bao does raw materials. Chandless, we know. Heavy construction. DynawaveSLR does a lot of military contracts, weapons, powered armor, and the like. They're the nightmare scenario, but also, probably the ones that'll open up first. I bet the others will wait for Dynawave. Everything I've found says UEA does biotech, but I'll be shocked if that doesn't mean viruses and shit like that. Looks like the whole fourth floor is theirs, and they're probably the reason it's so damn cold in here."

Bonnie continued, babbling about DynawaveSLR, but Wren stopped listening. Her brain was going in two directions. To the first, she went back to the still-unconscious engineer's desktop. "UEA, UEA," she mumbled.

"Are you even listening to me?" Bonnie asked.

"Yes," she lied. Then she made a triumphant sound as she found some of UEA's designs, and added one to the queue for herself. Once that was setup, she walked around to the other side of the desk and unplugged her security bot.

As soon as it was independent again, it resumed its litany of, "Sixteen point four degrees, twenty one percent."

Wren stepped in front of it, put her hands on its shoulders, and squared it with her. "Mr. Robot," she said, speaking clearly, "I need you to fix the temperature. It's too cold."

Did it adjust itself to more directly face her? "Sixteen point four degrees," it said.

Wren whooped for joy. It had never not announced both the temperature and humidity before. It was clearly doing something. She ran to the railing, at the central area that overlooked the first floor, and pointed. "There," she said, gesturing toward the door they'd come in through. "That door. If you open that door, you can get some warmer air flow in here."

The bot moved toward her. It didn't turn to follow her finger; it didn't need to. Its internal scanning suite was capable of scanning in any direction, in multiple directions, simultaneously, without physically turning its frame around. For a few seconds, it seemed like nothing was happening.

Then it said, "Sixteen point four degrees." Had it modulated its pitch downward, to sound more serious? Could it do that?

Wren watched anxiously as it navigated the stairs down to the first floor —she hadn't taught it to interface with anything so complicated as an elevator— and didn't realize she was holding her breath until it made it to the bottom.

Above them there was a knocking, or a thumping, and both Bonnie and Wren hurried down the stairs. An intercom squawked, but it was local to whatever door someone was trying to open.

The doors that had come down were flush with the inside wall of the lab, and had come down along a track. It looked heavy, probably well over five or six tons as it was wide enough to cover the double door. Most importantly, it had the interlocking almost-circles indicating that it was designed for a biohazard problem.

Bonnie had seen the same thing, pointing and saying, "That's good. It's hermetic, but probably not designed to stand up to, say, a vacuum leak."

Wren thought for a minute. "There's probably other doors that do that then, doors built into the wall that'll be harder to breach, so when this thing opens we're gonna have to get out. Quick."

Bonnie nodded, and they both turned and watched the bot run its fingers along the seams at the side of the wall. It happened with frightening speed. Once it found purchase, the bot planted one hand on the wall for leverage and pulled. Bonnie's eyes opened wide, and Wren was proud of herself for having the presence of mind to push Bonnie to the side, out of the way of the door.

"Did you know it was that strong?" Bonnie asked, as the door's metal track made an awful sound at being bent.

Wren said, "I mean, I knew it had a scary amount of power, but I figured that was so it could operate autonomously for, like, years. I didn't mess with the servos or motors. I don't know anything about that stuff!"

Eventually it bent the track free, and the bot grabbed the door itself and wrenched it sideways. Once there was a person's worth of clearance to get out, it stopped and turned around, saying, "Sixteen point six degrees, twenty two percent."

A single shot rang out. It was loud, but Wren barely heard it. She couldn't take her eyes off the sideways trajectory of her bot as it flew. It bounced, twice, and skidded to a stop.

"I think I got it," came a voice from out in the hall.

Wren started to move toward her bot, but Bonnie stuck a hand out in front of her, and stepped up beside the damaged door frame.

"Yeah," the voice said. Wren thought it was one of the guards from earlier. "It was that bot. I figured better safe than sorry... ...So far, no sign of them."

Bonnie peeked around the edge, just for a moment, and then stuck her CAR around the corner. It went off in short bursts, more than Wren could count, as Bonnie wiggled her arm to and fro.

"Are you just shooting blind?!" Wren screeched.

Bonnie frowned at her and tapped her glasses, and that was enough to make it click in Wren's mind that it was not just a regular rifle. It was smart.

Once Bonnie peeked out around the corner again, and said, "Clear," Wren kicked off her heels and scrambled to where her bot was struggling to get up.

"What are you doing?" Bonnie hissed.

Wren, mind racing, said, "Some of the hardware could be traced to Jackson. Don't want to leave that behind." She put one of its arms around her shoulder and tried to stand, and remembered at that moment exactly how heavy the fucking thing was. Fortunately, it was trying to get up too, and between the two of them they were hobbling out the door a few seconds later.

Bonnie sprinted to the end of the hallway, head swiveling back and forth to watch in both directions. They needed to cover about two hundred meters and change to get back to the Daedalus, which would take them approximately an hour at their current pace, and Wren was not looking forward to the inevitable advice from Bonnie to leave her bot behind.

Wren liked to think of herself as practical, and that shared characteristic was one of the reasons she and Bonnie communicated so well. They could cut to the heart of things when they wanted to, and for the most part that had always gone well. She didn't think she could take it if Bonnie said to leave it behind.

But then Bonnie looked back at them, at Wren gasping and struggling to help her bot move, sighed explosively, reloaded her gun, and ran back to prop up its other side.