Opposition Shift Read online

  Nibiru let herself smile then, though an exaggerated roll of her eyes accompanied it. “I’m glad you’re not dead.”

  He grinned back. “Me, too.”

  The more important bits out of the way, they got to work. Nibiru shared the files that Bascilica had sent along. He was caught off guard by a fit of laugher halfway through, when he realized that Bascilica wrote just as he talked, rehashing the same orders and requests with variations in phrasing.

  He had to give it to the all-too-sleek executive, at least the man wrote his own reports, which was something the average top-shelf executive treated as beneath them. There was little there that Hayden wasn’t already aware of, though some of it was new to Nibiru. Their objective was the same as it had always been, to get a lock on the pulse so that they could find the damn nexus and start actually winning the company something in return for this, so far, disastrously expensive endeavor.

  They might have hollowed out a handful of E-Bloc slingers and more than a few troopers, perhaps wreaked some collateral damage on Asia Prime's network hardware, but overall, they were deep in the red and without much to show for it beyond some basic intel on the resistance.

  “I don’t get it,” Hayden joked. “What the hell are they spending their cash on now that we've moved? It’s definitely not the food.” He paused, tapped his bruised chest. “Or the armor.”

  He wasn’t expecting a serious answer. His head was so tangled that he wanted all the new information to stay light, easy to process. Hayden was not in the mood to weigh anything else on the cosmic scale. He'd had enough of that these last few days.

  “Apparently,” Nibiru said, “Bribing the government to avoid our operations while E-Bloc is strong-arming them into helping their teams and troopers is getting expensive. According to Bascilica's write up, we’ve already had several double agents purged thanks to yesterday’s battle. And may I suggest not even daring to look at the repair bill for putting Laine back together after the HQ got hit.”

  “Agreed,” Hayden said grudgingly. “He’s certainly making sure we see just how much of a fortune this has already cost.” The room only held one chair, so he took a seat on the edge of the desk.

  “It was never about breaking even, though,” He continued. “If that had been the hope, they wouldn’t have bothered with setting anything up in Manila at all. This is about changing the entire balance of the post-war economy. All the pieces, all the money, all the power.”

  Nibiru nodded, went back to fiddling with the guts of her rig.

  “If he wants us to step it up,” she said, “Then we’d better get to it.”

  She looked at him expectantly. An odd sense of nervousness pervaded his thoughts, making him feel as though he couldn’t quite catch his breath. He told her what the old man had said, watching her face twist in thought at the myth that the energy was inside the Akiaten as well as in the earth around them.

  Hayden half expected her to laugh it off, or at least gloss over it as if it were just local gossip the way Bascilica had. It was, after all, a big intellectual leap for the high-tech types who saw reality expressly through the lens of hard science, himself included.

  To Hayden's surprise, her eyes lit up at the story, and her posture straightened, voice brimming with possibility.

  “Maybe if we can understand it, study it more—even just the residual energy in the bodies we have—we can use that to pinpoint the optimal location for harvesting. Could be that the nexus is something more arbitrary than we've been assuming.

  “We drill for oil and gas, so we think of such resources as static things, but this idea of the Akiaten indicates that it might not be as centralized as all that. Or there’s a nexus type thing out there. It’s more intentional maybe than circumstantial."

  Hayden agreed hollowly, trying, and failing to let himself be swept up in her enthusiasm.

  They both promised to work on the tentative plan separately and perhaps meet up in the operations center or the datascape the next morning. Hayden hauled himself back up the stairs to the living quarters, forgoing even a brief visit to the operations center or his private workspace.

  So much for going back for his rig, he pouted to himself, apparently still not done feeling put out by all of this. He did compose a quick message for Overdog as he walked, showing as much interest as he could in the current goings on and promising to stop by the next day regardless of whether he had need of anything in the space or not. It would be good to touch base with the man, and the slingers there needed to see that he was still on their team.

  But that could wait a few more hours.

  It was already the middle of the night, but Hayden allowed himself a few hours of sleep in a bed that still didn’t feel like his before he went back to work. Rest wasn’t easy to find—he spent the first hour tossing to and fro on the firm mattress as his thoughts shook his skull like an old train on rickety tracks.

  When his eyes eased shut and stayed that way, he dreamed about the jungle at night. He was walking through the dense vegetation, sweating in the heat, and something was watching him from the dark foliage. Something bright-eyed and quick with a flashing gaze that made him feel like prey. Everything became darkness, heat, the taste of blood on his tongue, and the flap of leathery wings filling his ears.

  When he woke, he wasn’t sure what his brain was trying to warn him off, but he felt shaken all the same, and warned on some primal level he had yet to fully understand.

  The datascape had been quiet for a while. Hayden worked from his private space near the operations center, not quite in the right mindset for company. The last thing he wanted was to seem hostile or snappish at the other slingers for reasons they didn’t understand. He nodded at Qais when he passed him in the hallway, but that was the extent of his interaction with other Union team members for the entirety of the morning. Better to remain aloof and pull rank for some privacy until he was ready to be part of the show again.

  He had settled into his chair with a mug of coffee that wasn’t quite as good as the one he’d had from the café the previous night and a pastry that tasted sweet but too dense, another unpleasant result of the emergency rations being drafted into use.

  He’d heard a rumor of new shipments arriving later that day as he’d gathered up his food in the small dining facility, but the voices discussing it had sounded more hopeful than anything, so he put little stock in its truth. Complaining about pastry, he laughed grimly to himself, now that was a first world problem indeed.

  He got little done that would be called actual work. He downloaded the file Bascilica had sent out to the team that detailed the report Hayden had given him the previous afternoon and read through it, curious to see whether the man had exaggerated or added commentary. He was disappointed to find it mostly stuck to the facts, and amused that Bascilica had thought to send it to the subject of the debriefing as well as the others. The boss reminding me that I'm an asset like everybody else, the slinger thought to himself.

  He ate his breakfast slowly, taking with it the low-grade painkillers the med center had issued him for his chest, just anti-inflammatories. He was planning on real work soon, at the very least shoring up their defenses in preparation of another drone run with Nibiru, and wouldn’t have taken anything that might risk dulling his senses or slowing his reaction time. Even in the datascape, such things were affected by the state one’s body was in.

  When he was finished with the various firewalls and pitfalls that comprised the Union's local defense grid, it was past ten in the morning. He dragged himself out of CodeSource and steeled himself for the questions that were sure to dog him when he entered the operations center. Had he had time, he would put off the inevitable until late that night, when the place would be empty of all but the usual skeleton crew of slingers.

  It was with a sense of relief that he walked through the doors at last, glad for once to simply get it over with. He was shocked when he was greeted with little fanfare. A bit of whispering started up between thos
e already standing close, but most were too absorbed in their own tasks to give him more than the cursory, curious look. He walked through without being assailed, and the only words he felt compelled to reply to were mostly cheerful.

  “Good to see you’re still kicking,” from a female slinger about to jack into CodeSource for one task or another, perhaps not yet realizing that Hayden had essentially re-built their entire defense grid in the amount of time it took them to sift through their inbox and peruse the Union newsfeeds.

  He headed straight for the throne in the back, half expecting to find that someone had claimed it in his absence. He gave the room one last cursory look for Overdog, still expecting a conversation of some sort to clear the air. His eyes scanned the room for Nibiru as well. She’d said to expect her in the datascape at some point, but they hadn’t discussed a concrete time.

  It was just as well to Hayden. He wanted time in the code to think, to try to reaffirm his status as the lead slinger of Americana’s operations. He needed to get his head on straight, and he did not want Nibiru to see him waver.

  It felt good to slip the twin cables into their respective jacks and sink down into the code, the feeling of the wired helmet cold and heavy against his head. Even in the datascape, he could feel it if he focused, just as he could feel the firmness of the throne that he sat on, his fingers moving, testing, as they brushed against the high-grade fabric that made it up. He watched the city grow around him, buildings rising and spreading outward until he seemed to be looking over the streets that surrounded their new HQ, far from the bulk of the Akiaten activity.

  If anything was to get done, this wasn’t where he needed to be. He took his time winding his way through the code, all the same, giving Nibiru plenty of time to finish whatever work she’d set aside for herself that morning; whatever preparations she thought should be made before venturing as far into the datascape as CodeSource would allow. The datascape could be a nightmare if you weren’t confident in your entrance, the anxious signals from one’s brain traveling down the cable and affecting what you saw. The streets seemed to change and shift as Hayden walked them, worrying over the old man’s words in his head.

  It belongs to us and, in a way, we belong to it.

  Hayden could see Una’s face, the utter wrongness of his upside-down reflection in her pupils. Should they even be toying with an energy source that did that, that changed the very basis of what a person was?

  As his thoughts grew darker, so did the sky above him, shifting toward evening, toward night, code glimmering in place of stars. He shook his head so hard that he felt the jarring sensation of the helmet shifting in real time, the cords and cables attached to him tugging as his neck twitched, trying to make the thoughts fall away.

  He recalled Captain Mitchell’s words and resolved that they should be the only thing in his head, spurring him forward. He was getting paid for this, and if he didn’t do it, someone else would. Perhaps, with Hayden at the head rather than someone else, he could at least do what he could to minimize damage. He was thinking of that kid, and the people gunned down in the streets in front of the safe house. E-Bloc might have pulled the trigger, but the Union was just as much at fault, he reluctantly determined.

  The sky lightened a bit, though the cloud cover was still heavy.

  His thoughts guided him through the datascape, the city around him thinning out. He saw the outskirts, smaller buildings with windows more often cracked and broken, the brickwork of the alleyways crumbling away much like the roads. Close to where the old HQ had been located, the firefight in the street, and near where the trail that Laine had followed to the safe-house originated. Just east of the fish market.

  The environment began to pixelate as fewer and fewer network nodes broadcast any signal on the edges of the city, and his imagination was working overtime to provide visuals for his experience.

  Intentionally keeping his MassNet presence near hard systems linked to CodeSource was risky considering that Sun might be lurking around out here. With no databases to raid or deep systems to plunder, the recon mission and CodeSource/MassNet collaboration of the work at hand required him to sail on more shallow seas.

  He found a good place to wait and busied himself preparing a number of executables to pass the time. He knew it was somewhat foolish for them to begin a mission unannounced, though, with other slingers on deck and Overdog somewhere in the building, it would only be a matter of time before everyone realized they were in the game. That was how it went on these sorts of jobs, when the time was right it was right, and Hayden felt the pull to get things moving.

  Nibiru found him there. He saw her movements in CodeSource, the metaphor casting her in his mind's eye as a light surrounded by many other, small lights. He could tell she meant to employ her drones again, and professionally, agreed with the move.

  She must have altered the programming to lock onto the energy, to find the nearest triangulation of the power. She still controlled them, still had the final say, but the drones were patterning the search movements themselves, going off whatever criteria she had given them. They swooped and dove through the air, the same glinting dragonflies as before. He did note that there were fewer this time and knew that not all of them had made it out of last excursion disaster unscathed.

  He hung back, though he kept himself positioned close to the searching swarm and tried to keep his attention locked on the drones despite his still conflicting thoughts.

  For a time, they simply made progress through the data stretched out across the cityscape, edging closer and closer to the pixelated jungle. While she was not as physically attached to the datascape as Hayden, her mind was still there, and he made sure she could see that he was ready to step in if there was an attack on the drones.

  When Hayden finally began to see activity in the distance, it had nothing to do with his presence or Nibiru’s. It was on the horizon of his imagination, though distance meant next to nothing in MassNet. Everything was real time and as close as touching so long as electrical current crackles and information streamed across time and space. Something was going down.

  Hayden set an overwatch.exe on Nibiru's signature, something low frequency that simply alerted him to her processing usage, as anything more than that would risk her getting noticed by other, more hostile scans and sweeps. If the processing usage spiked past its current point, Nibiru having established a baseline usage through having all her drones deployed, he would know that his .exe was defending her.

  Really, it just lashed out at anything that moved more than twenty percent into her firewall's perimeter, and after that, it was on Overdog, Hayden, and the gang to come to her rescue. More often than not, by the time, an attack was noticed it was too late, and he needed something faster than a request for help.

  He was almost relieved when he moved closer, altering the code to shield his form from sight. He made himself appear to be just part of the background noise of the bustling datascape. In that guise, he recognized the presence of E-Bloc slingers, their movements stiff and practiced even in MassNet. His imagination painted the E-Bloc slingers as something akin to humanoid beetles, and Hayden realized that he had grown to hate these people in a way he'd never experienced before.

  Most slingers appeared to him as the people reflected in the intel files the Union maintained on as many of its enemies as possible.

  Like his idea of Nibiru, the imagination painted a picture that often reflected one's innermost thoughts and prejudices. Last time he'd faced them, the E-Bloc slingers simply looked like troopers, but in the datascape, now they were grotesque things that spewed hostile programs.

  Their attacks were focused on what appeared to be a fortress of sorts, at least that's how his imagination interpreted the activity to which he was bearing witness.

  The building was, from the perspective of CodeSource, far from both the Union HQ and the current region of near-jungle city that Nibiru's drones were investigating. In MassNet however, it was as close as a few city bl
ocks and a shift in focus for Hayden, his mind slicing through the code to bring him right to the edge of the unfolding situation.

  The building appeared to him as a somewhat run-down apartment tower, surrounded on all sides by construction scaffolding, with all of its windows boarded up and its doors chained and locked.

  The E-Bloc slingers were smashing their insect-like appendages into the street level windows as others among them were attempting to break the chains on the front door with their hideous mandibles. No sooner would they pry away the boards of a window then someone inside, who exactly, Hayden couldn’t tell from his vantage point, would swiftly hammer more boards in their place, smashing pincers and beetle faces when possible with a crude hammer.

  Whoever was in there was fighting hard to hold the building secure, but the sheer might of the E-Bloc attack would wear them down any second now, and someone would get through.

  Before Hayden could fully cope with how his mind was presenting the hostile slingers he heard the sound of something breaking high above, and his eyes went to the scaffolding near the top of the besieged building.

  Sun had ascended the scaffolding, her body covered in close fitting armor mounted on a tight body glove. As he watched her fist glow with an overload.exe that she used to smash through one of the boarded-up windows, Hayden couldn't help but feel like she was being presented by his imagination as a bit more alluring than their previous encounters.

  Perhaps he'd been in the field and away from his high-rise lifestyle long enough his imagination was starting to tease him. He almost smiled at the awkward comedy of it, but when he saw her manifest a thin spear with a burning tip, the smile died at the corner of his mouth. When the Prime slinger thrust the spear into the darkness beyond the window Hayden could tell from the impact shudder in her arm and the tremor of a wicked smile on her lips that someone on the other end had just gotten fried, possibly killed outright.