“He’s scared of getting caught with me aboard,” Rhea said.
“Exactly,” DragonHunter said. “You understand.”
Rhea frowned at his sarcasm.
“This way, if you’re caught, he can claim the shuttle was stolen,” DragonHunter added.
She folded her arms, though he would not see, since the call was voice-only. “You didn’t publish a public call for transportation on my SubverseTube channel, did you?” Though DragonHunter didn’t have access privileges to her account, she wouldn’t have put it past the hacker to break in.
“No, of course not,” DragonHunter said. “I’m not going to announce your plans to the world.”
“Good,” she said. “So how did you find this ‘generous’ subscriber?”
“Simple,” DragonHunter said. “I scraped the comments from all your uploads and did some background checks on the usernames using some special look-up algorithms of mine. Basically, I filtered for those with the highest incomes. After creating a short list of twenty, I sent a mass email to them all, and reviewed the five replies.”
She sighed. “I guess I have no choice but to trust this guy.”
“Don’t worry, I’ve forwarded his name and address to the Wardenites, so if he betrays you, they’ll mess him up,” DragonHunter promised.
“That’s not necessary,” Rhea said.
“Tell that to your Wardenites,” DragonHunter commented. “Oh, by the way, got some news on the hacking front, for when you finally reach Mars. First of all, something you should know: on the red planet, you don’t really have to worry about spy satellites. There are very few. Unfortunately, cameras are deployed everywhere throughout the city. And I mean everywhere. So you’re basically constantly spied on anyway. You’re going to have to employ your CommNixer pistols liberally. I’m sending a map of all known camera positions. This data is recent as of yesterday, but it’s possible there are some cameras we missed.”
The data downloaded slowly. While she waited, she pulled up the map of Hongton and overlaid the different positions. As the dots representing the cameras began to fill out, she realized DragonHunter was right: they were everywhere.
“I’m not sure we have enough ammo to reach the palace,” Rhea said in dismay. “You’re going to have to deliver more CommNixer disks.”
“Actually, I won’t,” DragonHunter said. “There’s a pedway system that runs underneath Hongton. The cameras there use outdated software, so I’ve been able to hack them with the help of a contact I have in the city. I won’t get into the intricacies of breaking into a remote system over the Delay-tolerant network that spans our solar system, but needless to say, it was difficult.
“Anyhoo, with the aid of my contact, I installed man-in-the-middle software to scrub you from the images in real time once you get there. I’ve also included full face and body scans of your companions into the 3D dataset, so they’ll be blanked out too. You’ll be able to activate this software by transmitting the following data to the cameras when you enter the pedway.”
She received a share request, and accepted, storing the data locally. It took a while to download, because of how slow the network was, thanks to all the different obfuscation points the connection passed through across the world.
“You will, of course, have to avoid the cameras built into the AR goggles of unsuspecting passersby,” DragonHunter continued. His voice digitally distorted slightly, because the download was still taking place in the background. “If you can do that, and stick to the pedway system, you’ll be able to reach the palace undetected. I’m sending over route information that will take you almost to the front doors. But be advised: once you emerge, you’ll be exposed to the city’s camera systems again, and you’ll be on your own. Also, if I were you, I wouldn’t connect to the local Internet when you arrive. Like here, the government can use it to track you, by ID. Their infamous social credit system won’t allow you aboard any public transport if you have your comm node disabled, so you’ll have to travel on foot.”
“Noted,” Rhea said. “Anything else?”
“Well, I do have a detailed map of the different hangar bays,” DragonHunter said. She received another share request and accepted. “Most of them have a maintenance door you can use to skip customs. There are ten cameras in each bay which you’ll have to disable first. You’ll have about a minute after the first camera goes down until security drones arrive. So be quick. Once you’re through the maintenance tunnel, you’ll end up in the terminal. Proceed to the lower levels, and you’ll find an entrance right to the pedway system. There are more cameras on the way you’ll probably want to get rid of.”
“Got it,” she said. “That it?”
“That’s about it for now, yes,” DragonHunter said. “If anything else crops up, I’ll keep you posted.”
“Thank you,” she said, and hung up.
Since connecting to the Internet was too slow through the specialized AR goggles, they spent their time playing localized VR games and experiences over their wireless mesh network. Rhea chose the game Robot Wars, because it was the only one she was any good at, after having trained against Targon for a good month during the back and forth trip to Ganymede.
“Better enjoy it while you can,” Will told her after one particularly harrowing loss to her on his part. “Once we board the Molly Dook, Targon’s going to wipe your arse over the bulkheads.”
“We’ll see,” Rhea said.
Gizmo spotted bioweapons in the distance on the fourth day, and for a while the team was worried they’d have to clamber on top of pipeline to get away from them, and thus reveal their positions to the spy satellites. But the Werangs eventually wandered off. The party members weren’t numerous enough for their scents to attract the creatures at that range. Though if the party had even a couple more members, that might have been the tipping point.
Will joined her after the bioweapons had gone. Rhea usually sat a little apart from the others—she liked her space—so the two of them were guaranteed privacy, at
