Up Against It - M. J. Locke [128]
As Ouroboros grew slowly in their sights, Geoff tried to figure out a way to make this new development work out. Maybe, he thought, with the big ice coming Down, we can merely register ours, and hold off on selling it.
Was there really anything wrong with wanting to benefit from his claim?
He tried to picture what his dad and mom would say. No doubt Dad would be angry that here was yet another big secret Geoff had sat on for so long.
Maybe, Geoff thought, next time, I’ll punch him in the face. At the notion, he got a mental glimpse of Carl looking at him, looking sad. Go away, he thought. Stop trying to make me care. You’re dead. If his friends had not been on the comm channel with him, he would have screamed it.
* * *
Aaron reached Jane via her wavelink as she left Sarah’s office and entered the lobby. Aaron’s face was pale, masklike. She broke stride. “What—? What’s wrong?”
“A moment,” Aaron said, and—with an uncomfortable glance at Jane—used his new authority to invoke privacy. Dead spydust drifted down around her. On her waveface, the red “Stroiders” light winked out. Then he said, “Jane, Marty is dead.”
The words sank in, and horror spread through her. She braced her hand on the wall. It couldn’t be. They’d talked only an hour or two ago.
Marty!
Ogilvie did this. It had to be.
Think, Navio. Don’t jump to conclusions.
She found her voice. “What happened?”
“I don’t know yet. I tracked you down as soon as I heard. I’m on my way to the scene right now. Jane—” His voice broke. His gaze was anguished, his lips tight. “Too many things are happening at once. Too much is at stake. I don’t have the right to ask this, but I need your help.”
He seemed only half convinced she would agree. That stung. “Of course I’ll help! What do you need me to do?”
Relief broke over his face. “Thank you. I got a call from Police Chief Fitzpatrick, asking me to meet him at the scene. I don’t know the details. It may have been an accident, but I fear otherwise.”
“I’ll be right there. Send me the coordinates,” she said. “And I’ll need you to commandeer a lift for me.”
His hands danced in midair. “Both done. Hurry.”
Aaron got Tania on the line while Jane made her way to the lifts. They briefed Jane as she rode up alone, clinging batlike by her feet to the lift loops.
“I sent him on an assignment,” Aaron told her, “based on something Tania learned about the feral sapient attack last night. Tania, if you please…”
Tania was pacing on her catwalk. Behind her, Jane could see glimpses of her programmers’ space. She spoke low and fast, in a monotone, as if trying to stay ahead of her own thoughts. “It’s standard protocol to run security checks after something like last night, and when my people did so, they found evidence that somebody broke into our systems. We were hacked during the attack. By somebody other than the sapient.”
Jane gaped. “What? Are you sure?”
Tania nodded once, sharply. “Pretty damn sure. While you and I were fighting off the sapient and doing the shutdowns, there was a point at which the systems were vulnerable for an instant—no more than that. Someone broke through our firewalls at exactly that instant, and planted a worm that tampered with our video banks.”
“To what end? Do we know?”
“Yes,” Tania replied. “They modified some backed-up images. The system crashed just as the worm was finishing its work, which is the only reason we were able to detect it; it hadn’t finished cleaning up after itself. Otherwise we never would have detected the intrusion.”
“Are you sure it wasn’t the sapient itself doing this?” But she answered her own question. “No—it wouldn’t have any reason to.”
“Exactly. We have plenty of data on the feral’s state of awareness, and at that point it was not even aware of what videos were. It learned a lot during the attack, but not enough to know or