Time-Limited Targets
Contrary to Fox’s expectations, Alex didn’t work from
home.
He had a computer in his home office, to be sure. It
was a custom rig, sleek and sophisticated, radiating raw power. The tower was
water-cooled, the pipes and processor visible through see-through panels. He
had a silent mechanical keyboard and a complex-looking ergonomic mouse wired to
the tower unit. The machine boasted three curved screens, a full one hundred
and eighty-degree display, interrupted only by the bezels between them.
He used it for gaming.
And to remotely control his actual workstation.
Standing at the living room window, he gestured at a
ten-story building across the street.
“I rented a private office on the fifth floor, to host
my remote machine and servers. So far as the landlord is concerned, it is a
small IT company. The girls go in now and then in disguise to masquerade as
staff.”
“If you’re traced, the opposition will only find your
remote machine,” Mustafa mused.
“Yes. My remote and this machine are connected via a
secure data channel, separate from all other channels used by the remote. The
data channel cannot be accessed from the outside; you must physically interface
with either machine in meatspace to access it. The office is fitted with a
surveillance camera and a motion detector, and the remote machine and the
servers are equipped with small but powerful explosives. Should the police or
any other entity attempt to seize the machines, I will detonate the
explosives.”
“I’ve never heard of any hackers doing anything like
that before,” Fox said.
“This is why I’m the best cracker in the business,” Alex said.
There was no pride in his voice, no emotional
inflection, nothing but an unreadable monotone. He said it matter-of-factly, as
though it were an immutable fact, like the sun rising from the east.
As Alex set up his machines, the team debated their
own security measures. They were split down the middle. Yamamoto, Wood and Fox
wanted to disperse, to take advantage of Electric City’s many short-time hotels
and 24-hour media cafes. Tan, Connor and Mustafa insisted on holing up here,
concentrating manpower and guns.
Alex provided the tiebreaker.
“You are free to stay here for as long as you need.
Under my roof, you will be under my protection. I would urge you to stay off
the streets whenever you can. The surveillance cameras in Electric City are
equipped with facial and gait recognition software, and the hotels will not
protect your privacy from the police or the New Gods. Sooner or later you will be noticed.”
“You can’t hack into the cameras?” Connor asked.
“I have. But altering the feeds in real-time is
difficult enough. Should I attempt to do so, the system will notice. It is not
something I wish to do outside the most extreme of circumstances.”
“Such as?” Fox asked.
“Such as an escape attempt, in the extremely unlikely
event that the New Gods or the authorities find us.”
“Wait up,” Mustafa said. “You said the cameras were
fitted with facial and signature recognition software. Have we led the cops to
your door?”
“No. Cameras are not infallible. My remote monitors
the police dispatch system. If the police had found you, the gateway would have
flagged their alerts, and I wouldn’t have let you in. Nonetheless, you must
assume that the police, and therefore the New Gods, are aware of your presence
in Electric City. You must keep a low profile.”
There were probably a hundred other things they had to
do. But they had to wait. Despite the caffeine surging through them, the team was
drunk on exhaustion, barely able to remain functional. And Alex protested
vociferously when Tan asked to borrow the sole bedroom. Instead, the team
flopped over the sofas and the carpet and went straight to sleep.
Yamamoto had retained the presence of mind to crawl
into a sleeping bag. Fox followed his example before fading out.
She wasn’t sure if she’d slept. She was unconscious,
that much she was sure of. But it hadn’t felt long. She closed her eyes at the
break of dawn; when she opened them again the sun was high in the sky, but her
body insisted her eyelids were lowered only as long as a blink.
The bots had changed clothes. Now they were in modest
jackets and jeans, the better to conceal their hardware. Except for the
car-eared maid, who hid her tail under an ankle-length dress and smothered her
ears under a scarf.
She knew robotics and AI tech had grown by leaps and
bounds. Every year, scientists and corps affiliated with the New Gods rolled
out increasingly sophisticated hardware and software. But behavior like this
was extraordinary. AIs were narrowly specialized, superhuman in their area of
focus, utterly useless outside it. She’d never heard of a bot that could
seamlessly transition from servant to sex toy to soldier in the blink of an
eye.
Unless these bots had artificial general
intelligences. AIs capable of doing anything a human could.
AGI development was shrouded in rumors and shadows.
Only the Singularity Network reported any appreciable success in creating
one—the goal of the faction, after all, was the creation of a superintelligent
machine god. But the Sinners would never share their latest and greatest tech
with outsiders.
And yet, there was no other explanation for the bots.
Whoever Alex was, he was a very dangerous man.
And she was glad that he was on their side.
She hoped.
Alex was where the team had left him, glued to his
chair, staring at the screens. Now and then his fingers blazed across the
keyboard, or he navigated his cursor across the expansive display, but
otherwise he was practically frozen to the spot. And he refused to be
disturbed.
When the rest of the Black Watch came around, they
tended to their personal hygiene. One by one, they took turns to use the
bathroom adjacent to the kitchen. In the shower, Fox took pains to scrub off
every last trace of dirt from her hair and skin. By the time she was done, she
felt rejuvenated.
Over a light meal, the Black Watch discussed their
next steps. The first item on the agenda was supplies and security. To whit,
how to keep seven humans fed without arousing the suspicion of the authorities.
The debate was long and vigorous. They had to pull
Alex away from his screens to participate. For the first time, she saw anger
flicker across his face.
But at last, they came to an agreement. The robots
would go to randomly selected grocery stores and supermarkets outside Electric
City, purchasing just enough food or two or three people, staggering their
departure and arrival times.
For their part, the Black Watch would stay indoors and
maintain security. Now and then, they would leave the house in pairs under
heavy disguise to patrol the neighborhood. It was high-risk, but they had to
map the surrounding area and its atmospherics, create a baseline for what was
normal in Electric City, and identify surveillance attempts.
The team had protested the last. Alex himself joined
in. Yamamoto delivered the killer argument.
“This apartment only has one exit. If the New Gods
come for us, we will have to fight our way through a flood of SWAT cops, Elect,
Hellions, God knows what else. Or they’ll just fire a thermobaric rocket
through the window. If they’re ruthless enough to deploy death squads in
Fortune City, they’ll be ruthless enough to do this. We need advance warning,
we need to map escape routes, and the only way we can do that is to walk the
ground and pull static security of our own.”
“We agreed to stay indoors,” Wood replied. “Why didn’t
you bring it up earlier?”
Yamamoto shrugged. “I only thought of it just now.
Blame it on the lack of sleep.”
Fox was as up to date on countersurveillance protocols
as the rest of the STS. But with street cameras, cruisers and New Gods hunting
them, there was only so much she could do. And when the New Gods brought out
their psis, it was only a matter of time before they found them.
But they didn’t have to make it easy for them.
Alex laid out the facts of street cameras in his
characteristic cold manner. A street camera would read a person’s face and the
way he walked, then calculate the underlying anatomical structure of his body.
Within moments, it could identify his face and detect his joints, the precise
angles he swung his legs and arms, the degrees of variance, the way he held his
body. With enough data, gait analysis could identify walking patterns, suspicious
behaviors, unnatural walking patterns. And the software had an accuracy rate of
over 99 percent.
But there were defenses against that.
Fox replaced her boots with a pair of barefoot
moccasins she kept as emergency footwear. She puffed out her jacket and hid her
hands in her pockets. She fitted a privacy visor to her argees, designed to
reflect visible and infrared light into camera lenses and confuse facial
recognition algorithms, and pulled her hoodie over her head. She shortened her
stride and leaned forward, almost as if she were running in slow motion. With
the EyeMap app on her phone, she plotted routes that minimized exposure to
known street cameras.
She couldn’t hide from the cameras, but she could
bombard them with false data.
Defending against psis was easier. Mustafa taught
everyone a basic defense against remote viewing. Simply visualize a dark cloak
around your body, wrapping yourself in shadows. It would a hide a person’s aura
on the Aether. Alternatively, visualize a cloak that bent light around itself,
like a chameleon suit. It was trickier, but it would leave fewer traces on the
Aether. And you didn’t have to be a Godtouched psi to pull it off.
It sounded crazy the first time she’d heard it. It
still sounded crazy after the tenth time. But it had worked for Mustafa.
The psychic cloak also had unpredictable side effects.
Walking the streets of Electric City, she was a ghost. Few people saw her.
Teenagers stumbled into her path. Touts—humans and robots—ignored her presence.
Distracted adults walked into her. At a noodle store, it took sheer effort of
will to attract—and retain—the proprietor’s attention long enough to take her
order. And pay for it.
It wasn’t a perfect defense. More powerful psions,
like Mustafa, could perform psychometry. They could read the energies imprinted
into an area, reading the recent past for clues, and painstakingly recreate a
target’s movements. But that would take time and effort. And follow-up
investigations on foot.
Deny, delay, detect. It was the iron triangle of
countersurveillance. And for the worst-case scenario, she kept her weapons
close.
When night fell, maintaining street patrols became
both easier and harder. Crowds of young adults flooded the streets, many of
them dressed in crazy costumes. Walking about with a balaclava or a hoodie up
was far less suspicious. At the same time, it was much easier for surveillance
teams to hide in a crowd and mingle with vehicle traffic. And flying drones
filled the skies in large, ever-shifting drones.
The team adapted. They took up static security
positions by windows overlooking critical streets and junctions. They shifted
their vehicles to new positions and stayed inside. They kept their faces down
but their heads on a swivel, looking not at people but at behaviors, hunting
for breaks and disruptions in traffic and crowds, for anything that deviated
from what they knew as the baseline for Electric City.
As midnight approached, the streets cleared. The last
trains were rolling into the subway stations, and anyone who missed them had to
settle for expensive late-night taxis or cheap overnight rooms. The team took
the opportunity to fall back into the safe house.
Fox and Mustafa stayed outside.
She parked her car at the corner of a T-junction on
the east end of the street. She had rotated license plates again, drawing from
her pool of spares in the trunk. She tinted the windows, lowered them just a
crack, turned off the engine, and slid low in the front seat.
The cool air quickly grew warm and stale. Her eyelids
drooped, her muscles melted. She pinched herself, trying to stay awake, and
sipped from her thermos of hot coffee.
Her sleep schedule was shot. Her body didn’t know if
it were fully awake or almost asleep, only that it had to stay alert. She
fought the urge to turn on the engine and the air conditioner; she would show
up bright as day on a thermal imager. Instead, to stay awake, she diligently
jotted down every vehicle and pedestrian that passed by, war-gamed scenarios in
her head, breathed deeply of the rapidly-stagnating air, and kept an eye on the
clock.
Two and a half hours into her watch, a convoy of cars
appeared behind her.
A fleet of four black SUVs, utterly identical, painted
a matte black. They rode unusually low to the ground, betraying the presence of
ballistic armor. Their windows were tinted, but as they approached, she saw
silhouettes of men occupying the seats.
And, as one, they turned into the street.
Fox keyed her radio.
“Contact,” she whispered. “Four vics approaching the
safe house. Black SUVs, possibly armored. Four pax each.”
“Roger,” Mustafa replied. “I see them.”
“I’m going to make the call. Maintain visual.”
Fox dug her phone from her RFID-blocking pocket.
The SUVs approached the safe house.
She touched her finger to the speed dial.
They accelerated.
She waited.
And abruptly they pulled perfect U-turns, crossing
over to the other side of the road.
She blinked.
The cars rolled silently to a stop, halting outside—
She hit the call button and brought the phone to her
ear.
Cindy answered on the first ring.
“Yes, madam?”
“Wake everyone up, then pass the phone to Yuri.”
“Immediately, madam.”
Fabric scuffled. Soft voices hissed.
The cars lined up outside an unobtrusive concrete
building. In perfect synchrony, sixteen men spilled out from the vehicles. In
the neon and sodium lighting, she saw helmets, body armor, M585 personal
defense weapons.
“Go for Samurai,” Yamamoto said.
“Four vehicles pulled up across the road from the safe
house. Looks like an assault team.”
The assaulters worked in perfect silence. No words, no
hand gestures, no visible communications. They simply rolled out to their
positions. The teams from the lead and chase cars took up security positions,
locking down both ends of the street. The other eight assaulters stacked on the
door. One man broke off from the train, shotgun in hand.
“I see them,” Yamamoto said. “Z, tell Alex he’s been
traced.”
“Roger,” Tan replied, his voice distant and muted.
The shotgunner stabbed his weapon downwards at the
lock. Racked his weapon. Fired. Pivoted smartly in place. Pumped again. Blew
out the top hinge, then the bottom hinge.
Stepping back, he slung his weapon. A second assaulter
tossed in a flash-bang. The moment the stun grenade detonated, the entry team
rushed past the breacher and streamed into the office.
Thundercracks reverberated within the building.
Blinding light flashed out the windows, slowly climbing upwards. The security
team remained completely still, braced behind vehicles and lamp posts, scanning
the streets.
It was textbook tactics, Fox knew. And it was exactly
the wrong playbook to use.
Flash-bangs had their place in the arsenal. But much
of their impact relied on shock and surprise. Using them so many times so often
inside a structure merely alerted the occupants, giving them time to prepare
themselves. And the STS had, through long training, inured themselves to the
effects of stun grenades. If she were in charge of this takedown, they’d go
soft and stealthy all the way, waiting until the last moment to deploy stun
grenades. If at all.
These guys weren’t in the STS’ league.
On the other hand, they were smooth and professional.
They had at least some training. And
manpower was a superpower all by itself.
Headlights appeared in the rear view mirror. A second
convoy of vehicles approached from behind. Three trucks. Different makes and
models, but they were all painted black, maintaining an even separation between
them.
“Contact. Three trucks coming down the street. Stand
by.”
The first truck sped past the T-junction. The other
two turned into the road.
And the security team reacted instantly, training
their weapons on the vehicles.
The armored trucks halted suddenly. The rear vic almost collided into the lead vehicle.
Then the doors flew open and a dozen people climbed.
They were tall, lean, impossibly agile. But they all
had a mishmash of kit. Plate carriers, tactical vests, chest rigs; shotguns,
carbines, a pair of enormous pistols. They muddled about, forming a loose cigar
around both vehicles, following the direction of a grizzled man shouting orders
and waving knife-hands.
Their leader, an Amazon with her hair tied in huge
buns, strode towards the security element, shotgun slung around her neck.
“Who’s in charge here?!” she boomed, so loudly Fox
could clearly hear her.
An assaulter stepped away from the security team, held
up his hand, and shook his head.
The woman yelled again. Fox couldn’t make out the
words, but she was clearly furious. Her left hand was clenched in a tight ball,
her right hand poking the assaulter in the chest. She loomed over him,
attempting to dominate him with her stature. He stood his ground, visibly
unimpressed.
Heedless of the drama, the entry team continued
working their way up, flash-banging their way up. They were on the sixth floor,
two floors down from the top.
Fox dug out her monocular from the glove box and
raised it to her eyes.
“Samurai, it looks like they’re playing for different
teams.”
“Agreed,” Yamamoto said. “What can you see?”
“Stand by…”
Fox focused on the woman’s lips. Resting her fists on
her hips, the Amazon shouted at the impassive assaulter.
“This was not
part the agreement!” she shouted.
The assaulter shrugged. “The agreement only required
us to provide advance notice if we found the targets.”
“It was supposed to be a coordinated attack!”
“The Will of the Net estimated—”
An explosion cut them off.
“What the hell?” Fox murmured.
“Alex just blew his remote machine,” Yamamoto said.
“I see. The first batch of assaulters identified
themselves as Sinners. Nothing about the other group. They said they had some
kind of agreement, likely to hunt us down. But they were supposed to coordinate
their actions.”
“But they didn’t. Interesting…”
The Sinners glanced up at the blast, then resumed
their duties. Their representative nonchalantly brushed something off his
shoulder. The other team startled, frantically scanning in every direction. Their boss stepped back and looked both
ways.
“Apparently my team activated a self-destruct device.
No casualties, but I think we lost them,” the cyborg said.
The Amazon sniffed contemptuously. Her mouth fell into
shadow, and Fox couldn’t read her response.
“It was a calculated risk. These things happen,” the
cyborg replied. “We will—”
A two-dimensional circle of perfect blackness opened
in the space between them.
The Sinner and the Amazon jumped back, reflexively
raising their weapons.
A figure strode out of the darkness and into a pool of
light. Squinting, she made out a hat, a coat and black pants. He raised his
hands, and the portal closed behind him.
“Void Collective,” Yamamoto said. “Only they have
powers like that.”
At the same time, the newcomer said, “Good evening.”
Their backs to her, Fox couldn’t make out what the
Sinner and the Amazon said in response.
“I am from the Void Collective. I trust you two are
from the Singularity Network and the Liberated.”
The cyborg lowered his weapon. The Liberated woman
still kept hers trained on the newcomer.
“I am not a threat to you. Lower your weapon,” the VC
operative said.
Slowly, reluctantly, she did.
“Thank you. To answer your question, I was watching
the site. Through our own investigations, we determined that the targets were
somewhere in Electric City. My mission was to ascertain their location, along
with my brothers. Have you found them?”
The Amazon shook her head.
“Pity. But this is why we investigate before we
attack.”
The Amazon rankled.
The assault team filed out of the building. The ones
in the rear had expandable duffel bags slung over their shoulders.
“I see you found something. What is it?” the VC
operative asked.
The woman glanced at the cyborgs, and her face caught
the light again.
“Or were you planning to keep them from us?” she
asked.
The Sinner kept his back to Fox.
“I trust you will,” the Void operative said. “The
agreement only means something if you keep to it.”
The Liberated pivoted smoothly, facing her Sinner
counterpart.
“You won’t go attacking ‘time-limited targets’ on your
own again, will you?” she asked.
The Sinner shrugged.
“We’ll hold you to your word,” the Void operative
said.
The Sinner tilted his head slightly.
“Certainly,” the VC watcher replied. “On the other
hand, while the Singularity Network may be suzerain of Electric City, we hold
significant holdings here. What you do could potentially affect us. Likewise,
should the targets resurface in the domains of the other New Gods, we will
coordinate with them too, out of respect and practicality. We hope you would
keep that in mind. Both of you.”
The Sinner nodded. The Amazon dipped her head.
The SN assaulters pulled back to their vehicles. The
Liberated retreated to their own. The Void operative stood his ground, watching
them.
Abruptly he turned, staring at Fox.
She blinked.
And froze.
Had he seen her? She couldn’t tell, but she sensed the
heat of his gaze, burning through her lens.
She did the only things she could do.
Remain still.
Breathe.
Wait.
An eternity later, a circle of darkness opened behind
the VC watcher.
He stepped back, and the blackness swallowed him. An
instant later, the portal vanished.
Fox sighed sharply.
Then saw the armored vehicles rolling down the street.
She slunk low in her seat, way out of sight, tracking
the vehicles’ passage by their streetlights. When the last lights disappeared
into the night, she slid her way back up.
“Looks like they’re gone,” she whispered.
“Roger that,” Yamamoto said. “Are you alright?”
“Yeah. I don’t think they saw me.”
“That’s a relief. Did you learn anything useful?”
“The New Gods have an arrangement to hunt us all down.
But it doesn’t seem that they trust each other very much either.”
“It’s something we could exploit,” Yamamoto mused.
“Come back inside and tell us in detail what you saw.
“Roger,” Fox said.
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