Code Breakers: Beta (21 page)

Gerry found that comforting, realised it was probably Kaden.

As he scanned the data streams, he noticed a peculiar package of data amongst the sea of information. It stuck out to him because of the Helix++ code surrounding it. Unlike the regular flow of data that split into smaller packets of information, these were whole and although still relatively small, there was something odd about the encryption.

He focussed his mind on one, and loaded it into his AIA. From there, he looked closer at the code. The algorithm seemed familiar. To Gerry, all code was like handwriting. Everyone has their own unique style and approach, and after a while if you’re exposed to someone’s coding, you get to recognise their style.

And this style, all brash and elegant in equal measure meant only one person that he knew.

He ripped into the algorithm. His heart rate spiked. The anticipation made him dizzy. Layer after layer, he unpicked the code, unlocked the data to find a text message that made him smile a ridiculous grin.

Yo Gez, Petal here.

This is awkward. I don’t know if you’re alive or dead. If you’re still with us, and on Earth, I wanted to let you know I’m safe and with Criborg, my makers, kind of. Long story. I’ll fill you in another time. I got a new implant chip, this is my new network address: 2039:0db6:82c2:0022:1100. There’s a doctor here, Jimmy Robertson. He’s kind of my father. Anyway, tell Enna and Gabe if they’re with you that I’m all cool and fixed and upgraded.

We’re on our way to Darkhan with a small army. We’re fighting back, man! Let me know what’s happening with ya’ll and we’ll come and get you.

~ Petal.

“She’s alive!” he shouted. “Petal’s coming!”

As everyone turned to stare at him and react to the good news, he received an audio communication from The Family:

“Gerry, this is Jachz. We’ve looked at your data, and believe it to be true. We’ve also had some other factors to consider and the decision has been made. We’re evacuating City Earth of Priority one citizens. The Family have requested that you return to the Dome, with Petal, preferably within the next three hours.”

“Wait, what? What factors? Why only priority One? What’s going?” Gerry couldn’t believe what he was hearing. Priority One people were those exempt from the Death Lottery: the government, the president, and a handful of Family members on the surface.

“As I said, Gerry. Your presence has been requested.”

“Put me through to Amma, Jachz. Right now.”

“As you wish, Gerry.”

There was a short delay, before Gerry’s mother responded.

“Gerry, my love, this is serious. We’re under attack in more ways the one. The Family board have agreed to bring forward Phase Three of our mission. Please, come back. This isn’t reversible.”

“What the hell are you talking about? What’s not reversible, and what is Phase Three exactly?”

He heard her sigh over their communication channel.

“Phase Three is off-world development. I’m sure we spoke about this when you were with us. I hoped we would have more time, but our infrastructure both on the surface and in orbit is under attack and we don’t have the resources to defend those positions. We have no other choice. This is the catalyst. It was always going to come to this.”

“Catalyst? Stop talking in code and tell me what you are planning on doing.”

“Gerry, please. Just get to the City and get on the evacuation shuttles. I don’t want to lose you again.”

“Why dammit? What’s going to happen?”

“We can’t fight that force conventionally, Gerry love, we don’t have the personnel. Our mission is too precious to us. Furthering of humanity is too precious. It’s all we have.”

Slamming his fist on the desk and losing his temper, he blasted back his thoughts across his connection, trying to get as much as anger through as possible.

“Just tell me what the hell you’re planning!”

Amma sucked in her breath before answering.

“Posthuman, Gerry. It’s been agreed we’re moving forward with our plans. It’s our time to be born anew. And to defend our transformation we’re using nuclear deterrents. Nothing can threaten our evolution. It’s all we have left. We can’t allow scum like the Red Widows to simply take our City or destroy our satellites. We only have the station left. It’s too precious to risk.

“This is why you must return, come with us. Bring Petal. Leave the world. You have a bright future with us. You’ll be at the centre of it all. A new world, new beginnings!”

Gerry collapsed back into his chair, as a cold dread crept up his bones, chilling him through to the marrow.
Nukes
! They were going to nuke the planet again. And only Priority One saved. Priority One was fewer than a thousand people. They were going to sacrifice all of the innocent citizens as if they were nothing but trash.

“Gerry? You understand the circumstances, please, come back,” Amma said.

Of all the things The Family had done, or planned on doing this was beyond anything he imagined. They’d justified their actions of ending WWIII to save humanity, and stupidly he’d partly believed that. Sometimes there was a greater good argument, but this was beyond the greater good. It was cold genocide anyway you looked at it.

“You’re all nuts, you know that?”

“Please, try and see it from our point of view.”

“You’re point of view is sick and inhuman.”

“No, Gerry, not inhuman, posthuman. Don’t you understand? We’re diverging. And you’re one of the key parts of that. You’re not one of them. You’re not a barbaric backwards species. You’re one of the enlightened, the next stage of evolution. It’s our time, like all branches of species, to ascend to the dominant position.”

“You can’t play that card with me anymore,” Gerry said. “I will not allow you to do this. I will not allow you to sacrifice a million souls to save a thousand. No matter how low you consider them as a species. You mistook me. I’m not one of you. I’ll never be.”

“Look, an ambassador will be at the port of the Dome within a few hours. Please, talk to him. Hear him out. If you decide you don’t want to come, at least liaise with him and help organise the City’s security.”

Before Amma had chance to argue further, Gerry cut off his connection, surrounding it again within the encryption wrapper. The others in the bunker stared at him with worried looks. Gone were the smiles brought to them by the news of Petal and the Meshwork.

Enna was the first to speak. “It’s The Family, isn’t it?” she said. “They’ve decided on a response.”

“Something like that,” Gerry said, trying to think of the best way of putting it. Jess was starting at him like a startled lemur, her eyes wide with fear. She could sense it, could sense from his body language that it was something awful. Hell, she’d probably heard every word.

“We’re leaving. We need to get to the Dome right now.”

Without further discussion, Gerry set to work loading the truck, and in a tense silence, the others followed. Except the two Upsiders: Liza-Marie and Ghanus. The half-masked woman approached Gerry. Spoke quietly while Gerry re-packed the truck, “We’re not coming with you, I’m afraid. You have the server now, it seems our job is done. We’ve lost too many of our kind in this war. It’s time for us to stay behind and do what we need to do.”

“And what’s that?” Gerry asked.

“You don’t need to concern yourself with us anymore, Gerry. We’ve done all we can to aid you. You’re welcome to take as many supplies from here as you need. I wish you well in the struggles ahead, but for Ghanus and I, we’ve come to the end of our journey.”

With that, she pulled down the half-mask, exposed her twisted mouth. The flesh inverted, abnormal, her jaw mutated to hang low on one side. She gave Gerry a kiss on his cheek. The heat of her lips warmed his skin. “Thank you, Gerry, for helping us to complete our purpose.”

She turned away from him, took Ghanus by the hand, and sat in a huddle with their backs to everyone else. Gerry had an idea of what they would do. Everything had been taken from them, and he was a part of that. And now he was taking away their server, their computer god they had cared for and worshipped, protected until this day.

“Thank you,” Gerry whispered before turning back to the task at hand.

Gabe stopped Gerry while he was on his own near the back of the bunker collecting more water and food. “What’s the truth, man? What they gonna do?”

Gerry kept his voice low. “Nukes. They’re evacuating a few important people from City Earth and nuking the planet. They said they’re going off-world, bringing forward their next phase: genocide.”

“S’what’s the plan?”

“We get to the Dome, defend it, find a way of stopping The Family from nuking us all to hell. We have the servers. I have a direct connection. How are you feeling for an epic-level hack, old man?”

Gabe grinned, pulled the dreadlocks away from his face. “I say, Amen, brother!” And then he suddenly remembered: “Where’s Petal? Ya said she’s coming.”

“She said to say that’s she’s all good, safe, upgraded. She’s heading to Darkhan with a Criborg force. Once we’re on the road, I’ll send her a message, tell her what’s going on, but we need to leave now. They’re evacuating in three hours.”

“Dammit, we’re at least four away. How we gonna make it?”

“I don’t know, Gabe. We gotta have faith, I suppose.”

“Aye, man, I always got faith.”

Gerry was glad one of them did. His stomach churned with fear and anxiety.

Chapter 27

50 kilometres east of GeoCity-1

T
he long, almost-silent, rumble of the transporter’s engines infiltrated Petal’s murky dreams. Unclear, foggy things came to her in pieces. She knew something connected the random shapes and far-away images, but she couldn’t quite divine their meaning before the physical interruption of the outside world pulled her from her dream state.

For a brief moment, she thought she recognised those odd shapes. They looked like people, staring at her from far away in both time and distance, and yet she had a terrible feeling of dread that lingered far longer after the details of that particular dream had drifted away like the morning fog of summer.

She opened her eyes, yawned. The impossibly heavy fatigue only the gross lack of sleep could bring weighed down upon her. Her legs ached, no doubt due to the awkward, curled-up position within her seat she had taken on in order to get comfortable.

“What’s going on?” Petal said, her words weary and slow. “How long’ve I been out?”

“About four hours,” Robertson said. “We’ve had to change course. We’re no longer heading to Darkhan.”

“Eh? Why not?”

“They’re mobilising,” Vickers said. “Vulture ahead of us reported seeing a dust cloud from their ground vehicles. They also picked up encrypted communications like the ones we usually detect from their Jaguars. It’s a sizeable force down there.” He didn’t look up at her. Petal could almost hear the sneer in his voice. Before she could question him further, he took his slate and, via an integrated earpiece, received an update from the other two planes. “The Widows are heading away from the city. Abandoning it by all accounts, and they’re coming our way. Probably heading for the Dome.”

“Change of plan then?” Petal asked.

Robertson, Sasha, Petal, and General Vickers huddled together across their seats and made plans. Petal suggested abandoning Darkhan and heading straight for City Earth.

“I don’t know your guys’ history with The Family,” Petal said. “But I can certainly say the vast majority of the public in the Dome are decent people. We could do a lot worse than pitching up there to help defend the place.”

“Work
with
The Family?” Vickers said, snarling his lips.

“Not work for them per se,” Petal said. “Use them for a strategic purpose. An enemy of an enemy is a friend and all that.”

Vickers opened his mouth to speak.

“It’s logical,” she said, cutting him off. “Think about it. We’ll be in position to take over the place once the Red Widows are neutralised. I’m sure The Family have some defensive resources we could use, and what better way of fighting back at them from within their own city?”

“I agree,” Robertson said. “But I’d like to suggest we deploy the combat ‘droids elsewhere. Buy us some time, bog Red Widow’s forces in a ground battle before they even got to the Dome. Where we’ll be waiting.”

Sasha, Petal, and Robertson waited for Vickers’s response, giving him the respect of being the one with the most military experience to consider the options.

He turned away from them, assessed his slate, and spoke to a lieutenant in one of the other transporters. He nodded a few times, gestured across the slate. Mulled over the data.

“Okay,” he finally said with a long exhale. “I’m with the Doc. My men have identified an outpost, held by a number of Red Widow members a few clicks out from City Earth. It seems they have a small advanced squadron out there.”

“Yes!” Petal said. “I know the place. GeoCity-1. Before you ask, there’s no GeoCity-2 or 3 for some reason. I guess they never got built. Anyway, we must have passed it an hour or so ago. It’s where one of the servers used to be. It’d be a good place to defend, and it would be far enough outside of the Dome that we could arrange defences behind their ring of security.” To Petal’s mind it made strategic sense, but also her motivations were driven by the hope that maybe Gabe, Enna or Gerry would be there. It made sense, given how difficult it’d be for them to stay in Darkhan, or the Dome.

“We all agreed?” Vickers asked.

All three of them agreed.

“Okay, we turn around, get ahead of the Widows, and prepare for battle.” Vickers confirmed the instructions with the pilots of the Criborg fleet. As one they turned, gunned their great engines, hurtled towards GeoCity-1 in a bid to outrun Red Widow’s force on the ground. At the very least, they’d have time to take the settlement and deploy the ‘droids.

***

Ten minutes into their new flight plan, Petal’s implant buzzed with an incoming message. Her heart nearly jumped out from her chest as she instantly recognised the data signature. It was him.
Gerry
!

She opened the connection, heard his voice inside her head as clear as if he were sitting next to her. It had a worried edge to it, though. She secured their private connection behind a 256bit encryption and, via her newly updated mind interface,
spoke
with him.

—
Gez, is that really you?

—
Hey, Petal. Yeah. It’s me. Are you okay?

She trembled like a nervous schoolgirl. A flood of emotion and words rose up within her, threatened to overwhelm her senses. She detected the same trepidation in his voice. That meant what she felt wasn’t made up, conjured in the heat of a traumatic situation, that they were potentially more than friends, comrades, fellow-hackers, whatever.

— I’m great,
she said.
The doc here’s really fixed me up. Petal 2.0 you could say.

— That’s great to hear, really. I’ll let Enna and Gabe know. They’re here with me actually. We’re heading for the Dome. Something terrible has happened, is happening.

—
Something? You mean The Family, right? What’ve they done now?

— They’re evacuating the Dome. Well, a damned tiny portion of it. They learned about the Red Widows, but there was something else. Some attack or threat. It’s pushed ahead their plans.

A tight knot gripped Petal’s stomach. Any time The Family had plans always meant something bad was going to happen. Sasha and Robertson must have realised something was up. They’d stopping talking to each other and were now staring at Petal, trying to divine what was going on in her head, what the contents of her secret conversation was. They’d have to wait. Petal turned in her seat, avoided having to look at their concerned faces.

— What is it, Gez? Just tell me.

Gerry seemed to take a long breath, a deep, heavy pause, laden with a bombshell.

— They’re planning on nuking the Red Widows, and the Dome. You’ve gotta turn away from Darkhan, it’s too late for that place. We have to—

And there it was.

She’d been waiting for this time for the last two years. Ever since she and Gabe found themselves inside one of Seca’s early AIs, they had found snippets of code that appeared to be triggered within a phased plan. One of the phases was off-world development, and another was a scenario to deal with a threat to the Dome and their technology. Petal could never tell what that was exactly. But given how The Family decided to end the war, creating the Cataclysm, it didn’t take a wild jump of the imagination to guess that was on the cards again. The Family didn’t like to share their tech. They would rather see the world burn than let anyone benefit from their work, such were the levels of their disdain for ‘simple humans’.

— It’s okay, Gez, we’re on our way now. We already noticed them moving out. We’re dropping troops at GeoCity-1, setting up a defensive position. Where are you exactly? We could come get you.

— You remember the old city that Len and the Upsiders were hiding out in? We’re about ten kilometres east of there. We were going to skirt around GeoCity-1 and head straight for the Dome. I have to get there. I need to stop them from creating another Cataclysm. Damn, we’ve got so much to catch up on.

— We’ll be in GeoCity-1 in about thirty minutes. Why don’t you rendezvous with us there? We’ve got a ton of combat ‘droids, three heavily armed transporter planes, and a squad of infantry. Oh, and my sister.

— What? You have a sister?

— Three of them, man, you’re right. We do have a lot to catch up on. About Jasper, what happened? How? Are you okay?

— I’m fine, really. I’m so glad to hear your voice though. The Family took me up to their space station. Kind of gave me a new lease of life. Listen, they wanted me to bring you back with me, take you to them. But I can’t do that.

She could tell he wanted to say something, but whether it was the situation, or perhaps whom he was with, he stumbled, and hesitated with his words. Before she could keep her emotions in check she blurted out across their private network connection:

—
I really miss you, Gez.

There was a delay in the response. Had she gone too far? Got too personal? Time stopped as she waited for his reply. A few more seconds ticked by, and she received his response.

— I miss you, too, Petal. More than you probably realise.

She blushed, closed her eyes, hoped no one was watched her at that moment. Her smile was probably a huge give away, but when she opened her eyes again and looked around, everyone was too interested in their various slates and holoscreens, preparing their plans.

— I’m really glad to hear that. Wait, not that you miss me, but that you, oh, well you know. I’m not good at this kind of stuff. All I know is I’ve been worried sick about you. I thought you, well, you know. I didn’t think you would be coming back.

— I’m here. Don’t worry. Listen, can Criborg be trusted?

— I think so. From what I’ve seen so far they’re a good bunch. Been stuck underground since the Cataclysm, but they’ve got some great tech, and the Doc, my father, knows a great deal about the servers. Crap, that reminds me. Did Enna and Gabe secure them before the Red Widows got hold of them?

— It’s been a wild ride these last few days. But don’t worry. The servers are safe. I’m looking at them right this minute.

— Well at least that’s one thing we don’t have to worry about.

— Okay, we’re going dark for a while. We can see activity up ahead at GeoCity-1. We’ll hang back for now until you guys arrive. Give me a heads-up when you’re close. Just to let you know, the place is crawling with Red Widow fighters. They’ve got the place locked down at the moment.”

— Got it, Gez. I’ll give you the channel to our General, and you can liaise direct with him as he’s heading the military ops.

She buzzed Vickers a quick message explaining who Gerry was and his location. Vickers looked across to Petal. “Can he be trusted?”

“Yes. Absolutely.”

“Okay.”

Petal went back to her connection with Gerry.

— Okay, I’m sending you the General’s comm details. I guess I’ll see you shortly.

— Take care. It’s great to hear your voice again.

— You too, Gez.

Petal shut down their connection. Sasha and Robertson both stared at her.

“What?” She asked.

“Someone’s got a secret, huh?” Sasha said, elbowing Petal gently in the ribs.

“It’s not like that,” Petal said.

Robertson had a smile on his face. “I’m guessing someone has found their friend?”

“Yeah, something like that, Doc.”

Petal couldn’t help but ignore the situation they were in and focus on the thought of finally catching up with Gerry again. Despite the dangers that lay ahead, she’d finally see him again. Would he be the same though? She remembered how naive and innocent he was when they first met, and then how quickly he adapted to his new life. And how he saved her, twice.

She shared an entirely different dynamic with him compared to Gabe. Although she respected and looked up to Gabe as a father figure, she’d often question whether he only looked out for her for what he could gain from her skills. Gerry, however, was an open book. No secrets, no subterfuge, just kindness. He respected her for who she was, not only what he could get from her. Not that he needed them. He was a cut above anyone and anything she had seen when it came to coding.

“GeoCity-1 ETA ten minutes,” Vickers said. “We’re drop-shipping the ‘droids first, but buckle up just in case they have any ground-to-air defences set up.”

This was it then. She hoped Vickers was the man everyone thought he was and he could lead them to a successful victory, and that they’d survive long enough to meet up with Gerry and the others.

***

The dense black smoke of a city being burnt to the ground gathered in the morning sky like great dark vortexes messaging to the world that change was afoot, a smoke signal that indicated a new chief was in town. Petal gripped the armrest of her seat as the transporter banked hard, towards a landing spot.

Sounds of metal striking against metal echoed throughout the hull of the plane. Short, sharp, and sounding very much like machine gun fire.

“We’re taking damage!” Vickers yelled into his comm. “Land this instant, drop the ‘droids.”

The transporter dropped vertically. Petal pushed her legs out into the seat in front. Her guts lurched. Outside the window, tracer fire blistered through the sky, trying to find its target. The pilots displayed greater skill than Petal realised they had, and within seconds, the transporter levelled out and landed with a short vertical drop juddering her teeth together.

“Hard landing, much?” she said, easing her lower back, waiting for the blood to return to her legs.

Vickers shot up. He raced down the aisle to the back of the craft. He gestured across his slate, and the wide ramped door at the rear opened, dropping to the ground. “Everybody follow me. Don’t do anything stupid. Grab a gun on your way out.”

A squad of fifteen soldiers were the first to follow, each taking a rifle from the weapons rack on the sidewall of the craft as they exited. When Petal finally followed Sasha and the Doc, Vickers had arranged his small squad of men into a tight and efficient-looking group.