Code Breakers: Beta (12 page)

The door opened, Gerry tensed ready to attack.

“Hey, it’s just us!” Cheska said stepping in holding up her wrists, still restrained with the EM Cuffs. Malik and a few people from GeoCity-1 stood behind her.

“Any chance of getting us out of these? We need to move now. I can hear them trying to get through the main doors. They’ll be here any minute.” Malik said.

Gerry turned to Gabe, “There’s one door in, one door out. Unless you got any ideas?”

“Yeah, man, I gotta plan.”

Chapter 17

P
etal sipped fresh water from a cup, closed her eyes as the cool liquid helped take the taste of salt-water from her mouth. She yawned and looked over at Sasha’s holoscreen: nearly 23:00. She hadn’t slept properly for over twenty-four hours, and despite all the ‘Stems she’d had lately, her body demanded a rest.

She slumped into the seat next to Sasha, stared at her, smiled to herself. Whatever the exact situation was, it was kinda cool to have a sister, if that’s what they were.

Maybe she was a clone?
That’d be cool, too
. Petal had always wanted a family, and as close as she was to Gabe, he was still a man unto himself, a mystery, an enigma.

The sub rocked violently to the left. A great booming sound accompanied the movement, and the display flashed with a series of numbers. Petal noticed the temp gauge spike. Which meant one thing: particle beam weapons.

“It’s The Family’s drones, isn’t it?” Petal said.

Sasha brushed herself off and levelled the sub. “Yeah,” she said.

“Dive.”

“I’m on it.”

Sasha put the Sub into an evasive spin, and in a wide arc sent it back down into the depths, steering away from the reef, and the base.

“How far are we from your compound?” Petal asked

“Not far, but I can’t risk luring the drones there. I shouldn’t even be out here rescuing you. Jimmy’s gonna kill me.”

“Not if the drones kill us first,” Petal said. “This tub got any weaponry? EMP, laser, missiles, torpedoes?”

“Yeah, it has, but.” Sasha screwed up face and her cheeks blushed red.

“You didn’t arm it before coming out?” Petal said, trying not to sound too derogatory. It was clear the girl was out of her depth, in more ways than one.

“Well, I thought I’d pick you up and bring you back before the satellite came over. We’ve been tracking it for months, I got my times right, I’m sure I did.” Another blast hit the water and the sub jerked.

“They won’t just give up,” Petal said.

“You fought them before?” Sasha asked.

“Yeah, occupational hazard.” Petal gave her a wry smile.

“What do you do exactly?”

“Lately it’s been hacking a bit of this and a bit of that, although very lately it was saving City Earth, and look at the thanks we’re getting.”

“City Earth? You’ve been there? How did you get out?”

The radar screen showed the four UAVs circling their position. No doubt they’d hold their weapons until they breached the surface.

“I’ll tell you about it sometime, but we kinda need to deal with these first, huh? How much air do we have?”

Sasha checked the holoscreen. “About an hour.”

“That’s us screwed then. Those drones can go for days. They’ll wait for us and then blast us out of the water.”

Sasha slumped into her seat, kicked out in frustration. “I knew I should have listened to Jimmy. But oh no, I had to go and try and prove something.”

“Who’s Jimmy? Tell me about him,” Petal asked, more to get the girl to calm down, think rationally. If she could take some of the anger and frustration out of her, then they could think more logically.

“My father I suppose, kinda. It’s difficult to explain and, well, I probably shouldn’t be telling you any of this.”

“What is he though? A medical doctor, a tech guy, engineer?”

Sasha took a deep breath. “I suppose you could say he’s medical for the most part, but, look, it’s not that I don’t want to trust you, it’s just I’ve screwed up enough. Let’s see if we make it back, then you’ll learn about him, us, the whole lot.”

“Fair enough. What’s the tech like on this thing, decent processing power? What about its remote access facilities?”

“The computer’s a Legacy II. It’s standard for most military equipped subs and powerful enough. As for access to the systems, it’d be great if those UAVs weren’t jamming us. I can’t signal out, and the stealth doesn’t seem to be working. Jimmy warned me it wasn’t ready for real word applications, but in the tests, I don’t know. I was so convinced.”

“Stealth? What kind of stealth?” Petal asked.

“Look, how do I know you ain’t working for the Red Widows? You were in one of their Jaguars, wearing their gear. You even had one of their little religious books on you. If it walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck.” Sasha raised her eyebrows, questioning Petal’s origins. She had to agree. It did look suspicious.

Petal held out her forearm. “Would I be one of the Widows if I had one of your chips inside me?”

“They could have taken it out of you, turned you to a double agent or something.” Sasha crossed her arms defensively. Petal could tell she didn’t really believe it.

“And the fact we’re clearly related or perhaps the same clones doesn’t give you an idea that I might be on your side?”

Sasha shrugged, plotted a new direction into the sub’s navigation computer sending it into a wide arc some two-hundred metres below the surface.

“Look, we’ve got an hour before we’re out of air,” Petal said. “We can’t go back to the base, and we have no weaponry. Either you trust me and tell me more about what this sub can, and should be able to do, and let me help you, or we both stay here like sitting ducks.”

Sasha opened her mouth and began to speak, but Petal was riled up now and seeing the girl wilt under her aggression sought to take the advantage.

“You’re just a girl playing at real life. Do you really think those UAVs will politely stay up in the air? Do you even know what they are capable of? Did you not know that they could submerge too? What will you do when they decide to dive and find us down here in the dark?”

Sasha’s eyes grew wide. “They can do that? Go under water, I mean?”

“Of course they can. You think The Family make crappy equipment like this tub? They have the best resources and the best minds working on their stuff. They’ll be down here in no time. They’re probably just biding their time while they scan our systems for vulnerabilities. You really want The Family inside the computer of this thing?”

“If they get in then they’ll—” Sasha looked away, perhaps subconsciously towards the base.

“Yeah, they’ll find your base and probably nuke it. It’s far enough away from City Earth that it wouldn’t be a risk to them. And no one else would give a damn if some rinky-dink island gets blown to hell.”

“I can’t do this,” Sasha said quietly, almost under her breath. “I’m not trained for this kind of thing.”

“Then what are you trained for?” Petal asked.

“Field combat,” she said, slumping her shoulders as if that was nothing to be proud of. Petal supposed it wasn’t when you were stuck in a submarine.

“You’ve got a choice, girl,” Petal said. “Either you let me into the systems and let me see what I can do, or we swim about until either we’re out of energy, or the UAVs kill us. It’s up to you. What would Jimmy want you to do?”

Sasha squirmed in her chair, pressed her lips together. She took a deep breath, then, in a resigned rush said. “Okay, then. Just don’t mess it up.”

Petal arched an eyebrow. “Please, I’m the expert here. Now swap seats and give me your login credentials.”

Sasha complied. Petal navigated through the sub’s system via the holoscreen. It was slower work than using a gesture-capable tablet, but at least her apparent twin could see what she was doing. Maybe even learn something along the way.

Petal hacked the system easily. Within minutes she had bypassed the encryption and logged in as a super-root user, gaining access to the system’s core file system and code libraries. She supposed given that the sub was still in development they hadn’t anticipated someone would be driving it about and wanting to get into the code. It was certainly clean, well-commented, and elegant. She gave the developers that at least.

It took another five minutes to find the portion of the system that controlled the stealth module. It was a clever piece of tech. As Petal ran through the code line-by-line constructing a model of it in her head she had to give Jimmy and his coders a great deal of credit. The code was borderline genius: a polymorphic structure with its own machine-learning AI component that sent random signals to billions of nano-cells on the outside of the sub. Each one of the cells would make a note of the light falling upon its surrounding and recreate the photons within its own light transmitters so that anything that looked upon it, be it a satellite, drone or person, would effectively see nothing other than its surroundings, rendering it completely invisible.

The radar facilities appeared to work in a similar fashion, allowing a complete pass-through of any radar. There was one problem, however: Jimmy hadn’t quite finished the code. There were various functions and methods that the code relied upon to compile correctly that simply didn’t exist yet.

“Well, can you fix it?” Sasha said after a while, all the time fidgeting in the seat next to Petal.

“Yeah, I can do it. But I need something from you first.”

Sasha rolled her eyes. “What do you want?”

“When we get back, I want you to introduce me to this Doc of yours.”

“You’ll have no worries with that,” Sasha said. “He’ll kill me for all this, and will likely kill you second.”

“Oh, I doubt that. I can be charming when I need to be.” To prove the point, Petal pouted her lips, swept her hair back, and busted out her best smile. “See?”

Sasha shook her head and laughed.

Petal couldn’t believe how much they looked alike. Despite the differences of hairstyles, it was like looking in a mirror.

“I best get to work then,” Petal said.

“Okay, hurry.”

All the time Petal worked at coding the missing functions, she kept catching glimpses from Sasha, her face a mixture of awe, wonder, and confusion. No doubt the very same look that Petal had on her own face when looking at Sasha.

Almost at the same time they both spoke. “It’s weird, isn’t it?”

They laughed together, before they became silent, stared at each for a few long seconds.

Petal turned away, back to her screen. “Okay, just adding the last bit.” She completed the last of the required functions, rebooted the machine to compile the new code. “Right, let’s see if this works then.”

“I hope so. For both of our sakes.”

The radar blipped once, then twice.

“They’re here.” Sasha pointed to the video feed of the rear camera.

Two drones had submerged, and in a corkscrew pattern dived down into the depths, sweeping the waters for their location.

“Have you fixed it yet?” Sasha said, her eyes wider now, a little hint of panic twitching at the corner of her mouth.

“Almost,” Petal replied as she error-checked the last of her functions. It failed on the first reboot. Caught on a snag somewhere. After a while of debugging the original program, she eventually understood how the polymorphic code worked. Realising her mistake, she navigated back to a segment of code and typed in a fix. She ran a quick test: no errors. “That should do it.”

The drones drew closer. The video feed had them at less than fifty metres away.

They would be within visual contact in a matter of seconds.

“Hurry,” Sasha said, her leg bouncing up and down, making a tapping noise against the hull.

“I’m nearly done. Rebooting now.”

“Oh crap, they’re getting closer. Thirty metres, they’ll see us.”

Petal moved her hands swiftly across the holoscreen, waiting for it to catch up with her movement. How she wished to have had a direct connection instead. She could have done this in half the time. Hopefully this Jimmy guy could put her dermal wrist implant back in, give her back some of her abilities.

“Twenty metres. I think they’ve seen us. They’re moving into flanking formation.”

“Bastards!”
Come on come on
! She willed the system to reboot faster, but all the damned security checks and menus asking for input slowed her down. As good as these Criborg people were they could use some help to streamline their systems.

Petal glanced up at the video feed. Small streams of bubbles exited around the domed front of the two drones. “They’re readying weapons.”

Sasha grabbed the manual navigation controls and pulled the sub up, powering the engine and shooting them forwards. Two torpedoes from the drones, one either side of the sub, launched out into the water towards them. Sasha’s evasive manoeuvre pulled them out just in time as the torpedoes smashed into each other, sending a shock wave that knocked the sub into a semi-roll.

Petal flew backwards out of her seat, but managed to grab onto the headrest as Sasha righted the sub.

“That was close,” Petal said.

“Tell me the stealth is working, I can’t keep doing this, I wasn’t trained for this kind of thing,” Sasha said, sweat glossy on her forehead.

The boot process had finished. A dialogue box flashed on the holoscreen. Petal pulled herself back over the front seat and engaged the newly coded system.

“There, it’s online. I don’t know if it’ll actually work. Only one way to find out.” She turned to flash another grin at Sasha.

“What do you mean?” Sasha said slowly, with a hint of worry in her voice.

“Ramming speed! What’s your surname by the way?” Petal said.

“I don’t have one, you?”

“No damned clue. Probably a serial number or something, huh?”

Sasha dropped her head then, mumbled, “Yeah, probably.”

Had she hit a nerve? Oh well, t was too late to worry about that.

“Seriously though, ram them. If the stealth is working, they won’t see us until its too late, right?”

“But we can’t. What if it damages the sub?”

Petal shook her head, “Fine, get out of the way.” She pushed Sasha out of the navigation seat, took hold of the controls, and turned the sub around and plotted a collision course. “The hull’s strong on this thing, ain’t it?”

“I suppose, but I don’t think it’s—”

“That’s your problem right there, girl. Too much thinking and not enough doing.”

Petal pushed the engines to maximum while aiming the sub at the nearest drone.

They sped through the water. Given the drone’s slow arcing course, it was apparent that it was trying to find them. It appeared that the stealth system had worked after all. Petal gave herself a mental pat on the back and braced her legs against the bulkhead of the hull.