The second virtual augmentation she applied came in the form of a window. This she placed on the opposite wall. It displayed a portal onto a beach locked in eternal sunset. The golden rays of the sun cast the waves and sand in lovely shades of orange, while red and purple clouds streaked the horizon. She didn’t quite know what drew her to this landscape, but when she randomly saw the video while browsing one day, she’d fallen in love with it, and knew she had to make it part of her home.
“You have that look,” Will said.
“What look?” she asked distractedly.
“The look of someone who’s just added a virtual augmentation to her walls,” Will replied. “You seem… at peace.”
She nodded. “It’s the look of someone who’s come home.”
“When can I see them?” Will asked.
“You ask every time,” Horatio complained.
“Not every time,” Will said. “This is like… the second time I’ve asked.” He returned his attention to Rhea. “So? Set them as public?”
“Not today,” Rhea replied. “Maybe I never will. I have to have some privacy, you know. Some things that are for me alone.”
“Okay,” Will told her. “But when you come down to my quarters and start asking about my virtual decorations, don’t expect me to share.”
“That’s fair,” she said.
With her enhanced hearing, she heard a clanging sound from without, slowly growing in volume: the noises overlapped, as if multiple people were descending the rungs. A glance at her overhead map revealed nothing—the Faraday cage was blocking communications with the outside world.
She searched the nearby network interfaces and found the remote interface Renaldo had told her about, which was accessible only from within the Faraday cage. She connected using her default credentials and disabled the cage. The network signal returned on her HUD, and two dots promptly appeared on her overhead map, labelled “Miles” and “Brinks.”
The clangs became deeper in tone as the boots touched the floor outside, and a moment later a knock came at the door. She accessed the closest external security camera and confirmed it was indeed the two Wardenites who stood outside. She reenabled the Faraday cage and the video connection vanished.
She nodded at Horatio and the robot opened the door.
Miles and Brinks entered. “Warden!” The two were opposites in height, with Miles towering over the diminutive Brinks; so much so that the latter almost seemed like a child in comparison. A thickset child.
Horatio went to them and scanned each of their heads with his palm. “Excuse me, but I hope you don’t mind if I double check…”
“Not at all,” Miles said. The albino turned his head toward Horatio to make the scanning easier for the robot.
After a moment Horatio stepped back, apparently satisfied.
“Shut the door, please,” Rhea told the Wardenites.
Miles closed it behind him.
Rhea looked the pair up and down. “How was the return drive? Any issues?”
“None,” Miles replied. “We triggered zero motion sensors while traveling beneath the pipeline. Or if we did trigger them, the city employees we bribed looked the other way. When we reached Aradne and began skirting the city wall, hackers from Rust Town were able to shut down the video cameras. It was the smoothest operation you could expect. None of the Aradne security forces intercepted us anywhere along the route.”
“I just wish ours had been so smooth,” Will said.
“Renaldo told us about Chuck,” Brinks said, lowering his gaze. “Such terrible news. That could have been any one of us.”
“It hurt,” Rhea agreed.
“Two assassins came after you?” Miles asked.
“That’s right,” she told him.
Miles frowned. “Veil has been busy, it seems.”
“Tell me you have news from DragonHunter,” Rhea said.
Miles nodded. “Actually, we do. He visited us in person this morning. Apparently, yesterday Veil contacted him to perform a Denial of Service attack against a competitor. DragonHunter ran a trace during the call.”
“So he knows where Veil is?” she asked.
“Yes,” Miles answered.
She bit her lower lip impatiently. “So, tell me.”
“He says he’ll only reveal it to the Warden in person,” the albino explained.
“All right, well, can we summon him then?” she said. “Oh wait, let me guess; you’ve held him again. He’s already here.”
“Good guess,” Miles said. “We’ll bring him down.”
The pair vanished.
“This should be interesting,” Will said.
Miles and Brinks returned a few minutes later with DragonHunter. Rhea deactivated her sense of smell when the smallest whiff of him reached her.
With his cloak full of holes, and his long beard covered in dirt, the lanky hacker looked as disheveled as ever. And extremely paranoid: his eyes darted to the left and right, as if DragonHunter was expecting some assailant to jump out at him at any time.
Horatio scanned him outside the room, then they let him in. As in their last meeting, to allay his fears she closed the door to activate the Faraday cage, shut down the internal security camera, and instructed everyone to disable recording on their local AR devices.
When that was done, she gazed into the AR goggles that covered his eyes, and said, pointedly: “You know where Veil is?”
DragonHunter smiled proudly. “I do, Warden. Or at least, where he was, when he contacted me yesterday.”
“Tell me,” she said.
“You must understand, Veil’s cybersecurity staff obfuscated the data well,” DragonHunter said. “But it didn’t matter, because you see, I had poisoned the DNS servers of most of the local service providers in Aradne via a zero-day exploit, so that all hostnames resolved to IP addresses of my choice. I mostly routed traffic to the expected IP addresses, except known obfuscation servers, which I sent directly to me. Before I forwarded these latter packets on to the real obfuscation servers, I logged the data, along with the originating IPs. Now, a lot of people use obfuscation servers, so
