Re-Coil - J.T. Nicholas Page 0,33
miss us.”
I shook my head. “That guy in the med center on Prospect wasn’t trying to kidnap me, Chan. He was there to kill me. And those guys at the club started shooting just to get inside. They don’t want to kidnap us.”
A sickened expression flashed across the chiseled surfer-god features she wore. “Then our backups aren’t safe, either. If they want us dead, they’ll keep trying to hack their way in, and we know they’ve already succeeded once. Eventually, they’ll succeed again. And when they manage to kill us, we’ll be dead, truly dead, and gone forever.” Her voice quavered at the end and her head fell forward, blonde locks obscuring her face. My hand twitched to push them back, but instead I rested it on her coil’s shoulder. Her coil’s muscular shoulder. She was still Shay Chan, whatever body she wore. But there was something about Chan’s mind coupled with her present vulnerability that called to me.
I forced the thoughts from my head. Wherever they were coming from, now was certainly not the right time to explore them. I gave her shoulder a gentle squeeze.
“Then we’ll just have to stay alive,” I said. “And find out why all this is happening. If we can figure out what the hell happened on that derelict vessel, and what happened to the Persephone, then maybe we can expose all of this. One thing’s for sure. If we can prove that someone was able to delete or corrupt backups, we’ll get people’s attention real quick.”
She smiled wanly. “And just how do you propose we do that?”
I grinned back. “Hey, I’m just the lug that does the space walks and fights the zombies. You’re the crack hacker with a secret lair in the bowels of the habitat. These guys might be good, but they have to have left some kind of trail. Between the shuttle, the Persephone, and Miller, there’s got to be something on the Net. Otherwise, why go to all the trouble? They’re scared, Chan. Scared that something’s out there that can be traced back to them.”
“And if it’s there,” Chan said, some of the old confidence creeping back into her voice, “then I can find it.”
* * *
It wasn’t that easy, of course. It never was. Chan hunched over her console, a cable running from it to the access jack behind her ear, since no matter the advances in wireless technology, you still couldn’t beat a direct neural interface for maximum data transfer rates. Her hands sat flat on the desk and her face was slack and expressionless. She had been that way for hours, direct interfacing with the Net at maximum bandwidth, presumably breaking any number of laws to try and track down anything that would help us survive the next few days. Or hours. Hell. Minutes, even. A good and necessary thing for her to be doing, but it left me sitting in a strange compartment, with not a lot to do.
I was leery even of jumping on the Net, since whoever had erased Miller certainly outclassed me in that department. Access IDs could be traced, and I lacked the skill to adequately cover my tracks. I could only hope that Chan was good enough at erasing her digital footprints as she went.
Which left me staring at the barred door, waiting as the minutes ticked by, and wondering how long it would be before the next assassin found us and tried to batter their way through the reinforced door. I pulled the Gauss pistol from the pouch where I had stashed it and rested it in my lap. Anything that came through the door would be in for a bit of a surprise, at least. And that just about exhausted the preparations I could make.
Sarah, play me the full video from the salvage operation.
Would you like to view it in virtual reality? my agent asked.
Given that Sarah could inform me the moment any disturbance took place in the real world, it wasn’t as bad an idea as it sounded. But the visceral caveman part of me refused to turn its senses over to agent control while sticking its head in the metaphorical sands of VR—not for an unspecified number of hours, and not when I knew someone was coming to kill me. “No. Just open a window. A small window. And give me audio.”
Sarah complied, opening a window in my vision that took up maybe thirty percent of my sight picture. The audio started as well, playing directly