Re-Coil - J.T. Nicholas Page 0,76
set foot on Daedalus, you’d draw your share of eyes too. And probably be in considerably more danger. It seemed that, perhaps, some of the judgment I saw in the eyes around me was warranted.
I contemplated that as I followed Shay from the marbled world of Genetechnic and back into the barren and dusty landscape that was reality.
She was silent until we had passed through the doors of the Genetechnic headquarters and then cleared the grounds of the plaza in front of the building. When she spoke, it was in a low voice, almost a whisper, that I had to strain to hear. “I’ve had Bit working on some spoofing programs ever since we got here on Pallah,” Shay said. “Highly illegal. If we get caught, we’re going to be banned from the dome, at a minimum. Maybe incarcerated.” She shrugged. “But it should be enough to edit us out of the electronic eyes and I doubt Pallah Central will tumble to it in just a couple of hours. So, I think I can keep us clear of most electronic surveillance.” She paused. “But I don’t know if I should.”
“Huh?” I asked. “We need to make sure that Genetechnic doesn’t follow us. They’ve got enough money and enough pull to put pressure on any institution I can think of to leave the cores. If they know where we deposited them…” I trailed off. The implications were clear. Unless we could make a clean break, there wasn’t much to stop Genetechnic from trailing us and cleaning up our backups. I wasn’t certain they would try to do it. They seemed sincere in their need of our help. But they had also shown that they were willing to kill people on the chance that they might know something, so I wasn’t prepared to take that risk.
“I know,” Shay said, frustration clear in her voice. “But if we walk into a bank or whatever and their monitors don’t see us, it’s going to cause problems. Maybe get bank security crashing down on us.”
I was catching on. “And if you disable your program right before we go into the bank, then eventually Genetechnic’s hackers will find the video, and know right where to go.” I thought about it a moment. “Fuck. They’ve got us.”
“Maybe not,” Shay said. “I can see two options. First, we stash the cores somewhere no one would think to look—bury them or something—with my scrambler program running so no one sees us do it. Then we leave a dead-man’s switch on our systems to send the location to someone we can trust in the event we don’t return.” I nodded. It wasn’t all that different from what I’d managed—or rather, what my branch had managed—on the Persephone. More refined, of course—it was Shay we were talking about—but the same general idea.
“Okay, that sounds workable,” I agreed. “But you said you had two options.”
“The second is a shell game. We leave everything running and visit every bank, solicitor, storage center, and depository that we can in a couple of hours, and we drop something off at all of them.”
I grinned. “Betting that Genetechnic won’t be able to twist the arm of every business like that in Pallah all at the same time.”
Shay nodded. “Right. Eventually, they’ll find the cores. And there’s always a chance they’ll get lucky and find them early. But the odds of that happening in the time frame we’re talking…” She trailed off. Shrugged.
I thought about it a moment. “Why not both?” I asked. “We use your scrambler just long enough to bury the goods, then make it seem like it malfunctioned or something. Then we visit every place we can. Only, at one of them, we don’t just drop off some meaningless nothing. We set up our dead-man’s switch.”
A chuckle escaped Shay. “Genetechnic will be so intent on finding the prize under the right shell that they won’t think that we might have set up some other kind of insurance policy.” She offered me a coquettish smile that hung poorly on her coil. “I didn’t know you were so mischievous.”
“Or dirty, underhanded, and conniving,” I countered.
“Whatever works.”
* * *
We almost didn’t make it in time.
We moved from bank to bank, lawyer to lawyer, doing little more than having a brief conversation. Along the way, we cut through an alleyway between two prefab structures. I gave Shay the nod and a heartbeat later, she said, “We’re dark.”
What had drawn me to the alleyway was a large doorway. Not